by the young, and went to bed stark naked
on the earth. This great prince was not
killed by his early application to his studies.
He lived to the age of fifty-nine, and then he
only died because he had a son who did not
follow in his track. The Emperor Gordian,
when he was a little boy, wrote a book of
unfavourable criticism on the antiquated
style of Cicero, and himself composed a
historical poem called the Antoniniad, in thirty
books.

Does any one urge that this is all to be
condemned as Pagan work? "You cannot have
forgotten, Monsieur," one of the most beautiful
traits in ecclesiastical history, relating
to the infancy of Origen, who puzzled his
learned father with wise questions, and whose
little bosom his father sometimes, when he
went to bed, uncovered and kissed respectfully,
as a sanctuary of divine wisdom. At
the age of sixteen or seventeen, when his
father was seized, he would have rushed
out of the house to martyrdom, if his
discreet mother had not taken away his
trousers, or whatever other clothes any
small boy may tell us that he wore. Then
says the Dominie Baillet, Origen being
unable to leave his chamber, would at least
do what he could, and wrote a letter, giving
new proofs of the excellent education he had
received.

Saint Augustine says that he was frightened
at the wisdom of his son Adeodatus, whose
real discourse at the age of sixteen forms one
side of the talk in the dialogue of his father,
De Magistro.

Now turn from Christians to the barbarians
—the Arabs out of Barbary—and look
at Avicenna. At ten he knew all about the
Koran and the Humanities. He mastered
the arithmetic of the Indians, astronomy,
geometry, and mathematics, logic, and the
Almagest, before he turned to medicine; and,
when he had mastered medicine, he was
sixteen years old. This learned boy worked
far into the night; and, when he did sleep,
never failed to go on with his studies in his
dreams, and often worked out the solution
of a difficulty by the time of waking. Before
he was eighteen, he had passed on to the
study of theology, and had completed it. It
was begun by reading Aristotle's Metaphysics
forty times, so that he knew the book by
heart, without having found out the use of
it. But when the treatise of Alfarabius, on
the end and object of metaphysics, came in his
way, he was suddenly enlightened.

What must have been done in his
boyhood by Nicolas Heliot, who, when not yet
twenty years of age, appeared at the
University of Paris as the Prodigy of the
Fourteenth Century; and was declared, by the
astonished world of letters, "perfect in
languages, in all arts, liberal or mechanical,
a finished philosopher, a physician, a
jurisconsult, a canonist, a theologian." Here was
a youth with an intellect like a many-bladed
knife, which is also a saw, a toothpick, a
boothook, a pen, and a corkscrew! The
fifteenth century saw such another prodigy,
the "Anonymous youth of the year fourteen
hundred and forty-five," who was declared,
by good judges, to be the son of the foul fiend
himself. He was perfect in all arts and
sciences, and was regarded by some as the
Antichrist. Verini wrote, at fourteen, a book
of moral distiches which, being received as a
classic, superseded that bearing the name of
Cato in many colleges of Italy, France, Spain,
and the Netherlands. Politian, when a boy,
used to bring out of the Library of the
Medici Latin and Greek odes or epigrams,
composed by himself, and succeed in palming
them upon the learned as discovered
fragments of Catullus or Anacreon. Hermolaus
Barbarus, at the age of eighteen (and in the
year fourteen hundred and seventy-two), had
read all the books that were then printed,
and all the manuscripts that he had seen.
The invention of printing in Europe was
then thirty-two years old. It is not told us
whether the above statement is meant to
include the books printed in China.

Beroaldus the elder, when a child of very
tender years, wrote most judicious strictures
on the Commentaries of Servius upon Virgil.
Cristofle de Longueil was a learned boy who
made it a point of conscience to read fully
and to the end every book that he began.
He lived two or three centuries ago, and has
had no successors.

I have to mention next a little boy, whose
name was Quirinus, and who was a friend of
the famous Cardinal Bembo. He proposed
and maintained publicly in the city of Rome
four thousand five hundred theses, and there
was no philosopher, whatever his sect, who
was not satisfied with his answers, and whom
his arguments did not convince. This
argumentative boy has had successors, as I know;
for I have myself been argued down and overrun
by herds of them. I think, also, that we
need not go to Friesland for the three brothers,
Andrew, Peter, and James Canters, who had
a little sister like themselves, and who
seemed to know everything at the age of ten.
Their country was too small to hold their
fame, and they travelled through Germany,
France, and Italy, exhibiting proofs of their
universal knowledge, and astonishing the
nations.

Louis Stella was, in the sixteenth century,
a boy professor, Master Star at the University
of Orleans. He is said to have lectured upon
Greek authors to large assemblies at the age
of fifteen; especially expounding Lucian and
Aristophanes, Greek Grammar, and Theodore
Gaza. I must take an early opportunity
of asking some small boy who Theodore
Gaza was. Stella on Gaza seems to bring
heaven and earth together in some sort of
astronomical conjunction.

It is a descent from the sublime to talk
next about young Jacques Grevin, who, at