s would conduct him, had early conceived a high notion of his
talents for dramatic poetry: his tragedy of the _Regicide_ was refused by
Garrick, whom for a long time he could not forgive, but continued to abuse
our Roscius, through his works of genius, for having discountenanced his
first work, which had none. RACINE'S earliest composition, as we may judge
by some fragments his son has preserved, remarkably contrasts with his
writings; for these fragments abound with those points and conceits which
he afterwards abhorred. The tender author of "Andromache" could not have
been discovered while exhausting himself in running after _concetti_ as
surprising as the worst parts of Cowley, in whose spirit alone he could
have hit on this perplexing _concetto_, descriptive of Aurora: "Fille du
Jour, qui nais devant ton pere!"--"Daughter of Day, but born before thy
father!" GIBBON betrayed none of the force and magnitude of his powers in
his "Essay on Literature," or his attempted "History of Switzerland,"
JOHNSON'S cadenced prose is not recognisable in the humbler simplicity of
his earliest years. Many authors have begun unsuccessfully the walk they
afterwards excelled in. RAPHAEL, when he first drew his meagre forms under
Perugino, had not yet conceived one line of that ideal beauty which one
day he of all men could alone execute. Who could have imagined, in
examining the _Dream_ of Raphael, that the same pencil could hereafter
have poured out the miraculous _Transfiguration?_ Or that, in the
imitative pupil of Hudson, our country was at length to pride herself on
another Raphael?[A]

[Footnote A: Hudson was the fashionable portrait-painter who succeeded
Kneller, and made a great reputation and fortune; but he was a very mean
artist, who merely copied the peculiarities of his predecessor without his
genius. His stiff hard style was formality itself; but was approved in an
age of formalism; the earlier half of the last century.--ED.]

Even the manhood of genius may pass unobserved by his companions, and,
like. AEneas, he may be hidden in a cloud amidst his associates. The
celebrated FABIUS MAXIMUS in his boyhood was called in derision "the
little sheep," from the meekness and gravity of his disposition. His
sedateness and taciturnity, his indifference to juvenile amusements, his
slowness and difficulty in learning, and his ready submission to his
equals, induced them to consider him as one irrecoverably stupid. The
greatness of mi