I had long considered the character of our archdeacon as a lusus politicus et theologicus.  Having subscribed to the Articles, and enjoying the archdeaconry, he was writing against subscription and the whole hierarchy, with a spirit so irascible and caustic, that one would have suspected that, like Prynne and Bastwick, the archdeacon had already lost both his ears; while his antipathy to monarchy might have done honour to a Roundhead of the Rota Club.  The secret of these volcanic explosions was only revealed in a letter accidentally preserved.  In the youth of our spirited archdeacon, when fox-hunting was his deepest study, it happened at the house of a relation, that on a rainy day he fell, among other garret lumber, on some worm-eaten volumes which had once been the careful collections of his great-grandfather, an Oliverian justice.  “These,” says he, “I conveyed to my lodging-room, and there became acquainted with the manners and principles of many excellent old Puritans, and then laid the foundation of my own.”  The enigma is now solved!  Archdeacon BLACKBURNE, in his seclusion in Yorkshire amidst the Oliverian justice’s library, shows that we are in want of a Cervantes but not of a Quixote, and Yorkshire might yet be as renowned a country as La Mancha; for political romances, it is presumed, may be as fertile of ridicule as any of the folios of chivalry.

We may thus mark the influence through life of those first unobserved impressions on the character of genius, which every author has not recorded.

Education, however indispensable in a cultivated age, produces nothing on the side of genius.  Where education ends, genius often begins.  GRAY was asked if he recollected when he first felt the strong predilection to poetry; he replied that, “he believed it was when he began to read Virgil for his own amusement, and not in school hours as a task.”  Such is the force of self-education in genius, that the celebrated physiologist, JOHN HUNTER, who was entirely self-educated, evinced such penetration in his anatomical discoveries, that he has brought into notice passages from writers he was unable to read, and which had been overlooked by profound scholars.[A]

[Footnote A:  Life of John Hunter, by Dr. Adams, p. 59, where the case is curiously illustrated. [The writer therein defends Hunter from a charge of plagiarism from the Greek writers, who had studied accurately certain phases of disease, which had afterwards been “overlooked by the most profound scholars for nearly two thousand years,” until John Hunter by his own close observation had assumed similar conclusions.]]

That the education of genius must be its own work, we may appeal to every one of the family.  It is not always fortunate, for many die amidst a waste of talents and the wreck of mind.

                 Many a soul sublime
  Has felt the influence of malignant star.