Literature is an avenue to glory, ever open for those ingenious men who are deprived of honours or of wealth. Like that illustrious Roman who owed nothing to his ancestors, _videtur ex se natus_, these seem self-born; and in the baptism of fame, they have given themselves their name. Bruyere has finely said of men of genius, "These men have neither ancestors nor posterity; they alone compose their whole race." But AKENSIDE, we have seen, blushed when his lameness reminded him of the fall of one of his father's cleavers; PRIOR, the son of a vintner, could not endure to be reminded, though by his favourite Horace, that "the cask retains its flavour;" like VOITURE, another descendant of a _marchand de vin_, whose heart sickened over that which exhilarates all other hearts, whenever his opinion of its _quality_ was maliciously consulted. All these instances too evidently prove that genius is subject to the most vulgar infirmities. But some have thought more courageously. The amiable ROLLIN was the son of a cutler, but the historian of nations never felt his dignity compromised by his birth. Even late in life, he ingeniously alluded to his first occupation, for we find an epigram of his in sending a knife for a new-year's gift, "informing his friend, that should this present appear to come rather from Vulcan than from Minerva, it should not surprise, for," adds the epigrammatist, "it was from the cavern of the Cyclops I began to direct my footsteps towards Parnassus." The great political negotiator, Cardinal D'OSSAT, was elevated by his genius from an orphan state of indigence, and was alike destitute of ancestry, of titles, even of parents. On the day of his creation, when others of noble extraction assumed new titles from the seignorial names of their ancient houses, he was at a loss to fix on one. Having asked the Pope whether he should choose that of his bishopric, his holiness requested him to preserve his plain family name, which he had rendered famous by his own genius. The sons of a sword-maker, a potter, and a tax-gatherer, were the greatest of the orators, the most majestic of the poets, and the most graceful of the satirists of antiquity; Demosthenes, Virgil, and Horace. The eloquent Massillon, the brilliant Flechier, Rousseau, and Diderot; Johnson, Goldsmith, and Franklin, arose amidst the most humble avocations. Vespasian raised a statue to the historian JOSEPHUS, though a Jew; and the Athenians one to AEsop, though a slave. Even among great military republics the road to public honour was open, not alone to heroes and patricians, but to that solitary genius which derives from itself all which it gives to the public, and nothing from its birth or the public situation it occupies.