From The Harlot's Progress, by Honoré de BalzacGENIUS
“How many poets occur in an age, who are either good prose writers, or as witty in the intercourse of daily life as Madame Cornuel? Buffon was dull company; Newton was never in love: Lord Byron loved nobody but himself; Rousseau was gloomy and half crazy; La Fontaine absent minded. Human energy, equally distributed, produces dolts, mediocrity in all; unequally bestowed it gives rise to those incongruities to whom the name of genius is given, and which, if we could only see them, would look like deformities.”
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