could not retain barren words, discovered an active fancy in the image of things.  While at his grammar lessons, as it happened to Lucian, he was employing tedious hours in modelling in wax, groups of men, animals, and other figures, the rod of the pedagogue often interrupted the fingers of our infant moulder, who never ceased working to amuse his little sisters with his waxen creatures, which constituted all his happiness.  Those arts of imitation were already possessing the soul of the boy Gesner, to which afterwards it became so entirely devoted.

[Footnote A:  This is a remarkable expression from Goldsmith:  but it is much more so when we hear it from Lord Byron.  See a note in the following chapter, on “The First Studies,” p. 56.]

Thus it happens that in the first years of life the education of the youth may not be the education of his genius; he lives unknown to himself and others.  In all these cases nature had dropped the seeds in the soil:  but even a happy disposition must be concealed amidst adverse circumstances:  I repeat, that genius can only make that its own which is homogeneous with its nature.  It has happened to some men of genius during a long period of their lives, that an unsettled impulse, unable to discover the object of its aptitude, a thirst and fever in the temperament of too sentient a being, which cannot find the occupation to which only it can attach itself, has sunk into a melancholy and querulous spirit, weary with the burthen of existence; but the instant the latent talent had declared itself, his first work, the eager offspring of desire and love, has astonished the world at once with the birth and the maturity of genius.

We are told that PELEGRINO TIBALDI, who afterwards obtained the glorious title of “the reformed Michael Angelo,” long felt the strongest internal dissatisfaction at his own proficiency, and that one day, in melancholy and despair, he had retired from the city, resolved to starve himself to death:  his friend discovered him, and having persuaded him to change his pursuits from painting to architecture, he soon rose to eminence.  This story D’Argenville throws some doubt over; but as Tibaldi during twenty years abstained from his pencil, a singular circumstance seems explained by an extraordinary occurrence.  TASSO, with feverish anxiety pondered on five different subjects before he could decide in the choice of his epic; the same embarrassment was long the fate of GIBBON on the subject of his history.  Some have sunk into a deplorable state of utter languishment, from the circumstance of being deprived of the means of pursuing their beloved study, as in the case of the chemist BERGMAN.  His friends, to gain him over to the more lucrative professions, deprived him of his books of natural history; a plan which nearly proved fatal to the youth, who with declining health quitted the university.  At length ceasing to struggle with the conflicting desire within him, his renewed enthusiasm for his favourite science restored the health he had lost in abandoning it.