GRAY was asked if he recollected when he first felt the strong predilection to poetry; he replied that, "he believed it was when he began to read Virgil for his own amusement, and not in school hours as a task." Such is the force of self-education in genius, that the celebrated physiologist, JOHN HUNTER, who was entirely self-educated, evinced such penetration in his anatomical discoveries, that he has brought into notice passages from writers he was unable to read, and which had been overlooked by profound scholars.[A] [Footnote A: Life of John Hunter, by Dr.Adams, p.

59, where the case is curiously illustrated.

[The writer therein defends Hunter from a charge of plagiarism from the Greek writers, who had studied accurately certain phases of disease, which had afterwards been "overlooked by the most profound scholars for nearly two thousand years," until John Hunter by his own close observation had assumed similar conclusions.]] That the education of genius must be its own work, we may appeal to every one of the family.

It is not always fortunate, for many die amidst a waste of talents and the wreck of mind.
Many a soul sublime Has felt the influence of malignant star.
An unfavourable position in society is a usual obstruction in the course of this self-education; and a man of genius, through half his life, has held a contest with a bad, or with no education.

There is a race of the late-taught, who, with a capacity of leading in the first rank, are mortified to discover themselves only on a level with their contemporaries.