atient that happy moment to burst into life.

And thus by spontaneous accident, by delightful, careless chance, so to
speak, the thing was done. One wonders by what equally, nay more
fortunate unthought-of haphazard it was, that the country rogue
Shakspeare, his bright eyes shining with mock penitence for the wildness
of his woodland career, and the air and the accent of the fields still
on his honeyed lips, first found out that he could string a story
together for the theatre and make the old knights and the fair ladies
live again. Of this there is no record, but only enough presumption, we
think, to make it sufficiently clear that the discovery which has ever
since been one of the chief glories of the English name, and added the
most wonderful immortal inhabitants to the population, was made, like
Scott's, by what seems a divine chance, without apparent preparation or
likelihood. In our day much more importance is given to a development
which the scientific thinker would fondly hope to be traceable by all
the leadings of race and inheritance into an evolution purely natural
and to be expected; while, on the other hand, there is nothing which
appears more splendid and dignified to others than the aspect of a life
devoted to poetry, in which the man becomes but a kind of solemn
incubator of his own thoughts. It will always be, however, an additional
delight to the greater part of the human race to see how here and there
the greatest of all heavenly tools is found unawares by the happy hand
that can wield it, no one knowing who has put it there ready for his
triumphant grasp when the fated moment comes.

Everybody will remember as a pendant--but one so much more grave that we
hesitate to cite it, though the coincidence is curious--the pause made
by Dante in the beginning of the _Inferno_, which resembles so exactly
the pause in Scott's career. The great Florentine had written seven
cantos of his wonderful poem when the rush of his affairs carried him
away from all such tranquil work and left the Latin fragment, among
other more vulgar papers, shovelled hastily into some big cassone in the
house in Florence from which he was a banished man. It was found there
after five years by a nephew who would fain have tried his prentice hand
upon the poem, yet finally took the better part of sending it to its
author--who immediately resumed _Io dico sequitando_, in a burst of
satisfaction to have recovered what he must have begun wi