"When the intermission of my studies allowed me leisure for recreation,"
says BOYLE of his early life, "I would very often steal away from all
company, and spend four or five hours alone in the fields, and think at
random; making my delighted imagination the busy scene where some romance
or other was daily acted." This circumstance alarmed his friends, who
concluded that he was overcome with a growing melancholy. ALFIERI found
himself in this precise situation, and experienced these undefinable
emotions, when, in his first travels at Marseilles, his lonely spirit only
haunted the theatre and the seashore: the tragic drama was then casting
its influences over his unconscious genius. Almost every evening, after
bathing in the sea, it delighted him to retreat to a little recess where
the land jutted out; there would he sit, leaning his hack against a high
rock, which he tells us, "concealed from my sight every part of the land
behind me, while before and around me I beheld nothing but the sea and the
heavens: the sun, sinking into the waves, was lighting up and embellishing
these two immensities; there would I pass a delicious hour of fantastic
ruminations, and there I should have composed many a poem, had I then
known to write either in verse or prose in any language whatever."

[Footnote A: This solemnity of manner was aped in the days of Elizabeth
and James I. by such as affected scholar-like habits, and is frequently
alluded to by the satirists of the time. BEN JONSON, in his "Every Man in
his Humour," delineates the "country gull," Master Stephen, as affecting
"to be mightily given to melancholy," and receiving the assurance, "It's
your only fine humour, sir; your true melancholy breeds your perfect fine
wit, sir."--ED.]

An incident of this nature is revealed to us by the other noble and mighty
spirit of our times, who could most truly exhibit the history of the youth
of genius, and he has painted forth the enthusiasm of the boy TASSO:--