[Footnote A:  See in his Life, chap. iv., entitled Sviluppo dell’ indole indicato da vari fattarelli.  “Development of genius, or natural inclination, indicated by various little matters.”]

That the dispositions of genius in early life presage its future character, was long the feeling of antiquity.  CICERO, in his “Dialogue on Old Age,” employs a beautiful analogy drawn from Nature, marking her secret conformity in all things which have life and come from her hands; and the human mind is one of her plants.  “Youth is the vernal season of life, and the blossoms it then puts forth are indications of those future fruits which are to be gathered in the succeeding periods.”  One of the masters of the human mind, after much previous observation of those who attended his lectures, would advise one to engage in political studies, then exhorted another to compose history, elected these to be poets, and those to be orators; for ISOCRATES believed that Nature had some concern in forming a man of genius, and endeavoured to guess at her secret by detecting the first energetic inclination of the mind.  This also was the principle which guided the Jesuits, those other great masters in the art of education.  They studied the characteristics of their pupils with such singular care, as to keep a secret register in their colleges, descriptive of their talents, and the natural turn of their dispositions.  In some cases they guessed with remarkable felicity.  They described Fontenelle, adolescens omnibus numeris absolutus et inter discipulos princeps, “a youth accomplished in every respect, and the model for his companions;” but when they describe the elder Crebillon, puer ingeniosus sed insignis nebulo, “a shrewd boy, but a great rascal,” they might not have erred so much as they appear to have done; for an impetuous boyhood showed the decision of a character which might not have merely and misanthropically settled in imaginary scenes of horror, and the invention of characters of unparalleled atrocity.

In the old romance of King Arthur, when a cowherd comes to the king to request he would make his son a knight—­“It is a great thing thou askest,” said Arthur, who inquired 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.