e who was best adapted to make an exemplary carpenter
or artisan, by being the son of a nobleman is thrown a thousand fathoms
wide of his true destination.

Human creatures are born into the world with various dispositions.
According to the memorable saying of Themistocles, One man can play upon
a psaltery or harp, and another can by political skill and ingenuity
convert a town of small account, weak and insignificant, into a city
noble, magnificent and great.

It is comparatively a very little way that we can penetrate into the
mysteries of nature.

Music seems to be one of the faculties most clearly defined in early
youth. The child who has received that destination from the hands of
nature, will even in infancy manifest a singular delight in musical
sounds, and will in no long time imitate snatches of a tune. The present
professor of music in the university of Oxford contrived for himself,
I believe at three years old, a way for playing on an instrument, the
piano forte, unprompted by any of the persons about him. This is called
having an ear.

Instances nearly as precocious are related of persons, who afterwards
distinguished themselves in the art of painting.

These two kinds of original destination appear to be placed beyond the
reach of controversy.

Horace says, The poet is born a poet, and cannot be made so by the
ingenuity of art: and this seems to be true. He sees the objects about
him with an eye peculiarly his own; the sounds that reach his ear,
produce an effect upon him, and leave a memory behind, different
from that which is experienced by his fellows. His perceptions have a
singular vividness.

The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;

And his imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown,

It is not probable that any trainings of art can give these endowments
to him who has not received them from the gift of nature.

The subtle network of the brain, or whatever else it is, that makes a
man more fit for, and more qualified to succeed in, one occupation than
another, can scarcely be followed up and detected either in the living
subject or the dead one. But, as in the infinite variety of human beings
no two faces are so alike that they cannot be distinguished, nor even
two leaves plucked from the same tree(2), so it may reasonably be
presumed, that there are varieties in the senses, the organs, and the
in