Accident has frequently occasioned the most eminent geniuses to display
their powers. "It was at Rome," says Gibbon, "on the 15th of October,
1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the
bare-footed 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 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 by the Muse, that he grew irrecoverably a
poet.
Sir Joshua Reynolds had the first fondness for 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.
Accident determined the taste of Molière 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 were
as good an actor as Monrose." The words struck young Molière, 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 _Mélite_ and afterwards his other celebrated works. The
discreet Corneille had else remained a lawyer.
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 during 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 decided 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 day-time 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 Sphæra 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, 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; after 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 De Foe'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 few works among our elder writers, which we
still read with pleasure.
At a dinner given by Sir William Cecil, at his apartments at Windsor, 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 defence 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 that 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.