he composed a sort of tragedy from the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, to be represented by his brothers and sisters, and at this time also delighted himself in translating the old French and Spanish romances.  Sir WILLIAM JONES, at Harrow, divided the fields according to a map of Greece, and to each schoolfellow portioned out a dominion; and when wanting a copy of the Tempest to act from, he supplied it from his memory; we must confess that the boy Jones was reflecting in his amusements the cast of mind he displayed in his after-life, and evincing that felicity of memory and taste so prevalent in his literary character.  FLORIAN’S earliest years were passed in shooting birds all day, and reading every evening an old translation 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