CHILDHOOD PATTERN OF GENIUS—McCURDY 000 
With the other children he liked to produce plays in which the tyrant 
(his father) was worsted by the hero (himself). At a later age he 
regarded his home as a prison from which he had to break out. 
Chatterton, born 3 months after his talented father’s death, was the 
second surviving child of his very young mother, who had borne her 
daughter 4 or 5 years earlier before her marriage was legalized. Under 
their instruction, he learned the alphabet from an old illuminated music 
manuscript of his father’s, which his mother had been about to throw 
away, and learned how to read from an old blackletter Testament. He 
had been dismissed from his first school as a dullard. Later, he went 
to the uninspiring charity school which had been attended by his 
father. A note on his relations with playmates before he was 5 speaks 
of him as “presiding over his playmates as their master and they as his 
hired servants” [20, p. 22]. Already at 5 he was greedy for fame, and 
asked that a cup which had been presented to him by a relative should 
have on it “an angel with a trumpet, ‘to blow his name about, as he said” 
[20, p. 23]. He did form friendships at school, one in particular; and 
the death of this boy plunged him into melancholy. But with none of 
these, or with his sister, was he intimate enough to share the secret of 
his Rowley poems, those impressive forgeries which seem to have been 
written under the inspiration and tutelage of the beautiful church of 
St. Mary Redcliffe rather than any human preceptor. 
Niebuhr’s father, who had been a military engineer and explorer, 
took up residence after his marriage at 40 in a retired little town and 
devoted himself to his wife and family of two children. He liked to 
entertain his own and other children with stories, games, and music; 
but he concentrated particularly on the instruction of his son, for 
whom he also provided tutors from about 4 or 5. A cultured neighbor, 
Boje, who was editor of a literary periodical, took much interest 
in the boy; and Boje’s wife began his instruction in French. Her 
death when he was 10 overwhelmed him with grief and inclined him 
even more seriously to his studies. Between 14 and 18 he spent most 
of the day in hard work and general reading. When he was 16 his 
father, thinking that his attachment to home was excessive and that he 
was studying too much alone, sent him off to a school in Hamburg in 
the hope that he would become more sociable; but he was unhappy, 
and insisted on coming back. From an early age ill health and his 
mother’s anxiety contributed their share to his inclination to solitude. 
Mirabeau, the first surviving son of a family of the nobility, was in 
the beginning his father’s pride. Later, after disfigurement by small- 
pox at 3 and displacement from the position of only son by the birth 
of a brother when he was 5, he became increasingly the object of his 
erratic father’s dislike. Intense marital discord made him the more 
hateful because he resembled his mother’s side of the house. He was 
