go it, my boys! they did so at Athens." This self-formed genius could
throw up his native mud into the very heaven of his invention!

[Footnote B: Like Hogarth, when he attempted to engrave his own works, his
originality of style made them differ from the tamer and more mechanical
labours of the professional engraver. They have consequently less beauty,
but greater vigour.--ED.]

But even such pages as those of BARRY'S are the aliment of young genius.
Before we can discern the beautiful, must we not be endowed with the
susceptibility of love? Must not the disposition be formed before even the
object appears? I have witnessed the young artist of genius glow and start
over the reveries of the uneducated BARRY, but pause and meditate, and
inquire over the mature elegance of REYNOLDS; in the one he caught the
passion for beauty, and in the other he discovered the beautiful; with the
one he was warm and restless, and with the other calm and satisfied.

Of the difficulties overcome in the self-education of genius, we have a
remarkable instance in the character of MOSES MENDELSSOHN, on whom
literary Germany has bestowed the honourable title of "the Jewish
Socrates."[A] So great apparently were the invincible obstructions which
barred out Mendelssohn from the world of literature and philosophy, that,
in the history of men of genius, it is something like taking in the
history of man the savage of Aveyron from his woods--who, destitute of a
human language, should at length create a model of eloquence; who, without
the faculty of conceiving a figure, should at length be capable of adding
to the demonstrations of Euclid; and who, without a complex idea and with
few sensations, should at length, in the sublimest strain of metaphysics,
open to the world a new view of the immortality of the soul!