The ancients addicted themselves to one species of composition; the tragic poet appears not to have entered into the province of comedy, nor, as far as we know, were their historians writers of verse. Their artists worked on the same principle; and from Pliny's account of the ancient sculptors, we may infer that with them the true glory of genius consisted in carrying to perfection a single species of their art. They did not exercise themselves indifferently on all subjects, but cultivated the favourite ones which they had chosen from the impulse of their own imagination. The hand which could copy nature in a human form, with the characteristics of the age and the sex, and the occupations of life, refrained from attempting the colossal and ideal majesty of a divinity; and when one of these sculptors, whose skill was pre-eminent in casting animals, had exquisitely wrought the glowing coursers for a triumphal car, he requested the aid of Praxiteles to place the driver in the chariot, that his work might not be disgraced by a human form of inferior beauty to his animals. Alluding to the devotion of an ancient sculptor to his labours, Madame de Stael has finely said, "The history of his life was the history of his statue." Such was the limited conception which the ancients formed of genius. They confined it to particular objects or departments in art. But there is a tendency among men of genius to ascribe a universality of power to a master-intellect. Dryden imagined that Virgil could have written satire equally with Juvenal, and some have hardily defined genius as "a power to accomplish all that we undertake." But literary history will detect this fallacy, and the failures of so many eminent men are instructions from Nature which must not be lost on us.