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 his anger by drawing with red chalk on the deal boards he had carefully planed for his trade.  —­ED.]

In reading the memoirs of a man of genius, we often reprobate the domestic persecutions of those who opposed his inclinations.  No poet but is moved with indignation at the recollection of the tutor at the Port Royal thrice burning the romance which RACINE at length got by heart; no geometrician but bitterly inveighs against the father of PASCAL for not suffering him to study Euclid, which he at length understood without studying.  The father of PETRARCH cast to the flames the poetical library of his son, amidst the shrieks, the groans, and the tears of the youth.  Yet this burnt-offering neither converted Petrarch into a sober lawyer, nor deprived him of the Roman laurel.  The uncle of ALFIERI for more than twenty years suppressed the poetical character of this noble bard; he was a poet without knowing how to write a verse, and Nature, like a hard creditor, exacted, with redoubled interest, all the genius which the uncle had so long kept from her.  These are the men whose inherent impulse no human opposition, and even no adverse education, can deter from proving them to be great men.

Let us, however, be just to the parents of a man of genius; they have another association of ideas respecting him than ourselves.  We see a great man, they a disobedient child; we track him through his glory, they are wearied by the sullen resistance of one who is obscure and seems useless.  The career of genius is rarely that of fortune or happiness; and the father, who himself may not be insensible to glory, dreads lest his son be found among that obscure multitude, that populace of mean artists, self-deluded yet self-dissatisfied, who must expire at the barriers of mediocrity.