sipated and thoughtless of what dissipation and thoughtlessness must inevitably produce. It is much to be regretted, that they who mourn over the misfortunes of genius have been too frequently induced by the artifice of partial biographers, to suppose that misery is the inseparable lot of men of distinguished talents, and that the world has no rewards for those by whom it has been instructed or delighted, except poverty and neglect. Such is the propensity of some to murmur without reason, and of others to sympathise without discrimination, that this unfair opinion of mankind might be received as unanswerable, if we had no means of looking more closely into the lives of those who are said to have been denied that extraordinary indulgence to which they laid claim. Where the truth has been honestly divulged, however, we shall find that of the complaints which lenity or affectation have encouraged and exaggerated in narrative, some will appear to have very little foundation, and others to be trifling and capricious. Men of genius have no right to expect more favourable consequences from imprudence and vice than what are common to the meanest of mankind. Whatever estimate they may have formed of their superiority, if they pass the limits allotted to character, happiness, or health, they must not hope that the accustomed rules of society are to be broken, or the common process of nature is to be suspended, in order that they may be idle without poverty, or intemperate without sickness. Yet the lives of men celebrated for literary, and especially for poetical talents, afford many melancholy examples of these delusions, which, if perpetuated by mistaken kindness, cannot add any thing to genius but a fictitious privilege, which it is impossible to vindicate with seriousness, or exert with impunity.
If the life of Boyse be considered with a reference to these remarks, it will be found that he was scarcely ever in a situation of distress, of which he could justly complain. He exhausted the patience of one set of friends
