ed in
the comparison.

"Won't you do well by me some time, too?" teased little Taddy, who
overheard his adopted parents congratulating themselves on having acted
so generously by Reuben. "I don't care for no cowpen bonds, but I do
want a new drum!"

"Yes, yes, my son!" said Ducklow, patting the boy's shoulder.

And the drum was bought.

Taddy was delighted. But he did not know what made the Ducklows so much
happier, so much gentler and kinder, than formerly. Do you?

THE AUTHOR OF "SAUL."[A]

We are not one of those who believe that the manifestation of any
native, vigorous faculty of the mind is dependent upon circumstances. It
is true that education, in its largest sense, modifies development; but
it cannot, to any serious extent, add to, or take from, the power to be
developed. In the lack of encouragement and contemporary appreciation,
certain of the finer faculties may not give forth their full and perfect
fragrance; but the rose is always seen to be a rose, though never a bud
come to flower. The "mute, inglorious Milton" is a pleasant poetic
fiction. Against the "hands that the rod of empire _might_ have swayed"
we have nothing to object, knowing to what sort of hands the said rod
has so often been intrusted.

John Howard Payne once read to us--and it was something of an
infliction--a long manuscript on "The Neglected Geniuses of America,"--a
work which only death, we suspect, prevented him from giving to the
world. There was not one name in the list which had ever before reached
our ears. Nicholas Blauvelt and William Phillips and a number of other
utterly forgotten rhymesters were described and eulogized at length, the
quoted specimens of their poetry proving all the while their admirable
right to the oblivion which Mr. Payne deprecated. They were men of
culture, some of them wealthy, and we could detect no lack of
opportunity in the story of their lives. Had they been mechanics, they
would have planed boards and laid bricks from youth to age. The Ayrshire
ploughman and the Bedford tinker were made of other stuff. Our inference
then was, and still is, that unacknowledged (or at least unmanifested)
genius is no genius at all, and that the lack of sympathy which many
young authors so bitterly lament is a necessary test of their fitness
for their assumed vocation.

Gerald Massey is one of the most recent instances of the certainty with
which a poetic faculty by no means of the highest order will e