The man of genius will be restive even in his trammelled paces.  Too impatient amidst the heartless courtesies of society, and little practised in the minuter attentions, he has rarely sacrificed to the unlaughing graces of Lord Chesterfield.  Plato ingeniously compares Socrates to the gallipots of the Athenian apothecaries; the grotesque figures of owls and apes were painted on their exterior, but they contained within precious balsams.  The man of genius amidst many a circle may exclaim with Themistocles, “I cannot fiddle, but I can make a little village a great city;” and with Corneille, he may be allowed to smile at his own deficiencies, and even disdain to please in certain conventional manners, asserting that “wanting all these things, he was not the less Corneille.”

But with the great thinkers and students, their character is still more obdurate.  ADAM SMITH could never free himself from the embarrassed manners of a recluse; he was often absent, and his grave and formal conversation made him seem distant and reserved, when in fact no man had warmer feelings for his intimates.  One who knew Sir ISAAC NEWTON tells us, that “he would sometimes be silent and thoughtful, and look all the while as if he were saying his prayers.”  A French princess, desirous of seeing the great moralist NICOLLE, experienced an inconceivable disappointment when the moral instructor, entering with the most perplexing bow imaginable, silently sank into his chair.  The interview promoted no conversation, and the retired student, whose elevated spirit might have endured martyrdom, shrunk with timidity in the unaccustomed honour of conversing with a princess and having nothing to say.  Observe Hume thrown into a most ridiculous attitude by a woman of talents and coterie celebrity.  Our philosopher was called on to perform his part in one of those inventions of the hour to which the fashionable, like children in society, have sometimes resorted to attract their world by the rumour of some new extravagance.  In the present, poor HUME was to represent a sultan on a sofa, sitting between two slaves, who were the prettiest and most vivacious of Parisians.  Much was anticipated from this literary exhibition.  The two slaves were ready at repartee, but the utter simplicity of the sultan displayed a blockishness which blunted all edge.  The phlegmatic metaphysician and historian only gave a sign of life by repeating the same awkward gesture, and the same ridiculous exclamation, without end.  One of the fair slaves soon discovered the unchangeable nature of the forlorn philosopher, impatiently exclaiming, “I guessed as much, never was there such a calf of a man!”—­“Since this affair,” adds Madame d’Epinay, “Hume is at present banished to the class of spectators.”  The philosopher, indeed, had formed a more correct conception of his own character than the volatile sylphs of the Parisian circle, for in writing to the Countess de Boufflers, on an invitation to Paris, he