circumstance that produced those profound contemplations which made him
the Plato of his age.

Cowley became a poet by accident. In his mother's apartment he found,
when very young, Spenser's Fairy Queen; and, by a continual study of
poetry, he became so enchanted by the Muse, that he grew irrecoverably a
poet.

Sir Joshua Reynolds had the first fondness for his art excited by the
perusal of Richardson's Treatise.

Vaucanson displayed an uncommon genius for mechanics. His taste was
first determined by an accident: when young, he frequently attended his
mother to the residence of her confessor; and while she wept with
repentance, he wept with weariness! In this state of disagreeable
vacation, says Helvetius, he was struck with the uniform motion of the
pendulum of the clock in the hall. His curiosity was roused; he
approached the clock-case, and studied its mechanism; what he could not
discover he guessed at. He then projected a similar machine; and
gradually his genius produced a clock. Encouraged by this first success,
he proceeded in his various attempts; and the genius, which thus could
form a clock, in time formed a fluting automaton.

Accident determined the taste of Moliere for the stage. His grandfather
loved the theatre, and frequently carried him there. The young man lived
in dissipation; the father observing it asked in anger, if his son was
to be made an actor. "Would to God," replied the grandfather, "he were
as good an actor as Monrose." The words struck young Moliere, he took a
disgust to his tapestry trade, and it is to this circumstance France
owes her greatest comic writer.

Corneille loved; he made verses for his mistress, became a poet,
composed _Melite_ and afterwards his other celebrated works. The
discreet Corneille had else remained a lawyer.

We owe the great discovery of Newton to a very trivial accident. When a
student at Cambridge, he had retired during the time of the plague into
the country. As he was reading under an apple-tree, one of the fruit
fell, and struck him a smart blow on the head. When he observed the
smallness of the apple, he was surprised at the force of the stroke.
This led him to consider the accelerating motion of falling bodies; from
whence he deduced the principle of gravity, and laid the foundation of
his philosophy.

Ignatius Loyola was a Spanish gentleman, who was dangerously wounded at
the siege of Pampeluna. Having heated his imagination by reading the
Lives