Accorso, a great lawyer, being asked why he began the study of the law so late, answered, that indeed he began it late, but should therefore master it the sooner.
Dryden’s complete works form the largest body of poetry from the pen of one writer in the English language; yet he gave no public testimony of poetical abilities till his twenty-seventh year. In his sixty-eighth year he proposed to translate the whole Ilias; his most pleasing productions were written in his old age.
Michael Angelo preserved his creative genius even in extreme old age; for he worked almost to his last day, and he reached his ninetieth year. He alludes, doubtless, to himself in an ingenious device, if it be of his own invention: A venerable old man is represented in a go-cart, an hour-glass upon it, with the inscription, Ancora Imparo! Yet I am learning!
Literary Shoemakers.—The fraternity of shoemakers have unquestionably given rise to some characters of worth and genius. The late Mr. Holcroft was originally a shoemaker. His dramatic pieces must rank among the best of those on the English stage. Robert Bloomfield wrote his poem of “The Farmer’s Boy,” while employed at this business, and Dr. William Carey, professor of Sanscrit and Bengalee at the college of Fort William, Calcutta, and the able and indefatigable translator of the Scriptures into many of the Eastern languages, was in early life a shoemaker in Northamptonshire. The present Mr. Gifford, the translator of Juvenal, and the supposed editor of the Quarterly Review, spent some of his early days in learning the “craft and mystery” of a shoemaker; as he tells us, in one of the most interesting pieces of auto-biography ever penned, and prefixed to his nervous and elegant version of the great Roman satirist.
Imprisonment of the Learned.—Imprisonment seems not much to have disturbed the men of letters in the progress of their studies.
It was in prison that Boethius composed his excellent book on the Consolations of Philosophy.
Grotius wrote, in his confinement, his Commentary on St. Matthew.
Buchanan, in his dungeon of a monastery in Portugal, composed his excellent Paraphrases on the Psalms of David.
Pelisson, during five years’ confinement for some state affairs, pursued with ardour his studies in the Greek language, in philosophy, and particularly in theology, and produced several good compositions.
Michael Cervantes composed the best and most agreeable book in the Spanish language, during his captivity in Barbary.