4 oo THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



by their ability. Once more, take Charles Darwin himself. He was 

 nearly if not quite fifty before he published " The Origin of Species." 

 It was a mere chance that with his feeble health he lived on to com- 

 plete that great work. Suppose he had died at forty, how would he 

 have been remembered ? Chiefly as the author of a clever book of 

 scientific travels, and of a monograph on the fossil acorn-barnacles. In 

 a world of such mere accidents as these, who shall say that an appar- 

 ently negative instance proves anything ? 



Take another and somewhat different case the Tennyson family. 

 Here we have three brothers, all with more or less poetical tempera- 

 ment, and all marked by much the same minute peculiarities in cast of 

 thought and turn of expression. Only two, however, I believe, have 

 published or at least have acknowledged their verses ; and of these 

 two alone Alfred Tennyson and Charles Tennyson Turner has one 

 a right to speak publicly. When the " Poems by Two Brothers " ap- 

 peared, who could have said which of the two was destined to turn 

 out a great poet ? And in the after-event, who can say what little 

 difference of circumstances may have made the one into a clergyman 

 and the other into a professional versifier ? If Charles Turner had 

 cultivated his muse as assiduously as the laureate, would he have pro- 

 duced equal results ? What little twist set the one, with Tennysonian 

 love of form carried to the length of a passion, upon the writing of 

 exquisite sonnets alone, while it set the other upon " In Memori- 

 am," and " Maud," and " The Princess," and the " Morte d'Arthur " ? 

 What little extra encouragement on the part of a reviewer may have 

 impelled the more successful poet to fresh efforts ; what professional 

 distractions or religious scruples may have held back the less illustri- 

 ous parson ? And yet, who can read Charles Tennyson Turner's son- 

 nets without feeling that though the idiosyncrasis is not exactly the 

 same, the crasis itself is at bottom identical ? Compare the sonnets 

 with the work of any one among the imitators the men who " all 

 can raise the flower now, for all have got the seed," and what a dif- 

 ference ! The imitator is all servile copy ism in form, with no real 

 underlying identity of matter ; the brother is only half a Tennyson 

 in mere externals, but is still own brother in the most intimate turns 

 of thought and feeling. 



After such cases as these, do we need any explanation of the sud- 

 den apparition of a Carlyle, a Burns, a Shakespeare, a Dickens, from 

 out the ranks of the people themselves ? To me it seems not. Are 

 there not pithiness and sternness and ability enough in the Lowland 

 peasantry to account for the occasional production, out of thousands 

 of casts at the dice, of such a convergence as that which gave us the 

 old man at Ecclefechan who " had sic names for things and bodies," 

 and his two able sons, of whom the more strangely compounded was 

 Thomas Carlyle ? Is there not in another type of Scotch peasant 

 enough of pathos and literary power and bonhomie to account for an 



