GREGORY. TORRICELLI. PASCAL.

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himself had completed many of his grand discoveries, and laid the foundation of all of them, before he had reached his twenty-fifth year; and, although he lived to a great age, may be said to have finished all that was brilliant in his career at the early period of forty-five. After this, it has been remarked, that he wrote nothing, except some further explanations and developements of what he had previously published. But to go to other great names: JAMES GREGORY, the celebrated inventor of the reflecting telescope, was suddenly struck blind in his thirtyseventh year, while observing the satellites of Jupiter, and died a few days after. TORRICELLI, whose famous discovery of the barometer: we have already mentioned, and who had deservedly acquired the reputation of being in every respect one of the greatest natural philosophers of his time, after the world had lost the illustrious Galileo, died at the age of thirty-nine. PASCAL, who first shewed the true use and value of Torricelli's discovery,* and who has ever been accounted, for his eminence both in science and in literature, one of the chief glories of France, as he would have been of any country in which he had appeared, was cut off at the same early age. Nay, in his case, the wonder is greater still; for he passed the last eight years of his life, as is well known, in almost uninterrupted abstinence from his wonted intellectual pursuits. Under the influence of certain religious views, operating upon a delicate and excitable temperament, and a frame exhausted by long ill-health and hard study, he, most mistakenly, conceived these pursuits to be little better than an abuse of his time and faculties as if it were criminal in man to employ those powers which his Creator has given him, in a way so well fitted

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to purify and elevate his nature, and to fill him with sublimer conceptions, both of the wonderful universe around him, and of the Infinite Mind that formed it. It ought not to be forgotten, however, that it was during this period of depression and seclusion that he wrote and published his celebrated Provincial Letters,' an attack upon the casuistry of the Jesuits, which, strange to say, is a work not only distinguished by all that is admirable in style and reasoning, but abounding in the most exquisite wit and humour, which the splendid enthusiast intermingles with his dexterous and often eloquent argumentation, appa rently with as much light-heartedness, and as natural an ease, as if he had been one the flow of whose spirits had scarcely yet known what it was to be disturbed either by fear or sorrow. So false a thing, often, is the show of gaiety-or rather so mighty is the power of intellectual occupation-to make the heart forget for the time its most prevailing griefs, and to change its deepest gloom to sunshine. Thus, too, it was that our own CowPER Owed to his literary efforts almost the only moments of exemption he enjoyed from a depression of spirits extremely similar, both in its origin and effects, to that under which Pascal laboured; and, while the composition of his great poem, The Task,' and his translations of the Iliad and Odyssey, suspended even for months and years the attacks of the disease, his inimitable John Gilpin,' for a shorter interval, absolutely tranformed his melancholy into riotous merriment. Cowper affords us also another example of how much may be done in literature, and in the acquirement of a high name in one of its highest departments, even by the dedication to it of only a comparatively small portion of a life-time. He had received a regular education; but after leaving school threw away the next twenty or thirty years

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of his life almost in doing nothing. When the first volume of his poems appeared, the author was above fifty years old; and it was after this that all his more celebrated pieces were written-and that, too, although the eighteen years that intervened 'before his death were, in regard to both his body and mind, little better than a long disease." Many of our other poets, likewise, whose names are imperishable, have had but a brief term of life allowed them in which to achieve their fame. Sir THOMAS WYATT and Lord SURREY, the great refiners of our language in the reign of Henry VIII., and the first English poets after Chaucer whose works can be said still to survive, died, the former at the age of thirty-eight, and the latter on the scaffold, the last victim of Henry's despotism, at that of thirty-one. The gallant Sir PHILIP SYDNEY, the author of various works in prose and verse, but best known by his celebrated pastoral romance, The Arcadia,' fell at the battle of Zutphen, in the Netherlands, in his thirty-second year. FRANCIS BEAUMONT, the dramatic poet, whose works, written in conjunction with Fletcher, form, indeed, the second glory of the English drama, died in the thirtieth year of his age. OTWAY had written his Orphan' and his Venice Preserved,' as well as nearly all his other pieces, before he had reached the age of thirty-one; and he died in extreme penury, the consequence, in a great measure, of his irregular and dissolute habits, at thirty-four. COLLINS first published his odes, many of which are among the most exquisite in the language, when only twenty-six, and was but ten years older when he died. Finally, BURNS died at the age of thirty-seven, and BYRON at that of thirty-six. Yet these are all names that will never die.

We will mention only a very few more, distinguished in other departments of art or literature,

who died very young, when compared with the impression they have produced on the world. The great musical composer, MOZART, was a wonderful instance of precocity, as well as of surpassing genius. He died at the early age of thirty-five, after a career of unrivalled splendour, and the production of a succession of works which have left him almost, if not altogether, without an equal among either his predecessors or those who have come after him. Mozart's devotion to his art, and the indefatigable industry with which, notwithstanding his extraordinary powers, he gave himself to its cultivation, may read an instructive lesson, even to far inferior minds, in illustration of the true and only method for the attainment of excellence. From his childhood to the last moment of his life, Mozart was wholly a musician. Even in his earliest years no pastime had ever any interest for him in which music was not introduced. His voluminous productions, to enumerate even the titles of which would occupy no little space, are the best attestation of the unceasing diligence of his maturer years. He used, indeed, to compose with surprising rapidity: but he had none of the carelessness of a rapid composer; for so delicate was his sense of the beautiful, that he was never satisfied with any one of his productions until it had received all the perfection he could give it, by the most minute and elaborate correction. Ever striving after higher and higher degrees of excellence, and existing only for his art, he scarcely suffered even the visible approach of death to withdraw him for a moment from his beloved studies. "During the last months of his life," says an anonymous writer *, though weak in body, he was 'full of the God,' and his application, though indefati

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*In Gorton's Biographical Dictionary?

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gable, could not keep pace with his invention. Flauto Magico,' La Clemenza di Tito,' and a requiem, which he had scarcely time to finish, were among his last efforts. The composition of the requiem, in the decline of his bodily powers, and under great mental excitement, hastened his dissolution; he was seized with repeated fainting fits, brought on by his extreme assiduity in writing, in one of which he expired. A few hours before his death took place, he is reported to have said, 'Now I begin to see what might be done in music.""

In the sister art of painting, the great RAPHAEL, whose works astonish not more by their excellence than their number, lived only till he was thirtyseven, dying, like our own Shakspeare, on the anniversary of his birth. His distinguished contemporary, CORREGGIO, was only two or three years older, when, having completed his great work, the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, which is painted on the ceiling of the dome of the Cathedral at Parma, he suddenly met with his death, under circumstances never to be remembered without sorrow. So ignorantly, we are told, was his masterly performance appreciated by the canons, his employers, that they not only refused the unfortunate artist the price that had been agreed upon, but paid him five hundred crowns, which was all they would allow, in copper. Correggio was carrying home this money to his family, who were living in great poverty in a neighbouring village, when, overcome by the heat of the weather and the weight of his load, he was unfortunately tempted to slake his thirst at a spring by the way-side, and the consequence was an inflammatory attack, which soon proved fatal. The destiny of the picture itself had nearly been the same with that of the artist. It is said that the canons were just about to efface it, when the illustrious