Ah, fields beloved in vain,
Where once my careless childhood stray'd,
A stranger yet to pain."
Gray.
Mankind naturally feel an interest in the boyhood of men of genius; but it often happens that very little attention is paid to early indications; and, when observed, it is certain that they are often interpreted very falsely.
Nothing more emphatically suggests how much we have to learn on this subject, than the obscurity which so often hangs over the earlier years of distinguished men. At school, a number of variable organizations are subjected to very much the same influences; the necessity for generalization affords little opportunity for individual analysis. The main road is broad and familiar; there is no time for indulging in bye-paths, even should the master have the penetration to perceive, in individual cases, the expediency of such selection. Hence the quickening of those impulses, on which the development of character so much depends, is greatly a matter of uncertainty. The moment boys leave school, on the contrary, this uniformity of external influences is replaced by an interminable diversity; at home, scarcely two boys being subjected to exactly the same. Thus, in many instances, it would be easier to deduce the character of the boy from the man, than to have predicted the man from the boy. The evidences of the one are present to us, those of the other may have been entirely unelicited, unobserved, or forgotten.
We cannot wonder, then, that expectation should have been so often disappointed in the boy, or that excellences little dreamt of should have been developed in the man.
Dryden, who, regarded in the triple capacity of poet, prose-writer, and critic, is hardly second to any English author, took no honour at the University. Swift, perhaps our best writer of pure English, whose talents proved scarcely less versatile and extraordinary than they had appeared restricted and deficient, was "plucked" for his degree, in Dublin, and only obtained his recommendation to Oxford "speciali gratia" as it was termed. The phrase, however, being obviously equivocal, and used only in the bad sense at Dublin, was, fortunately for Swift, interpreted in a good sense at Oxford—a misapprehension which Swift, of course, was at no pains to remove.
Sheridan was remarkable for his readiness, his invention, and his wit; as a writer, he showed considerable powers of sustained thought also. He had an habitual eloquence, and, on one occasion, delivered an oration before one of the most distinguished audiences that the world ever saw[6], with an effect that seems to have rivalled the most successful efforts of Cicero, or even Demosthenes. Yet he had shown so little capacity as a boy, that he was presented to a tutor by his own mother with the complimentary accompaniment that he was an incorrigible dunce.