have been of any country in which he had appeared, was cut off at the same early age. Nay, in his case the wonder is greater still; for he passed the last eight years of his life, as is well known, in almost uninterrupted abstinence from his wonted intellectual pursuits. Under the influence of certain religious views, operating upon a delicate and excitable temperament, and a frame exhausted by long illhealth and hard study, he most mistakenly conceived these pursuits to be little better than an abuse of his time and faculties as if it were criminal in man to employ those powers which his Creator has given him, in a way so well fitted to purify and elevate his nature, and to fill him with sublimer | conceptions, both of the wonderful universe around him, and of the Infinite Mind that formed it. It ought not to be forgotten, however, that it was during this period of depression and seclusion that he wrote and published his celebrated Provincial Letters, an attack upon the casuistry of the Jesuits, which, strange to say, is a work not only distinguished by all that is admirable in style and reasoning, but abounding in the most exquisite wit and humour, which the splendid enthusiast intermingles with his dexterous and often eloquent argumentation, apparently with as much light-heartedness, and as natural an ease, as if he had been one the flow of whose spirits had scarcely yet known what it was to be disturbed either by fear or sorrow. So false a thing, often, is the show of gaietyor rather, so mighty is the power of intellectual occupation to make the heart forget for the time its most prevailing griefs, and to change its deepest gloom to sunshine. Thus, too, it was that our own COWPER owed to his literary efforts almost the only moments of exemption he enjoyed from a depression of spirits extremely similar, both in its origin and effects, to that under which Pascal laboured; and while the composition of his great poem, "The Task,' and his translations of the Iliad and Odyssey, suspended even for months and years the attacks of the of the disease, his inimitable 'John Gilpin,' for a shorter interval, absolutely transformed his melancholy into riotous merriment. Cowper affords us also another example of how much may be done in literature, and in the acquirement of a high name in one of its highest departments, even by the dedication to it of only a comparatively small portion of a lifetime. He had received a regular education; but, after leaving school, threw away the next twenty or thirty years of his life almost in doing nothing. When the first volume of his poems appeared, the author was above fifty years old; and it was after this that all his more celebrated pieces were written and that, too, although the eighteen years that intervened only twenty-six, and was but before his death were, in regard to both his body and mind, little better than a long disease.' Many of our other poets likewise, whose names are imperishable, have had but a brief term of life allowed them in which to achieve their fame. Sir THOMAS WYATT and Lord SURREY, the great refiners of our language in the reign of Henry VIII., and the first English poets after Chaucer whose works can be said still to survive, died, the former at the age of thirty-eight, and the latter on the scaffold, the last victim of Henry's despotism, at that of thirty-one. The gallant Sir PHILIP SYDNEY, the author of various works in prose and verse, but best known by his celebrated pastoral romance, The Arcadia, fell at the battle of Zutphen, in the Netherlands, in his thirty-second year. FRANCIS BEAUMONT, the dramatic poet, whose works, written in conjunction with Fletcher, form, indeed, the second glory of the English drama, died in the thirtieth year of his age. OTWAY had written his Orphan' and his 'Venice Preserved,' as well as nearly all his other pieces, before he had reached the age of thirty-one; and he died in extreme penury, the consequence, in a great measure, of his irregular and dissolute habits, at thirty-four. COLLINS first published his odes, many of which are among the most exquisite in the language, when ten years older when he died. Finally, BURNS died at the age of thirty-seven, and BYRON at that of thirty-six. Yet these are all names that will never die. We will mention only a very few more, distinguished in other departments of art or literature, who died very young, when compared with the impression they have produced on the world. The great musical composer MOZART was a wonderful instance of precocity, as well as of surpassing genius. He died at the early age of thirty-five, after a career of unrivalled splendour, and the production of a succession of works which have left him almost, if not altogether, without an equal among either his predecessors or those who have come after him. Mozart's devotion to his art, and the indefatigable industry with which, notwithstanding his extraordinary powers, he gave himself to its cultivation, may read an instructive lesson, even to far inferior minds, in illustration of the true and only method for the attainment of excellence. From his childhood to the last moment of his life, Mozart was wholly a musician. Even in his earliest years no pastime had ever any interest for him in which music was not introduced. His voluminous productions, to enumerate even the titles of which would occupy no little space, are the best attestation of the unceasing diligence of his ma turer years. He used, indeed, number, lived only till he was to compose with surprising thirty-seven, dying, like our rapidity, but he had none of own Shakespeare, on the annithe carelessness of a rapid com-versary of his birth. His disposer; for so delicate was his tinguished contemporary, CORsense of the beautiful, that he REGGIO, was only two or three was never satisfied with any one years older, when, having comof his productions until it had pleted his great work, the received all the perfection he Assumption of the Virgin Mary, could give it by the most which is painted on the ceiling minute and elaborate correction. of the dome of the cathedral Ever striving after higher and at Parma, he suddenly met with higher degrees of excellence, his death, under circumstances and existing only for his art, never to be remembered withhe scarcely suffered even the out sorrow. So ignorantly, we visible approach of death to are told, was his masterly perwithdraw him for a moment formance appreciated by the from his beloved studies. 'Dur- canons his employers, that they ing the last months of his not only refused the unfortunate life,' says an anonymous writer, artist the price that had been 'though weak in body, he was agreed upon, but paid him five "full of the God;" and his ap- hundred crowns, which was all plication, though indefatigable, they would allow, in copper. could not keep pace with his Correggio was carrying home invention. "Il Flauto Magico," this money to his family, who "La Clemenza di Tito," and a were living in great poverty in requiem, which he had scarcely a neighbouring village, when, time to finish, were among his overcome by the heat of the last efforts. The composition weather and the weight of his of the requiem, in the decline load, he was unfortunately of his bodily powers, and under tempted to slake his thirst at great mental excitement, hast- a spring by the wayside, and ened his dissolution; he was the consequence was an inflamseized with repeated fainting matory attack, which soon fits, brought on by his extreme proved fatal. The destiny of assiduity in writing, in one of the picture itself had nearly which he expired. A few hours been the same with that of the before his death took place, he artist. It is said that the is reported to have said, "Now canons were just about to I begin to see what might be efface it, when the illustrious done in music."' Titian, happening to pass through Parma, expressed himself with regard to it in terms of such high admiration, as to induce them to forego their 66 In the sister art of painting, the great RAPHAEL, whose works astonish not more by their excellence than their intention. Titian, in this case, recovery of the lost works of the ancients was, in reality, by far the most important occupation to which a scholar could devote himself, and, fortunately, it was also looked upon as the most honourable. It occupied, accordingly, a large portion of the time of Politian and all his distinguished contemporaries. The celebrated Lorenzo de Medici, the wealthy and munificent patron of all the liberal arts, and himself a scholar and writer of no mean order, was one of the most ardent among the collectors of ancient manuscripts; and Politian was often despatched by him to different parts of Italy, In the same country, and nearly at the same period with Raphael and Correggio, lived Angelo Politian and Giovanni Pico, Prince of Mirandola, two of the most learned men of an age abounding in great scholars, the former of whom died at forty, and the latter at thirty-to search for those fast-perishing two. POLITIAN, in particular, has scarcely been excelled by any scholar of later times, in that combination of profound erudition and elegant taste in which he so conspicuously surpassed all his contemporaries. We may imagine how actively his short life must have been spent, when we reflect on his extensive literary labours, and the variety and amazing exact ness of his acquirements. The works he has left us are not so voluminous as those of some other writers; but it would be unfair and absurd to measure the industry of such a mind as his by the mere bulk of its productions. The works, however, which he wrote and published constitute but a small part of the services he rendered to literature. In that age, the treasures, and to purchase them known to have occupied a large share of his attention. He had acquired so perfect a familiarity with the two classic languages, that he wrote both in Latin and Greek almost with the facility of one using his native tongue, and with a purity and elegance that would have done no dishonour, it has been thought, to the most learned of the ancients themselves. The few compositions he has left us, too, in his native Italian, still rank with the most exquisite in that beautiful language. It was, long after the revival of letters, the reproach of some of the greatest scholars of Europe, that they neglected their mother tongue to such a degree as to be incapable of expressing themselves in it with ordinary gracefulness, or even perspicuity. This was certainly less the case with the learned of Italy than of other countries, owing principally to the mighty influence which had been exerted some time before the era we are speaking of, in refining, fixing, and giving celebrity to the Italian language by the great Dante and his successors, Petrarch and Boccaccio; and partly, perhaps, to that resemblance to its parent, Latin, which would naturally give to this language a peculiarly classic character in the estimation of the students of ancient learning, and incline them to favour and cherish it accordingly. But in France, a more than a century after this, the greatest ignorance of their native language was often exhibited, even by those scholars who wrote most elegantly in that of the Greeks or Romans. Thus, the celebrated Sebastian Castalio, whose Latin version of the Bible has been already mentioned as remarkable for its purity, and whose other works in the same language are all eminently deserving of the same praise, in afterwards translating the Scriptures into French, expressed himself in so vulgar and barbarous manner, that his style has been described as no better than the jargon of the beggars. In Germany, so late as even a century after the time of Castalio, the illustrious Leibnitz composed almost all his works either in Latin or French, the little which he composed in German being very ill written; and although, in the variety of his schemes, he proposes one for the improvement of that language, he only shows, by the remarks he makes on it, his ignorance of its true character and resources. Our own noble tongue was, even up to a very recent period, scarcely recognised, by many of our most learned scholars, as a suitable vehicle either for elegant literature or philosophy; and that, too, strangely enough, long after it had been adorned by some of the greatest works, both in verse and prose, that any nation has yet had to boast |