GENIUS AT MATURITY.

Lyttelton Times, Volume CXIV, Issue 13937, 20 December 1905, Page 8

GENIUS AT MATURITY.

If genius had anticipated Dr Osier’s dictum and given up work at forty the world (savs “ T. P.’s Weekly ”) would bo a much poorer place, and some ot the finest creations of the biaiii won have been lost to us. Macaulay forty-seven before he began .hie brilliant “History of England”; Gibbon was almost forty when he began his monumental work, which occupied him till he was turned fifty; Josephus was fiftysix when he published “ The Wars of the Jews”; Washington Irving was seventy-two when he wrote his tile of Washington”; John Knox was seventy-nine before ho published his “ History of the Reformation in ia Poetry would have been robbed of its most immortal works, for Homer is said to have composed the Iliad when he was turned sixty; Virgil wrote hm Bucolics between his forty-fourth and forty-eighth years; Coleridge published, “ Christabel ” when he was forty-tour; Wordsworth wrote “The Excursion at forty-four; Browning wrote 1110 Ring a fid the Book” at fifty-seven; Dryden was sixty-eight when he began the translation of tb© fEnc.kl; Cowper was fifty-three when “ The ’lam l jvas published; Chaucer wrote the Canterbury Tales” when he was _ turned fifty; Goethe, who was forty-six when “Wilhelm Meister ” appeared, was ten years older when he . published “Faust”; Pope was forty-five when he wrote his “ Ss.say on Man 3J ; was turned sixty when he began Jtludibras”; Dante was fifty-one when he finished “ The Divina Commedia.” As may he expected, philosophy and science would have suffered, too. Bacon was forty-one when he wrote the “ Novum Organum ” ; Isaac Newton was forty-five when he finished his “ Natural Philosophy V ; John Lociie did not complete his “Essays on the Human Understanding” till - he was fifty-eight; Ciosro was turned forty when he wrote “ De Officiis ” ; Seneca was. turned fifty when be wrote “De Beneficfis” ; Kant was fifty-seven when .the “Critique of Pure Reason” appeared; Swedenborg was turned sixty before his, “ Arcana Celestia ” appeared ; Burton published his “ Anatomy of Melancholy ” when he was forty-five; Rousseau wrote “Emile” at fifty; Humboldt was eighty-two when he finished his great work, the “Cosmos”; Machiavelli completed “The Prince” at forty-five; Sir Thomas More was seventy-three when ho finished his “Utopia.” „ We should have lost Pamela, wmen Richardson published at fifty-one and set the fashion of the modern novel; “Tristram Shandy,” which Sterne published at forty-sis; and “ Robinson Crusoe,” which Defoa began when he was fifty-eight-