ADDISON and PRIOR were unskilful statesmen; and MALESHERBES confessed, a few days before his death, that TURGOT and himself, men of genius and philosophers, from whom the nation had expected much, had badly administered the affairs of the state; for “knowing men but by books, and unskilful in business, we could not form the king to the government.”  A man of genius may know the whole map of the world of human nature; but, like the great geographer, may be apt to be lost in the wood which any one in the neighbourhood knows better than him.

“The conversation of a poet,” says Goldsmith, “is that of a man of sense, while his actions are those of a fool.”  Genius, careless of the future, and often absent in the present, avoids too deep a commingling in the minor cares of life.  Hence it becomes a victim to common fools and vulgar villains.  “I love my family’s welfare, but I cannot be so foolish as to make myself the slave to the minute affairs of a house,” said MONTESQUIEU.  The story told of a man of learning is probably true, however ridiculous it may appear.  Deeply occupied in his library, one, rushing in, informed him that the house was on fire:  “Go to my wife—­these matters belong to her!” pettishly replied the interrupted student.  BACON sat at one end of his table wrapt in many a reverie, while at the other the creatures about him were trafficking with his honour, and ruining his good name:  “I am better fitted for this,” said that great man once, holding out a book, “than for the life I have of late led.  Nature has not fitted me for that; knowing myself by inward calling to be fitter to hold a book than to play a part.”

BUFFON, who consumed his mornings in his old tower of Montbard, at the end of his garden,[A] with all nature opening to him, formed all his ideas of what was passing before him from the arts of a pliant Capuchin, and the comments of a perruquier on the scandalous chronicle of the village.  These humble confidants he treated as children, but the children were commanding the great man!  YOUNG, whose satires give the very anatomy of human foibles, was wholly governed by his housekeeper.  She thought and acted for him, which probably greatly assisted the “Night Thoughts,” but his curate exposed the domestic economy of a man of genius by a satirical novel.  If I am truly informed, in that gallery of satirical portraits in his “Love of Fame,” YOUNG has omitted one of the most striking—­his OWN!  While the poet’s eye was glancing from “earth to heaven,” he totally overlooked the lady whom he married, and who soon became the object of his contempt; and not only his wife, but his only son, who when he returned home for the vacation from Winchester school, was only admitted into the presence of his poetical father on the first and the last day; and whose unhappy life is attributed to this unnatural neglect:[B]—­a lamentable domestic catastrophe, which, I fear, has too frequently occurred amidst the ardour and occupations of literary glory.  Much,