CHAMBERS'S JOURNAL
OF
POPULAR
LITERATURE, SCIENCE, AND ART.
CONTENTS
YOUTHFUL PRODIGIES.
FROM DAWN TO SUNSET.
WEAVING-SCHOOLS.
TIM BAYLIS.
THE GIGANTIC MOA BIRD.
THE BRIDGE POOL.
INDIAN BORDER WARFARE.
A HINT TO YOUNG NOBLES.
SUNSET.
| No. 716. | SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 15, 1877. | Price 1½d. |
YOUTHFUL PRODIGIES.
A curious question has more than once beenasked: have the most remarkable works, in thevarious kinds of literary labour, been producedin the flush of youth or the calmness of age?Are men better fitted for vigorous exercise ofthe mind in the first half or the second halfof their existence? The spring and elasticity oftemperament, the warmth of feeling, the hopefulaspirations, the activity of vital energy, the longingto throw the thoughts into some kind of wordsor of music—all tempt one, at a first glance, tosay that early authorship is more probable thanlater.
Certainly the examples of young authorship areneither few nor unimportant. Of course we maytake Tristram Shandy's authority with as manygrains of allowance as we please; but the marvelstold in his colloquy are unique. Yorick declaredthat Vincent Quirinus, before he was eight yearsold, pasted up in the public schools of Rome morethan four thousand five hundred theses on abstrusequestions, and defended them against all opponents.Mr Shandy capped this by citing one eruditeman who learned all the sciences and liberal artswithout being taught any of them.
Isaac D'Israeli, in his Curiosities of Literature,notices many curious examples; and the subjectwas taken up by a pleasant writer in the Globenewspaper, a few months ago. Pope wrote someof his Pastorals at sixteen; and a large number ofhis works, including the translation of Homer, werethrown off before he reached thirty. Edgar Poewrote his Helen, remarkable for its beauty of style,when scarcely more than eleven years old. Cowleyat fifteen published his Poetic Blossoms; whilehis Pyramus and Thisbe, though not publishedtill his sixteenth year, is said to have been writtenwhen he was only ten. Lord Bacon planned hisgreat work, the Novum Organum Scientiarum, whenonly sixteen, although the writing was the workof maturer years. The late Bishop Thirlwallwrote his Primitiæ when a boy of only elevenyears of age; he was one of the few who wroteboth early and late, a