man, was, as is well known, short and squat—
"le petit caporal." Wellington was a middle-
sized man, and Nelson little bigger than a boy.
These men stand confessedly at the very summit
of fame in arms; but after them come a host of
lesser names; heroes of all sizes except the right
size, from the little weakly Agesilaus and Julian
the Apostate, to the days of Condé and Suwarrow,
with here and there a burly form like that of
Cromwell towering above the crowd.

And when we come to great poets and mighty
thinkers who heave up the world of thought
as with a lever; men who, like Bacon, Hunter,
and Newton, looked into the cloudy realms of
times yet to come—the brilliant meteoric dreamers—
we find the regulations growing still more
stringent, especially on approaching ages that
afford us certain knowledge. Thus Paracelsus,
who, whatever his errors, was a most extraordinary
man, was, to judge from his skull, not
bigger than a boy; Harvey, the real discoverer
of the circulation, was " very small in stature."
Newton was a stout, compact man, much like
Plato; but of Bacon's stature, the author is
driven, by the absence of any accounts, to
confess his entire ignorance. Voltaire was a thin,
puny being; John Hunter, one of the greatest
of men, who really foresaw, not only the germ,
but almost the mature fruit of the sublime
doctrines sketched out by Carus, Goethe, and St.
Hilaire, "was a little sturdy fellow," like Hogarth;
while his illustrious brother, Dr. William Hunter,
was not only short but slender also. Milton
was of the same low, compact build as Burns;
Pope was a little weakly being, " so low in
stature, that to bring him to a level with common
tables, it was necessary to raise his seat;"
and Moore was very like him, being " a little,
a very little man;" Thomson, like Byron, was
just above the common size, Byron being five
feet eight and a half, with which we must close
the list, not for want of matter, but of space.

Having thus arranged what size a man of
genius is to be, it may be as well to furnish
some instructions respecting his health, which
Nature has made almost as stringent as those
relating to height and thickness. Be it known,
then, that a genius may have as many headaches,
colds, and sore-throats as he likes. Gout, too,
and heartburn are admissible, or he may have a
fever if he prefer it, or fits of some kind, in
moderation, but he must not meddle too much with
real downright diseases such as cancer and
aneurism, genius being, I suppose, the parent
malady, that, like Aaron's serpent, swallows up
the rest. Johnson is a rare instance of a
scrofulous poet, and Napoleon an equally rare
example of cancer and genius united in the same
person; a combination to which he perhaps
owed the loss of his throne, as if he hadn't had
such an irritable stomach, and hadn't eaten that
messy garlic and mutton, he would not have been
obliged to leave the field of battle, and therefore
might not have lost the campaign in Saxony,
the connexion between which and his final overthrow
is too apparent to require any further remarks;
unless, indeed, the reader prefer the
theory of Mr. Lizars, that, like every other evil
change in the fortunes of men, it all arose from
some person or other being addicted to smoking.

Even that interesting disease, consumption,
is quite out of his way. The few and very few
who have been cut off by it, were simply young
men of great abilities, very promising indeed,
but never of the genuine metal. Men endowed
with great genius are of better stuff, and though
not always long-lived, scarcely ever die very
young. A remarkable proof how tough they
really are, is the fact that many of them—Addison,
Voltaire, and Fontenelle among the number—
were, in their infancy, such puny little
mannikins, that no one thought they could live at all,
yet they managed pretty well upon the whole.
Voltaire and Fontenelle were both born almost
in a dying condition, yet one died in his eighty-
fifth year, and the other lived to within a few
weeks of a hundred! The magnificent description,
then, of

The fiery soul that, working out its way,
Tickled the pigmy body to decay, &c.,

is, though sublime, inapplicable here.

If genius be a malady, it is as truly epidemic
as measles or scarlet fever. Every person has
heard of the Augustan age—the age of Leo the
Tenth, of Louis the Fourteenth, of Anne, &c.,
and there is more meaning in this phrase than
we always find. The great Greek dramatists
came so close together, that before the last of
them went down into the grave, ere the mighty
hand that drew Cassandra raving before the
presence of Atrides, and the awful picture of
Prometheus launched into the abyss amid the
rending of the earthquake and the wild roar of
the thunder, had crumbled into dust, the drama
of Greece was gone to return no more. One age
produced the comedies of Cralinus, Aristophanes,
Eupolis, and Menandu. Horace and Virgil were
born within five years of each other. Within
eighty years came all the great historians of
Rome, except Cato and Livy. One age produced
most of the great painters of Italy; and
one short cycle gave to the world Spencer,
Shakespeare, Cervantes, Bacon, Napier (the
mathematician), Tycho Brahe, Kepler, Vaita,
and Galileo. Less than an age brought forth
Milton, Butler, Molière, Boileau, and Dryden.
Wellington and Napoleon were born in the
same year, and the great age which has just
passed away gave birth to the contemporaries of
Scott and Byron, of Goethe and Burns.

While human passions remain the same as in
the birth of our race, and while that element of
the mind continues unchanged which recognises
the demonstrations of physics, that which created
the dignity of the Apollo Belvedere, or designed
the wondrous glories of York and Lincoln cathedrals;
which designed the picturesque dresses
and rich colours of the mediaeval times, seem gone.
No clue to this problem, instances of which
might be multiplied to an enormous extent, has
been afforded as yet. Humboldt traced one branch
of it so far as to work out the gradual introduction
of nature pictures, the inroad of statuary
into poetry, the heavens, and the field, and the