It would be curious to know how much chance or accident has had to do with even the best of the productions of literature. Wordsworth, in a conversation with one of his friends, gave an account of the origin of the Ancient Mariner. It was written in Devonshire, where he and Coleridge were together. It was intended for the Monthly Magazine, and was to pay the expenses of a journey. It was to have been a joint work, but Wordsworth left the execution to Coleridge, after suggesting much of the plan. The idea of the crime was suggested by a book of travels, in which the superstition of the sailors with regard to the albatross is mentioned. Mark Lemon, it is said, loved to tell an anecdote which related to the period when Hood became a contributor to Punch. Looking over his letters one morning, he opened an envelope inclosing a poem which the writer said had been rejected by three contemporaries. If not thought available for Punch, he begged the editor, whom he knew but slightly, to consign it to the waste-paper basket, as the writer was "sick at the sight of it." The poem was signed "Tom Hood," and the lines were entitled "The Song of the Shirt." The work was altogether different from anything that had ever appeared in Punch, and was considered so much out of keeping with the spirit of the periodical that at the weekly meeting its publication was opposed by several members of the staff. Lemon was so firmly impressed, not only with the beauty of the work, but with its suitableness, that he stood by his first decision and published it. The Song of the Shirt trebled the sale of the paper, and created a profound sensation throughout Great Britain. Scott told Ticknor that he once traveled with Campbell in a stage-coach alone, and that, to beguile the time, they talked of poetry and began to repeat some. At last Scott asked Campbell for something of his own, and he said there was one thing he had written but never printed that was full of "drums and trumpets and blunderbusses and thunder," and he didn't know if there was anything good in it. And then he repeated Hohenlinden. Scott listened with the greatest interest, and when he had finished, broke out, "But do you know that's devilish fine; why it's the finest thing you ever wrote, and it must be printed!" Scott told Leslie that he had known a laboring man who was with Burns when he turned up the mouse with his plow. Burns' first impulse was to kill it, but checking himself, as his eye followed the little creature, he said, "I'll make that mouse immortal!" "One meets now and then with polished men," says Emerson, "who know everything, have tried everything, can do everything, and are quite superior to letters and science. What could they not, if only they would?" Wrote Byron:--