ALL OF A SUDDEN; OR, MOMENTOUS MOMENTS IN THE LIVES OF GREAT MEN.

Otago Witness, Issue 1894, 9 March 1888, Page 31

ALL OF A SUDDEN; OR, MOMENTOUS MOMENTS IN THE LIVES OF GREAT MEN.

" The true genius," says Dr Johnson, in his " Life of Cowley," "is a mind of large general powers accidentally determined to some particular direction,"

According to this way of looking at it, Oowley furnished a good example. The poet, when very young, found in the window of his mother's parlour a copy of the " Fairy Queen." He was fascinated by the spell of Spenser's verse, and in this way became irrevocably a poet. "Such," Dr Johnson remarks, " are the accidents which, sometimes remembered and perhaps sometimes forgotten, produce that particular designation of mind and propensity for some certain science or employment which is commonly called genius." As an additional illustration he mentions his friend Sir Joshua Reynolds, whose fondness for painting was first excited by the perusal of Jonathan Richardson's " Treatise on the Theory of Painting." One may not quite agree with the definition here given. It is extremely doubtful if genius — as might be inferred from Dr Johnson's .language— would succeed equally well in any line to which accident directed its "mind of large general powers." It is not of such an adaptable nature, and never, in any instance we can remember, has shown itself a fire that will burn any colour of the rainbow, according to the torch with which it is lit.

But however this may be, Dr Johnson, with his two illustrations, has started ns on an exceedingly interesting subject. There have been undoubtedly in the lives of many great men moments to which they could look back with the thought that in them their characters became fixed, and the work of their lives really began. Previously they had been groping in the dark, and then all of a sudden the path was illuminated and their direction was made plain. To the 'enumeration of a few of these this article is to be devoted.

The momentous moment when, according to his own account, the spark of ambition

first entered the mind of Napoleon was at tho terrible bridge of Lodi. Not till then did he become impressed with the idea that he was destined to do great things, and be a decisive actor in the political arena.

The dedication of himself to labour for the abolition of the slave trade dates from Clarkson's journey from Cambridge to London after reading his prize essay on slavery afc the university. Near the village of Wade's Mill, in Hertfordshire, he sat down in a disconsolate mood upon the grass by the roadside, holding his horse by the bridle, and at that very instant the thought flashed into his mind that if the atrocities he had told about in his essay were true, the time had arrived when some person should come forward and put an end to the traffic in human flesh and blood.

The incidents of the life of the late Lord Shaftesbury have been too recently told for readers to have forgotten how the whole life of that lover of the human race was influenced by a scene he witnessed during his young days at Harrow. He had come on the sickening spectacle of the dead. carried to the grave by the drunk, and before the sounds of tipsy mirth had died away in the distance " he had faced the future of his life, and had determined that, with the help of God, he would from that time forth devote his energies to pleading the cause of the poor and friendless."

Charles Kingsley used to date the political principles which animated much of his life to what he saw at Bristol during the serious Reform riots of 1831. One day, talking to Harriet Martineau, he told how, as a schoolboy, he had slipped away into the midst of tbe tumult. He described " the brave, patient Soldiers sitting hour after hour motionless on their horses, the blood streaming from wounds on their heads and faces, waiting for the order which the miserable terrified mayor had not the courage to give ; the savage, brutal, hideous mob of inhuman wretches plundering, destroying, burning casks of spirits broken open and set flowing into the streets, the wretched creatures drinking on their kneet in the gutter till a flame from a burning house caught the stream, ran down it with a horrible rushing sound, and in one dreadful moment the prostrate'drunkards had become a row of blackened corpses." " That sight," said he to Miss Martineau, " made me a Radical."

" The obligations of intellect," says Coleridge, " are among the most sacred of the claims of gratitude." We may take his own case. His" feeling for poetry was first decidedly roused by reading a little pamphlet of sonnets by the Rev. William Lisle Bowles, a true poet, though not a great one, whose works have now gone much into the background. Coleridge became acquainted with the sonnets in his 17th year, and such was his enthusiasm about them that, with "undisciplined eagerness and impetuous zeal," he not only praised them to all his friends, but within less than a year and a-half wrote out 40 copies, which he presented as the best of gifts to those who had in any way won his regard. La Fontaine, the famous French writer, was long in discovering his true vocation. He first thought of taking orders, but soon found he had made a mistake. Then he tried law, but that proved another error. It was not till he was past 30 that the event happened which gave his talents their right direction. The first waking in him of poetical fancies arose from his hearing by chance some verses by Malhcrbe. A sudden impulse came over him ; he immediately bought the works of the poet, and with these was so fascinated that he used to spend the nights in committing Malherbo's verses to memory, and the da5S in reciting them to himself at the top of his voice in the woods of Champagne. James Hogg, the "Ettrick Shepherd," lighted his poetic torch at the unquenchable fire of the genius of Robert Burns. Hearing "Tarn o' Shanter" read by an acquaintance, made a deep impression on his mind, and from that hour he began to indulge in dreams of succeeding to the mantle and poetical fame of the Ayrshire bard. Kotzebue, the German dramatist— he who was assassinated as the "betrayer of the Fatherland "—was a boy when one day a strolling company came to Weimar. He was taken to the performance. " I came home." he writes, "almost stunned with delight," and such was the beginning of an enthusiasm for the drama which resulted in the production of more than a hundred plays. It was originally intended that Molierc should follow his father's business, that of an upholsterer. A chance remark, however, made by his grandfather, who was fond of the theatre, struck him, he took a disgust to the line of life which had been marked out, took to the stage, and became the greatest comic writer in France.