Genius, in its infancy, sometimes puts on a very funny face. The first efforts of a painter are generally rude enough. So are those of a poet, or any other artist. I have often wished I might see the first picture that such a man as Titian, or Rubens, or Reynolds, or West, ever drew. It would interest me much, and, I suspect, would provoke a smile or two, at the expense of the young artists. History does not often transmit such sketches to the world. But I wish it would. I wish the picture of the sheep that Giotto was sketching, when Cimabue, one of the greatest painters of his age, came across him, could be produced. I would go miles to see it. And I wish West's mother had carefully preserved, for some public gallery, the picture that her son Benjamin made of the little baby in the cradle. You have heard that story, I dare say. Benjamin, you know, showed a taste for drawing and painting, when he was a very little boy. His early advantages were but few. But he made the most of these advantages; and the result was that he became one of the first painters of his day, and before he died, he was chosen President of the Royal Society in London. How do you think he made his colors? You will smile when you hear that they were formed with charcoal and chalk, with an occasional sprinkling of the juice of red berries. His brush was rather a rude one. It was made of the hair he pulled from the tail of Pussy, the family cat. Poor old cat! she lost so much of her fur to supply the young artist with brushes, that the family began to feel a good deal of anxiety for her pussyship. They thought her hair fell off by disease, until Benjamin, who was an honest boy, one day informed them of their mistake. What a pity that the world could not have the benefit of one of the pictures that West painted with his cat-tail brush. And then, what a treat it would be, to get hold of the first rhymes that Watts and Pope ever made. I believe that Watts had been rhyming some time when he got a fatherly flogging for this exercise of his genius, and he sobbed out, between the blows, "Dear father, do some pity take, And I will no more verses make." That couplet was not his first one, by a good deal. The habit, it would seem, had taken a pretty strong hold of him, when the whipping drew that out of him. It seems to me that the childhood and early youth of a genius are more interesting than any riper periods of his life; or rather, that they become so, when time and circumstances have developed what there was in the man, and when from the stand-point of his fame in manhood, we look back upon his early history. What small beginnings there have been to all the efforts of those who have made themselves masters of the particular art to which they have directed their attention.