’Cowley, in the history of his own mind, shews the influence of boyish fancies upon later life.  He compares them to letters cut in the bark of a young tree, which grow and widen with it.  We are not surprised to hear from a school-fellow of the Chancellor Somers, that he was a weakly boy, who always had a book in his hand, and never looked up at the play of his companions; to learn from his affectionate biographer, that Hammond at Eton sought opportunities of stealing away to say his prayers; to read that Tournefort forsook his college class, that he might search for plants in the neighbouring fields; or that Smeaton, in petticoats, was discovered on the top of his father’s barn, in the act of fixing the model of a windmill which he had constructed.  These early traits of character are such as we expect to find in the cultivated lawyer, who turned the eyes of his age upon Milton; in the Christian, whose life was one varied strain of devout praise; in the naturalist, who enriched science by his discoveries; and in the engineer, who built the Eddystone Lighthouse.’

This accords very well with a notion of our own.  We hold that men have a tendency to follow what they are by nature best qualified to succeed in; and that the fact ought to be regarded in the education of the individual.  Education should include the study and trial of aptitudes, so that each may be directed to his appropriate vocation.  It is true, there are sometimes such things as ‘false tendencies’ to be encountered; but these, as Goethe has shewn, may be readily detected, inasmuch as they are plainly ‘unproductive;’ that is to say, the thing aimed after does not come out as a recognisable success.  False tendencies are more easily perceived in others than in ourselves—­especially when ambition, interest, or vanity is involved in the consideration; and on this account the difficulty, perhaps, might not be insurmountable, if the charge of it could be committed to a really judicious educator.  But to say anything further on the subject would be out of place at present; and, accordingly, we return to what is more immediately before us.

‘The instinct of flight,’ continues our author, ’is combined with the instinct of labour.  Genius lights its own fire; but it is constantly collecting materials to keep alive the flame.  When a new publication was suggested to Addison, after the completion of the Guardian, he answered:  “I must now take some time, pour me delasser, and lay in fuel for a future work.”  The strongest blaze soon goes out when a man always blows and never feeds it.  Johnson declined an introduction to a popular author with the remark, that he did not desire to converse with a person who had written more than he had read.

’It is interesting to follow great authors or painters in their careful training and accomplishing of the mind.  The long morning of life is spent in making the weapons and the armour which manhood and age are to polish and prove.  Usher, when nearly twenty years old, formed the daring resolution of reading all the Greek and Latin fathers, and with the dawn of his thirty-ninth year he completed the task.  Hammond, at Oxford, gave thirteen hours of the day to philosophy and classical literature, wrote commentaries on all, and compiled indexes for his own use.