were the fruits of his early devotion, having had from my youth a strong inclination to the study of plants and all other productions of nature.  The vehement passion of PEIRESC for knowledge, according to accounts which Gassendi received from old men who had known him as a child, broke out as soon as he had been taught his alphabet; for then his delight was to be handling books and papers, and his perpetual inquiries after their contents obliged them to invent something to quiet the child’s insatiable curiosity, who was hurt when told that he had not the capacity to understand them.  He did not study as an ordinary scholar, for he never read but with perpetual researches.  At ten years of age, his passion for the studies of antiquity was kindled at the sight of some ancient coins dug up in his neighbourhood; then that vehement passion for knowledge “began to burn like fire in a forest,” as Gassendi happily describes the fervour and amplitude of the mind of this man of vast learning.  Bayle, who was an experienced judge in the history of genius, observes on two friars, one of whom was haunted by a strong disposition to genealogical, and the other to geographical pursuits, that, “let a man do what he will, if nature incline us to certain things, there is no preventing the gratification of our desire, though it lies hid under a monk’s frock.”  It is not, therefore, as the world is apt to imagine, only poets and painters for whom is reserved this restless and impetuous propensity for their particular pursuits; I claim it for the man of science as well as for the man of imagination.  And I confess that I consider this strong bent of the mind in men eminent in pursuits in which imagination is little concerned, and whom men of genius have chosen to remove so far from their class, as another gifted aptitude.  They, too, share in the glorious fever of genius, and we feel how just was the expression formerly used, of “their thirst for knowledge.”

But to return to the men of genius who answer more strictly to the popular notion of inventors.  We have BOCCACCIO’S own words for a proof of his early natural tendency to tale-writing, in a passage of his genealogy of the gods:—­“Before seven years of age, when as yet I had met with no stories, was without a master, and hardly knew my letters, I had a natural talent for fiction, and produced some little tales.”  Thus the “Decamerone” was appearing much earlier than we suppose.  DESCARTES, while yet a boy, indulged such habits of deep meditation, that he was nicknamed by his companions “The Philosopher,” always questioning, and ever settling the cause and the effect.  He was twenty-five years of age before he left the army, but the propensity for meditation had been early formed; and he has himself given an account of the pursuits which occupied his youth, and of the progress of his genius; of the secret struggle which he so long maintained with his own mind, wandering in concealment over the world for