[Footnote A:  For an account of them and their works, see “Curiosities of Literature,” vol, i. p. 76.]

[Footnote B:  The Phillips.]

No event in literary history is more impressive than the fate of QUINTILIAN; it was in the midst of his elaborate work, which was composed to form the literary character of a son, that he experienced the most terrible affliction in the domestic life of genius—­the successive deaths of his wife and his only child.  It was a moral earthquake with a single survivor amidst the ruins.  An awful burst of parental and literary affliction breaks forth in Quintilian’s lamentation,—­“My wealth, and my writings, the fruits of a long and painful life, must now be reserved only for strangers; all I possess is for aliens, and no longer mine!” We feel the united agony of the husband, the father, and the man of genius!

Deprived of these social consolations, we see JOHNSON call about him those whose calamities exiled them from society, and his roof lodges the blind, the lame, and the poor; for the heart must possess something it can call its own, to be kind to.

In domestic life, the Abbe DE ST. PIERRE enlarged its moral vocabulary, by fixing in his language two significant words.  One served to explain the virtue most familiar to him—­bienfaisance; and that irritable vanity which magnifies its ephemeral fame, the sage reduced to a mortifying diminutive—­la gloriole!

It has often excited surprise that men of genius are not more reverenced than other men in their domestic circle.  The disparity between the public and the private esteem of the same man is often striking.  In privacy we discover that the comic genius is not always cheerful, that the sage is sometimes ridiculous, and the poet seldom delightful.  The golden hour of invention must terminate like other hours, and when the man of genius returns to the cares, the duties, the vexations, and the amusements of life, his companions behold him as one of themselves—­the creature of habits and infirmities.

In the business of life, the cultivators of science and the arts, with all their simplicity of feeling and generous openness about them, do not meet on equal terms with other men.  Their frequent abstractions calling off the mind to whatever enters into its lonely pursuits, render them greatly inferior to others in practical and immediate observation.  Studious men have been reproached as being so deficient in the knowledge of the human character, that they are usually disqualified for the management of public business.  Their confidence in their friends has no bound, while they become the easy dupes of the designing.  A friend, who was in office with the late Mr. CUMBERLAND, assures me, that he was so intractable to the forms of business, and so easily induced to do more or to do less than he ought, that he was compelled to perform the official business of this literary man, to free himself from his annoyance; and yet Cumberland could not be reproached with any deficiency in a knowledge of the human character, which he was always touching with caustic pleasantry.