For Richard Brinsley Sheridan became the most brilliant, eloquent and amazing statesman of his day.

Yet if his first efforts had been but moderately successful, he might have been content with mere mediocrity.

It was his defeats that nerved him to strive for eminence and win it.

But it took hard, persistent work in his case to secure it, just as it did in that of so many others.
Byron was stung into a determination to go to the top by a scathing criticism of his first book, "Hours of Idleness," published when he was but nineteen years of age.

Macaulay said, "There is scarce an instance in history of so sudden a rise to so dizzy an eminence as Byron reached." In a few years he stood by the side of such men as Scott, Southey and Campbell.