fool) is never _vain_, but when he stands in need of the tribute of adulation to strengthen the hollowness of his pretensions; nor _conceited_, but when he can find no one to flatter him, and is obliged secretly to pamper his good opinion of himself, to make up for the want of sympathy in others. A _damned_ author has the highest sense of his own merits, and an inexpressible contempt for the judgment of his contemporaries; in the same manner that an actor who is hissed or hooted from the stage, creeps into exquisite favour with himself, in proportion to the blindness and injustice of the public. A prose-writer, who has been severely handled in the Reviews, will try to persuade himself that there is nobody else who can write a word of English: and we have seen a poet of our time, whose works have been much, but not (as he thought) sufficiently admired, undertake formally to prove, that no poet, who deserved the name of one, was ever popular in his life-time, or scarcely after his death! There is nothing that floats a man sooner into the tide of reputation, or oftener passes current for genius, than what might be called _constitutional talent_. A man without this, whatever may be his worth or real powers, will no more get on in the world than a leaden Mercury will fly into the air; as any pretender with it, and with no one quality beside to recommend him, will be sure either to blunder upon success, or will set failure at defiance. By constitutional talent I mean, in general, the warmth and vigour given to a man’s ideas and pursuits by his bodily _stamina_, by mere physical organization. A weak mind in a sound body is better, or at least more profitable, than a sound mind in a weak and crazy conformation. How many instances might I quote! Let a man have a quick circulation, a good digestion, the bulk, and thews, and sinews of a man, and the alacrity, the unthinking confidence inspired by these; and without an atom, a shadow of the _mens divinior_, he shall strut and swagger and vapour and jostle his way through life, and have the upper-hand of those who are his betters in every thing but health and strength. His jests shall be echoed with loud laughter, because his own lungs begin to crow like chanticleer, before he has uttered them; while a little hectic nervous humourist shall stammer out an admirable conceit that is damned in the doubtful delivery—_vox faucibus hæsit_.—The first shall tell a story as long as his arm, without interruption, while the latter stops short in his attempts from mere weakness of chest: the one shall be empty and noisy and successful in argument, putting forth the most common-place things ‘with a confident brow and a throng of words, that come with more than impudent sauciness from him,’ while the latter shrinks from an observation ‘too deep for his hearers,’ into the delicacy and unnoticed retirement of his own mind. The one shall never feel the want of intellectual resources,