the top of his class. Many of our greatest divines have been anything but precocious. Isaac Barrow, when a boy at the Charterhouse School, was notorious chiefly for his strong temper, pugnacious habits, and proverbial idleness as a scholar; and he caused such grief to his parents that his father used to say that, if it pleased God to take from him any of his children, he hoped it might be Isaac, the least promising of them all. Adam Clarke, when a boy, was proclaimed by his father to be "a grievous dunce"; though he could roll large stones about. Dean Swift was "plucked" at Dublin University, and only obtained his recommendation to Oxford "speciali gratia." The well-known Dr. Chalmers and Dr. Cook[1] were boys together at the parish school of St. Andrews; and they were found so stupid and mischievous, that the master, irritated beyond measure, dismissed them both as incorrigible dunces.
The brilliant Sheridan showed so little capacity as a boy, that he was presented to a tutor by his mother with the complimentary accompaniment that he was an incorrigible dunce. Walter Scott was all but a dunce when a boy, always much readier for a "bicker" than apt at his lessons. At the Edinburgh University, Professor Dalzell pronounced upon him the sentence that "Dunce he was, and dunce he would remain." Chatterton was returned on his mother's hands as "a fool, of whom nothing could be made." Burns was a dull boy, good only at athletic exercises. Goldsmith spoke of himself as a plant that flowered late. Alfieri left college no wiser than he entered it, and did not begin the studies by which he distinguished
- ↑ Late Professor of Moral Philosophy at St. Andrews.
