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