Thus Charles Darwin, world-famous for his splendid contributions to the advance of science, was so lazy in boyhood that his father predicted he would turn out a ne’er-do-well and a disgrace to the family. His great contemporary, Sir Charles Lyell, similarly had as a boy a profound dislike for work of any sort. Heinrich Heine, on his own confession, idled away his time in school, and was “horribly bored” by the instruction given him at Göttingen. According to an American psychologist, Edgar James Swift, who has made an extensive study of the boyhood of great men, Wordsworth up to the age of seventeen was so lazy as to be “wholly incapable of continued application to prescribed work.” Of Patrick Henry it is recorded by an early biographer that in boyhood “he was too idle to gain any solid advantage from the opportunities which were thrown in his way.” And, after his schooling was done, indolence caused him to fail dismally in several business ventures before he took up the study of law. When James Russell Lowell was a boy his relatives were greatly distressed by his laziness, and he was suspended by the authorities of Harvard University “on account of continual neglect of his college duties.” A boyhood friend who had unusual facilities for observation is credited with having repeatedly declared that “there never was so idle a dog as young Humphry,” afterward Sir Humphry Davy of scientific renown. “My master,” Samuel Johnson once remarked, in speaking of his school-boy days, “whipped me very hard. Without that, sir, I should have done nothing.” Balzac, who wrote so many novels, yet did not let one appear until it had undergone repeated revision, confessed that not only in boyhood but throughout the years of his literary labours he was tormented by longings for an existence of pleasure-seeking leisure. Through the lips of his famous character, Raphael de Valentin, here is what he says of himself: “Since the age of reason until the day when I had finished my task, I observed, read, wrote without ceasing, and my life was like a long imposition; an effeminate lover of oriental indolence, enamoured of my dreams, sensual, I have always worked, refusing to allow myself to taste the joys of Parisian life; gourmand, I have been temperate; enjoying movement and sea voyages, longing to visit other countries, still finding pleasure, like a child, in making ducks and drakes on the water, I remained constantly seated, pen in hand.”