curiously illustrated. [The writer therein defends Hunter from a charge of
plagiarism from the Greek writers, who had studied accurately certain
phases of disease, which had afterwards been "overlooked by the most
profound scholars for nearly two thousand years," until John Hunter by his
own close observation had assumed similar conclusions.]]

That the education of genius must be its own work, we may appeal to every
one of the family. It is not always fortunate, for many die amidst a waste
of talents and the wreck of mind.

Many a soul sublime
Has felt the influence of malignant star.

An unfavourable position in society is a usual obstruction in the
course of this self-education; and a man of genius, through half his
life, has held a contest with a bad, or with no education. There is a race
of the late-taught, who, with a capacity of leading in the first
rank, are mortified to discover themselves only on a level with their
contemporaries. WINCKELMANN, who passed his youth in obscure misery as a
village schoolmaster, paints feelings which strikingly contrast with his
avocations. "I formerly filled the office of a schoolmaster with the
greatest punctuality; and I taught the A, B, C, to children with filthy
heads, at the moment I was aspiring after the knowledge of the beautiful,
and meditating, low to myself, on the similes of Homer; then I said to
myself, as I still say, 'Peace, my soul, thy strength shall surmount thy
cares.'" The obstructions of so unhappy a self-education essentially
injured his ardent genius, and long he secretly sorrowed at this want of
early patronage, and these habits of life so discordant with the habits of
his mind. "I am unfortunately one of those whom the Greeks named [Greek:
opsimatheis], _sero sapientes_, the late-learned, for I have appeared too