CHILDHOOD PATTERN OF GENIUS—McCURDY 531 
of the children suffered comparative neglect or abuse, they would be 
Leopardi, Chatterton, and Mirabeau. Chatterton had no father from 
the time of his birth, and the fathers of Leopardi and Mirabeau were 
lacking in sympathy or worse. On the other hand, Chatterton’s 
mother and sister helped him to learn to read, saw that he went to 
school, and were good enough to him that the promise he made them 
when a child to reward them with all kinds of finery when he grew 
up was fulfilled in the last year of his short life; Leopardi was pro- 
vided with tutors and had access to his father’s rich library; and 
Mirabeau, cuffed and persecuted as he finally was by his erratic father, 
was received into the world with an outburst of joy and was always 
provided for educationally, even though the arrangement may have 
been savagely disciplinary. 
Favorable parental attention may take the two forms of displays of 
affection and intellectual stimulation. There is strong evidence for 
both in most of the cases in our list. Remarkable indeed are the 
educational programs followed by Mill, Goethe, Pascal, Bentham, 
Niebuhr, Adams, Wieland, Tasso, and Pitt, under the encouragement, 
guidance, and powerful insistence of their fathers. Yet it is not the 
educational program itself which requires our notice so much as it is 
the intimate and constant association with adults which it entails. 
Not only were these boys often in the company of adults, as genuine 
companions; they were to a significant extent cut off from the society 
of other children. The same statement can be made, on the whole, 
for others in the list whose educations proceeded less directly, or less 
strenuously under the guidance of fathers. 
Warm attachments to children outside the family circle seem to 
have been rare, and there are several cases of isolation within the 
family, too. Yet it is within the family that most of the recorded 
intimacies between these geniuses and other children developed. 
Goethe, Pascal, Niebuhr, Macaulay, Voltaire, and Mirabeau ex- 
perienced some intensity of affection for sisters; Musset for his older 
brother. Macaulay and Voltaire remained attached to their favorite 
sisters throughout their lives, becoming devoted uncles to their sisters’ 
children; Goethe’s and Pascal’s affection for their younger sisters 
approached passion; and Mirabeau speaks of incestuous relations 
with his. 
The reality and nature of the pattern to which I am pointing—the 
very great dominance of adults in the lives of these children, and their 
isolation from contemporaries outside the family and, sometimes, 
within—can be adequately appreciated only through a more detailed 
statement about each individual. 
Mill, under his father’s persona] and unremitting tutelage, began 
hard intellectual work before he was 3. From very early he was given 
the responsibility of acting as tutor to his brothers and sisters. This 
