No poet but is moved with indignation at the recollection of the tutor at the Port Royal thrice burning the romance which RACINE at length got by heart; no geometrician but bitterly inveighs against the father of PASCAL for not suffering him to study Euclid, which he at length understood without studying.

The father of PETRARCH cast to the flames the poetical library of his son, amidst the shrieks, the groans, and the tears of the youth.

Yet this burnt-offering neither converted Petrarch into a sober lawyer, nor deprived him of the Roman laurel.

The uncle of ALFIERI for more than twenty years suppressed the poetical character of this noble bard; he was a poet without knowing how to write a verse, and Nature, like a hard creditor, exacted, with redoubled interest, all the genius which the uncle had so long kept from her.

These are the men whose inherent impulse no human opposition, and even no adverse education, can deter from proving them to be great men.
Let us, however, be just to the parents of a man of genius; they have another association of ideas respecting him than ourselves.