father of PETRARCH cast to the flames the poetical library of his son,
amidst the shrieks, the groans, and the tears of the youth. Yet this
burnt-offering neither converted Petrarch into a sober lawyer, nor
deprived him of the Roman laurel. The uncle of ALFIERI for more than
twenty years suppressed the poetical character of this noble bard; he was
a poet without knowing how to write a verse, and Nature, like a hard
creditor, exacted, with redoubled interest, all the genius which the uncle
had so long kept from her. These are the men whose inherent impulse no
human opposition, and even no adverse education, can deter from proving
them to be great men.

Let us, however, be just to the parents of a man of genius; they have
another association of ideas respecting him than ourselves. We see a great
man, they a disobedient child; we track him through his glory, they are
wearied by the sullen resistance of one who is obscure and seems useless.
The career of genius is rarely that of fortune or happiness; and the
father, who himself may not be insensible to glory, dreads lest his
son be found among that obscure multitude, that populace of mean artists,
self-deluded yet self-dissatisfied, who must expire at the barriers of
mediocrity.

If the youth of genius be struggling with a concealed impulse, he will
often be thrown into a train of secret instruction which no master can
impart. Hippocrates profoundly observed, that "our _natures_ have not been
taught us by any master." The faculty which the youth of genius displays
in after-life may exist long ere it is perceived; and it will only make
its own what is homogeneous with itself. We may often observe how the mind
of this youth stubbornly rejects whatever is contrary to its habits, and
alien to its affections. Of a solitary character, for solitariness is the
wild nurse of his contemplations, he is fancifully described by one of the