a generation agò, Mr. Fonblanque was writing to the purpose when he satirised "biography à la mode" by inditing an imaginary and ironical memoir of Henry Hunt, Esq., M.P.,-a radical and something more. Loyalty," we read, seems to have been the instinct of his nature. His mother was used pleasantly to relate that, when the child was seven years of age, she chanced on approaching the nursery to hear a sound resembling that which an active full-grown bee of the bumble kind makes in the interior of an empty full-bellied pitcher, and, being naturally curious at hearing so remarkable and singular a noise, she stepped gently on her tiptoes to the door, and on listening attentively, ascertained that it was young master Harry warbling from his infant lips 'God save great George our King.' If a piece of money was given to him, the bent of his affections would appear in the delight with which he gazed at the head, and he would ask whether the King at London was made of gold or of silver?-for the child could not imagine royalty of the same substance as other folks."* The fun of this composition, apart from its merits as a genteel burlesque of the approved verbiage in style, consists in the exquisite inapplicability to the mob-leader, of so adoring an estimate of royalty. Admitting, however, that the future demagogue might in childhood have had so pronounced a penchant the other way, we may suppose his followers to adopt a couplet of Crabbe's, and say,

Such was the boy, and such the man had been,

But fate or happier fortune changed the scene.†

An equally imaginary biography of him by a high Tory might have fathered the man on the child after this sort:

Tetchy and wayward was thy infancy;

Thy school-days frightful, desperate, wild, and furious;
Thy prime of manhood, daring, bold, and venturous.‡

To return, however, to what is reasonable in corroboration of Wordsworth's trite doctrine. Mr. Helps agrees with Hazlitt, "who was a very shrewd thinker," that men's characters do not alter much after their earliest years. The boys that he knew well at school, one of his friends in council is made to say, are the same boys now. The beard was rudimentary then it is fully developed now. : That is the chief difference. One boy, for instance," was mean in playing at marbles; and he is mean now in playing for high office and great dignities. Another was profuse with bull's-eyes and toffy: a large experience of life has not tamed his liberality; and, when the poor fellow has nothing else to give, he offers you his best wishes, and is ready to go anywhere and do anything for you."S

Not but that too absolute a deference to the general doctrine is impugned by observers of the laws of growth and development in their fellow-creatures. In a letter reflecting on the frail vitality of school-day friendships, Cowper appends to the causes he suggests in explanation of their brief tenure: "Add to this, the man frequently differs so much from

* England under Seven Administrations, vol. ii. p. 183.
† Crabbe's Tales, The Convert.

King Richard III., Act IV. Sc. 4.

§ Friends in Council, 2nd Series, vol. ii. p. 312. 2nd edit.

the boy; his principles, manners, temper, and conduct undergo so great an alteration, that we no longer recognise in him our old playfellow, but find him utterly unworthy and unfit for the place he once held in our affections."*

query,

One may apply in this sense quite another poet's

How can this formal man be styled
Merely an Alexandrine child,
A boy of larger growth ?†

The babe, says Mrs. Gore, must be nursed into perfect growth; and rarely has human instinct enabled us to prognosticate from the boyhood of the aspiring urchin, that breadth and strength of manhood which, like

-the towering mountain stands,

And casts its shadow into distant lands.

So, again, in Mr. Whitehead's life-history of Richard Savage, Burridge, desiring to remove his friend's prejudice against Sinclair, from what he remembers of him as a boy, argues to this effect: Remember that you were boys [when you disagreed], and that boys grow into men, and that men are not boys. To judge of the man from the boy, is to refuse an apple in August, because it was sour enough to set the teeth on edge in May.§ But the argument was in this instance, at least, fallacious. Not so Richard Savage's instinct of antipathy, derived from old memories of what kind of boy this Sinclair had been, and thence inferring what manner of man he now was likely to be. In this respect a suggestive parallel occurs in Herr Freytag's Sollen und Haben, in a passage towards the end of the story, which sufficiently interprets itself: "Itzig sat quiet, only his eyes moved uneasily about. No stranger would have observed this sign of a bad conscience, but Anthony saw in the altered countenance the old face of the Ostrau schoolboy-the same face the boy Veitel had made, when he was accused of having stolen a pen or a sheet of paper. Itzig knew then about those thefts, and he knew now about these stolen documents."||

It is Mr. Dickens's account of Miss Sally Brass-a confirmed pettifogger and sharp practitioner in middle life-that she had been remarkable, when a tender prattler, for an uncommon talent in counterfeiting the walk and manner of a bailiff; in which character she had learned to tap her little playfellows on the shoulder, and to carry them off to imaginary sponginghouses, with a correctness of imitation which was the surprise and delight of all who witnessed her performances, and which was only to be exceeded by her exquisite manner of putting an execution into her doll's house, and taking an exact inventory of the chairs and tables. No wonder that her father lamented that she could not take out an attorney's certificate and hold a place upon the roll.¶ Practically, however, Miss Brass did practise; without a certificate.

Richardson makes Clarissa's correspondent, Miss Howe, fond of, what she calls, retrospecting the faces and minds of grown people; that is to

*Cowper to Rev. Wm. Unwin, Oct. 5, 1780.
Hood's Poems, A Retrospective Review.
The Hamiltons, ch. xxix.

§ Richard Savage, ch. xvii.

Sollen und Haben, von Gustav Freytag.
The Old Curiosity Shop, ch. xxxvi.

say, of forming images from their present aspect, outside and in, what sort of figures they made when boys and girls. She records, by way of example, the lights in which three of the leading actors in that tragical History of a Young Lady,-namely, Solmes, Hickman, and Lovelace,have appeared to her, supposing them boys at school. Solmes she imagines to have been a little sordid pilfering rogue, who would purloin from everybody, and beg every boy's bread-and-butter from him; Hickman, a great over-grown, lank-haired, chubby boy, who would be hunched and punched by everybody, and go home with his finger in his eye, and tell his mother; Lovelace, a curly-pated villain, full of fire, fancy, and mischief; an orchard-robber, a wall-climber, a horse-rider without saddle or bridle, neck or nothing; a sturdy rogue, in short, who would kick and cuff, and do no right, and take no wrong of anybody; would get his head broke, then a plaister for it, or let it heal of itself; whilst he went on to do more mischief, and if not to get, to deserve broken bones. "And the same dispositions have grown up with them, and distinguish them as men, with no very material alteration.'

A medley of illustrative evidence-a sort of chance-medley, indeed; indigesta moles-now awaits the reader, an he will.

From the first dawn of his infancy, Marcus Aurelius, says Mr. de Quincey, indicated, by his grave deportment, the philosophic character of his mind; and at eleven years of age he professed himself a formal devotee of philosophy in its strictest form,-assuming the garb, and submitting to its most ascetic ordinances.†

Chateaubriand ascribes signal traits of turbulente malice‡ to the childhood of Pope Gregory the Seventh-" un mauvais petit garçon," he styles that Hildebrand who was one day to shake Christendom to its centre,— at its centre, rather; himself becoming the centre of the system.

William Rufus, as a child, all covered with broidery and gems, is pictured by Sir E. B. Lyttons as betraying the passion for foppery for which the Red King, to the scandal of the church and court, exchanged the decorous pomp of his father's generation.

Of Froissart in his school-days, already a devoted lover of minstrelsy, and dancing, and field-sports, and the smiles of the fair, it has been said that the boy prefigured the man: son enfance précoce annonça ce qu'il serait.|| John Ziska became a page at twelve to the King of Bohemia, and was noted among his fellow-pages for his gloomy temper and love of solitude.

Wallenstein is said to have shown from his earliest boyhood an aggravating spirit of independence and haughtiness. When only seven, on being chastised by his mother for a boyish fault, he cried out indignantly, "Why, am I not a prince? nobody should venture to flog me;" and his uncle having once reproached him with being as proud as a prince, he coolly answered, "Was nicht ist, kann noch werden”—what is not, may yet be.

* Clarissa Harlowe, vol. ii. letter i.

"He pushed his austerities, indeed, to excess; for Dio mentions that in his boyish days he was reduced to great weakness by exercises too severe, and by a diet of too little nutriment."-De Quincey on the Cæsars, ch. iv.

p. 8.

Without the slightest authority, objects M. Villemain, Vie de Chateaubriand, § Harold, book ix. ch. vii. Sainte-Beuve, sur Froissart.

Don John of Austria, brought up as Geronimo, in a Spanish village, used to lead all the lads of the village (so merrily, ah!) in their rustic sports, and gave token, as Mr. Prescott tells us, of his belligerent propensities by making war on the birds in the orchards, on whom he did great execution with his little cross-bow. The peasants of Cuacos are said to have pelted him with stones as he was rifling their fruit-trees: the first lesson in war of the future hero of Lepanto.*

Biographers are not unfrequently tempted to deduce what their hero must have been in childhood, from what they know of him in mature age. Thus we find Mr. Langton Sanford, in his account of the early life of Oliver Cromwell, discoursing after this sort: " In many respects there is no saying more true than that 'the child is father of the man;' and we may with perfect safety deduce from this account of maturer years, that Oliver in his boyhood was passionate, but easily appeased, impetuous, but warm-hearted, fearless, but subject to the controlling influences of a kind and compassionate heart." If "absurd and irrelevant" stories are told of the lad's early depravity, be sure an enemy hath done this.

There is a delightful geniality, it has been remarked, in the pleasure with which the first Earl of Shaftesbury, in his correspondence,‡ dwells on his College lead among his contemporaries; and it might be difficult to point out an instance in which the boy has more unmistakably proved himself father of the man.

It is seldom, maintains M. Bouchitté, in his Life of Poussin, that nature does not give indications beforehand, in men predestined to distinction, of the work to which she devotes them: the spirit which animates us, like the germ wherein lies hid the flower or the animal, that shall one day expand in full, contains the secret of our future, a future concealed at first, but which may be guessed at and divined in those spontaneous, almost involuntary essais, that reveal the man to himself, and discover just enough of the pathway of genius designed for him to direct his steps and sustain his courage. In the case of Nicolas Poussin, the earliest attempts of the child announced the ripened works of the man : "les essais de l'enfant annonçaient les œuvres de l'homme."§

Descartes, from his earliest childhood, was noted for insatiable curiosity. He was for ever asking questions about cause and effect; and his father, when speaking of him, used complacently to style him "my philosopher." -Pascal was only twelve years old when his father surprised him, one day, tracing figures by which, independent and innocent of Euclid, the boy had made the discovery that the angles of a triangle are together equal to two right angles. There is a similar anecdote of James Watt having been observed, as a child of six years old, drawing mathematical lines and circles on the hearthstone, and of a bystander's comment that he was 66 no common child."

The story goes that Linnæus, while a child in arms, would at once be pacified when crying by having a flower put into his tiny hands.

* See Prescott's History of Philip II., vol. iii. pp. 104, 107.

† J. L. Sanford's Studies of the Great Rebellion, ch. iv.

Memoirs, Letters, &c., edit. W. D. Christie.

Le Poussin, sa Vie et ses Œuvres, par H. Bouchitté, ch. i.

"Gracieuse légende de l'enfance de Linné, et qui rappelle les récits des bucoliques anciens sur le jeune Daphnis !"-Causeries du Lundi, t. x. p. 48.

Horace Walpole, when a child, was haunted, as Lord Macaulay observes, with a longing to see George the First, and gave his mother no peace till she had found a way of gratifying his curiosity. “The same feeling, covered with a thousand disguises, attended him to the grave. No observation that dropped from the lips of Majesty seemed to him too trifling to be recorded," &c.

Boswell almost anticipates, by paraphrase, Wordsworth's line, when he declares Dr. Johnson to have been a memorable instance of what has been often observed, that "the boy is the man in miniature; and that the distinguishing characteristics of the individual are the same through the whole course of life."+

What Mr. Carlyle calls Johnson's disposition for royalty, was well seen in early boyhood, when three of his schoolfellows used to come in the morning as his humble attendants, and carry him to school. One in the middle stooped, upon whose back Johnson sat, and one on each side supporting him, in this fashion was he borne along triumphant. Already dominant, imperial, irresistible. "Not in the king's-chair' (of human arms), as we see, do his three satellites carry him along; rather on the Tyrant's-saddle, the back of his fellow-creature, must he ride prosperous! The child is father of the man."§ The schoolroom, indeed, affords ample room and verge enough for taking observations of this kind, to those who, like Crabbe's matron, have any gift of insight in that direction :

...

She early sees to what the mind will grow,
Nor abler judge of infant-powers I know.
Observes the dawn of wisdom, fancy, taste,
And knows what parts will wear and what will waste;
She marks the mind too lively, and at once

Sees the gay coxcomb and the rattling dunce.

Long has she lived, and much she loves to trace
Her former pupils, now a lordly race;

Whom when she sees rich robes and furs bedeck,

She marks the pride which once she strove to check :

A burgess comes, and she remembers well

How hard her task to make his worship spell;

Cold, selfish, dull, inanimate, unkind,

'Twas but by anger he display'd a mind:
Now civil, smiling, complaisant, and gay,
The world has worn th' unsocial crust away;
That sullen spirit now a softness wears,
And, save by fits, e'en dulness disappears:
But still the matron can the man behold,
Dull, selfish, hard, inanimate, and cold.

Of Warren Hastings and Elijah Impey at Westminster together, Lord Macaulay shrewdly says, that, little as we know about their school-days, we may safely venture to guess that, whenever Hastings wished to play

*Macaulay, Crit. and Histor. Essays, Walpole's Letters.

† Life of Johnson, Introduct.

Boswell.

§ Carlyle's Critical and Miscel. Essays, vol. iii., Boswell's Life of Johnson. Crabbe, The Borough, letter xxiv.