GENIUS AND TALENT. 345 



the seal upon Darwin's undoubted apostolate. Other men had had 

 that same apergu in greater or less degree before him : some of 

 them smaller men, no doubt, and some of them at least his peers 

 in grasp and ability. "Wells had had it years earlier; Patrick 

 Matthew had had it as a passing glimpse ; Wallace lighted upon 

 it almost simultaneously ; Herbert Spencer trembled more than 

 once with strange nearness upon the very verge of discovery. 

 But what Darwin did was to raise this apergu into the guiding 

 star and mainspring of his active life ; to work away at it early 

 and late ; to heap together instances pro and con j to bring out at 

 last after endless toil that banner of a fresh epoch, the Origin of 

 Species, with all its wonderful ancillary treatises. Darwin's mind, 

 though broad and open, a mind of singular candor and acuteness 

 and penetration, was not, in respect of mere general ability, very 

 far above the average constructive mind of the better class of 

 English scientific men. He had twenty contemporaries in the 

 Royal Society who were probably his equals in native intellect 

 and generalizing power. But he had no equals in industry and 

 systematic observation ; it was the combination of so much faculty 

 for hard work with so much high organizing intelligence that 

 enabled Darwin to produce so vast a result upon the thought of 

 the world and the future of science, of philosophy, and of politics. 

 When John Gibson was studying under Canova at Rome, a 

 young English sculptor of the divine genius order — the order rep- 

 resented in our own days by Mr. Richard Belt of funest memory 

 — came to cast a lordly glance in passing around the Roman stu- 

 dios. Gibson himself had been born an artist — not perhaps an 

 artist of the particular type at present exclusively admired by a 

 cultivated clique as supreme and intense, but still in his own way 

 a true and admirable academic artist. Apprenticed first to a 

 wood-carver and then to a stone-cutter, the Welsh working lad 

 determined to make himself a real sculptor. Your boy of talent 

 placed in such circumstances would have considered himself a 

 divinely gifted sculptor already, and would have begun turning 

 out marble nymphs and Ganymedes and Psyches as fast as his 

 active hands could carve them. But Gibson knew better than 

 that. He knew he was a genius, and he determined to behave 

 as such. He went to an anatomy class in Liverpool, where he 

 lived, and he worked with scalpel and saw among the budding 

 surgeons on the bones and muscles of the human frame. When 

 he had studied dra^ving, modeling, and the use of the chisel, as 

 far as England could then instruct him, he made up his mind to 

 go to Rome ; and to Rome he would go, he said, if he had to tramp 

 it on foot. To him thus employed at molding clay in Canova's 

 studio enter the self-taught divine genius, who has come Rome- 

 ward to glance casually right and left at Michael Angelos and 

 Vol. xxxit.— 22.* 



