on of the Iliad: whenever he got a bird remarkable for its size
or its plumage, he personified it by one of the names of his heroes, and
raising a funeral pyre, consumed the body: collecting the ashes in an
urn, he presented them to his grandfather, with a narrative of his
Patroclus or Sarpedon. We seem here to detect, reflected in his boyish
sports, the pleasing genius of the author of Numa Pompilius, Gonsalvo of
Cordova, and William Tell. BACON, when a child, was so remarkable for
thoughtful observation, that Queen Elizabeth used to call him "the young
lord-keeper." The boy made a remarkable reply, when her Majesty,
inquiring of him his age, he said, that "He was two years younger than
her Majesty's happy reign." The boy may have been tutored; but this
mixture of gravity, and ingenuity, and political courtiership,
undoubtedly caught from his father's habits, afterwards characterised
Lord Bacon's manhood. I once read the letter of a contemporary of HOBBES,
where I found that this great philosopher, when a lad, used to ride on
packs of skins to market, to sell them for his father, who was a
fellmonger; and that in the market-place he thus early began to vent his
private opinions, which long afterwards so fully appeared in his
writings.

For a youth to be distinguished by his equals is perhaps a criterion of
talent. 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 characterised by events congenial with those of his
after-days; 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, betray the invention and the firm intrepidity of his character,
and even perhaps his carelessness of means to obtain a purpose. In boyhood
he felt a desire for adventure; but as 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 schoolboy'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 building of a
house. With that sort of practical wi