In this case of the youth of genius, are we to conclude that the accidental view of a young actress practising her studies imparted the character of Clairon?  Could a mere chance occurrence have given birth to those faculties which produced a sublime tragedian?  In all arts there are talents which may be acquired by imitation and reflection,—­and thus far may genius be educated; but there are others which are entirely the result of native sensibility, which often secretly torment the possessor, and which may even be lost from the want of development, dissolved into a state of languor from which many have not recovered.  Clairon, before she saw the young actress, and having yet no conception of a theatre—­for she had never entered one—­had in her soul that latent faculty which creates a dramatic genius.  “Had I not felt like Dido,” she once exclaimed, “I could not have thus personified her!”

The force of impressions received in the warm susceptibility of the childhood of genius, is probably little known to us; but we may perceive them also working in the moral character, which frequently discovers itself in childhood, and which manhood cannot always conceal, however it may alter.  The intellectual and the moral character are unquestionably closely allied.  ERASMUS acquaints us, that Sir THOMAS MORE had something ludicrous in his aspect, tending to a smile,—­a feature which his portraits preserve; and that he was more inclined to pleasantry and jesting, than to the gravity of the chancellor.  This circumstance he imputes to Sir Thomas More “being from a child so delighted with humour, that he seemed to be even born for it.”  And we know that he died as he had lived, with a jest on his lips.  The hero, who came at length to regret that he had but one world to conquer, betrayed the majesty of his restless genius when but a youth.  Had Aristotle been nigh when, solicited to join in the course, the princely boy replied, that “He would run in no career where kings were not the competitors,” the prescient tutor might have recognised in his pupil the future and successful rival of Darius and Porus.

A narrative of the earliest years of Prince Henry, by one of his attendants, forms an authentic collection of juvenile anecdotes, which made me feel very forcibly that there are some children who deserve to have a biographer at their side; but anecdotes of children are the rarest of biographies, and I deemed it a singular piece of good fortune to have recovered such a remarkable evidence of the precocity of character.[A] Professor Dugald Stewart has noticed a fact in ARNAULD’S infancy, which, considered in connexion with his subsequent life, affords a good illustration of the force of impressions received in the first dawn of reason.  ARNAULD, who, to his eightieth year, passed through a life of theological controversy, when a child, amusing himself in the library of the Cardinal Du Perron, requested to have a pen given to him.  “For