of one day, the infant projector thought of a wharf for them to stand on, and raised it with a heap of stones deposited there for the building of a house.  With that sort of practical wisdom, or Ulyssean cunning, which marked his mature character, Franklin raised his wharf at the expense of another’s house.  His contrivances to aid his puny labourers, with his resolution not to quit the great work till it was effected, seem to strike out to us the invention and decision of his future character.  But the qualities which would attract the companions of a schoolboy may not be those which are essential to fine genius.  The captain or leader of his schoolmates is not to be disregarded; but it is the sequestered boy who may chance to be the artist or the literary character.  Some facts which have been recorded of men of genius at this period are remarkable.  We are told by Miss Stewart that JOHNSON, when a boy at the free-school, appeared “a huge overgrown, misshapen stripling;” but was considered as a stupendous stripling:  “for even at that early period of life, Johnson maintained his opinions with the same sturdy, dogmatical, and arrogant fierceness.”  The puerile characters of Lord BOLINGBROKE and Sir ROBERT WALPOLE, schoolfellows and rivals, were observed to prevail through their after-life; the liveliness and brilliancy of Bolingbroke appeared in his attacks on Walpole, whose solid and industrious qualities triumphed by resistance.  A parallel instance might be pointed out in two great statesmen of our own days; in the wisdom of the one, and the wit of the other—­men whom nature made rivals, and time made friends or enemies, as it happened.  A curious observer, in looking over a collection of the Cambridge poems, which were formerly composed by its students, has remarked that “Cowley from the first was quaint, Milton sublime, and Barrow copious.”  If then the characteristic disposition may reveal itself thus early, it affords a principle which ought not to be neglected at this obscure period of youth.

Is there then a period in youth which yields decisive marks of the character of genius?  The natures of men are as various as their fortunes.  Some, like diamonds, must wait to receive their splendour from the slow touches of the polisher, while others, resembling pearls, appear at once born with their beauteous lustre.

Among the inauspicious circumstances is the feebleness of the first attempts; and we must not decide on the talents of a young man by his first works.  DRYDEN and SWIFT might have been deterred from authorship had their earliest pieces decided their fate.  SMOLLETT, before he knew which way his genius would conduct him, had early conceived a high notion of his talents for dramatic poetry:  his tragedy of the Regicide was refused by Garrick, whom for a long time he could not forgive, but continued to abuse our Roscius, through his works of genius, for having discountenanced his first work, which had none.