Ascham has placed among “the best natures for learning, the sad-natured and hard-witted child;” that is, the thoughtful, or the melancholic, and the slow.  The young painters, to ridicule the persevering labours of DOMENICHINO, which were at first heavy and unpromising, called him “the great ox;” and Passeri, while he has happily expressed the still labours of his concealed genius, sua taciturna lentezza, his silent slowness, expresses his surprise at the accounts he received of the early life of this great artist.  “It is difficult to believe, what many assert, that, from the beginning, this great painter had a ruggedness about him which entirely incapacitated him from learning his profession; and they have heard from himself that he quite despaired of success.  Yet I cannot comprehend how such vivacious talents, with a mind so finely organised, and accompanied with such favourable dispositions for the art, would show such signs of utter incapacity; I rather think that it is a mistake in the proper knowledge of genius, which some imagine indicates itself most decisively by its sudden vehemence, showing itself like lightning, and like lightning passing away.”

A parallel case we find in GOLDSMITH, who passed through an unpromising youth; he declared that he was never attached to literature till he was thirty; that poetry had no peculiar charms for him till that age;[A] and, indeed, to his latest hour he was surprising his friends by productions which they had imagined he was incapable of composing.  HUME was considered, for his sobriety and assiduity, as competent to become a steady merchant; and it was said of BOILEAU that he had no great understanding, but would speak ill of no one.  This circumstance of the character in youth being entirely mistaken, or entirely opposite to the subsequent one of maturer life, has been noticed of many.  Even a discerning parent or master has entirely failed to develope the genius of the youth, who has afterwards ranked among eminent men; we ought as little to decide from early unfavourable appearances, as from inequality of talent.  The great ISAAC BARROW’S father used to say, that if it pleased God to take from him any of his children, he hoped it might be Isaac, as the least promising; and during the three years Barrow passed at the Charter-house, he was remarkable only for the utter negligence of his studies and of his person.  The mother of SHERIDAN, herself a literary female, pronounced early that he was the dullest and most hopeless of her sons.  BODMER, at the head of the literary class in Switzerland, who had so frequently discovered and animated the literary youths of his country, could never detect the latent genius of GESNER:  after a repeated examination of the young man, he put his parents in despair with the hopeless award that a mind of so ordinary a cast must confine itself to mere writing and accompts.  One fact, however, Bodmer had overlooked when he pronounced the fate of our poet and artist—­the dull youth, who