The fire burned towards Heaven, although the altar was rude and rustic.
[Footnote A: "One assertion I will venture to make, as suggested by my own experience, that there exist folios on the human understanding and the nature of man which would have a far juster claim to their high rank and celebrity, if in the whole huge volume there could be found as much fulness of heart and intellect as burst forth in many a simple page of George Fox and Jacob Behmen."-- _Mr.Coleridge's Biographia Litteraria_, i.
143.] BARRY, the painter, has left behind him works not to be turned over by the connoisseur by rote, nor the artist who dares not be just.

That enthusiast, with a temper of mind resembling Rousseau's, but with coarser feelings, was the same creature of untamed imagination consumed by the same passions, with the same fine intellect disordered, and the same fortitude of soul; but he found his self-taught pen, like his pencil, betray his genius.[B] A vehement enthusiasm breaks through his ill-composed works, throwing the sparks of his bold conceptions into the soul of the youth of genius.

When, in his character of professor, he delivered his lectures at the academy, at every pause his auditors rose in a tumult, and at every close their hands returned to him the proud feelings he adored.

This gifted but self-educated man, once listening to the children of genius whom he had created about him, exclaimed, "Go it, go it, my boys! they did so at Athens." This self-formed genius could throw up his native mud into the very heaven of his invention! [Footnote B: Like Hogarth, when he attempted to engrave his own works, his originality of style made them differ from the tamer and more mechanical labours of the professional engraver.

They have consequently less beauty, but greater vigour .-- ED.] But even such pages as those of BARRY'S are the aliment of young genius.
Before we can discern the beautiful, must we not be endowed with the susceptibility of love?
Must not the disposition be formed before even the object appears?
I have witnessed the young artist of genius glow and start over the reveries of the uneducated BARRY, but pause and meditate, and inquire over the mature elegance of REYNOLDS; in the one he caught the passion for beauty, and in the other he discovered the beautiful; with the one he was warm and restless, and with the other calm and satisfied.
Of the difficulties overcome in the self-education of genius, we have a remarkable instance in the character of MOSES MENDELSSOHN, on whom literary Germany has bestowed the honourable title of "the Jewish Socrates."[A] So great apparently were the invincible obstructions which barred out Mendelssohn from the world of literature and philosophy, that, in the history of men of genius, it is something like taking in the history of man the savage of Aveyron from his woods--who, destitute of a human language, should at length create a model of eloquence; who, without the faculty of conceiving a figure, should at length be capable of adding to the demonstrations of Euclid; and who, without a complex idea and with few sensations, should at length, in the sublimest strain of metaphysics, open to the world a new view of the immortality of the soul! [Footnote A: I composed the life of MENDELSSOHN so far back as in 1798, in a periodical publication, whence our late biographers have drawn their notices; a juvenile production, which happened to excite the attention of the late BARRY, then not personally known to me; and he gave all the immortality his poetical pencil could bestow on this man of genius, by immediately placing in his Elysium of Genius MENDELSSOHN shaking hands with ADDISON, who wrote on the truth of the Christian religion, and near LOCKE, the English master of MENDELSSOHN'S mind.] Mendelssohn, the son of a poor rabbin, in a village in Germany, received an education completely rabbinical, and its nature must be comprehended, or the term of _education_ would be misunderstood.