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Hereditary Genius
169
to mount into the fervid and turbulent atmosphere of imagination.”
The majority of the men described in the appendix to this chapter
justify the description by Mr. Disraeli. Again, that the powers of
many of them were of the highest order, no one can doubt. Several
were prodigies in boyhood, as Grotius, Lessing, and Niebuhr; many
others were distinguished in youth; Charlotte Bronte published “Jane
Eyre” aet. 22; Chateaubriand was of note at an equally early age;
Fenelon made an impression when only 15; Sir Philip Sydney was of
high mark before he was 21, and had acquired his great fame, and
won the heart of the nation in a few more years, for he was killed in
battle when only 32. I may add, that there are occasional cases of
great literary men having been the reverse of gifted in youth. Boileau
is the only instance in my appendix. He was a dunce at school, and
dull till he was 30. But, among other literary men of whom I have
notes, Goldsmith was accounted a dull child, and he was anything but
distinguished at Dublin University. He began to write well aet. 32.
Rousseau was thought a dunce at school, whence he ran away aet.
16.
It is a striking confirmation of what I endeavoured to prove in an
early chapter—that the highest order of reputation is independent of
external aids—to note how irregularly many of the men and women
have been educated whose names appear in my appendix—such as
Boileau, the Bronte family, Chateaubriand, Fielding, the two
Gramonts, Irving, Carsten Niebuhr, Person (in one sense), Roscoe,
Le Sage, J. C. Scaliger, Sevigne, and Swift.
I now give my usual table, but I do not specify with confidence the
numbers of eminent literary people contained in the thirty-three
families it includes. They have many literary relations of considerable
merit, but I feel myself unable, for the reasons stated at the beginning
of this chapter, to sort out those that are “eminent”
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