ies in his ancestral village: marries Mary, the
daughter of Hodge Secundus of that parish, and begets assorted Hodges
and Marys in vast quantities, all of the same pattern, to replenish the
earth in the next generation. There you have a very well-marked
hereditary caste, little given to intermixture with others, and from
whose members, however recruited by fresh blood, the object of our
quest, the Divine Genius, is very unlikely to find his point of origin.
Then there is the town artisan caste, sprung originally, indeed, from
the ranks of the Hodges, but naturally selected out of its most active,
enterprising, and intelligent individuals, and often of many generations
standing in various forms of handicraft. This is a far higher and more
promising type of humanity, from the judicious intermixture of whose
best elements we are apt to get our Stephensons, our Arkwrights, our
Telfords, and our Edisons. In a rank of life just above the last, we
find the fixed and immobile farmer caste, which only rarely blossoms
out, under favourable circumstances on both sides, into a stray Cobbett
or an almost miraculous miller Constable. The shopkeepers are a tribe of
more varied interests and more diversified lives. An immense variety of
brain elements are called into play by their diverse functions in
diverse lines; and when we take them in conjunction with the upper
mercantile grades, which are chiefly composed of their ablest and most
successful members, we get considerable chances of those happy blendings
of individual excellences in their casual marriages which go to make up
talent, and, in their final outcome, genius. Last of all, in the
professional and upper classes there is a freedom and play of faculty
everywhere going on, which in the chances of intermarriage between
lawyer-folk and doctor-folk, scientific people and artistic people,
county families and bishops or law lords, and so forth _ad infinitum_,
offers by far the best opportunities of any for the occasional
development of that rare product of the highest humanity, the genuine
genius.

But in every case it is, I believe, essentially intermixture of
variously acquired hereditary characteristics that makes the best and
truest geniuses. Left to itself, each separate line of caste ancestry
would tend to produce a certain fixed Chinese or Japanese perfection of
handicraft in a certain definite, restricted direction, but not probably
anything worth calling real genius. For e