an authentic collection of juvenile anecdotes, which
made me feel very forcibly that there are some children who deserve to
have a biographer at their side; but anecdotes of children are the rarest
of biographies, and I deemed it a singular piece of good fortune to have
recovered such a remarkable evidence of the precocity of character.[A]
Professor Dugald Stewart has noticed a fact in ARNAULD'S infancy, which,
considered in connexion with his subsequent life, affords a good
illustration of the force of impressions received in the first dawn of
reason. ARNAULD, who, to his eightieth year, passed through a life of
theological controversy, when a child, amusing himself in the library of
the Cardinal Du Perron, requested to have a pen given to him. "For what
purpose?" inquired the cardinal. "To write books, like you, against the
Huguenots." The cardinal, then aged and infirm, could not conceal his joy
at the prospect of so hopeful a successor; and placing the pen in his
hand, said, "I give it you as the dying shepherd, Damcetas, bequeathed his
pipe to the little Corydon." Other children might have asked for a pen--
but to write against the Huguenots evinced a deeper feeling and a wider
association of ideas, indicating the future polemic.

[Footnote A: I have preserved this manuscript narrative in "Curiosities of
Literature," vol. ii.]

Some of these facts, we conceive, afford decisive evidence of that
instinct in genius, that primary quality of mind, sometimes called
organization, which has inflamed a war of words by an equivocal term. We
repeat that this faculty of genius can exist independent of education, and
where it is wanting, education can never confer it: it is an impulse, an
instinct always working in the character of "the chosen mind;"

One with our feelings and our powers,
And rather part of us, than ours.

In the history of genius there are unquestionably many secondary causes of
considerable influence in developing, or even crushing the germ--these
have been of late often detected, and sometimes carried to a ridiculous
extreme; but among them none seem more remarkable than the first studies
and the first habits.

CHAPTER VI.

The first studies.--The self-educated are marked by stubborn
peculiarities.--Their errors.--Their improvement from the neglect or
contempt they incur.--The history of self-education in Moses Mendelssohn.
--Friends usually prejudicial in the youth of genius.--A remarkable