superiority. What their haughtiness, as a body, was, may be guessed, when we know that inferior birth was reckoned a fair and legitimate ground for excluding any man from the bar. In one remarkable instance, about this very time, a man of very extraordinary talents and accomplishments was chiefly opposed in a long and painful struggle for admission, and, in reality, for no reasons but those I have been alluding to, by gentlemen who, in the sequel, stood at the very head of the Whig party in Edinburgh; and the same aristocratical prejudice has, within the memory of the present generation, kept more persons of eminent qualifications in the background, for a season, than any English reader would easily believe. To this body belonged nineteen out of twenty of those patricians, whose stateliness Burns so long remembered and so bitterly resented. It might, perhaps, have been well for him had stateliness been the worst fault of their manWinebibbing appears to be in most regions a favorite indulgence with those whose brains and lungs are subjected to the severe exercises of legal study and forensic practice. To this day, more traces of these old habits linger about the Inns of Court than in any other section of London. In Dublin and Edinburgh the barristers are even now eminently convivial bodies of men; but among the Scotch lawyers of the time of Burns the principle of jollity was, indeed, in its high and palmy state. He partook largely in those tavern scenes of audacious hilarity, which then soothed, as a matter of course, the arid labors of the northern noblesse de la robe-so they were called in "Redgauntlet "—and of which we are favored with a specimen in the High Jinks chapter of "Guy Mannering."

ners.

From "Life of Burns.»

CESARE LOMBROSO

(1836-)

OMBROSO'S essays on the "Pathology of Genius » created one of the hottest literary discussions of the last quarter of the nineteenth century. While he does not commit himself to the direct assertion that genius is a diseased as well as an abnormal condition of the human intellect, the facts and anecdotes with which he illustrated his essays all tended to leave that impression in the mind of the general public. The discussion which ensued was at all times animated and sometimes bitter, frequently subjecting Lombroso himself to severe tests by his own standards. "The Man of Genius," which appeared in 1888, summarizes his conclusions on this subject. He has made a comprehensive study of the pathology of the criminal intellect, and his works on "criminology" are valued by specialists in all civilized countries. He was born at Venice in November, 1836 (at Verona, according to other authorities). The University of Turin was his Alma Mater, and he is now professor of Psychiatry there.

FO

ECCENTRICITIES OF FAMOUS MEN

ORGETFULNESS is one of the characteristics of genius. It is said that Newton once rammed his niece's finger into his pipe; when he left his room to seek for anything he usually returned without bringing it. Rouelle generally explained his ideas at great length, and when he had finished, he added: "But this is one of my arcana which I tell to no one. Sometimes one of his pupils rose and repeated in his ear what he had just said aloud; then Rouelle believed that the pupil had discovered the arcanum by his own sagacity, and begged him not to divulge what he had himself just told to two hundred persons. One day, when performing an experiment during a lecture, he said to his hearers: "You see, gentlemen, this caldron over the flame? Well, if I were to leave off stirring it, an explosion would at once occur which would make us all jump." While saying these words, he did not fail to forget to stir, and the pre

diction was accomplished; the explosion took place with a fearful noise: the laboratory windows were all smashed, and the audience fled to the garden. Sir Everard Home relates that he once suddenly lost his memory for half an hour, and was unable to recognize the house and the street in which he lived; he could not recall the name of the street, and seemed to hear it for the first time. It is told of Ampère that when traveling on horseback in the country he became absorbed in a problem; then, dismounting, began to lead his horse, and finally lost it; but he did not discover his misadventure until, on arrival, it attracted the attention of his friends. Babinet hired a country house, and after making the payments returned to town; then he found that he had entirely forgotten both the name of the place and from what station he had started.

One day Buffon, lost in thought, ascended a tower and slid down by the ropes, unconscious of what he was doing, like a somnambulist. Mozart, in carving meat, so often cut his fingers, accustomed only to the piano, that he had to give up this duty to other persons. Of Bishop Munster, it is said that, seeing at the door of his own antechamber the announcement: "The master of the house is out," he remained there awaiting his own return. Of Toucherel, it is told by Arago, that he once even forgot his own name. Beethoven, on returning from an excursion in the forest, often left his coat on the grass, and often went out hatless. Once, at Neustadt, he was arrested in this condition, and taken to prison as a vagabond; here he might have remained, as no one would believe that he was Beethoven, if Herzog, the conductor of the orchestra, had not arrived to deliver him. Gioia, in the excitement of composition, wrote a chapter on the table of his bureau instead of on paper. The Abbé Beccaria, absorbed in his experiments, said during mass: "Ite! experientia facta est." St. Dominic, in the midst of a princely repast, suddenly struck the table and exclaimed: "Conclusum est contra Manicheos." It is told of Ampère that having written a formula, with which he was pre-occupied, on the back of a cab, he started in pursuit as soon as the cab went off. Diderot hired vehicles which he then left at the door and forgot, thus needlessly paying coachmen for whole days. He often forgot the hour, the day, the month, and even the person to whom he was speaking; he would then speak long monologues like a somnambulist. Rossini, conducting the orchestra at the rehearsal of his "Barbiere," which was a fiasco,

did not perceive that the public, and even the performers, had left him alone in the theatre until he reached the end of an act.

vents or creates.

Hagen notes that originality is the quality that distinguishes genius from talent. And Jurgen-Meyer: "The imagination of talent reproduces the stated fact; the inspiration of genius makes it anew. The first disengages or repeats; the second inTalent aims at a point which appears difficult to reach; genius aims at a point which no one perceives. The novelty, it must be understood, resides not in the elements, but in their shock." Novelty and grandeur are the two chief characters which Bettinelli attributes to genius; "for this reason," he says, "poets call themselves troubadours or trouvères. » Cardan conceived the idea of the education of deaf mutes before Harriot; he caught a glimpse of the application of algebra to geometry and geometric constructions before Descartes. Giordano Bruno divined the modern theories of cosmology and of the origin of ideas. Cola di Rienzi conceived Italian unity, with Rome as capital, four hundred years before Cavour and Mazzini. Stoppani admits that the geological theory of Dante, with the regard to the formation of seas, is at all points in accordance with the accepted ideas of to-day.

Genius divines facts before completely knowing them; thus Goethe described Italy very well before knowing it; and Schiller, the land and people of Switzerland, without having been there. And it is on account of those divinations which all precede common observation, and because genius, occupied with lofty researches, does not possess the habits of the many, and because, like the lunatic and unlike the man of talent, he is often disordered, the man of genius is scorned and misunderstood. Ordinary persons do not perceive the steps which have led the man of genius to his creation, but they see the difference between his conclusions and those of others, and the strangeness of his conduct. Rossini's "Barbiere," and Beethoven's "Fidelio" were received with hisses; Boito's "Mefistofele" and Wagner's "Lohengrin» have been hissed at Milan. How many academicians have smiled compassionately at Marzolo, who has dis. covered a new philosophic world! Bolyai, for his invention of the fourth dimension in anti-Euclidian geometry, has been called the geometrician of the insane, and compared to a miller who wishes to make flour of sand. Every one knows the treatment accorded to Fulton and Columbus and Papin, and, in our own days, to

Piatti and Praga and Abel, and to Schliemann, who found Ilium, where no one else had dreamed of looking for it, while learned academicians laughed. "There never was a liberal idea," wrote Flaubert," which has not been unpopular; never an act of justice which has not caused scandal; never a great man who has not been pelted with potatoes or struck by knives. The history of human intellect is the history of human stupidity,' as M. de Voltaire said."

In this persecution, men of genius have no fiercer or more terrible enemies than the men of academies, who possess the weapons of talent, the stimulus of vanity, and the prestige by preference accorded to them by the vulgar, and by governments which, in large part, consist of the vulgar. There are, indeed, countries in which the ordinary level of intelligence sinks so low that the inhabitants come to hate, not only genius, but even talent.

From "The Man of Genius.»