that he had no great
understanding, but would speak ill of no one. This circumstance of the
character in youth being entirely mistaken, or entirely opposite to the
subsequent one of maturer life, has been noticed of many. Even a
discerning parent or master has entirely failed to develope the genius of
the youth, who has afterwards ranked among eminent men; we ought as little
to decide from early unfavourable appearances, as from inequality of
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 of 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 so
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. One fact, however, Bodmer had overlooked when
he pronounced the fate of our poet and artist--the dull youth, who could
not retain barren words, discovered an active fancy in the image of
things. While at his grammar lessons, as it happened to Lucian, he was
employing tedious hours in modelling in wax, groups of men, animals, and
other figures, the rod of the pedagogue often interrupted the fingers of
our infant moulder, who never ceased working to amuse his little sisters
with his waxen creatures, which constituted all his happiness. Those arts
of imitation were already possessing the soul of the boy Gesner, to which
afterwards it became so entirely devoted.

[Footnote A: This is a remarkable expression from Goldsmith: but it is
much more so when we hear it from Lord Byron. See a note in the following
chapter, on "The First Studies," p. 56.]

Thus it happens that in the first years of life the education of the youth
may not be the education of his genius; he lives unknown to himself and
others. In all these cases nature had dropped the seeds in the soil: but
even a happy disposition must be concealed amidst adverse circumstances: I
repeat, that genius can only make that its own which is ho