Carlyle says the richer a nature the harder and slower its development. He reminds us that the cabbage is the quickest and completest of all vegetables. He gives the story of two boys as an illustration, who were once in a class in the Edinburgh Grammar School: John was ever trim, precise, and dux; Walter ever slovenly and dull. John developed like the cabbage, and in due time became Baillie John of Hunter Square; there he stopped. Walter struggled on against a slower growth, but in the course of years became Sir Walter Scott of the Universe. Nearly every one of those tales which conferred immortality upon him, was written after he had reached the age of forty-six.

Reminiscent of Carlyle's reference to the slow development of a rich nature, is his own literary career. While he was never a doltish student, the prospect in his younger manhood of making a name for himself, was exceedingly dubious. At twenty-three his life's plans were so unsettled and the outlook as to his success as a teacher in Edinburgh so uncertain, that he seriously entertained the idea of quitting Scotland, the land of his birth, and emigrating to America.

Carlyle's Cromwell's Letters and Speeches, which is said to have been the most successful of all his works because it completely revolutionized the public estimate of the great statesman and ruler, was published when Carlyle was forty years old. The first two volumes of Frederick the Great appeared when he was sixty-three; another two when he was sixty-seven; and the last two when he was sixty-nine.

The most famous of Swift's works is Gulliver's Travels. Almost immediately after its appearance it was in the mouth of the world; yet the Dean did not begin to write the immortal satire till he was past fifty-seven, completing it in two years.

Macaulay was a strong writer in his early manhood, but he was forty-eight when he issued the first and second volumes of his History of England. He seemed never to be in haste with his work, for he was fifty-five when the third and fourth volumes appeared. Good though the essays are which he produced before he was forty-five, they pale when compared with the work of his mature years.

Darwin did not establish his reputation as a naturalist until he was passing fifty, when his Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection was given to the world. The Descent of Man, hardly less famous than the previous volume as an epoch-making work, was published when he was sixty-two.

It was in 1855, when Longfellow was forty-eight, that he wrote "The Song of Hiawatha." After that age he was as prolific as he was excellent, for in the years following came his splendid translation of Dante's "Divine Comedy," and the poem of exquisite beauty, "Mar-ituri Salutamus." The latter was written in 1875 for the fiftieth anniversary of his graduation from Bowdoin College, the occasion being one of unusual impressiveness and deeply affecting. The poem closes with the characteristic lines:

For age is opportunity no less

Than youth itself, though in another dress,

And as the evening twilight fades away

The sky is filled with stars invisible by day.

The readers of William Cullen Bryant will remember that the great poet made his translation of Homer's Iliad at the age of seventy-six, and of The Odyssey a year later. So ably was this task performed that the translations are said to be, in many respects, the best that any English writing poet has yet produced. The passing of sixty-four years from the appearance of his immortal Thanatopsis to the writing of The Flood of Years, brought no loss whatever to his poetic capacity. In his editorial management of the New York Evening Post he displayed the same remarkable mental balance and power up to his accidental and sudden death in 1878, at the age of eighty-four, as when he assumed control of that paper in 1826.

It was not until late in life that Oliver Wendell Holmes became known to the world as a writer of fiction. The romance of the Professor and the Schoolmistress interwoven with his "Breakfast Table" essays, might be regarded as his first venture in that field. But Elsie Tenner, which appeared in 1860, was the first real work of Holmes as a novelist. The Guardian Angel, some seven years later; and eighteen years further on, when he had reached seventy-six, he published A Mortal Antipathy. Of The Guardian Angel, produced when the doctor was approaching seventy, an English critic said: "There is no such minor poet in the whole range of fiction as the immortal Gifted Hopkins. If Dr. Holmes has more characters like Gifted Hopkins in his mind, the hilarity of two continents is not in much danger of being extinguished." The Iron Gate, which Dr. Holmes wrote for a breakfast given in honor of his seventieth birthday by the Atlantic Monthly, has been called the finest creation of his genius since the publication of The Cambered Nautilus, written some twenty years previously.

There was no rapid development of Washington Irving's best powers as a writer. It is said by competent authority that the volumes which came from his pen toward the close of his life "added to his reputation." When his life of Oliver Goldsmith appeared in 1849, Irving was sixty-six years old, and his Mahomet and His Successors was published a year later. His long-planned and affectionate life of Washington, in five volumes, was completed only with the year of his death - 1859.

The intellectual powers of George Bancroft, our distinguished historian, were so vigorous at seventy-six that he was able to publish a centenary edition of his works; and at eighty-two he prepared his History of the Formation of the Constitution of the United States. He was eighty-three when he revised the edition of his history in six volumes. His mental faculties were well-preserved up to his death in his ninety-first year, in 1891.

When Frances M. Trollope came to America from England in 1829 for the purpose of establishing herself in business in Cincinnati, she lacked only a few months of being fifty years old. She was a stranger in a strange land, and was without a literary career. Though her enterprise failed, she was not idle. During the three years' residence in this country, Mrs. Trollope gathered material for Domestic Manners in America, which she published in London in 1832. From the time she was fifty-two to her death at eighty-three, she published upwards of one hundred volumes - novels of society, and impressions of travel making up the sum of her works. Mrs. Trollope was widely read, and during her thirty-two years of authorship her income from her books is said to have reached one hundred thousand dollars.