L I N N M U S. 
7 
The case of Linn;eus, whose parents had resolved to make him 
embrace a calling quite opposite to that prescribed to him by nature 
and genius, has likewise been that of no small number of other 
men, who have afterwards raised their name to immortality. Luther 
was intended for a lawyer, and became the reformer of the churclv 
Tycho Brahe, was to have studied politics, and by his own inclina- 
tion acquired the celebrity of one of the first astronomers of his time. 
Shakespeare was to have wielded the yard-measure of a linen-dra- 
per, which his father had wielded before himj but his unrivalled parts 
rendered him the first pattern of tragical poesy : In short, to recur to 
the moderns, Voltaire was to have been a barrister and counsellor 
of parliament ; but instead of the pande&s he studied the writings of 
the beaux esprits, and became himself the first of the age he lived in. 
Tournefort and Boerhaave were destined to wear the cassock, 
but the former rose to be the greatest botanist of the last, and the 
latter the greatest physician of the present century. 
The resolution of the parent of young Linnaeus, who preferred 
binding his son an apprentice to a shoemaker to letting him become a 
botanist, sprung at leafi^ considering a man of his circumstances, from 
a pure sentiment of parental fondness. What prospeft of a solid in- 
come could he flatter himself for his son, if the latter applied to 
botanical study ? — What reason had he to think that his son would 
once shine as the firft connoisseur and reformer of that science ? And 
had he adopted medical pursuits as an additional exertion of his mental 
faculties, how much more arduous and uncertain must have proved a 
career in which he would have erred unsupported by fortune ?— . To 
acquire eminence in those sciences a proper competence was absolutely 
re' 
