In all ages and in all countries has this feeling been created. It is neither a temporary ebullition nor an individual honour. It comes out of the heart of man. It is the passion of great souls. In Spain, whatever was most beautiful in its kind was described by the name of the great Spanish bard:[A] everything excellent was called a Lope. Italy would furnish a volume of the public honours decreed to literary men; nor is that spirit extinct, though the national character has fallen by the chance of fortune. METASTASIO and TIRABOSCHI received what had been accorded to PETRARCH and to POGGIO. Germany, patriotic to its literary characters, is the land of the enthusiasm of genius. On the borders of the Linnet, in the public walk of Zurich, the monument of GESNER, erected by the votes of his fellow-citizens attests their sensibility; and a solemn funeral honoured the remains of KLOPSTOCK, led by the senate of Hamburgh, with fifty thousand votaries, so penetrated by one universal sentiment, that this multitude preserved a mournful silence, and the interference of the police ceased to be necessary through the city at the solemn burial of the man of genius. Has even Holland proved insensible? The statue of ERASMUS, in Rotterdam, still animates her young students, and offers a noble example to her neighbours of the influence even of the sight of the statue of a man of genius. Travellers never fail to mention ERASMUS when Basle occupies their recollections; so that, as Bayle observes, "He has rendered the place of his death as celebrated as that of his birth." In France, since Francis I. created genius, and Louis XIV. protected it, the impulse has been communicated to the French people. There the statues of their illustrious men spread inspiration on the spots which living they would have haunted:--in their theatres, the great dramatists; in their Institute their illustrious authors; in their public edifices, congenial men of genius.[B] This is worthy of the country which privileged the family of LA FONTAINE to be for ever exempt from taxes, and decreed that "the productions of the mind were not seizable," when the creditors of CREBILLON would have attached the produce of his tragedies. [Footnote A: Lope de Vega.] [Footnote B: We cannot bury the fame of our English worthies--that exists before us, independent of ourselves; but we bury the influence of their inspiring presence in those immortal memorials of genius easy to be read by all men--their statues and their busts, consigning them to spots seldom visited, and often too obscure to be viewed. [We have recent evidence of a more noble acknowledgment of our great men. The statue of Dr. Jenner is placed in Trafalgar Square; and Grantham has now a noble work to commemorate its great townsman, Sir Isaac Newton.]]