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.