It would be injustice to suppose that, by this well turned and energetic passage, our author could mean to depreciate the benign influence of original genius, or to insinuate aught against the necessity of it's periodical appearance: his aim is to assign their proper place to the literati of the epoch he describes, to trace the probable motives of their pursuits, and to show, that by a judicious choice they supplied, in some degree, their want of innate power, and even of discernment in their objects of imitation. Who, better than our historian, knows, that, if Nature be inexhaustible in her resources and productions, and genius be merely a power, seizing and representing with clearness some of her features, the appearance of one man of genius can no more check the perceptions, than preclude the existence of another? He who takes Homer or Michael Angelo for his model, adopts him merely as his medium to see Nature more distinctly or on a grander scale; he imitates without copying, like Virgil and Pelegrino Tibaldi, for whom it will be difficult to find a name, if they be refused that of imitators of the Ionian and the Tuscan genius. If the supposed inaccessible excellence of Dante and his contemporaries dispirited the Italians of the fifteenth century from the cultivation of the higher Italian poetry, it proved not that they had exhausted Nature, but that they were no longer understood; and that they were not, almost every line of their pedantic commentators proves. Machiavelli, Ariosto, Tasso, appeared after them, with the same models before their eyes, and each produced works none would wish to exchange for all the laboured lucubrations of Tuscan Latinists: the fact is, it was easier to shine before a partial public formed by themselves, with glittering compilations of classic lines, almost always dishonoured by some clumsy or gothic addition of their own, than to emulate the pace of their great predecessors before the general eye.