GENIUS, in its modern use, signifies generally the bent of national or individual disposition. In a more limited sense it denotes those endowments and powers of mind which one has received from nature. To define or illustrate the term, when employed in this sense, is difficult if not impossible. Fuseli described it as "that power which enlarges the circle of human knowledge, or combines the known with novelty." A better, though far from perfect, definition is that of the poet Crabbe: "I recognize genius wherever there is power to stimulate the thoughts of men and command their feelings." Better than either of these is that of Coleridge, which we extract from his Table Talk: "To carry on the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood, to combine the child's sense of wonder
Genghis Khan and novelty with the appearances which every day for perhaps forty years had rendered familiar—
Genlis. 'With sun and moon and stars throughout the year,
And man and woman;'
this is the character and privilege of genius, and one of the marks which distinguish genius from talent." Genius is in fact a quality so subtle and impalpable that though we are aware of its presence, and recognise it when it manifests itself, we cannot tell exactly in what it consists. It has been called by Diderot, "L'étendue de l'esprit, la force de l'imagination, et l'activité de l'âme." That this definition is not correct is plain, because these qualities are often found separately or collectively in men to whom "the vision and the faculty divine" have been denied. In general terms, genius may be considered as that power which either creates ideas wholly new, or combines old ideas in new and unexpected forms. It is to be found in every department of thought in which the human mind has been exercised; and no work is fairly entitled to be called great which does not exhibit traces of this quality. Genius, like art, is of no country, and is not restricted to any form of thought. Galileo and Newton were as undoubtedly men of genius as Dante and Shakespeare; and if we deny the title to Tacitus we must also withhold it from Sir Walter Scott. Genius, like talent, is of various degrees; but its presence is an indispensable element in all greatness.