trate our notion of Ability. And Ability, in this lofty sense, is not less sure of supremacy in other great intellectual pursuits of a complicated kind-statesmanship, military command, the conduct of a bank, the management of a railway, the quicquid agunt homines of that order which taxes the faculties the most-than it is in courts of justice. Nor is sheer Ability, in truth, less predominant in literary pursuits. It maintains its place, as against those special faculties which we call talents, in perhaps a preponderating amount of instances. The historian, the philosopher, the essayist, nay, the man of science, where that science is not merely the fruit of special observation, but is of the higher and architectonic order, all these— supposing that their powers have not been so great as to receive by common consent the designation of Genius-triumph in their several departments through their ability. Nay, in the imaginative domain of poetry itself, the man of ability, if he is in earnest, can find and maintain a place of his own, if not in the highest rank at least among the foremost; as many a great work in English and still more in French and Latin verse remains to testify.

By Talent we mean a special aptitude, which may be consistent with very imperfect adaptation of the mental faculties to general use. Thus we speak of the talent of the artist, musician, arithmetician, poet, and so forth; often, to the surprise of the multitude, found in combination with general inferiority of intellect, sometimes almost with imbecility. Ability, on the whole, plays a far greater part in the world than Talent; but it is to talent, nevertheless, that we are indebted for most of what ministers to our higher intellectual and spiritual enjoyment, and redeems life from its commonplace character.

Now assuming the theory of heredity to be well founded, it becomes a question of some nicety which of these two great qualities, ability or talent, comes most frequently within its law? A question not very easily answered, for both are frequently, so to speak, sporadic; manifesting themselves when sudden occasion calls for their development, and retreating, as it were, into obscurity as soon as the occasion for that development has passed by.

We believe it will be found, on the whole, that ability is more frequently hereditary than talent. Numerous cases of what commonly passes for hereditary talent are not really so. They arise from other causes than the influence of blood. They are especially subject to those influences which M. Lordat calls didactic.' If we find a father and a son possessed of the

same special gift-that of playing the fiddle, for instance, or portrait-painting-the first and most obvious conclusion, as we have seen, would be, not that the son has followed his pro'fession because he is instinctively drawn to it,' as Mr. Galton would have it, but that the son, possessing fair aptitude, has been carefully instructed in his particular line by the father, or has followed him by natural imitation. But no teaching by the father, no industrious imitation by the son, can convey Ability, in the sense in which we have used the word, And, therefore, when we find not only father and son, but whole families, as is often the case, distinguished for general ability, we have probably the most striking corroboration of the theory of heredity which can be found; far more cogent than those instances of mere special gifts, supposed hereditary, which most writers on the subject, including Mr. Galton as well as M. Lucas, are apt to employ as affording the readiest means of demonstration.

Our English society, so eminently aristocratic, furnishes a great repertory of facts of this description. No one who has read our histories-no one who has even studied the peerage no one, indeed, who has mixed much in society-will be likely to question the fact that whole families are often so gifted in this way that it is an uncommon circumstance to find an absolutely commonplace personage among them. And another remarkable proposition we would venture to advance on the evidence of public notoriety only, without anticipating contradictionno man of ability was ever the son of a couple of fools. But it is noteworthy also, in how very many cases this general high average of ability in a family seems to be accompanied with a powerlessness to rise still higher than that average. Every one of us—we appeal again to general observation -must be conversant with cases of families in which almost every member is clever, but not one very clever. None rises much above the average, though few or none seem to fall below it. And one remarkable instance of the kind we will cite from history as an explanation of our meaning rather than a proof, as single instances prove nothing. The Grenville family were for two or three generations a great power in our state. They had every opportunity of success in the line of politics which could be given to mortals. Several of them were distinguished,' almost all of them were able,' men. And a curious similarity of turn and temperament seemed to unite them all. But not one was very able. No Grenville ever said or did a thing particularly worth remembering, if we except the unlucky author of the American Stamp Act.'

But when Grenville ability became crossed with the loftier qualifications inherited through the blood of Pitt, the result was of a very different order.

6

Perhaps it is no mere indulgence of the imagination to point out, as a singular instance of pertinacity of family type, the fortunes of the famous house of Fairfax. The Parliamentary general left no male issue; and, through marriage with the heiress of Colepepper, his collateral successor acquired a vast estate in Virginia, extending from the shores of the Potomac to the Alleghany. His descendants have multiplied in that region of the United States. The present Lord Fairfax is a physician at Baltimore. Now, for these last two hundred years, they seem to have retained among them the leading qualities which characterised the chief of the name-a chivalrous turn of mind, military aptitude, and religious zeal. Irving attributes a good deal of the character of General Washington, as formed in early life, to his familiarity with his relations, the Fairfaxes, especially William, a man of liberal education and intrinsic 'worth,' who lived at Belvoir, the wooded promontory which projects into the Potomac immediately south of Mount Vernon. He is described as an eccentric personage, who had retired into the wilderness from some disappointment in love, but retained much of courtly manners. In the late civil war, all the numerous Fairfaxes adopted eagerly the side of the South, except one-and he was the officer detached by Captain Wilkes to arrest Mason and Slidell. The younger members took up arms, mostly as privates, and deeply imbued with that spirit of warlike puritanism of which Stonewall Jackson was as exalted a type as the original Thomas Fairfax himself. One, Eugene, fell at Williamsburg- a devoted Christian.' Another, Randolph Fairfax, is the subject of a beautiful and touching piece of biography by the Reverend Philip Slaughter, of Richmond. He entered Jackson's army as a private in the Rockbridge Artillery at the age of eighteen. The letters of this gallant youth, chiefly to his mother, are models of simple, unconscious enthusiasm. He was of the Episcopal Church, and well known among his comrades-among whom a similar zealous temperament largely prevailed-by the well-worn New Testament which was his constant companion in the bivouac, after his prayer-book-only second in his estimation-had fallen into the hands of the Yankees with his luggage. He had no doubt of his cause, or of the means to ensure victory. I think,'

* See Mr. Clements Markham's recent Biography of the General,

p. 409.

he writes, the fate of the country is now in the hands of the praying people, and though I cannot see how or when, I believe God will certainly answer the prayers of His faithful 'people in the land.' He was killed on the spot by a fragment of shell, in the battle of Fredericksburg.

We cannot long pursue inquiries into the subject of hereditary mental powers and propensities in families, without entering on that obscure province of it which has lately received the name of Atavism-the tendency in individuals to reproduce the peculiarities, not of the parent, but of the grandparent, or some remoter ancestor. Observation on this head seems as yet to have failed, not only in laying down rules, but in accumulating sufficient examples for the elements of a theory. But that some such exceptional law of nature does exist seems to be the general opinion of physiologists. There is one rather remarkable instance of Atavism-if we shall not be deemed too fanciful in so terming it-in the annals of great European houses. No modern royal house has exhibited such a general preponderance of natural ability as that of Hohenzollern. But it seems to produce alternately-generation after generationmen of imaginative temperaments, not to say visionaries and eccentrics, and men of clear practical intellect. And thus the throne has been ascended, for nearly two centuries, alternately by an able ruler and by what the Germans call a Phantast. Frederick William the First, indeed, combined to a certain extent both characters. He was a man of strong mental energy, yet withal of an eccentricity approaching to madness, and full of strange crotchets. His wild imagination drove him hither and thither at a sad rate,' says his panegyrist Mr. Carlyle, who considers that his mania for collecting and propagating tall guardsmen was a whim of genius. His son, Frederick the Great, was gifted with as keen and unencumbered an intellect as ever was owned by mortal. Frederick William the Second, who succeeded his uncle, was an illuminé, a dreamer of dreams, what would now be called a Spiritualist. His son, the warrior King of the Coalition against Napoleon, inherited the sound practical character of his grandfather, though of course much inferior in mental power. And the son of this last, the late Frederick William, reproduced the type of the Visionary-an amiable enthusiast, whose well-meant efforts at constructing a romantic medieval Church and State in the clouds we all remember. At his death ensued another break in the direct succession; and we may dispense with pursuing the analysis farther.

Now, as we have already observed, we conceive talent-special

6

aptitude of the mind for special purposes-to be undoubtedly heritable, though less frequently inherited than general ability. We will not dwell on the cases of families of painters, musicians, mathematicians, and the like, to which we have already referred as somewhat questionable, because they may really be due to a combination of other causes; still, these are too numerous and well authenticated to be disregarded as writers like Mr. Buckle would disregard them. Every one's knowledge of his neighbour's family history will more or less corroborate them. And so will popular tradition respecting great houses everywhere. The esprit des Mortemars' was proverbial in France. There is an old saying in our county ' of Cornwall,' observed the poet Lord Lansdowne, that a Trelawney never wanted courage, nor a Godolphin wit, nor a Granville loyalty.' There is among us at this day a ducal family of which the members in one generation, while in other respects persons of ability, are specially distinguished by one not very common faculty-aptitude for numerical calculation; developing itself, according to their several temperaments, in lavish statistical argument on public affairs, in the mastery of complicated accounts, and at the whist-table. Another very distinguished house might be named, in which a predominant spirit of contrivance has displayed itself, through successive generations, in large speculations, in the management' of the Cabinets of the last century, and in the government of a railroad in this. In cases like these, hereditary idiosyncrasy furnishes the only explanation, unless we are determined to regard them as accidental. A musician's son may take to music from education or imitation. But when a family talent for calculation or for construction takes wholly different directions in different members, this persistence of special qualities can only be accounted for, if at all, by physical causes: non hæc sine numine divûm eveniunt.'

This would perhaps be the natural stage of our inquiry for entering into the question of the relative physical influence of the father and mother in the formation of the character of children. But no part of the subject is as yet so obscure, or so little illustrated by anything like copious induction. The popular notion that distinguished men owe most to their mothers does not seem to meet with much favour from physiological inquirers. The only doctrine which has been boldly propounded on the subject seems to be that of the mystic Jacob Böhme, who reveals to us that in the formation of children men contribute the soul and women the intellect. Mr. Galton has arrived from his tables at the somewhat overdrawn conclusion.