thus early, it affords a principle which ought not to be neglected at this obscure period of youth. Is there then a period in youth which yields decisive marks of the character of genius? The natures of men are as various as their fortunes. Some, like diamonds, must wait to receive their splendour from the slow touches of the polisher, while others, resembling pearls, appear at once born with their beauteous lustre. Among the inauspicious circumstances is the feebleness of the first attempts; and we must not decide on the talents of a young man by his first works. DRYDEN and SWIFT might have been deterred from authorship had their earliest pieces decided their fate. SMOLLETT, before he knew which way his genius 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.]