THE RECIPE FOR GENIUS 337 



tary caste, little given to intermixture with others, and 

 from whose members, however recruited by fresh blood, 

 the object of our quest, the Divine Genius, is very un- 

 likely to find his point of origin. Then there is the town 

 artisan caste, sprung originally, indeed, from the ranks of 

 the Hodges, but naturally selected out of its most active, 

 enterprising, and intelligent individuals, and often of many 

 generations standing in various forms of handicraft. This 

 is a far higher and more promising type of humanity, from 

 the judicious intermixture of whose best elements we are 

 apt to get our Stephensons, our Arkwrights, our Telfords, 

 and our Edisons. In a rank of life just above the last, we 

 find the fixed and immobile farmer caste, which only 

 rarely blossoms out, under favourable circumstances on 

 both sides, into a stray Cobbett or an almost miraculous 

 miller Constable. The shopkeepers are a tribe of more 

 varied interests and more diversified lives. An immense 

 variety of brain elements are called into play by their di- 

 verse functions in diverse lines ; and when we take them 

 in conjunction with the upper mercantile grades, which are 

 chiefly composed of their ablest and most successful mem- 

 bers, we get considerable chances of those happy blendings of 

 individual excellences in their casual marriages which go to 

 make up talent, and, in their final outcome, genius. Last of 

 all, in the professional and upper classes there is a freedom 

 and play of faculty everywhere going on, which in the 

 chances of intermarriage between lawyer-folk and doctor- 

 folk, scientific people and artistic people, county families 

 and bishops or law lords, and so forth ad infinitum, offers 

 by far the best opportunities of any for the occasional de- 

 velopment of that rare product of the highest humanity, 

 the genuine genius. 



But in every case it is, I believe, essentially intermix- 

 ture of variously acquired hereditary characteristics that 



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