whether this entreaty proceeded from him or his
son. The old man's answer is remarkable--"Of my son, not of me; for I have
thirteen sons, and all these will fall to that labour I put them; but this
child will not labour for me, for anything that I and my wife will do; but
always he will be shooting and casting darts, and glad for to see battles,
and to behold knights, and always day and night he desireth of me to be
made a knight." The king commanded the cowherd to fetch all his sons;
"they were all shapen much like the poor man; but Tor was not like none of
them in shape and in countenance, for he was much more than any of them.
And so Arthur knighted him." This simple tale is the history of genius--
the cowherd's twelve sons were like himself, but the unhappy genius in the
family, who perplexed and plagued the cowherd and his wife and his twelve
brothers, was the youth averse to the common labour, and dreaming of
chivalry amidst a herd of cows.

A man of genius is thus dropped among the people, and has first to
encounter the difficulties of ordinary men, unassisted by that feeble
ductility which adapts itself to the common destination. Parents are too
often the victims of the decided propensity of a son to a Virgil or a
Euclid; and the first step into life of a man of genius is disobedience
and grief. LILLY, our famous astrologer, has described the frequent
situation of such a youth, like the cowherd's son who would be a knight.
Lilly proposed to his father that he should try his fortune in the
metropolis, where he expected that his learning and his talents would
prove serviceable to him; the father, quite incapable of discovering the
latent genius of his son in his studious disposition, very willingly
consented to get rid of him, for, as Lilly proceeds, "I could not work,
drive the plough, or endure any country labour; my father oft would say I
was _good for nothing_,"--words which the fathers of so many men of genius
have repeated.[A]

[Footnote A: The father of Sir Joshua Reynolds reproached him frequently
in his boyish days for his constant attention to drawing, and wrote on the
back of one of his sketches the condemnatory words, "Done by Joshua out of
pure idleness." Mignard distressed his father the surgeon, by sketching
the expressive faces of his patients instead of attending to their
diseases; and our own Opie, when a boy, and working with his father at his
business as a carpenter, used frequently to excite