Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, No. 716 / September 15, 1877

A curious question has more than once been asked: have the most remarkable works, in the various kinds of literary labour, been produced in the flush of youth or the calmness of age? Are men better fitted for vigorous exercise of the mind in the first half or the second half of their existence? The spring and elasticity of temperament, the warmth of feeling, the hopeful aspirations, the activity of vital energy, the longing to throw the thoughts into some kind of words or of music—all tempt one, at a first glance, to say that early authorship is more probable than later.
Certainly the examples of young authorship are neither few nor unimportant. Of course we may take Tristram Shandy's authority with as many grains of allowance as we please; but the marvels told in his colloquy are unique. Yorick declared that Vincent Quirinus, before he was eight years old, pasted up in the public schools of Rome more than four thousand five hundred theses on abstruse questions, and defended them against all opponents. Mr Shandy capped this by citing one erudite man who learned all the sciences and liberal arts without being taught any of them.
Isaac D'Israeli, in his Curiosities of Literature , notices many curious examples; and the subject was taken up by a pleasant writer in the Globe newspaper, a few months ago. Pope wrote some of his Pastorals at sixteen; and a large number of his works, including the translation of Homer, were thrown off before he reached thirty. Edgar Poe wrote his Helen , remarkable for its beauty of style, when scarcely more than eleven years old. Cowley at fifteen published his Poetic Blossoms ; while his Pyramus and Thisbe , though not published till his sixteenth year, is said to have been written when he was only ten. Lord Bacon planned his great work, the Novum Organum Scientiarum , when only sixteen, although the writing was the work of maturer years. The late Bishop Thirlwall wrote his Primitiæ when a boy of only eleven years of age; he was one of the few who wrote both early and late, a wonderful example of long-continued mental activity. Dr Watts almost thought in verse when a boy. Crabbe wrote both early and late, but not much in middle life; he published his first poem at twenty, and his Village before thirty; then a silence of twenty years was followed by a renewal of literary labour. Charlotte Bronté wrote in very early life, 'because she could not help it.' Chatterton, the scapegrace who applied so much of his marvellous powers to dishonest or lying purposes, wrote minor pieces of poetry at fifteen, and soon afterwards a pretended pedigree of a Bristol family. At sixteen he published the alleged plays and poems of Rowley, described by him as a priest or monk of the fifteenth century; at about seventeen he brought forward some pretended old parchments, made to appear soiled and timeworn, containing a fictitious description of an old bridge at Bristol; and then wrote biographies of Bristol artists who never lived. Coming to London, he wrote many satirical and political papers for the press; and ended his extraordinary life before he had completed his eighteenth year.