Poets, Philosophers, And Artists, Made By Accident
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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 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 were as good an actor as Monrose.” 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 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.