By what combination of forces shall we say that the various geniuses have developed which, in a manner almost spectacular, rise before us as we study the literatures of the past? The youthful years of Shakespeare were spent under circumstances which might have produced in him one dull and unaspiring British country lout, like, as one egg to another, to a hundred thousand others who lived in his age. What made this one country boy the most astonishing genius in all the history of literature? Study the youth of Robert Burns, of Heinrich Heine, or Coleridge, and then tell me why the first two should become the greatest lyric poets of their time, and the third, one of England's deepest thinkers? Why did they not develop, one into a satisfied Scottish farmer, the other into a peddler of notions, and the third into a fat and comfortable English banker? We quote from an article which appeared in _"Theological Quarterly"_ some twenty years ago: "What process of evolution resulted in the lives and deeds of such men as Alexander the Great, Julius Ceasar, [tr. note: sic] Constantine the Great, Luther, Napoleon I, and Bismarck? All these great makers of history were what they were far less in consequence and by the continuation of the course of previous events or developments, than largely in spite of the past and in direct opposition to forces which had worked together in shaping the condition of things with which they had to deal. The Macedonian empire would never have sprung into being but for an Alexander, in whose mind the chief facts for its realization were united. The Rome which Julius Ceasar [tr. note: sic] left behind him was not that which he had found, only carried forward to a new stage of development, but the embodiment of ideas conceived in his mind, a quantity which under God the greatest Roman had _made_ out of a quantity which he had found. The distinctive features of the Constantinian empire as compared with that of Diocletian, or of the tetrarchy of which he was the head, were not evolved from earlier political principles, but stood out in bold contrast and even in direct opposition to the very fundamentals of antique statesmanship, and so new in politics that even Constantine permitted them to slip away from his grasp long before the sunset of his life had come. Luther was not a more fully developed Hus or Savonarola, and the Reformation was not the more advanced stage or completion of a movement inaugurated by the Humanists, but a work of God the actuating spirit of which was as diametrically contrary to the rationalistic spirit which animated Erasmus and, in a measure, Zwingli and his abettors, as it was to anti-christian Rome,--which was in 1517 essentially what it had been in 1302, when Boniface VIII issued his bull _Unam sanctum_ as a definition of the rights and powers of Popery. Napoleon did not carry onward but broke away from the tumult of French politics when he laid the greater part of western Europe at his feet,