idle buzz of fashion, the venal puff, the soothing flattery of favour or of friendship; but it is the spirit of a man surviving himself in the minds and thoughts of other men, undying and imperishable.  It is the power which the intellect exercises over the intellect, and the lasting homage which is paid to it, as such, independently of time and circumstances, purified from partiality and evil-speaking.  Fame is the sound which the stream of high thoughts, carried down to future ages, makes as it flows—­deep, distant, murmuring evermore like the waters of the mighty ocean.  He who has ears truly touched to this music, is in a manner deaf to the voice of popularity.—­The love of fame differs from mere vanity in this, that the one is immediate and personal, the other ideal and abstracted.  It is not the direct and gross homage paid to himself, that the lover of true fame seeks or is proud of; but the indirect and pure homage paid to the eternal forms of truth and beauty as they are reflected in his mind, that gives him confidence and hope.  The love of nature is the first thing in the mind of the true poet:  the admiration of himself the last.  A man of genius cannot well be a coxcomb; for his mind is too full of other things to be much occupied with his own person.  He who is conscious of great powers in himself, has also a high standard of excellence with which to compare his efforts:  he appeals also to a test and judge of merit, which is the highest, but which is too remote, grave, and impartial, to flatter his self-love extravagantly, or puff him up with intolerable and vain conceit.  This, indeed, is one test of genius and of real greatness of mind, whether a man can wait patiently and calmly for the award of posterity, satisfied with the unwearied exercise of his faculties, retired within the sanctuary of his own thoughts; or whether he is eager to forestal his own immortality, and mortgage it for a newspaper puff.  He who thinks much of himself, will be in danger of being forgotten by the rest of the world:  he who is always trying to lay violent hands on reputation, will not secure the best and most lasting.  If the restless candidate for praise takes no pleasure, no sincere and heartfelt delight in his works, but as they are admired and applauded by others, what should others see in them to admire or applaud?  They cannot be expected to admire them because they are his; but for the truth and nature contained in them, which must first be inly felt and copied with severe delight, from the love of truth and nature, before it can ever appear there.  Was Raphael, think you, when he painted his pictures of the Virgin and Child in all their inconceivable truth and beauty of expression, thinking most of his subject or of himself?  Do you suppose that Titian, when he painted a landscape, was pluming himself on being thought the finest colourist in the world, or making himself so by looking at nature?  Do you imagine that Shakspeare, when he wrote Lear