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44
Hereditary Genius
to the wife of a poor glazier. The child's indomitable tendency to the higher
studies, could not be repressed by his foster-mother's ridicule and
dissuasion, nor by the taunts of his schoolfellows, nor by the
discouragements of his schoolmaster, who was incapable of appreciating
him, nor even by the reiterated deep disappointment of finding that his ideas,
which he knew to be original, were not novel, but long previously
discovered by others. Of course, we should expect a boy of this kind, to
undergo ten or more years of apparently hopeless strife, but we should
equally expect him to succeed at last; and D'Alembert did succeed in
attaining the first rank of celebrity, by the time he was twenty-four. The
reader has only to turn over the pages of my book, to find abundant
instances of this emergence from obscurity, in spite of the utmost
discouragement in early youth.
A prodigal nature commonly so prolongs the period when a man's
receptive faculties are at their keenest, that a faulty education in youth, is
readily repaired in after life. The education of Watt, the great mechanician,
was of a merely elementary character. During his youth and manhood he
was engrossed with mechanical specialities. It was not till he became
advanced in years, that he had leisure to educate himself, and yet by the
time he was an old man, he had become singularly well-read and widely
and accurately informed. The scholar who, in the eyes of his
contemporaries and immediate successors, made one of the greatest
reputations, as such, that any man has ever made, was Julius Caesar
Scaliger. His youth was, I believe, entirely unlettered. He was in the army
until he was twenty-nine, and then he led a vagrant professional life, trying
everything and sticking to nothing. At length he fixed himself upon Greek.
His first publications were at the age of forty-seven, and between that time
and the period of a somewhat early death, he earned his remark
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