unalterable being of intrepidity and fortitude, full of confidence, be commanding even in his sports, a daring leader among his equals ?” "Bossuet would not join his young companions, and flew to his solitary task, while the classical boys avenged his flight by applying to him from Virgil the bos suetus aratro, the ox daily toiling in the plough. The young painters, to ridicule the persevering labours of Domenichino in his youth, honoured him by the same title of "the great ox;" and Passeri, in his delightful biography of his own contemporary artists, has bappily expressed the still labours of his concealed genius, sua taciturna lentezza, his silent slowness. The learned Huet has given an amusing detail of the inventive persecutions of his school-mates, to divert him from his obstinate love of study.“ At length,” says he," in order to indulge my own taste, I would rise with the sun, while they were buried in sleep, and hide myself in the woods that I might read and study in quiet;" but they beat the bushes, and started in his burrow the future man of erudition. Sir William Jones was rarely a partaker in the active sports of Harrow; it was said of Gray that he was never a boy, and the unhappy Chatterton and Burns were remarkably serious boys. Milton has preserved for us, in solemn numbers, his school-life : "When I was yet a child, no childish play To me was pleasing; all my mind was set Par, Reg. "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 school-boy, composed a sort of tragedy from the story of Pyramus and Thishe, and had it represented by his brothers and sisters. Pope seems to have indicated bis passion for Homer in those rough scenes which he drew up from Ogilby's yersion; 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 act 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 felicity of memory and taste so prevalent in his literary character." But we would account for the particular disposition of the mind in early life, upon different principles than those laid down by our author; and, in opposition to him, would cordially give our assent to Johnson's definition of genius," a mind of general powers, accidentally determined by some particular direction." Instead of considering it a peculiar gift of heaven, which would, we imagine, be accusing the Omnipotent of partiality in his dispensations, we would denominate it, simply an energy of thought, a perseverance of investigation, and an acuteness of feeling which renders its possessor alive to every surrounding object of some particular class, determined accidentally. The particular organization of the body may strengthen and enfeeble not only the feelings and perceptions, but also the combinations of thought, and the decisions of the judgment. Every man, nay every child, has an object in view, determined by circumstances totally independent of nature, but which generally escape the observations of the most attentive observer. "When Pope was a child he found in his mother's closet a small library of mystical devotion; but it was not suspected, till the fact was discovered, that the effusions of love and religion poured forth in his Eloisa were derived from the seraphic raptures of those erotic mystics, who to the last retained a place in his library among the classical bards of antiquity. The accidental perusal of Quintus Cortius first made Boyle 'in love with other than pedantic books, and conjured up in him,' as he expresses it, 'an unsatisfied appetite of knowledge, so that he thought he owed more to Quintus Curtius than did Alexander.' From the perusal of Rycaut's folio of Turkish history in childhood, the noble and impassioned bard of our times retained those indelible impressions, which gave life and motion to the " Giaour,” the "Cor; sair," and Alp." "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 devouring the trash of romances, could only conceive human natüre in the colossal forms, or be affected by the infirm sensibility, of an imagination mastering all bis faculties; thinking like a Roman, and feeling like a Sybarite. The same circumstance happened to Catharine Macauley, who herself has told us how she owed the bent of her character to the early reading of the Roman historians." In these instances we find that the peculiar liveliness of attachment to one class of objects was accidentally determined. It may be asked why does not this peculiar disposi tion of mind display itself in all equally early, and equally energetically? The answer is simple:-Proper objects under proper associations do not present themselves to all equally early. It is on this account that we find some of our most celebrated literary characters to have been very lightly esteemed till a late period of life. Dryden and Swift, Racine, Gibbon, and even Johnson himself displayed in their youthful compositions none of those peculiar beauties which are to be found in their subsequent productions. In their boyhood, indeed, the greatest geniuses have sometimes been considered by their nearest friends exceedingly dull and stupid. Goldsmith 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 heavy companion, and afterwards combined, with great knowledge of the world, a light airy 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 literary class in Switzerland, who had sa 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." "The education of genius must be its own work," says our author';" and such is the force of self education in genius that the celebrated physiologist, John Hunter, who was entirely self-educated, evinced such penetration in his anatomical discoveries, that kis şensible biographer observes," he has brought into notice passages from writers he was unable to read, and which had been overlooked by profound scholars." But the self educated are always marked by strong peculiarities. "If their minds are rich in acquisition, they often want taste, and the art of communication; their knowledge, like corn heaped in a granary, for want of ventilation and stirring, perishes in its own masses. They may abound with talent in all shapes, but rarely in its place, and they have to dread a plethora of genius, and a delirium of wit." Barry the painter may be exhibited as one of the most peculiar of the self-taught geniuses. "A vehement enthusiasm breaks through his ill-composed works, throwing the sparks of his bold and rich conceptions, so philosophical and magnificent, into the soul of the youth of genius. When, in his character of professor, he delivered his lectures at the academy, he never ceased speaking but his auditors rose in a tumult, while their hands returned to him the proud feelings he adored. The self-educated and gifted man, once listening to the children of genius whom he had created about him, exclaimed, "Go it, go it, my boys! they did so at Athens." Thus high could he throw up his native mud into the very heaven of his invention! Of the difficulties overcome in the self-education of genius, we have another, and perhaps a more remarkable instance in the character of Moses Mendelsohn, " on whom literary Germany has bestowed the honourable title of the Jewish Socrates." He was the son of a poor rabbin, in a village in Germany, and "received an education completely rabbinical, but its nature must be comprehended, or the term of education would be misunderstood. The Israelites in Poland and Germany live, with all the restrictions of their ceremonial law, in an insulated state, and are not always instructed in the language of the country of their birth. They employ for their common intercourse a barbarous or patois Hebrew, while the sole studies of the young rabbins are strictly confined to the Talmud, of which the fundamental principle, like the Sonna of the Turks, is a pious rejection of every species of uninspired learning. This ancient jealous spirit, which walls in the understanding and the faith of man, was shutting out what the imitatiye Catholics afterwards called heresy. It is, then, these numerous folios of the Talmud which the true Hebraic student contemplates through all the seasons of life, as the Patuecos in their low valley imagine their surrounding mountains to be the confines of the universe. “Of such a nature was the plan of Mendelsohn's first studies; but even in his boybood this conflict of study occasioned an agitation of his spirits, which affected his life ever after; rejecting the Talmudical dreamers, he caught a nobler spirit from the celebrated Maimonides; and his native sagacity was already clearing up the darkness around. An enemy, not less hostile to the enlargement of mind than voluminous legends, presented itself in the indigence of his father, who was now compelled to send away the youth on foot to Berlin to find labour and bread. "At Berlin he becomes an amanuensis to another poor rabbin, who could only still initiate him into the theology, the jurisprudence, and scholastic philosophy of his people. Thus he was no farther advanced in that philosophy of the mind in which he was one day to be the rival of Plato and Locke, nor in that knowledge of literature of which he was to be among the first polished critics of Germany. "Some unexpected event occurs which gives the first great impulse to the mind of geaius. Mendelsohn received this from the first companion of his misery and his studies, a man of congenial but maturer powers. He was a Polish Jew, expelled from the communion of the orthodox, and the calumniated student was now a vagrant, with more sensibility than fortitude. But this vagrant was a philosopher, a poet, a naturalist, and a mathematician. Mendelsohn, at a distant day, never alluded to him without tears. Thrown together into the same situation, they approached each other by the same sympathies, and communicating in the only language which Mendelsohn knew, the Polander voluntarily undertook his literary education. “Then was seen one of the most extraordinary spectacles in the history of modern literature. Two houseless Hebrew youths might be discovered, in the moonlight streets of Berlin, sitting in retired corners, or on the steps of some porch, the one instructing the other, with an Euclid in his hand; but what is more extraordinary, it was a Hebrew version, composed by himself for one who knew no other language. Who could then have imagined that the future Plato of Germany was sitting on those steps! "The Polander, whose deep melancholy had settled on his heart, died; yet he had not lived in vain, since the electric spark that lighted up the soul of Mendelsohn had fallen from his own. "Mendelsohn was now left alone, his mind teeming with its chaos, and still master of no other language than that barren idiom which was incapable of expressing the ideas he was meditating on. He had scarcely made a step into the philosophy of his age, and the genius of Mendelsohn had probably been lost to Germany had not the singularity of his studies and the cast of his mind been detected by the sagacity of Dr. Kisch. The aid of this physician was momentous; for he devoted several hours every day to the instruction of a poor youth, whose strong capacity be had the discernment to perceive, and the generous temper to aid. Mendelsohn was soon enabled to read Locke in a Latin version, but with such extreme pain, that, compelled to search for every word, and to arrange their Latin order, and at the same time to combine metaphysical ideas, it was observed that he did not so much translate, as guess by the force of meditation. "This prodigious effort of his intellect retarded his progress, but invigorated his habit, as the racer, by running against the hill, at length courses with facility. 1 “A succeeding effort was to master the living languages, and chiefly the English, that he might read his favourite Locke in his own idiom, Thus a great genius for me. taphysics and languages was forming itself by itself. "At length the mind of Mendelsohn enlarged in literary intercourse: be became a great and original thinker in many beautiful speculations in moral and critical philosophy; while he had gradually been creating a style which the critics of Germany have declared was their first luminous model of precision and elegance. Thus a Hebrew vagrant, first perplexed in the voluminous labyrinth of Judaical learning, in his middle age oppressed by indigence and malady, and in his mature life wrestling with that commercial station whence he derived his humble independence, became one of the masterwriters in the literature of his country. The history of the mind of Mendelsohn is one of the noblest pictures of the self-education of genius." On the propriety of showing our manuscripts to our friends, the opinions of our author exactly accord with our own. "When a young writer's first essay is shown, some, through mere inability of censure, see nothing but beauties; others, with equal imbecility, can see none; and others, out of pure malice, see nothing but faults. 'I was soon disgusted,' says Gibbon, with the modest practice of reading the manuscript to my friend. Of such friends some will praise for politeness, and some will criticise for vanity.' Had several of our first writers set their, fortunes on the cast of their friend's opinions, we might have lost some precious compositions. The friends of Thomson discovered nothing but faults in his early productions, one of which happened to be his noblest, the "Winter;" they just could discern that these abounded with luxuriances, without being aware that they were the luxuriances of a poet. He had created a new school in art, and appealed from his circle to the public." In the fourth chapter of this interesting work, we are presented with a dissertation on "the irritability of genius." A feeling of this nature may be discovered in the mind of almost every literary character, and it not unfrequently bears a proportion to the degree of intellect. "That happy equality of temper so prevalent among mere men of letters, and which is conveniently acquired by men of the world, has been usually refused to great mental powers, or to vivacious dispositions; authors or artists. The man of wit becomes petulant, and the profound thinker, morose." "Racine had extreme sensibility; the pain inflicted by a severe criticism outweighed all the applause he received. He seems to have felt, what he was often reproached with, that his Greeks, his Jews, and his Turks were all inmates of Versailles. He bad two tritics, whỏ, like our Dennis with Pope and Addison, regularly dogged his pieces as they appeared. Corneille's objection he would attribute to jealousy-at his burlesqued pieces at the Italian theatre, he would smile outwardly, though sick at heart,-but his son informs us, that a stroke of raillery from his witty friend Chapelle, whose pleasantry scarcely concealed its bitterness, sunk more deeply into his heart than the burlesques at the Italian theatre, the protest of Corneille, and the iteration of the two Dennises. The life of Tasso abounds with pictures of a complete exhaustion of this kind; his con. tradictory critics had perplexed him with the most intricate literary discussions, and probably occasioned a mental alienation. We find in one of his letters that he repents the composition of his great poem, for although his own taste approved of that marvellous, which still forms the nobler part of its creation, yet he confesses that his critics have decided; that the history of his hero Godfrey required another species of conduct. 'Hence,' cries the unhappy bard, doubts vex me; but for the past and what is done, İknow of no remedy;' and he longs to precipitate the püblication that he may be delivered from misery and agony.' He solemnly swears that Did not the circumstances of my situation compel me, I would not print it, even perhaps during my life, I so much doubt of its success.' Such was that painful state of fear and doubt, experienced by the author of the "Jerusalem Delivered;" when he gave it to the world; a state of suspense among the children of imagination, of which none are more liable to participate in than the too sensitive artist. At Florence may still be viewed the many works begun and abandoned by the genius of Michael Angelo; they are preserved inviolate; so sacred is the terror of Michael Angelo's genius! exclaims Forsyth. Yet these works are not always to be considered as failures of the chissel; they appear ráther to have been rejected by coming short of the artist's first conceptions. «Gesner, in one of his hypochondria of genius, after a long interval of despair, one morning at breakfast with his wife, fixed his eye on one of his pictures; it was a group of fauns with young shepherds dancing at the entrance of a cavern shaded with vines; his eye appeared at length to glisten; and a sudden return to good humour broke out in this lively apostrophe, Ah! see those playful children, they always dance! This was the moment of gaiety and inspiration, and he flew to his forsaken easel.” "Thus, the state of authorship is not friendly to equality of temper; and in those various humours incidental to it, when authors are often affected deeply, while the cause escapes all perception of sympathy, at those moments the lightest injury to the feelings, which at another time would make no impression, may produce even even fury in the warm temper, or the corroding chagrin of a self-wounded spirit." The beauties of this work are so numerous, that if we were to extract all of them, we might occupy the whole of the present number of our Magazine, without the least hazard of fatiguing or displeasing our readers. But our quotations are already so ex |