Miscellanies of Literature Author:William Hazlitt, Isaac Disraeli, James Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: sion of great authors sustains their own genius by a sense of their own glory. Such, then, are some of the domestic treasons of the literary character against... more » literature—"Et tu, Brute ! " But the hero of literature outlives his assassins, and might address them in that language of poetry and affection with which a Mexican king reproached his traitorous counsellors : " You were the feathers of my wings, and the eyelids of my eyes." CHAPTER III. ' Of artists, in the history of men of literary genius—Their habits and pursuits analogous—The nature of their genius is similar in their distinct works—Shown by their parallel eras, and by a common end pursued by both. Artists and literary men, alike insulated in their studies, pass through the same permanent discipline; and thus it has happened that the same habits and feelings, and the same fortunes, have accompanied men who have sometimes unhappily imagined their pursuits not to be analogous. Let the artist share The palm ; he shares the peril, and dejected Faints o'er the labour unapprovcd—alas! Despair and genius!— The congenial histories of literature and art describe the same periodical revolutions and parallel eras. After the golden age of Latinity, we gradually slide into the silver, and at length precipitately descend into the iron. In the history of painting, after the splendid epoch of Raphael, Titian, and Corregio, we meet with pleasure the Carraccis, Domenichino, Guido, and Albano ; as we read Paterculus, Quintilian, Seneca, Juvenal, and Silius Italicus, after their immortal masters, Cicero, Livy, Yirgil, and Horace. It is evident that Milton, Michael Angelo, and Handel, belong to the same order of minds ; the same imaginative powers, and the same sensibility, are only operating with different material...« less