Chatterton wrote all his beautiful things, exhausted all hopes of life, and saw nothing better than death,—at the early age of eighteen.
Burns and Byron died in their thirty-seventh year, and doubtless the strength of their genius was over.
Raffaelle, after filling the world with divine beauty, perished also at thirty-seven. Mozart died even earlier.
These men might have produced still greater works.
On the other hand, Handel was forty-eight before he gave the "world assurance of a man."
Dryden came up to London from the provinces, dressed in Norwich drugget, somewhat above the age of thirty, and did not even then know that he could write a single line of poetry; yet what towering vigor and swinging ease appeared all at once in Glorious John.
Milton had, indeed, written Comus at twenty-eight, but he was upwards of fifty when he began his great work.
Cowper knew not his own might till he was far beyond thirty, and his Task was not written till about his fiftieth year.
Sir Walter Scott was also upwards of thirty before he published his Minstrel, and all his greatness was yet to come.
