superiority, or at worst, air of superiority, over the corresponding
mediocre character of low rank; thus we perceive, the vulgar Do-nothing,
as contrasted with the vulgar Drudge, is in general a much prettier man;
with a wider perhaps clearer outlook into the distance; in innumerable
superficial matters, however it may be when we go deeper, he has a
manifest advantage. But with the man of uncommon character, again, in
whom a germ of irrepressible Force has been implanted, and _will_ unfold
itself into some sort of freedom,--altogether the reverse may hold. For
such germs, too, there is, undoubtedly enough, a proper soil where they
will grow best, and an improper one where they will grow worst. True
also, where there is a will, there is a way; where a genius has been
given, a possibility, a certainty of its growing is also given. Yet
often it seems as if the injudicious gardening and manuring were worse
than none at all; and killed what the inclemencies of blind chance would
have spared. We find accordingly that few Fredericks or Napoleons,
indeed none since the Great Alexander, who unfortunately drank himself
to death too soon for proving what lay in him, were nursed up with an
eye to their vocation; mostly with an eye quite the other way, in the
midst of isolation and pain, destitution and contradiction. Nay, in our
own times, have we not seen two men of genius, a Byron and a Burns: they
both, by mandate of Nature, struggle and must struggle towards clear
manhood, stormfully enough, for the space of six-and-thirty years; yet
only the gifted ploughman can partially prevail therein; the gifted peer
must toil, and strive, and shoot out in wild efforts, yet die at last in
boyhood, with the promise of his manhood still but announcing itself in
the distance. Truly, as was once written, "it is only the artichoke that
will not grow except in gardens: the acorn is cast carelessly abroad
into the wilderness, yet on the wild soil it nourishes itself, and rises
to be an oak." All woodmen, moreover, will tell you that fat manure is
the ruin of your oak; likewise that the thinner and wilder your soil,