YOUTH AND ACHIEVEMENT.

Evening Post, Volume LXVIII, Issue 134, 3 December 1904, Page 11

YOUTH AND ACHIEVEMENT.

Forty-three were the years of Professor Finsen, yet they sufficed for him to give the world a deathless legacy. Some of the most famous as well as the infamous of men have run their race in even less time. Nero was only thirty-one, as, listening to the gallop of approaching horsemen coming to drag him from the cellar in which he hid, he plunged the dagger into his throat, and ended his evil life. Napoleon by the time he was five-and-thirty had twice overrun Italy, and conducted his expedition in Ec;ypt, and made himself Emperor of the French. Shelley was only in his thirtieth year when he died ; Keats was four years younger ; Byron expired when he was thirty-six ; Burns Tit thirty-seven ; Poe at forty. In the latter case, however, the miserable man would have died earlier had his attempt at suicide been successful. Stevenson's light went out at fortyfouj;; poor Chatterton swallowed his potion of arsenic before he had completed his eighteenth year. The fierce controversy over his works outlasted him by nef.rly four times the duratior, of Lis own life. — St. James's Budget.