The idea of genius has intrigued and baffled generations of thinkers interested in the problems of human excellence, leadership, and creativity. Until the early twentieth century, it was generally assumed that the man of genius, whatever his mode of expression, was qualitatively different from the rest of humanity—that he possessed some mysterious, inborn element that made his achievements possible. Because of the supposed mystery surrounding the origin and nature of genius, there grew up over the years a veritable mythology linking the man of genius with phenomena ranging from Deity to insanity.

In the winter of 1835, when he was a student at Harvard College, Henry Thoreau briefly “kept school” in Canton, Massachusetts. In 1837, after his graduation, he kept the town school in Concord for a fortnight but gave it up because he was unwilling to punish pupils by whipping. “I have ever been disposed to regard the cowhide as a non-conductor,” he wrote, at the end of the year, to Orestes Brownson, at whose home he had stayed while he was a “practice teacher” in Canton, “…. We should seek to be fellow-students with the pupil, and we should learn of, as well as with him, if we would be most helpful to him.”

Giambattista Vico was born in 1668, at a time when Italy was just beginning to recover from the enervating effects of more than a century of clerical and foreign domination. In 1559, a century before Vico's birth, the long contest between France and Spain for supremacy in the peninsula had been decided in favor of Spain by the treaty of Cateau-Cambresia. Following this, hope for the independence of Italy had definitely been abandoned. The minor princes submitted to being Spanish vassals, and the Spanish rulers joined hands with the Roman Curia in a strict surveillance of the thought and action of the Italian people. The Church, fearful of the spread of Protestantism, drew more straight and narrow the way of orthodoxy, increasing at the same time the degree of punishment for those who strayed. The decadence and torpor that engulfed Italy during this period has come to be called secentismo or baroque.

One of the most outstanding classical scholars in the twelfth century was John of Salisbury, who, steeped in the literature of the Latin writers, seems to echo Cicero when he remarks that to be properly literate one must be familiar with mathematics and history as well as with the poets and the orators. The twelfth century as a whole reflected a deep interest in history and historical writing, to such an extent that Haskins calls it one of the greatest periods of medieval historiography. But history as it was understood by men like John of Salisbury, Hugo of St. Victor, and other learned clerics of the age was the history of St. Augustine, not the “narration of past events” of the Greek and Roman historians. The classical historians had regarded history as a branch of the art of rhetoric, written to please public taste, or to relate anecdotes, or to set examples, or to display the literary powers of the authors. Their theory of world cycles, in which the order of the universe was pessimistically regarded as a degeneration from the Golden Age of the past to the Iron Age of the present, and in which the present reproduced the past and the future the present, was supplanted by a new philosophy of history as formulated by St. Augustine. St. Augustine asserted that the whole record of the world turned upon the divine concern for man, which had eventuated in the life of Christ. Prior to this miracle of Incarnation, all mankind had been doomed; after it, all of the elect were to be saved.

Twenty years of diligent labor on the part of New Englanders in Ohio, the Western Literary Institute, and other groups resulted in the creation by the legislature, in March 1837, of the office of State Superintendent of Common Schools. The resolution of the General Assembly providing for the position stressed the two chief duties of this new official: (1) collecting information on the schools of the state; and (2) seeing that the school laws were being properly observed.

The age which was not only that of Dr. Johnson but also that of Pope, Addison, Gay, Goldsmith, Fielding, Lord Chesterfield, Gibbon, Horace Walpole, Gainsborough, and Garrick is surely to be reckoned among the brilliant periods of English history. And, as William Sydney notes, these great figures lived, moved, and had their being against a strange, quaint, frivolous, and corrupt English background in which beaux strutted about Pall Mall displaying all their finery such as embroidered velvet coats, cocked hats, lace cravats, and ten guinea clouded canes; when belles, “accompanied by black boys and curly lap-dogs,” promenaded in St. James's Park, attracting attention by beauty patches stuck on their faces, by pyramidical headdresses, by hooped petticoats, and by oversized decorated fans; when people of quality, so-called, repaired to their pleasure haunts in sedan chairs and gilded chariots; when travelers quailed at “the thought and prospect of traveling after nightfall because of the armed and mounted desperadoes on the highways.”