[Literary Character of Men of Genius by Isaac Disraeli]@TWC D-Link book
Literary Character of Men of Genius

CHAPTER VI
5/22

Having subscribed to the Articles, and enjoying the archdeaconry, he was writing against subscription and the whole hierarchy, with a spirit so irascible and caustic, that one would have suspected that, like Prynne and Bastwick, the archdeacon had already lost both his ears; while his antipathy to monarchy might have done honour to a Roundhead of the Rota Club.

The secret of these volcanic explosions was only revealed in a letter accidentally preserved.

In the youth of our spirited archdeacon, when fox-hunting was his deepest study, it happened at the house of a relation, that on a rainy day he fell, among other garret lumber, on some worm-eaten volumes which had once been the careful collections of his great-grandfather, an Oliverian justice.

"These," says he, "I conveyed to my lodging-room, and there became acquainted with the manners and principles of many excellent old Puritans, and then laid the foundation of my own." The enigma is now solved! Archdeacon BLACKBURNE, in his seclusion in Yorkshire amidst the Oliverian justice's library, shows that we are in want of a Cervantes but not of a Quixote, and Yorkshire might yet be as renowned a country as La Mancha; for political romances, it is presumed, may be as fertile of ridicule as any of the folios of chivalry.
We may thus mark the influence through life of those first unobserved impressions on the character of genius, which every author has not recorded.
Education, however indispensable in a cultivated age, produces nothing on the side of genius.

Where education ends, genius often begins.


<<Back  Index  Next>>

D-Link book Top

TWC mobile books