reached the age of sixteen," he says, "I showed little inclination for scientific
pursuits." He was essentially self-taught, and acquired most of his knowledge
rather late in life. At nineteen he had never heard of botany. Sheridan was called
inferior to many of his schoolfellows. He was remarkable for nothing but
idleness and winning manners, and was "not only slovenly in construing, but
unusually defective in his Greek grammar." Swift was refused his degree
because of "dulness and insufficiency," but given it later as a special favor.
Wordsworth was disappointing. General Grant was never above mediocrity, and
was dropped as corporal in the junior class and served the last year as a private.
W. H. Seward was called "too stupid to learn." Napoleon graduated forty-second
in his class. "Who," asks Swift, "were the forty-one above him?" Darwin was
singularly incapable of mastering any language. "When he left school," he says,
"I was considered by all my masters and by my father as a very ordinary boy,
rather below the common standard in intellect. To my deep mortification, my
father once said to me, 'You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-
catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and to all your family.'" Harriet
Martineau was thought very dull. Though a horn musician, she could do
absolutely nothing in the presence of her irritable master. She wrote a cramped,
untidy scrawl until past twenty. A visit to some very brilliant cousins at the age
of sixteen had much to do in arousing her backward nature. At this age J.
Pierpont Morgan wrote poetry and was devoted to mathematics. Booker T.
Washington, at about thirteen or fourteen (he does not know the date of his
birth), felt the new meaning of life and started off on foot to Hampton, five
hundred miles away, not knowing even the direction, sleeping under a sidewalk
his first night in Richmond. Vittorino da Feltre,[16] according to Dr. Burnham,
had a low, tardy development, lingering on a sluggish dead level from ten to
fourteen, which to his later unfoldment was as the barren, improving years
sometimes called the middle ages, compared with the remainder which followed
when a new world-consciousness intensified his personality.
Lancaster's summaries show that of 100 actors, the average age of their first
great success was exactly 18 years. Those he chose had taken to the stage of
their own accord, for actors are more born than made. Nearly half of them were
Irish, the unemotional American stock having furnished far less. Few make their
first success on the stage after 22, but from 16 to 20 is the time to expect talent
in this line, although there is a second rise in his curve before and still more after
25, representing those whose success is more due to intellect. Taking the average
age of 100 novelists when their first story met with public approval, the curve
reaches its highest point between 30 and 35. Averaging 53 poets, the age at