ests of literature-men who have reached their summit and reject the ladder: for those who have once placed themselves high, feel a sudden abhorrence of climbing. These have risen through the gradations of politics into office, and in that busy world view every thing in a cloud of passions and politics-they who once commanded us by their eloquence would now drive us by the single force of despotism; like Adrian VI, who obtaining the Pontificate as the reward of his studies, yet possessed of the Tiara, persecuted students; he dreaded, say the Italians, lest his brothers might shake the Pontificate itself. It fares worse with authors when minds of this cast become the arbiters of the public opinion; when the literary character is first systematically degraded and then sported with, as elephants are made to dance on hot iron; or the bird plucked of its living feathers is exhibited as a new sort of creature to invite the passengers! Whatever such critics may plead to mortify the vanity of authors, at least it requires as much to give effect to their own polished effrontery. Lower the high self-reverence, the lofty conception of Genius, and you deprive it of the consciousness of its powers with the delightfulness of its character; in the blow you give the musical instrument, the invisible soul of its tone is for ever lost. A lighter class reduce literature to a mere curious amusement; a great work is likened to a skilful game of billiards, or a piece of music finely executed-and curious researches, to charade making and Chinese puzzles. An author with them is an idler who will not be idle, amusing, or fatiguing others, who are completely so. We have been told that a great genius should not therefore 'ever allow himself to be sensible to his own celebrity, nor deem his pursuits of much consequence however important or successful.' Catholic doctrine to mortify an author into a saint; Lent all the year, and self-flagellation every day! This new principle, which no man in his senses would contend with, had been useful to Buffon and Gibbon, to Voltaire and Pope,-who assuredly were too sensible to their celebrity, and deemed their pursuits of much consequence,' particularly when important and successful.' But this point may be adjusted when we come to examine the importance of an author, and the privilege he may possess of a little anticipating the public, in his self-praise. Such are the domestic treasons of the literary character against literature-et tu, Brute !-but a hero of literature falls not though struck at; he outlives his assassinsand might address them in that language of poetry and tenderness with which a Mexican king reproached his traitorous counsellors: "You were the feathers of my wings, and the eyelids of my eyes." Every class of men in society have their peculiar sorrows and enjoyments, as they have their habits and their characteristics. In the history of men of genius, we may often open the secret story of their minds; they have, above others, the privilege of communicating their own feelings, and it is their talent to interest us, whether with their pen they talk of themselves, or paint others. In the history of men of genius let us not neglect those who have devoted themselves to the cultivation of the fine arts; with them genius is alike insulated in their studies; they pass through the same permanent discipline. The histories of literature and art have parallel epochs; and certain artists resemble certain authors. Hence Milton, Michael Angelo, and Handel! One principle unites the intellectual arts, for in one principle they originate, and thus it has happened that the same habits and feelings, and the same fortunes have accompanied men who have sometimes, unhappily, imagined that their pursuits were not analogous. In the world of ear and eye,' the poet, the painter, and the musician are kindled by the same inspiration. Thus all is Art and all are artists! This approximation of men apparently of opposite pursuits is so natural, that when Gesner, in his inspiring letter on landscape-painting, recommends to the young painter a constant study of poetry and literature, the impatient artist is made to exclaim, Must we combine with so many other studies those which belong to literary men? Must we read as well as paint? It is useless to reply to this question,' says Gesner, for some important truths must be instinctively felt, perhaps the fundamental ones in the arts.' A truly imaginative artist, whose enthusiasm was never absent when he meditated on the art he loved, Barry, thus vehemently broke forth-Go home from the Academy; light up your lamps, and exercise yourselves in the creative part of your art, with Homer, with Livy; and all the great characters, ancient and modern, for your companions and counsellors.' Every life of a man of genius, composed by himself, presents us with the experimental philosophy of the mind. By living with their brothers, and contemplating on their masters, they will judge from consciousness less erroneously than from discussion; and in forming comparative views and parallel situations, they will discover certain habits and feelings, and find these reflected in themselves. CHAPTER II. YOUTH OF GENIUS. Genius, that creative part of art which individualises the artist, belonging to him and to no other,-is it an inherent faculty in the constitutional dispositions of the individual, or can it be formed by the patient acquisitions of art? Many sources of genius have indeed been laid open to us, but if these may sometimes call it forth, have they ever supplied its wants? Could Spenser have struck out a poet in Cowley, Richardson a painter in Reynolds, and Descartes a metaphysician in Mallebranche, had they not borne that vital germ of nature, which, when endowed with its force, is always developing itself to a particular character of genius? The accidents related of these men have occurred to a thousand, who have run the same career; but how does it happen, that the multitude remain a multi tude, and the man of genius arrives alone at the goal? The equality of minds in their native state is as monstrous a paradox, or a term as equivocal in metaphysics, as the equality of men in the political state. Both come from the French school in evil times; and ought, therefore, as Job said, 'to be eschewed.' Nor can we trust to Johnson's definition of genius, as a mind of general powers accidentally determined by some particular direction,' as this rejects any native aptitude, while we must infer on this principle that the reasoning Locke, without an ear or an eye, could have been the musical and fairy Spenser. The automatic theory of Reynolds stirs the puppet artist by the wires of pertinacious labour. But industry without genius is tethered; it has stimulated many drudges in art, while it has left us without a Corregio or a Raphael. Akenside in that fine poem which is itself a history of genius, in tracing its source, first sang, From heaven my strains begin, from heaven descends but in the final revision of that poem he left many years after, the bard has vindicated the solitary and independent origin of genius by the mysterious epithet the chosen breast. The veteran poet was perhaps lessened by the viccussitudes of his own. poetical life, and those of some of his brothers. But while genius remains still wrapt up in its mysterious bud, may we not trace its history in its votaries? Let us compare although we may not always decide. If nature in some of her great operations has kept her last se crets, and even Newton, in the result of his reasonings, has religiously abstained from penetrating into her occult connections, is it nothing to be her historian although we cannot be her legislator? Can we trace in the faint lines of childhood, an unsteady outline of the man? in the temperament of genius may de not reasonably look for certain indications, or prognostics announcing the permanent character? Will not great sensibility be borne with its susceptible organization; the deep retired character cling to its musings; and the ungterable being of intrepidity and fortitude, full of confidence, be commanding even in his sports, a daring leader among his equals. The virtuous and contemplative Boyle imagined that he had discovered in childhood that disposition of mind which indicated an instinctive ingenuousness; an incident which he relates, evinced as he thought, that even then he preferred aggravating his fault, rather than consent to suppress any part of the truth, an effort which had been unnatural to his mind. His fanciful, yet striking illustration may open our inquiry. This trivial passage'-the lite story alluded to-I have mentioned now, not that I think that in itself it deserves a relation, but because as the sun is seen best at his rising and bis setting, so men's native dispositions are clearliest perceived whilst they are chil dren, and when they are dying. These little sudden actions are the greatest discoverers of men's true humours." That the dispositions of genius in early life presage its fuit, he finds all places in it; he converses silently with all ture character, was long the feeling of antiquity. Isocrates, about him-he is a hermit, a lover, a hero. The fragrance after much previous observation of those who attended his and blush of the morning; the still hush of the evening; lectures, would advise one to engage in political studies, the mountain, the valley, and the stream; all nature open. exhorted another to compose history, elected some to being to him, he sits brooding over his first dim images, in poets, and some to adopt his own profession. He thought that train of thought we call reverie, with a restlessness that nature had some concern in forming a man of genius; of delight, for he is only the being of sensation, and has and he tried to guess at her secret by detecting the first not yet learnt to think; then comes that tenderness of energetic inclination of the mind. This principle guided spirit, that first shade of thought colouring every scene, the Jesuits. and deepening every feeling; this temperament has been often mistaken for melancholy. One truly inspired, unfolds the secret story In the old romance of King Arthur, when a cowherd comes to the king to request he would make his son a knight-It is a great thing thou askest,' said Arthur, who inquired whether this entreaty proceeded from him or his son? The old man's answer is remarkable-' Of my son, not of me; for I have thirteen sons, and all these will fall to that labour I put them; but this child will not labour for me, for any thing that I and my wife will do; but always he will be shooting and casting darts, and glad for to see battles, and to behold knights, and always day and night he desireth of me to be made a knight.' The king commanded the cowherd to fetch all his sons; they were all shapen much like the poor man; but Tor was not like none of them in shape and in countenance, for he was much more than any of them. And so Arthur knighted him.' This simple tale is the history of genius-the cowherd's twelve sons were like himself, but the unhappy genius in the family who perplexed and plagued the cowherd and his wife and his twelve brothers, was the youth averse to labour, but active enough in performing knightly exercises; and dreaming on chivalry amidst a herd of cows. A man of genius is thus dropt among the people, and has first to encounter the difficulties of ordinary men deprived of that feeble ductility which adapts itself to the common destination. Parents are too often the victims of the decired propensity of a son to a Virgil or an Euclid; and the first step into life of a man of genitis is disobedi ence and grief. Lilly, our famous astrologer, has described the frequent situation of such a youth, like the cowherd's son who would be a knight. Lilly proposed to his father that he should try his fortune in the metropolis, where he expected that his learning and his talents would prove serviceable to him; the father, quite incapable of discovering the latent genius of his son in his studious dispositions, very willingly consented to get rid of him, for, as Lilly proceeds, I could not work, drive the plough, or endure any country labour; my father oft would say I was good for nothing,'-words which the fathers of so many men of gemus have repeated. In reading the memoirs of a man of genius we often reprobate the domestic persecutions of those who opposed his inclinations. No poet but is moved with indignation at the recollection of the Port Royal Society thrice burning the romance which Racine at length got by heart; no geometrician but bitterly inveighs against the father of Pascal for not suffering him to study Euclid, which he at length understood without studying. The father of Petrarch in a barbarous rage burnt the poetical library of his son amidst the shrieks, the groans, and the tears of the youth. Yet this neither converted Petrarch into a sober lawyer, nor deprived him of the Roman laurel. The uncle of Alfieri for more than twenty years suppressed the poetical character of this noble bard; he was a poet without knowing to write a verse, and Nature, like a hard creditor, exacted with redoubled interest, all the genius which the uncle had so long kept from her. Such are the men whose inherent impulse no human opposition, and even no adverse education, can deter from being great men. Let us, however, be just to the parents of a man of genius; they have another association of ideas concerning tum than we; we see a great man, they a disobedient child; we track him through his glory, they are wearied by the sullen resistance of his character. The career of genius is rarely that of fortune or happiness; and the father, who may himself be not insensible to glory, dreads lest his son be found among that obscure multitude, that populace of mean artists, who must expire at the barriers of mediocrity. The contemplative race, even in their first steps towards nature, are receiving that secret instruction which no master can impart. The boy of genius flies to some favourite haunt to which his fancy has often given a name; he populates his solitude; he takes all shapes in 'Indowed with all that nature can bestow, O'er the mixt treasures of his pregnant breast This delight in reverie has been finely described by Boyle: It is remarkable that this love of repose and musing is retained throughout life. A man of fine genius is rarely enamoured of common amusements or of robust exercises; and he is usually unadroit where dexterity of hand or eye, or trivial elegancies, are required. This characteristic of genius was discovered by Horace in that Ode which school boys often versify. Beattie has expressly told us of his Minstrel The exploit, of strength, dexterity, or speed 'Instead of hounds that make the wooded hills I like the pleasing cadence of a line Browne's Brit. Past. B. ii, Song 4. And we discover the true 'humour' of the indolent contemplative race in their great representatives Virgil and Horace. When they accompanied Mecenas into the country, while the minister amused himself at tennis, the two bards reposed on a vernal bank amidst the freshness of the shade. The younger Pliny, who was so perfect a literary character, was charmed by the Roman mode of hunting, or rather fowling by nets, which admitted him to sit a whole day with his tablets and stylus, that, says he, should I return with empty nets my tablets may at least be full.' Thomson was the hero of his own Castle of Indolence. The youth of genius will be apt to retire from the active sports of his mates. Beattie paints himself in his own Minstrel, *An unhappy young man who recently forfeited his life to the laws for forgery appears to have given promises of genius, -He had thrown himself for two years into the studious retirement of a foreign university. Before his execution he sketched an imperfect auto-biography, and the following pas sage is descriptive of young genius: About this time I became uncommonly reserved, withdraw, ing by degrees from the pastimes of my associates, and was frequently observed to retire to some solitary place alone.Ruined castles, bearing the vestiges of ancient broils, and the impairing hand of time,-cascades thundering through the echoing groves,-rocks and precipices,-the beautiful as well as the sublime traits of nature-formed a spacious field for contemplation many a happy hour. From these inspiring objects, contemplation would lead me to the great Author of nature. Often have I dropped on my knees, and poured out the astacies of my soul to the God who inspired them.' Hor. Od. Lib. iv. O. 3. 'Concourse and noise, and toil he ever fled, "When I was yet a child, no childish play Par. Reg. It is perhaps a criterion of talent when a youth is distinguished by his equals; at that moment of life with no flattery on the one side, and no artifice on the other, all emotion and no reflection, the boy who has obtained a predominance has acquired this merely by native powers. The boyhood of Nelson was characterized by events congenial to those of his after-days; and his father understood his character when he declared that "in whatever station he might be placed, he would climb, if possible, to the top of the tree." Some puerile anecdotes which Franklin remembered of himself, in association with his after-life, betray the invention, and the firm intrepidity, of his character; and even perhaps the carelessness of the means to obtain his purpose. In boyhood he was a sort of adventurer; and since his father would not consent to a sealife, he made the river near him represent the occan; he lived on the water, and was the daring Columbus of a school-boy's boat. A part where he and his mates stood to angle, in time became a quagmire. In the course of one day the infant projector thought of a wharf for them to stand on, and raised with a heap of stones deposited there for the building of a house. But he preferred his wharf to another's house; his contrivances to aid his puny labourers, with his resolution not to quit the great work till it was effected, seem to strike out to us the decision and invention of his future character. But the qualities which attract the companions of a school-boy may not be those which are essential to fine genius. The captain or leader of his school-mates has a claim on our attention, but it is the sequestered boy who may chance to be the artist, or the literary character. Is there then a period in youth which yields decisive marks of the character of genius? The natures of men are as various as their fortunes. Some, like diamonds, must wait to receive their splendour from the slow touches of the polisher, while others, resembling pearls, appear at once born with their beautiful lustre. Among the inauspicious circumstances is the feebleness of the first attempts; and we must not decide on the talents of a young man by his first works. Dryden and Swift might have been deterred from authorship, had their earliest pieces decided their fate. Racine's earliest com position, which we know of by some fragments his son had preserved, to show their remarkable contrast with his writings, abound with those points and conceits which af terwards he abhorred; the tender author of Andromache could not have been discovered while exhausting himself in his wanderings from nature, in running after conceits as absurd and surprising as the worst parts of Cowley, Gibbon betrayed none of the force and magnitude of his powers in his "Essay on Literature," or his attempted History of Switzerland. Johnson's cadenced prose is not recognizable in the humble simplicity of his earliest years. Many authors have begun unsuccessfully the walk they afterwards excelled in. Raphael, when he first drew his meagre forms under Perugino, had not yet conceived one line of that ideal beauty, which one day he of all men could alone execute. Even the manhood of genius may pass by unobserved by his companions, and may, like Eneas, be hidden in a cloud amidst his associates. The celebrated Fabius Maximus in his boyhood was called in derision " the httle sheep," from the meekness and gravity of his disposition. His sedateness and taciturnity, his indifference to juvenile amusements, his slowness and difficulty in learning, and his ready submission to his equals, induced them to con sider him as one irrecoverably stupid. That greatness of mind, unalterable courage, and invincible character Fabius afterwards displayed, they then imagined had lain con cealed in the apparent contrary qualities. The bay of genius may indeed seem slow and dull even to the phleg matic, for thoughtful and observing dispositions conceal themselves in timorous silent characters, who have not yet learnt their strength; nor can that assiduous love, which cannot tear itself away from the secret instruction it is perpetually imbibing, be easily distinguished from that pertinacity which goes on with the mere plodder. We often hear from the early companions of a man of genius that at school, he had appeared heavy and unpromising. Rousseau imagined that the childhood of some men is accompanied by that seeming and deceitful dulness, which 18 the sign of a profound genius; and Roger Ascham has placed among the best natures for learning, the sad natured and hard-witted child," that is, the thoughtful or the melancholic, and the slow, Domenichino was at first heavy and unpromising, and Passeri expresses his surprise at the accounts he received of the early life of this great artist. "It is difficult to believe," he says, "what many assert, that from the beginning this great painter had a ruggedness about him, which entirely incapacitated hun from learning his profession, and they have heard from himself that he quite despaired of success. Yet I can not comprehend how such vivacious talents, with a mund so finely organized, and accompanied with such favourable dispositions for the art, would show such signs of utter in capacity; I rather think that is a mistake in the proper knowledge of genius, which some imagine indicates itself most decisively by its sudden vehemence, show.ng itself like lightning, and like lightning passing away." A paralel case we find in Goldsmith, who passed through an unpromising youth; he declared that he was never attached to the Belles-lettres till he was thirty, that poetry had no peculiar charms for him till that age, and indeed to his latest hour he was surprizing his friends by productions which they had imagined he was incapable of composing. Hume was considered, for his sobriety and assiduity, as competent to become a steady merchant; of Johnson it was said that he would never offend in conversation, as of Boileau that he had no great understanding, but would speak ill of no one. Farquhar at college was a beary companion, and afterwards, combined, with great knowledge of the world, a light airy talent. Even a discerning parent or master has entirely failed to develope the genius of the youth, who has afterwards ranked among eminent men; and we ought as little to infer from early unfavourable appearances as from inequality of talent. The great Isaac Barrow's father used to say, that if it pleased God to take from him any of his children he hoped it might be Isaac, as the least promising; and during the three years Barrow passed at the Charter-house, he was remarkable only for the utter negligence of his studies and his person. The mother of Sheridan, herself a literary female, pronounced early, that he was the dullest and most hopeless of her sons. Bodmer, at the head of the literery class in Switzerland, who had so frequently discovered and animated the literary youths of his country, could never detect the latent genius of Gesner; after a repeated examination of the young man, he put his parents in despair with the hopeless award that a mind of so ordinary a cast must confine itself to mere writing and accompts. Thus it happens that the first years of life do not always include those of genius, and the education of the youth may not be the education of his genius. In all these cases nature had dropt the seeds in the soil, but even a happy disposition must be concealed amidst adverse circumstances. It has happened to some men of genius during a long period of their lives, that an unsettled impulse, without having discovered the objects of its aptitude, a thirst and fever in the temperament of too sentient a being which cannot find the cccupation to which it can only attach itself, has sunk into a melancholy and querulous spirit, weary with the burden of existence; but the instant the latent talent had declared itself, his first work, the eager offspring of desire and love, has astonished the world at once with the birth and the maturity of genius. Abundant facts exhibit genius unequivocally discovering itself in the juvenile age connecting these facts with the subsequent life-and in general, perhaps a mastermind exhibits precocity. Whatever a young man at first applies himself to, is commonly his delight afterwards.' This remark was made by Hartley, who has related an anecdote of the infancy of his genius, which indicated the man. He declared to his daughter that the intention of writing a book upon the nature of man was conceived in his mind when he was a very little boy-when swinging backwards and forwards upon a gate, not more than nine or ten years old; he was then meditating upon the nature of his own mind, how man was made, and for what future end-such was the true origin, in a boy of ten years old, of his celebrated book on the frame, the duty, and the expectation of man.' The constitutional propensity has declared itself in painters and poets, who were such before they understood the nature of colours and the arts of verse. The vehement passion of Peiresc for knowledge, according to accounts Gassendi had received from old men who had known him a child, broke out as soon as he had been taught his alphabet; his delight was to be handling books and papers, and his perpetual inquiries after their contents obliged them to invent something to quiet the child's insatiable curiosity, who was offended if told he had not the capacity to understand them. He did not study like ordinary scholars, and would read neither Justin nor Ovid without a perpetual consultation of other authors, such was his early love of research! At ten years of age his taste for the studies of antiquity was kindled at the sight of some ancient coin dug up in his neighbourhood; and then that passion began to burn like fire in a forest, as Gassendi most happily describes the fervour and the amplitude of his mind. We have Boccaccio's own words for a proof of his early natural tendency to zale-writing, in a passage of his genealogy of the Gods: Before seven years of age, when as yet I had met with no stories, was without a master and hardly knew my letters, I had a natural talent for fiction, and produced some little tales. Thus the Decamerone was appearing much earlier than we suppose. So Ariosto, as soon as he obtamed some knowledge of languages, delighted himself in translating French and Spanish romances; was he not sowing plentifully the seeds of his Orlando Furioso? Lope de Vega doclares that he was a poet from the cradle, be. gimming to make verses before he could write them, for he bribed his school-mates with a morsel of his breakfast to write down the linea he composed in the early morning. Descartes, while yet a boy, was so marked out by habits of deep meditation, that he went among his companions by the title of the philosopher, always questioning, and settling cause and effect. It happened that he was twentyfive years of age before he left the army, but the propensity for meditation had been early formed, and the noble enterprize of reforming philosophy never ceased to inspire his solitary thoughts. Descartes was a man born only for meditation-and he has himself given a very interesting account of the pursuits which occupied his youth, and of the progress of his genius; of that secret struggle he so long held with himself, wandering in concealment over the world, for more than twenty years, and, as he says of himself, like the statuary, labouring to draw out a Minerva from the marble block. Michael Angelo, as yet a child, wherever he went, busied himself in drawing; and when his noble parents, hurt that a man of genius was disturbing the line of their ancestry, forced him to relinquish the pencil, the infant artist flew to the chissel: art was in his soul and in his hands. Velasquez, the Spanish painter, at his school tasks, filled them with sketches and drawings, and as some write their names on their books, his were known by the specimens of his genius. The painter Lanfranco was originally the page of a marquis, who observing that he was perpetually scrawling figures on cards, or with charcoal on the walls, asked the boy whether he would apply to the art he seemed to love? The boy trembled, fearing to have incurred his master's anger; but when encouraged to decide, he did not hesitate: placed under one of the Carraccios, his rapid progress in the art testified how much Lanfranco had suffered by suppressing his natural aptitude. When we find the boy Nanteuil, his parents being averse to their son's practising drawing, hiding himself in a tree to pursue the delightful exercise of his pencil; that Handel, intended for a doctor of the civil laws, and whom no parental discouragement could deprive of his enthusiasm for the musical science, for ever touching harpsichords, and having secretly conveyed a musical instru ment to a retired apartment, sitting through the night awakening his harmonious spirit; and when we view Ferguson the child of a peasant, acquiring the art of reading without any one suspecting it, by listening to his father teaching his brother; making a wooden watch without the slightest knowledge of mechanism, and while a shepherd, like an ancient Chaldean, studying the phenomena of the heavens and making a celestial globe, as he had made a wooden watch, can we hesitate to believe that in such minds, there was a resistless and mysterious propensity, growing up with the temperaments of these artists? Ferguson was a shepherd-lad on a plain, placed entirely out of the chance of imitation; or of the influence of casual excitement; or any other of those sources of genius so frequently assigned for its production. The case of Opie is similar. Yet these cases are not more striking than one related of the Abbé La Caille, who ranked among the first astronomers of the age. La Caille was the son of the parish clerk of a village; at the age of ten years his father sent him every evening to ring the church bell, but the boy always returned home late. His father was angry and beat him, and still the boy returned an hour after he had rung the bell. The father, suspecting something mysterious in his conduct, one evening watched him. He saw his son ascend the steeple, ring the bell as usual, and remain there during an hour. When the unlucky boy descended, he trembled like one caught in the fact, and on his knees confessed that the pleasure he took in watching the stars from the steeple was the real cause of detaining him from home. As the father was not born to be an astronomer, like the son, he flogged the boy severely. The youth was found weeping in the streets, by a man of science, who, when he discovered in a boy of ten years of age, a passion for contemplating the stars at night, and who had discovered an observatory in a steeple, in spite of such ill-treatment, he decided that the seal of nature had impressed itself on the genius of that boy.-Relieving the parent from the son and the son from the parent, ho assisted the young La Caille in his passionate pursuit, and the event perfectly justified the prediction. Let others tell us why children feel a predisposition for the studies of astronomy, or natural history, or any similar pursuit. We know that youths have found themselves in parallel situations with Ferguson and La Caille, without experiencing their energies. The case of Clairon, the great French tragic actress, deserves attention: she seems to have been an actress before she saw a theatre. This female, destined to be a sublimo actress, was of the lowest extraction; the daughter of a the native graces of the language. The first studies of violent and illiterate woman, who with blows and menaces Rembrandt affected his after-labours; that peculiarity of was driving about the child all day to manual labour. 'I shadow which marks all his pictures originated in the cir know not,' says Clairon, whence I derived my disgust, cumstance of his father's mill receiving light from an aper. but I could not bear the idea to be a mere workman, or to ture at the top, which habituated that artist afterwards to remain inactive in a corner.' In her eleventh year, being view all objects as if seen in that magical light. When locked up in a room, as a punishment, with the windows Pope was a child, he found in his mother's closet a small fastened, she climbed upon a chair to look about her. A library of mystical devotion; but it was not suspected till new object instantly absorbed her attention; in the house the fact was discovered, that the effusions of love and reopposite she observed a celebrated actress amidst her ligion poured forth in his Eloisa were derived from the family, her daughter was performing her dancing lesson; seraphic raptures of those erotic mystics, who to the last the girl Clairon, the future Melpomene, was struck by the retained a place in his library among the classical bards of influence of this graceful and affectionate scene. All my antiquity. The accidental perusal of Quintus Curtius little being collected itself into my eyes; I lost not a single first made Boyle "in love with other than pedantic books, motion; as soon as the lesson ended all the family applaud- and conjured up in him," as he expresses it, "an unsatis ed and the mother embraced the daughter. That differ- fied appetite of knowledge; so that he thought he owed ence of her fate and mine filled me with profound grief, my more to Quintus Curtius than did Alexander." From the tears hindered me from seeing any longer, and when the perusal of Rycaut's folio of Turkish history in childhood, palpitations of my heart allowed me to reascend the chair, the noble and impassioned bard of our times retained those all had disappeared.' This was a discovery; from that indelible impressions, which gave life and motion to the moment she knew no rest; she rejoiced when she could "Giaour," the "Corsair," and " Alp." A voyage to get her mother to confine her in that room, the happy girl the country produced the scenery. Rycaut only commu was a divinity to the unhappy one, whose susceptible genius nicated the impulse to a mind susceptible of the poencal imitated her in every gesture and motion; and Clairon character; and without this Turkish history we should soon showed the effect of her ardent studies, far she betray- still have had our poet. ed all the graces she had taught herself, in the common intercourse of life; she charmed her friends and even softened her barbarous mother; in a word, she was an actress without knowing what an actress was. In this case of the use of genius, are we to conclude that the accidental view of a young actress practising her studies, imparted the character of the great tragic actress Clairon? Could a mere chance occurrence have given birth to those faculties which produced a sublime tragedian? In all arts there are talents which may be acquired by imitation and reflection; and thus far may genius be educated, but there are others which are entirely the result of native sensibility, which often secretly torment the possessor, and which may even be lost for the want of development; a state of languor from which many have not recovered. Clairon, before she saw the young actress, and having yet no conception of a theatre, never having entered one, had in her soul that latent faculty which creates a genius of her cast. 'Had I not felt l.se Dido,' she once exclaimed, 'I could not have thus personified her!' Some of these facts, we conceive, afford decisive evidence of that instinct in genius, that constitutional propensity in the mind, sometimes called organization, which inflamed such a war of words by its equivocal term and the ambiguity of its nature; it exists independent of education, and where it is wanting, education can never confer it. Of its mysterious influence we may be ignorant; the effect is more apparent than the cause. It is, however, always working in the character of the chosen mind. In the history of genius, there are unquestionably many secondary causes of considerable influence in developing or even crushing the germ-these have been of late often detected, and sometimes carried even to a ridiculous extreme; but among them none seem more remarkable than the first studies and the first habits. tions. CHAPTER III. THE FIRST STUDIES. The first studies form an epoch in the history of genius, and unquestionably have sensibly influenced its producOften have the first impressions stamped a character on the mind adapted to receive one, as often the first step into life has determined its walk. To ourselves, this is a distant period lost in the horizon of our own recollection, and so unobserved by others, that it passes away in neglect. Many of those peculiarities of men of genins which are not fortunate, and some which have hardened the character in its mould, may be traced to this period. Physicians tell us that there is a certain point in youth at which the constitution is formed, and on which the sanity of life revolves; the character of genius experiences a similar dangerous period. Early bad tastes, early particular habits, early defective instructions, all the egotistical pride of an untamed intellect, are those evil spirits which will dog Genius, to its grave. An early attachment to the works of Sir Thomas Browne produced in Johnson an excessive admiration of that launised English, which violated The influence of first studies, in the formation of the character of genius, is a moral phenomenon, which has not sufficiently attracted our notice. Dr. Franklin acquaints us that when young and wanting books, he accidentally found De Foe's "Essay on Projects," from which work impressions were derived which afterwards influenced some of the principal events of his life. Rousseau, in early youth, full of his Plutarch, while he was also devou ing the trash of romances, could only conceive human n ture in the colossal forms, or be affected by the infin sensibility of an imagination mastering all his faculties; thinking like a Roman and feeling like a Sybarite. The same circumstance happened to Catharine Macaules, who herself has told us how she owed the beat of hit character to the early reading of the Roman historians; but combining Roman admiration with English faction, she violated truth in her English characters, and exagge rated romance in the Roman. But the permanent effect of a solitary bias in the youth of genus, impelling the whole current of his after-life, is strikingly displayed m the remarkable character of Archdeacon Blackburne, the author of the famous "Confessional," and the carinus "Memoirs of Hollis," written with such a republican fierceness. I had long considered the character of our archdeacon as a lusus politico et theologico. 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, as if, like Prynne and Bastwick, the archdeacon had already lost both his ears; while tes antipathy to monarchy might have done honour to a Roundhead of the Rota Club. The secret of these volcanic ex plosions was only revealed in a letter accidentally pre served. In the youth of our spirited archdeacon, when fox-hunting was his deepest study, it happened at the house of a relation, that on some rainy day, among other garret lumber, he fe'l on some worm eaten volumes which had once been the careful collections of his great grand father, an Oliverian justice. These,' says he, 'I CCDveyed to my lodging-room, and there became acquainted with the manners and principles of many excellent c puritans, and then laid the foundation of my own.' Thus is the enigma solved! Archdeacon Blackburne, in his se clusion 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 roun ty as La Mancha; for political romances, it is presumed, may be as fertile of ridicule as any of the folios se cài valry. Such is the influence through life of those first unobserv. ed 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, and where educa tion ends often genius begins. Gray was asked if he re collected when he first felt the strong predilection to poet. ry; he replied, that "be believed it was when he began to read Virgil for his own amusement, and not in school hours as a ta k." Such is the force of self-education in genius, that the celebrated physiologist, John Hunter, who |