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by regularly playing truant, and devising plausible excuses to satisfy his master. Nor did he, so far as we can learn, when "subjected to the stricter discipline of a public school, and pitted against the young athletes of the land, apply himself to study with much increase of diligence, or even exhibit any great compensating capacity for acquiring learning without the usual exertion."

Ebenezer Elliott was regarded as a dull child: at school he could never master his grammar, or scale the low heights of vulgar fractions; he "seemed to be a confirmed dunce, and eventually, out of sheer hopelessness, was sent by his father to work in the foundry," where himself, the ultra-Calvinistic Beroan, was clerk.

John Constable, R.A., though regarded by his master (at the Dedham Grammar School) as a boy of genius, showed excellence in penmanship only, with a pronounced fondness for painting. Long pauses, it is said, would often occur during his lessons, which his master would be the first to break, by saying, "Go on; I am not asleep. Oh! now I see, you are in your painting-room!”

Mr. de Quincey tells us of his sometime associate and friend, the celebrated Peripatetic, John Stewart, commonly called "Walking Stewart," that at school

-as he would often himself relate with high glee, and even with something of gratified vanity in the avowal-no boy except himself was considered an invincible dunce, or what is sometimes called a Bergen-op-Zoom; that is, a head impregnable to all

teachings and all impressions that could be conveyed through books. “Like many a boy before him, he obtained the reputation of a dunce, merely because his powers were never called into action, or tried among tasks in which he took any genial delight." Yet this same scoffing-stock of the school, when summoned away to the tasks of life, dealing with subjects that interested his feelings, and moving in an element for which his natural powers had qualified him, displayed the energetic originality of genius.

Archbishop Whately illustrates the same thing by a number of examples, in his annotations on one of Bacon's essays. For instance, he cites the case of a literary man's son who had a perfect hatred of literature, was a mere dunce at his book, and was, to all appearance, turning out a "ne'er-do-weel.” As a last resource, he was sent out to a new colony. "There he was in his element; for, when at school, though dull at learning, and soon forgetting what he had read, he never saw a horse or carriage once that he did not always recognise; and he readily understood all that belonged to each. In the colony he became one of the most thriving settlers; skilful in making roads, erecting mills, draining, cattle-breeding, &c." As we, in the words of Mr. Lewes, call both the child "clever" who learns his lessons rapidly, and the child "clever" who shows wit, sagacity, and invention, this ambiguity of phrase has led to surprise, when the child, who was "so clever" at school, turns out a mediocre man; or, inversely,

when the child, who was a "dunce" at school, turns out a genius in art.

Well and wisely writes old Roger Ascham, of schoolboys and the way to treat them in school, that if one by quickness of wit take his lesson readily, another by hardness of wit taketh it not so speedily, and the first is always commended, the second commonly punished, whereas a wise schoolmaster should rather consider discreetly the right disposition of both their natures, and not so much weigh what either of them is able to do, as what either of them is likely to do hereafter. For of this Roger Ascham is thoroughly convinced, not only by reading of books in his study, but also by experience of life abroad in the world, that "those which be commonly the wisest, the best learned, the best men also, when they be old, were never commonly the quickest of wit when they were young. Quick wits commonly be apt to take, unapt to keep. Some are more quick to enter speedily than able to pierce far, even like unto over sharp tools, whose edges be very soon turned." It has been suggestively remarked, however, on the general subject of youthful promise, that one great secret of the exaggerated notions entertained about promising youths is the confusion of conduct with capacity, of goodness with power— the grounds on which a lad earns a reputation for promise being, in an ordinary way, exclusively moral grounds; industry, perseverance, docility, good manners; the always knowing his lessons, and never being insolent or quarrelsome. People are accord

ingly said to form their judgments of a man's future from one or two moral qualities, which in truth have much less to do with the kind of future they are thinking about than the intellectual qualities which they have scarcely any trustworthy means of measuring. "We nearly always find in the biographies of distinguished men, that at school or college they gave no remarkable sign of their future power; and even where this is not the case, the predictions of greatness may commonly be traced to a time after the greatness had been achieved." The child may, it is owned, be father of the man, in a certain sense

-nor will anybody of judgment deny that we are born with peculiar temperaments and our own individual predispositions. But, character being the compound product of predispositions and experience, "you cannot predict anything of the product until you know something of the second of these factors." Hence the impossibility of being quite sure how a boy or a young man will turn out after he has stepped into the world beyond the class-room.

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Some whom, on account of their schoolroom virtues, their friends insisted on raising aloft on pedestals, no sooner get fairly out into the big world than they seem to be scared by the size of things, and to be utterly lacking in that intrepidity of the intellect which is so needful for great successes." Others, again, it is added, whose intellectual energies have hitherto passed for second-rate, and of whom nobody entertained very sanguine hopes, have their imagination excited, their faculties braced,

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all their powers stimulated, by the novelty and bustle, and Brobdingnagian dimensions of the new scene to which they are introduced. If not the same essayist, another of the same school, dilates on the comparative non-success in after-life of the pattern boy who always obeys his masters when at school, and his aunts when at home for the holidays, and is altogether pronounced a paragon of a schoolboy,-who, nevertheless, is doomed so often to see the scapegrace gain the front and keep it, when both are fairly started on the race of life. For a long time the paragon may go on comforting himself with the reflection that the success of his aggravating contemporary is an accident and a mistake; but as years wear on, it becomes more and more difficult to keep up this innocent little piece of selfdelusion. "A cold perspiration breaks out on the paragon's forehead one fine morning, when the newspaper informs him at breakfast-time that the wicked scapegrace has attained celebrity and greatness." Mrs. Gore's Marquis, who owns to having been a monstrous stupid dog at Eton, and to have studied nothing at Cambridge but smoking and snipe-shooting, comforts himself with the conviction that your precocious heroes often fail in the proof; and "a young Roscius sometimes dwindles into a scene-shifter." Mr. Caxton perplexes his wife and Mr. Squills by complacently asserting his little boy, Pisistratus, to be now, at eight years old, as great a blockhead as most boys of his age are: what else did he go to school for? Infant prodigies are Mr.

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