AGE AND AUTHORSHIP.

Thames Star, Volume XVI, Issue 4995, 15 January 1885, Page 3

AGE AND AUTHORSHIP.

That the brain is not always strongest and brighest in youth would appear from the following interesting facts :— Sir Walter Scott was 34 when he made his first drßft of " Waverley," and was 44 when he rewrote and published it. Nearly every one of those tales, which conferred immortality upon him, was composed after he had reached the age of 46. Carlyle was 42 when he published the " French Revolution*;" the first work to which be formally put his name. His " Cromwell " was published when hel was 50. Swift waß 50 when he published " Gullivers Travels." Tennyson was 50 when his idyls, " Elaine," " Vivien," and " Guinevere " were published, and was about 62 when he cbnjpleted the series with " Gareth and Lynette." Macauley was 48 when he issued the first and second volume of his "History of England," and the third and fourth did not Bppfar till he was 55. Good as are the essays of his early manhood, they pale when compared with the work of his maturer years. John Stuart Mill was 53 when his essay of "Liberty" was published, and 56 when he gave us that on "Utilitarianism." Milton was certainly more than 54 when he began his 11 Paradise Lost" ;be was 59 w hen he sold it to Simmons, the bookseller. George Eliot composed *' Middlemarch " between the ages of 46 and 51, and since then " Daniel Derondfti" Bacon was 59 before he published his great work, "The Novum Organuin." Cowper was over 50 when he published <( John Gilpin " and "The Task," "and Defoe was 58 when he published " : Bobinson Crusoe." Darwin published his "Origin of Species " when 50, and his "Descent of Man" when 62. Grote wrote the larger part of the •• History of Greece •■" between the ages of 52 and 62, and Hallam occupied nearly the same period of life with his "Introduction to the Literature of Europe." The two works by which Thomas Hood has surTired^the grave, " The Bridge of Sighs," ■nd "The Song of the Shirt," were composed when he wbs 46, and on a sick bed, from which he never rose. Lingfellow gave us " Hiawatha " when 41, "Talesof a Wayside Inn " when 58, and was afterwards as prolific as he had been excellent. " The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table" was published when Holmes was 48, and " Songs in Many Keys" when he was .55. : „■'.,-. ;