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his son's distinguished career, the old gentleman used to exclaim, with mingled pride and dudgeon, So, the booby has some sense in him after all !”

Hogarth tells us that his exercises, when at school, were more remarkable for the ornaments which adorned them, than for any merit of their own; adding: "In the former [the exercises], I soon found that blockheads with better memories could soon surpass me; but for the latter I was particularly distinguished."

In childhood, Patrick Henry gave little promise of distinction-his aversion to study being invincible: no persuasion could bring him either to read or to work.

Fanny Burney (Madame d'Arblay) assures us that she was so backward when a child, that at the age of eight she was still ignorant of her letters—though by the time she was ten, she was an inordinate scribbler of elegies, odes, plays, songs, stories, farces, and even epic poems. Molière's Monsieur Diafoirus would perhaps have predicted her predestined eminence, from the mere fact of her early backwardness; to judge at least from his sagacious disquisition on the antecedents of that precious lout, his son. "On eut toutes les peines du monde à lui apprendre à lire, et il avait neuf ans qu'il ne connaissait pas encore ses lettres. Bon, disais-je en moi-même, les arbres tardifs sont ceux qui portent les meilleurs fruits. On grave sur le marbre bien plus malaisément que sur le sable, mais les choses y sont conservées bien plus longtemps; et cette lenteur à comprendre, cette

pesanteur d'imagination, est la masque d'un bon jugement à venir." Only the à venir, sometimes, as in the instance of Thomas Diafoirus, is toujours à venir. For it is not every irreclaimable dunce at school that walks off with first-class prizes in the prime of life. It is possible not to know one's letters at nine years old, and yet to be void of common sense at nine times five.

Affright at the irresistible progress of the Civil Service and universal Examination system prompted the perplexed inquiry, some time ago, what is to become of the Stupid Men in the next generation, when the system will be in full play? The question, said the querist, is a dreadful one for parents and guardians; insomuch that if a boy under twelve develops a "healthy animalism," the best thing that can be done with him is to put him quietly out of the way-like the weakly babies of Plato's ideal community. "Any taste which calls him off from his books is as bad as scrofula. A fondness for hardbake is dangerous, but a passion for pony equitation is nearly fatal. In such cases, the strongest remedies of the intellectual pharmacopoeia must be applied, and everything sacrificed to the great object of bringing the patient to decimals by eight, and to longs and shorts by nine and a half at the latest." A consummation not too devoutly to be wished for-any more than a reproduction of the early Jesuit colleges depicted by Michelet-who tells us their success was so great that the Protestants themselves entrusted their children to teachers so capable: "En moins de

rien, vous verrez leurs écoliers, Cicérons improvisés, faire la stupeur de leurs parents; ils jasent, ils latinisent, ils scandent, docteurs à quinze ans, et sots à jamais." A truly great man generally has the reputation of a dull boy, is Hartley Coleridge's deliberate dogma on this topic at large. Goethe's biographer observes that the fathers of poets are seldom gratified with the progress visible in their sons; that only your perfectly stupid young gentlemen uniformly delight their parents. They, he says, "tread the beaten path, whereon are placed milestones marking every distance; and the parents, seeing how far their sons have trudged, are freed from all misgivings. Of that silent progress, which consists less in travelling on the broad highway, than in development of the limbs which will make a sturdy traveller, parents cannot guess. Rousseau declares that nothing is more difficult than to distinguish real stupidity in childhood from that apparente et trompeuse stupidité, which, says he, is l'annonce des âmes fortes. Young Cato, he reminds us, during his childhood, seemed an imbécille in the house. And Jean Jacques refers to a contemporary, Condillac, who passed chez ses amis for one of very limited capacity. "Oh, que ceux qui jugent si précipitamment les enfants sont sujets à se tromper !"

In this medley of samples and examples, types and instances, we let red spirits and white, black spirits and grey, mingle, mingle, mingle as they may. -Giraldus Cambrensis, in the history of his life, professes or confesses that in early youth, at St.

David's, he was negligent of study and over-given to sport. But he adds, that his uncle, the bishop, together with his masters, remonstrated so sharply with him on this score, that, turning over a new leaf he became as diligent as he had been lazy, and soon headed the classes of which he had hitherto been the tail.

Cortes is said to have sorely disappointed his parents by the little fondness he showed for books, when sent at fourteen to Salamanca. Edmund Waller, at the Grammar School of Market-Wickham, was dull and slow in his tasks. Dean Swift, says Goldsmith, was long considered an incorrigible dunce; and Goldy could write feelingly touching that same.

Isaac Barrow at the Charterhouse "gave but little promise of excellence," his principal delight being in fighting, and his general habits so negligent, that his father is reported to have wished, that if it pleased God to take any of his children, it might be Isaac.*

That marvellous boy, Chatterton, the sleepless soul who perished in his pride, marvellous as he was in his teens-in the sixth of which he diedt-was no marvel when at the age of five years he was put to school under his father's successor, Mr. Love: here his progress was so slow, that after his master, we read, had exhausted his patience in attempting to

* After leaving the Charterhouse, Isaac went to the Grammar School at Felstead, in Essex; and here he seems to have turned over a new leaf.

That is to say, not at the age of sixteen-for that would be but the fourth of his teens-but at that of seventeen years and nine months; well on in his eighteenth year.

teach him, he sent him back to his mother as a "dull boy, and incapable of further instruction."

Sir Joseph Banks, as a schoolboy at Harrow, was, by his tutor's account, so immoderately fond of play that there was no getting him to mind his book. Byron, again, at the same school, is said to have been much more anxious to distinguish himself by prowess in the playground than by advancement in learning. Moore says that, though quick, when he could be persuaded to attend, or had any study that pleased him, he was in general very low in the class, and seemed noway ambitious of getting higher. The highest and lowest boys were sometimes made to change places; and on such occasions the master would banter Byron, now at the top, by saying, "Now, George, man, let me see how soon you'll be at the foot again." At Harrow, too, Sheridan got on no better than we have seen him do in Dublin: an impenetrable dunce, they styled him, with whom neither severity nor indulgence could avail. He could not spell when he left Harrow, and wrote "think" for "thing." Yet at eighteen he joined his friend Halhed in translating the Epistles of Aristænetus. So that he could scarcely be one of those who were in the mind's eye of Sydney Smith when he assigned "Too much Latin and Greek”—especially verse-making-as the reason why boys who make a considerable figure at school, so very often make no figure in the world;--and why other lads who are passed over without notice, turn out to be valuable important men. "The test established in the world

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