RACINE’S earliest composition, as we may judge by some fragments his son has preserved, remarkably contrasts with his writings; for these fragments abound with those points and conceits which he afterwards abhorred.  The tender author of “Andromache” could not have been discovered while exhausting himself in running after concetti as surprising as the worst parts of Cowley, in whose spirit alone he could have hit on this perplexing concetto, descriptive of Aurora:  “Fille du Jour, qui nais devant ton pere!”—­“Daughter of Day, but born before thy father!” GIBBON betrayed none of the force and magnitude of his powers in his “Essay on Literature,” or his attempted “History of Switzerland,” JOHNSON’S cadenced prose is not recognisable in the humbler simplicity of his earliest years.  Many authors have begun unsuccessfully the walk they afterwards excelled in.  RAPHAEL, when he first drew his meagre forms under Perugino, had not yet conceived one line of that ideal beauty which one day he of all men could alone execute.  Who could have imagined, in examining the Dream of Raphael, that the same pencil could hereafter have poured out the miraculous Transfiguration? Or that, in the imitative pupil of Hudson, our country was at length to pride herself on another Raphael?[A]

[Footnote A:  Hudson was the fashionable portrait-painter who succeeded Kneller, and made a great reputation and fortune; but he was a very mean artist, who merely copied the peculiarities of his predecessor without his genius.  His stiff hard style was formality itself; but was approved in an age of formalism; the earlier half of the last century.—­ED.]

Even the manhood of genius may pass unobserved by his companions, and, like.  AEneas, he may be hidden in a cloud amidst his associates.  The celebrated FABIUS MAXIMUS in his boyhood was called in derision “the little sheep,” from the meekness and gravity of his disposition.  His sedateness and taciturnity, his indifference to juvenile amusements, his slowness and difficulty in learning, and his ready submission to his equals, induced them to consider him as one irrecoverably stupid.  The greatness of mind, unalterable courage, and invincible character, which Fabius afterwards displayed, they then imagined had lain concealed under the apparent contrary qualities.  The boy of genius may indeed seem slow and dull even to the phlegmatic; for thoughtful and observing dispositions conceal themselves in timorous silent characters, who have not yet experienced their strength; and that assiduous love, which cannot tear itself away from the secret instruction it is perpetually imbibing, cannot be easily distinguished from the pertinacity of the mere plodder.  We often hear, from the early companions of a man of genius, that at school he appeared heavy and unpromising.  Rousseau imagined that the childhood of some men is accompanied by this seeming and deceitful dulness, which is the sign of a profound genius; and Roger