tion of genius," as a mind of general powers accidentally determined by some particular direction," as this re Genius, that creative part of art which individualises the artist, belong-jects any native aptitude, while we ing to him and to no other, is it an must infer on this principle that the inherent faculty in the constitutional reasoning Locke, without an ear or dispositions of the individual, or can an eye, could have been the musical it be formed by the patient acquisitions and fairy Spenser. 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 want? Could Spen-, ser 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 multitude, and the man of genius arrives alone at the goal? The virtuous and contemplative Boyle imagined that he had discovered in childhood that disposition of mind which indicated an instinctive ingenu ousness; 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 king illustration may fanciful, yet striking open our inquiry." This trivial passage" the little story alluded to "I have mentioned now, not that I think that in itself it deserves a rela tion, but because as the sun is seen best at his rising and his setting, so men's native dispositions are clearliest The equality of minds in their na- perceived whilst they are children, and tive state is as monstrous a paradox, when they are dying. These little or a term as equivocal in metaphysics, sudden actions are the greatest dis as the quality of men in the political coverers of men's, true humours state. Both come from the French That the dispositions of genius in ear school in evil times; and ought, there ly life presage its future character, was fore, as Job said, " to be eschewed." long the feeling of antiquity, Isa Nor can we trust to Johnson's defini-crates, after much previous observation lection of the Port Royal Society thrice burning the romance which Racine at length got by heart; no geonetrician but bitterly inveighs against the father of Pascal for not suffering of those who attended his lectures, would advise one to engage in political studies, exhorted another to compose history, elected some to be poets, and some to adopt his own profession. He thought that nature had some con-him to study Euclid, which he at cern in forming a man of genius; and length understood without studying. he tried to guess at her secret by de- The father of Petrarch in a barbarous tecting the first energetic inclination rage burnt the poetical library of his of the mind. This principle guided son amidst the shrieks, the groans, and the Jesuits. 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. 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 any 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. 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 recol If the youth of genius is apt to retire from the ordinary sports of his mates, he often substitutes others, the reflections of those favourite studies which are haunting his young imagination; the amusements of such an idler have often been fanciful. ARIOSTO, While yet a schoolboy, composed a sort of tragedy from the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, and had it represented by his brothers and sisters. POPE seems to have indicated his passion for Homer in those rough scenes which he drew up from Ogilby's version; and when Sir WILLIAM JONES at Harrow divided the fields according to a map of Greece, and portioned out to each school-fellow a dominion, and further, when wanting a copy of the Tempest to aet from, he supplied it from his memory, we must confess that the boy JONES was reflecting in his amusements the cast of mind he displayed in his after-life, and that 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 felicity of memory and taste so prevalent in his literary character. FLORIAN's earliest years were passed in shooting birds all day and reading every evening an old translation of the Liad; whenever he got a bird remark-to us the decision and invention of his able for its size or its plumage, he per- future character. But the qualities sonified it by one of the names of his which attract the companions of heroes, and raising a funeral pyre con- school-boy may not be those which are sumed the body; collecting the ashes essential to fine genius. The captain in an urn, he presented them to his or leader of his school-mates has a grandfather, with a narrative of his claim on our attention, but it is the Patroclus or Sarpedon. We seem sequestered boy who may chance to here to detect, reflected in his boyish be the artist, or the literary character. sports, the pleasing genius of the author of Numa Pompilius, Gonsalvo of Cordova and William Tell. 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 splendor 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 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; the talents of a young man by his first 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 sea-life, he made the river near him represent the ocean; 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 it with a heap of stones deposited there for the works. Dryden and Swift might have been deterred from authorship, had their earliest pieces decided their fate, Racine's earliest composition, which we know of by some fragments his son has preserved, to show their remarkable contrast with his writings, abound with those points and conceits which afterwards 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 great artist. "It is difficult to behe first drew his meagre forms under lieve," he says, "what many assert, Perugino, had not yet conceived one that from the beginning this great line of that ideal beauty, which one painter had a ruggedness about him, day he of all men could alone execute. which entirely incapacitated him from Even the manhood of genius may learning his profession, and they have pass by unobserved by his companions, heard from himself that he quite deand may, like Æneas, be hidden in spaired of success. Yet I cannot a cloud amidst his associates. The comprehend how such vivacious tacélebrated Fabius Maximus in his lents, with a mind so finely organized, boyhood was called in derision" the and accompanied with such favourable little sheep," from the meekness and dispositions for the art, would shew gravity of his disposition. His se- such signs of utter incapacity; I radateness and taciturnity, his indiffe- ther think that it is a mistake in the rence to juvenile amusements, his proper knowledge of genius, which slowness and difficulty in learning and some imagine indicates itself most dehis ready submission to his equals, in- cisively by its sudden vehemence, shewduced them to consider him as one ing itself like lightning, and like lightirrecoverably stupid. That greatness ning passing away." A parallel case of mind, unalterable courage, and in- we find in Goldsmith, who passed vincible character Fabius afterwards through an unpromising youth; he displayed, they then imagined had lain declared he was never attached to concealed in the apparent contrary qua- the belles lettres till he was thirty, that lities. The boy of genius may indeed poetry had no peculiar charms for him seem slow and dull even to the phleg- till that age, and indeed to his latest matic, for, thoughtful and observing hour he was surprising his friends by dispositions conceal themselves in tim- productions which they had imagined orous silent characters, who have not he was incapable of composing. Hume yet learnt their strength; nor can that was considered, from his sobriety and assiduous love, which cannot tear it- assiduity, as competent to become a self away from the secret instruction it steady merchant; of Johnson it was is perpetually imbibing, be easily dis- said that he would never offend in tinguished from that pertinacity which conversation, as of Boileau that he goes on with the mere plodder. We had no great understanding, but would often hear from the early companions speak ill of no one. Farquhar at colof a man of genius that at school, he lege was a heavy companion, and afhad appeared heavy and unpromising. terwards combined, with great know Rousseau imagined that the childhood ledge of the world, a light airy talent. of some men is accompanied by that Even a discerning parent or master has seeming and deceitful dulness, which entirely failed to develope the genius is the sign of a profound genius; and of the youth, who was afterwards rankRoger Ascham has placed among the ed among eminent men; and we best naturés for learning, the sad-na-ought as little to infer from early untured and hard-witted child," that is, favourable appearances as from inequathe thoughtful or the melancholic, and lity of talent. The great Isaac Barthe slow. Domenichino was at first row's father used to say, that if it heavy and unpromising, and Passeri pleased God to take from him any of expresses his surprise at the accounts his children he hoped it might be he received of the early life of thisIsaac, as the least promising; and dur ing 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 literary 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. Some of these facts, we conceive, afford decisive evidence of that instinct in genius, that constitutional propensity in the mind sometimes, called organization, which has 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. ON PEOPLE WITH ONE IDEA. There are people who have but one idea: at least, if they have more, they keep it a secret, for they never talk but of one subject. There is Major C but one idea or subject of discourse, It hopeless. If a farmer talks to you about his pigs or his poultry, or a physician about his patients, or a lawyer about his clients, or a merchant he has about stock, or an author about him |