How often we see the lives and fortunes of individuals contingent upon seeming chance! Cromwell and Hampden, who were cousins, both took passage in a vessel that lay in the Thames, bound for this country, in 1637. They were actually on board, when an order of council prohibited the vessel from sailing. We recall two other instances of a similar character in the career of Goethe and Robert Burns, each of whom was once on the eve of sailing for America to seek a foreign home. Locke was banished from England by force of public opinion, in company with his friend Lord Ashley, and wrote his well-known "Essay on the Human Understanding"[90] in a Dutch garret. He finally lived down all detraction, and was himself a practical example of that self-teaching which he so strongly advocates in his writings. He possessed a wonderful memory; so also did Thomas Fuller, who could repeat five hundred unconnected words after twice hearing them. Coleridge esteemed Fuller, not only for his wit, originality, and liberality, but as being the most sensible great man of an age that boasted a galaxy of great men. Jeremy Taylor, whose birth is shrouded in mystery, though he is said to be the son of a barber, was a singular compound, in character, of simplicity and erudition. He was always a child among children, and it is said that a child could at any time attract his attention. He encountered many of the sterner vicissitudes of life, being more than once cast into prison. In the civil war he was a decided adherent of Charles I., and some have supposed him to have been a natural son of that monarch. Emerson calls him the Shakespeare of divines. Gibbon, the distinguished historian, composed while walking back and forth in his room, completely arranging his ideas in his brain before taking his pen in hand, which in a degree accounts for the correctness of his manuscript.[91] Montaigne and Châteaubriand,[92] when disposed to composition, sought the open fields and unfrequented paths, where, somewhat like Gibbon, they arranged their matter with great precision before sitting down to write. Bacon always wrote in a small room, because, as he believed, it enabled him to concentrate his thoughts. Franklin wrote and studied with a plate of bread and cheese by his side to repair mental waste, as he said, and also to economize time. Is there not a ceaseless interest hanging over the domestic and professional habits of these famous men of the past?