A parallel case we find in GOLDSMITH, who passed through an unpromising youth; he declared that he was never attached to literature till he was thirty; that poetry had no peculiar charms for him till that age;[A] and, indeed, to his latest hour he was surprising his friends by productions which they had imagined he was incapable of composing. HUME was considered, for his sobriety and assiduity, as competent to become a steady merchant; and it was said of BOILEAU that he had no great understanding, but would speak ill of no one. This circumstance of the character in youth being entirely mistaken, or entirely opposite to the subsequent one of maturer life, has been noticed of many. Even a discerning parent or master has entirely failed to develope the genius of the youth, who has afterwards ranked among eminent men; we ought as little to decide from early unfavourable appearances, as from inequality of talent. The great ISAAC BARROW'S father used to say, that if it pleased God to take from him any of his children, he hoped it might be Isaac, as the least promising; and during the three years Barrow passed at the Charter-house, he was remarkable only for the utter negligence of his studies and of his person. The mother of SHERIDAN, herself a literary female, pronounced early that he was the dullest and most hopeless of her sons. BODMER, at the head of the literary class in Switzerland, who had so frequently discovered and animated the literary youths of his country, could never detect the latent genius of GESNER: after a repeated examination of the young man, he put his parents in despair with the hopeless award that a mind of so ordinary a cast must confine itself to mere writing and accompts. One fact, however, Bodmer had overlooked when he pronounced the fate of our poet and artist--the dull youth, who could not retain barren words, discovered an active fancy in the image of things. While at his grammar lessons, as it happened to Lucian, he was employing tedious hours in modelling in wax, groups of men, animals, and other figures, the rod of the pedagogue often interrupted the fingers of our infant moulder, who never ceased working to amuse his little sisters with his waxen creatures, which constituted all his happiness. Those arts of imitation were already possessing the soul of the boy Gesner, to which afterwards it became so entirely devoted. [Footnote A: This is a remarkable expression from Goldsmith: but it is much more so when we hear it from Lord Byron. See a note in the following chapter, on "The First Studies," p. 56.]