years abstained from his pencil, a singular circumstance seems explained
by an extraordinary occurrence. TASSO, with feverish anxiety pondered on
five different subjects before he could decide in the choice of his epic;
the same embarrassment was long the fate of GIBBON on the subject of his
history. Some have sunk into a deplorable state of utter languishment,
from the circumstance of being deprived of the means of pursuing their
beloved study, as in the case of the chemist BERGMAN. His friends, to gain
him over to the more lucrative professions, deprived him of his books of
natural history; a plan which nearly proved fatal to the youth, who with
declining health quitted the university. At length ceasing to struggle
with the conflicting desire within him, his renewed enthusiasm for his
favourite science restored the health he had lost in abandoning it.

It was the view of the tomb of Virgil which so powerfully influenced the
innate genius of BOCCACCIO, and fixed his instant decision. As yet young,
and in the neighbourhood of Naples, wandering for recreation, he reached
the tomb of the Mantuan. Pausing before it, his youthful mind began to
meditate. Struck by the universal glory of that great name, he lamented
his own fortune to be occupied by the obscure details of merchandise;
already he sighed to emulate the fame of the Roman, and as Villani tells
us, from that day he abandoned for ever the occupations of commerce,
dedicating himself to literature. PROCTOR, the lost Phidias of our
country, would often say, that he should never have quitted his mercantile
situation, but for the accidental sight of Barry's picture of "Venus
rising from the Sea;" a picture which produced so immediate an effect on
his mind, that it determined him to quit a lucrative occupation. Surely we
cannot account for such sudden effusions of the mind, and such instant
decisions, but by the principle of that predisposition which only waits
for an occasion to declare itself.