histories which show, that,
had he chosen, he might have been as much a master in the region of
historic fact as in the realm of imagination. He had edited other men's
works; he had written essays; he had lent himself with a royal
generosity to every one who asked his time or influence; and when,
almost an old man, commercial bankruptcy overtook him, and he sought to
lift the mountain of his debt by pure intellectual toil, he wore out.
But declining years, disappointed hopes, desperate exertions, may wear
anybody out. He wore out, but it was at more than threescore years, when
nine tenths of his generation had long slept in quiet graves,--when the
crowd of the thoughtless and indolent, who began life with him, had
rusted out in inglorious repose. Yes, Walter Scott wore out, if you call
that wearing out.

John Calvin, all his biographers say, wore out. Perhaps so;--but not
without a prolonged resistance. Commencing life with the frailest
constitution, he was, as early as twenty-five, a model of erudition, and
had already written his immortal work. For thirty years he was in the
heat and ferment of a great religious revolution. For thirty years he
was one of the controlling minds of his age. For thirty years he was the
sternest soldier in the Church Militant, bearing down stubborn
resistance by a yet more stubborn will. For thirty years neither his
brain nor his pen knew rest. And so at fifty-six this man of broken body
and many labors laid down the weapons of his warfare; but it was at
Geneva, where the public registers tell us that the average of human
life in that century was only nine years.

One writes words like these:--"John Kitto died, and his death was the
judgment for overwork, and overwork of a single organ,--the brain." And
who was John Kitto? A poor boy, the son a drunken father, subject from
infancy to agonizing headache. An unfortunate lad, who at thirteen fell
from a scaffolding and was taken up for dead, and escaped only with
total deafness and a supposed permanent injury to the brain. A hapless
apprentice, who suffered at the hands of a cruel taskmaster all that
brutality and drunken fury could suggest. A youth, thirsting for
knowledge, but able to obtain it only by the hardest ways, peering into
booksellers' windows, reading at book-stalls, purchasing cheap books
with pennies stained all over with the sweat of his toil. An heroic
student, who labored for more than twenty years with almost unparalleled