Accident has frequently occasioned the most eminent geniuses to
display their powers. It was at Rome, says Gibbon, on the fifteenth of
October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while
the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter,
that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first
started to my mind.
Father Malebranche, having completed his studies in philosophy and
theology without any other intention than devoting himself to some
religious order, little expected the celebrity his works acquired for
him. Loitering in an idle hour in the shop of a bookseller, and
turning over a parcel of books, 'L'Homme de Descartes' fell into his
hands. Having dipt into some parts, he read with such delight that the
palpitations of his heart compelled him to lay the volume down. It was
this circumstance that produced those profound contemplations which
made him the Plato of his age.
Cowley became a poet by accident. In his mother's apartment he found,
when very young, Spenser's 'Fairy Queen,' and by a continual study of
poetry he became so enchanted of the Muse that he grew irrecoverably a
poet.
Dr. Johnson informs us that Sir Joshua Reynolds had the first fondness
of his art excited by the perusal of Richardson's Treatise.
Vaucanson displayed an uncommon genius for mechanics. His taste was
first determined by an accident: when young, he frequently attended
his mother to the residence of her confessor; and while she wept with
repentance, he wept with weariness! In this state of disagreeable
vacation, says Helvetius, he was struck with the uniform motion of the
pendulum of the clock in the hall. His curiosity was roused; he
approached the clock-case, and studied its mechanism; what he could
not discover he guessed at. He then projected a similar machine, and
gradually his genius produced a clock. Encouraged by this first
success, he proceeded in his various attempts; and the genius which
thus could form a clock, in time formed a fluting automaton.
If Shakespeare's imprudence had not obliged him to quit his wool trade
and his town; if he had not engaged with a company of actors, and at
length, disgusted with being an indifferent performer, he had not
turned author, the prudent wool-seller had never been the celebrated
poet.
Accident determined the taste of Moliere for the stage. His
grandfather loved the theatre, and frequently carried him there. The
young man lived in dissipation; the father, observing it, asked in
anger if his son was to be made an actor. "Would to God," replied the
grandfather, "he was as good an actor as Montrose." The words struck
young Moliere; he took a disgust to his tapestry trade; and it is to
this circumstance France owes her greatest comic writer.
Corneille loved; he made verses for his mistress, became a poet,
composed 'Melite,' and afterwards his other celebrated works. The
discreet Corneille had remained a lawyer.
Thus it is that the devotion of a mother, the death of Cromwell,
deer-stealing, the exclamation of an old man, and the beauty of a
woman, have given five illustrious characters to Europe.
We owe the great discovery of Newton to a very trivial accident. When
a student at Cambridge, he had retired during the time of the plague
into the country. As he was reading under an apple-tree, one of the
fruit fell, and struck him a smart blow on the head. When he observed
the smallness of the apple, he was surprised at the force of the
stroke. This led him to consider the accelerating motion of falling
bodies; from whence he deduced the principle of gravity, and laid the
foundation of his philosophy.
Ignatius Loyola was a Spanish gentleman who was dangerously wounded at
the siege of Pampeluna. Having heated his imagination by reading the
Lives of the Saints, which were brought to him in his illness instead
of a romance, he conceived a strong ambition to be the founder of a
religious order; whence originated the celebrated society of the
Jesuits.
Rousseau found his eccentric powers first awakened by the
advertisement of the singular annual subject which the Academy of
Dijon proposed for that year, in which he wrote his celebrated
Declamation against the arts and sciences; a circumstance which
determined his future literary efforts.
La Fontaine, at the age of twenty-two, had not taken any profession or
devoted himself to any pursuit. Having accidentally heard some verses
of Malherbe, he felt a sudden impulse, which directed his future
life. He immediately bought a Malherbe, and was so exquisitely
delighted with this poet that after passing the nights in treasuring
his verses in his memory, he would run in the daytime to the woods,
where, concealing himself, he would recite his verses to the
surrounding dryads.
Flamsteed was an astronomer by accident. He was taken from school on
account of his illness, when Sacrobosco's book 'De Sphaera' having been
lent to him, he was so pleased with it that he immediately began a
course of astronomic studies. Pennant's first propensity to natural
history was the pleasure he received from an accidental perusal of
Willoughby's work on birds; the same accident, of finding on the table
of his professor Reaumur's 'History of Insects,'--of which he read
more than he attended to the lecture.--and having been refused the
loan, gave such an instant turn to the mind of Bonnet that he hastened
to obtain a copy, but found many difficulties in procuring this costly
work. Its possession gave an unalterable direction to his future life:
this naturalist indeed lost the use of his sight by his devotion to
the microscope.
Dr. Franklin attributes the cast of his genius to a similar accident.
"I found a work of Defoe's, entitled an 'Essay on Projects,' from
which perhaps I derived impressions that have since influenced some of
the principal events of my life."
I shall add the incident which occasioned Roger Ascham to write his
'Schoolmaster,' one of the most curious and useful treatises among our
elder writers.
At a dinner given by Sir William Cecil during the plague in 1563, at
his apartments at Windsor, where the Queen had taken refuge, a number
of ingenious men were invited. Secretary Cecil communicated the news
of the morning, that several scholars at Eton had run away on account
of their master's severity, which he condemned as a great error in the
education of youth. Sir William Petre maintained the contrary; severe
in his own temper, he pleaded warmly in defense of hard flogging. Dr.
Wootton, in softer tones, sided with the Secretary. Sir John Mason,
adopting no side, bantered both. Mr. Haddon seconded the hard-hearted
Sir William Petre, and adduced as an evidence that the best
schoolmaster then in England was the hardest flogger. Then was it that
Roger Ascham indignantly exclaimed that if such a master had an able
scholar it was owing to the boy's genius and not the preceptor's rod.
Secretary Cecil and others were pleased with Ascham's notions. Sir
Richard Sackville was silent; but when Ascham after dinner went to the
Queen to read one of the orations of Demosthenes, he took him aside,
and frankly told him that though he had taken no part in the debate he
would not have been absent from that conversation for a great deal;
that he knew to his cost the truth Ascham had supported, for it was
the perpetual flogging of such a schoolmaster that had given him an
unconquerable aversion to study. And as he wished to remedy this
defect in his own children, he earnestly exhorted Ascham to write his
observations on so interesting a topic. Such was the circumstance
which produced the admirable treatise of Roger Ascham.