explanation has been suggested that it is
owing to the craving of some new field of distinction.
It is, perhaps, due to some miraculous
change; akin to that in the eye and mind which
enable them to see beauty where it was not
visible before—as after instruction; and it is not
at all improbable that parts of the brain of man
are undergoing some slow but constant mutation,
like that which produced the destruction
of so many races of animals—an immutable law
of transformation and decay.

A man of genius must not on any account
have eminent children. An illustrious house is
quite allowable; a line of Vernets or Bayards, of
Scipios or Plantagenets, but not of Newtons or
Shakespeares. What seems strange is, that the
very bent of mind which most distinguishes the
sire is often least shown in the son. The race
of Charlemagne, as of so many great soldiers
and rulers, were little better than sots or fools.
Richard Cromwell, the son of the lion-hearted,
daring Protector, a simple-minded squire, contented
to live as plain Mr. Clarke of Cheshunt;
the darling child of Napoleon, born King of
immortal Rome, satisfied with a colonelcy in the
army of Austria, a country in all ages without
the ambition of conquest or arts, the natural
enemy of France and Italy; the daughter of
the sturdy Milton, infirm and unlettered; the
heir of Lord Eldon, mad; the son of the polished
Chesterfield, an incurable booby.

But it is much more en règle that we should
have no children at all, for if we be so far
blessed they perish in an age or two, as surely
as the spring flower that has bloomed too early
will sink beneath the redoubled fury of the east
wind. Of all the illustrious men who have
adorned the last five centuries, I believe not
one has left a family that survived through the
fourth generation; very few, indeed, outlived
the second or third, by far the greater number
dying witli the parent tree. To an overwhelming
preponderance of great names there is no
family at all, or, if there were, the biographers
have forgotten to name it. Indeed, they generally
think such matters below their notice.
They can find plenty of time to decide some
trumpery dispute about a text or date, which is
the more sensible, as the next writer will reverse
their judgment, and the reader cares nothing
about the matter; but they seem to think it is
sheer waste of labour to tell us even in a dozen
lines how an author looked, dressed, and lived,
which are just the very things most persons
want to know.

There can be little doubt that this absence of
family is the work of some immutable law. The
result is far too uniform for mere chance. In
whatever land we take up the thread of the
story, however far we go back, even to the dim
and grand old times when Homer drew Earth-shaken
Poseidon pending a charge of the Greeks,
or Jove reclining by streamy Ida; or, still
farther, when Orpheus sang in Thrace of the
great men of old, and Moses laid his hands upon
Joshua, that the son of Nun might lead Israel
into the land of promise, we find it at work,
and so far as can be seen, it is destined to work
so long as men shall achieve mighty deeds and
be enrolled in the chronicles of fame. The life
of Confucius and Zoroaster is the life of Aristotle
and Socrates; of Bacon and Newton; the childless
old age of Plato and AEsop is repeated in
the histories of Voltaire and Gay. The same
narrow circle bounds the family hearth of Sophocles
and Shakespeare; of Milton and Dryden.
Caesar and Alexander leave their vast empires to
the children of other men, as Napoleon and
Nelson must have done, had the one dreamed of
conquests and the other been able to retain them.

Not to weary the reader, let him take one
solitary instance and run over the lives of a
few of our poets. He will find that Shakespeare
had three daughters, "of which" says
the biographer quaintly, "two lived to be married;
Judith, the elder, to one Mr. Thomas
Quincy, by whom she had three sons who all
died without children, and Susannah, who was
his favourite, to Dr. John Hall, a physician of
good reputation. She left one child only, a
daughter, who was married first to Thomas
Nasne, Esq., and afterwards to Sir John Barnard,
of Abington, but died likewise without
issue." Of Ben Jonson nothing is reported.
Milton had children only by his first wife.
They were girls, and the eldest, deformed and
infirm, died a wife, while the next one died
single. The youngest married a weaver in
Spitalfields and had a family. Of Butler it
is related that he was married, and that is
all we are told. There is no mention of his
having had any family; and Congreve, Pope,
Gray, Johnson, Swift, Goldsmith, Otway, Savage,
Thomson, and Shenstone, may, without
further ceremony, be ranked under the same
head. Dryden had three sons: Charles, who
was usher of the palace to Pope Clement the
Eleventh, and was drowned in an attempt to
swim across the Thames at Windsor; John,
who is said to have died obscurely at Rome;
and Henry, who entered some religious order.
Young, like Addison and Byron, had an only
child. Moore outlived his family, and Scott's
race is so completely extinct that the author
believes not even a grandchild is now alive.
Burns stands almost alone in having surviving
sons. Of Wordsworth, Southey, and still more
recent writers, it would not be proper to speak.

There is no need to go into statistics now.
Were such results as these to ensue in a village,
they would depopulate it within half a century, an
event of which there is no need, except among
races like the red Indian, doomed to decay. Of
course war, famine, and pestilence unpeople whole
realms, but that arises from entirely visible causes,
and is therefore a different matter.

There has been many a sad chapter in the
history of genius, but this is the saddest of all.
A man of genius is perhaps in many respects
more purely the child of destiny than people
think him; in this part of his fate there is clearly
more of destiny than choice. He reaps, indeed,
the fame for which he has struggled, because
there is no genius without that strength that