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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Biographies of Working Men, by Grant Allen
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+Title: Biographies of Working Men
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+Author: Grant Allen
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+
+BIOGRAPHIES OF WORKING MEN
+
+by
+
+GRANT ALLEN, B.A.
+
+1884
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+
+
+
+
+I.  THOMAS TELFORD, STONEMASON
+
+II.  GEORGE STEPHENSON, ENGINE-MAN
+
+III.  JOHN GIBSON, SCULPTOR
+
+IV.  WILLIAM HERSCHEL, BANDSMAN
+
+V.  JEAN FRANCOIS MILLET, PAINTER
+
+VI.  JAMES GARFIELD, CANAL BOY
+
+VII.  THOMAS EDWARD, SHOEMAKER
+
+
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE.
+
+
+
+
+
+My acknowledgments are due to Dr. Smiles's "Lives of the
+Engineers," "Life of the Stephensons," and "Life of a Scotch
+Naturalist;" to Lady Eastlake's "Life of Gibson;" to Mr. Holden's
+"Life of Sir William Herschel;" to M. Seusier's "J. F. Millet, Sa
+Vie et Ses Oeuvres;" and to Mr. Thayer's "Life of President
+Garfield;" from which most of the facts here narrated have been
+derived.
+
+G.A.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+BIOGRAPHIES OF WORKING MEN.
+
+I.
+
+THOMAS TELFORD, STONEMASON.
+
+
+
+
+
+High up among the heather-clad hills which form the broad dividing
+barrier between England and Scotland, the little river Esk brawls
+and bickers over its stony bed through a wild land of barren
+braesides and brown peat mosses, forming altogether some of the
+gloomiest and most forbidding scenery in the whole expanse of
+northern Britain.  Almost the entire bulk of the counties of
+Dumfries, Kirkcudbright, and Ayr is composed of just such solemn
+desolate upland wolds, with only a few stray farms or solitary
+cottages sprinkled at wide distances over their bare bleak surface,
+and with scarcely any sign of life in any part save the little
+villages which cluster here and there at long intervals around some
+stern and simple Scottish church.  Yet the hardy people who inhabit
+this wild and chilly moorland country may well be considered to rank
+among the best raw material of society in the whole of Britain; for
+from the peasant homes of these southern Scotch Highlands have come
+forth, among a host of scarcely less distinguished natives, three
+men, at least, who deserve to take their place in the very front
+line of British thinkers or workers--Thomas Telford, Robert Burns,
+and Thomas Carlyle.  By origin, all three alike belonged in the very
+strictest sense to the working classes; and the story of each is
+full of lessons or of warnings for every one of us: but that of
+Telford is perhaps the most encouraging and the most remarkable of
+all, as showing how much may be accomplished by energy and
+perseverance, even under the most absolutely adverse and difficult
+circumstances.
+
+Near the upper end of Eskdale, in the tiny village of Westerkirk,
+a young shepherd's wife gave birth to a son on the 9th of August,
+1757.  Her husband, John Telford, was employed in tending sheep on
+a neighbouring farm, and he and his Janet occupied a small cottage
+close by, with mud walls and rudely thatched roof, such as in
+southern England even the humblest agricultural labourer would
+scarcely consent willingly to inhabit.  Before the child was three
+months old, his father died; and Janet Telford was left alone in
+the world with her unweaned baby.  But in remote country districts,
+neighbours are often more neighbourly than in great towns; and a
+poor widow can manage to eke out a livelihood for herself with an
+occasional lift from the helping hands of friendly fellow-
+villagers.  Janet Telford had nothing to live upon save her own ten
+fingers; but they were handy enough, after the sturdy Scotch
+fashion, and they earned some sort of livelihood in a humble way
+for herself and her fatherless boy.  The farmers about found her
+work on their farms at haymaking or milking, and their wives took
+the child home with them while its mother was busy labouring in the
+harvest fields.  Amid such small beginnings did the greatest of
+English engineers before the railway era receive his first hard
+lessons in the art of life.
+
+After her husband's death, the poor widow removed from her old
+cottage to a still more tiny hut, which she shared with a
+neighbour--a very small hut, with a single door for both families;
+and here young Tam Telford spent most of his boyhood in the quiet
+honourable poverty of the uncomplaining rural poor.  As soon as he
+was big enough to herd sheep, he was turned out upon the hillside
+in summer like any other ragged country laddie, and in winter he
+tended cows, receiving for wages only his food and money enough to
+cover the cost of his scanty clothing.  He went to school, too;
+how, nobody now knows: but he DID go, to the parish school of
+Westerkirk, and there he learnt with a will, in the winter months,
+though he had to spend the summer on the more profitable task of
+working in the fields.  To a steady earnest boy like young Tam
+Telford, however, it makes all the difference in the world that he
+should have been to school, no matter how simply.  Those twenty-six
+letters of the alphabet, once fairly learnt, are the key, after
+all, to all the book-learning in the whole world.  Without them,
+the shepherd-boy might remain an ignorant, unprogressive shepherd
+all his life long, even his undeniable native energy using itself
+up on nothing better than a wattled hurdle or a thatched roof; with
+them, the path is open before him which led Tam Telford at last to
+the Menai Bridge And Westminster Abbey.
+
+When Tam had gradually eaten his way through enough thin oatmeal
+porridge (with very little milk, we fear) to make him into a hearty
+lad of fifteen, it began to be high time for him to choose himself
+a final profession in life, such as he was able.  And here already
+the born tastes of the boy began to show themselves: for he had no
+liking for the homely shepherd's trade; he felt a natural desire
+for a chisel and a hammer--the engineer was there already in the
+grain--and he was accordingly apprenticed to a stonemason in the
+little town of Lochmaben, beyond the purple hills to eastward.  But
+his master was a hard man; he had small mercy for the raw lad; and
+after trying to manage with him for a few months, Tam gave it up,
+took the law into his own hands, and ran away.  Probably the
+provocation was severe, for in after-life Telford always showed
+himself duly respectful to constituted authority; and we know that
+petty self-made master-workmen are often apt to be excessively
+severe to their own hired helpers, and especially to helpless lads
+or young apprentices.  At any rate, Tam wouldn't go back; and in
+the end, a well-to-do cousin, who had risen to the proud position
+of steward at the great hall of the parish, succeeded in getting
+another mason at Langholm, the little capital of Eskdale, to take
+over the runaway for the remainder of the term of his indentures.
+
+At Langholm, a Scotch country town of the quietest and sleepiest
+description, Tam Telford passed the next eight years of his
+uneventful early life, first as an apprentice, and afterwards as a
+journeyman mason of the humblest type.  He had a good mother, and
+he was a good son.  On Saturday nights he generally managed to walk
+over to the cottage at Westerkirk, and accompany the poor widow to
+the Sunday services at the parish kirk.  As long as she lived,
+indeed, he never forgot her; and one of the first tasks he set
+himself when he was out of his indentures was to cut a neat
+headstone with a simple but beautiful inscription for the grave of
+that shepherd father whom he had practically never seen.  At
+Langholm, an old maiden lady, Miss Pasley, interested herself
+kindly in Janet Telford's rising boy.  She lent him what of all
+things the eager lad most needed--books; and the young mason
+applied himself to them in all his spare moments with the vigorous
+ardour and perseverance of healthy youth.  The books he read were
+not merely those which bore directly or indirectly upon his own
+craft: if they had been, Tam Telford might have remained nothing
+more than a journeyman mason all the days of his life.  It is a
+great mistake, even from the point of view of mere worldly success,
+for a young man to read or learn only what "pays" in his particular
+calling; the more he reads and learns, the more will he find that
+seemingly useless things "pay" in the end, and that what apparently
+pays least, often really pays most in the long run.  This is not
+the only or the best reason why every man should aim at the highest
+possible cultivation of his own talents, be they what they may; but
+it is in itself a very good reason, and it is a sufficient answer
+for those who would deter us from study of any high kind on the
+ground that it "does no good."  Telford found in after-life that
+his early acquaintance with sound English literature did do him a
+great deal of good: it opened and expanded his mind; it trained his
+intelligence; it stored his brain with images and ideas which were
+ever after to him a source of unmitigated delight and unalloyed
+pleasure.  He read whenever he had nothing else to do.  He read
+Milton with especial delight; and he also read the verses that his
+fellow-countryman, Rob Burns, the Ayrshire ploughman, was then just
+beginning to speak straight to the heart of every aspiring Scotch
+peasant lad.  With these things Tam Telford filled the upper
+stories of his brain quite as much as with the trade details of his
+own particular useful handicraft; and the result soon showed that
+therein Tam Telford had not acted uncannily or unwisely.
+
+Nor did he read only; he wrote too--verses, not very good, nor yet
+very bad, but well expressed, in fairly well chosen language, and
+with due regard to the nice laws of metre and of grammar, which is
+in itself a great point.  Writing verse is an occupation at which
+only very few even among men of literary education ever really
+succeed; and nine-tenths of published verse is mere mediocre
+twaddle, quite unworthy of being put into the dignity of print.
+Yet Telford did well for all that in trying his hand, with but poor
+result, at this most difficult and dangerous of all the arts.  His
+rhymes were worth nothing as rhymes; but they were worth a great
+deal as discipline and training: they helped to form the man, and
+that in itself is always something.  Most men who have in them the
+power to do any great thing pass in early life through a verse-
+making stage.  The verses never come to much; but they leave their
+stamp behind them; and the man is all the better in the end for
+having thus taught himself the restraint, the command of language,
+the careful choice of expressions, the exercise of deliberate pains
+in composition, which even bad verse-making necessarily implies.
+It is a common mistake of near-sighted minds to look only at the
+immediate results of things, without considering their remoter
+effects.  When Tam Telford, stonemason of Langholm, began at
+twenty-two years of age to pen poetical epistles to Robert Burns,
+most of his fellow-workmen doubtless thought he was giving himself
+up to very foolish and nonsensical practices; but he was really
+helping to educate Thomas Telford, engineer of the Holyhead Road
+and the Caledonian Canal, for all his future usefulness and
+greatness.
+
+As soon as Tam was out of his indentures, he began work as a
+journeyman mason at Langholm on his own account, at the not very
+magnificent wages of eighteenpence a day.  That isn't much; but at
+any rate it is an independence.  Besides building many houses in
+his own town, Tam made here his first small beginning in the matter
+of roads and highways, by helping to build a bridge over the Esk at
+Langholm.  He was very proud of his part in this bridge, and to the
+end of his life he often referred to it as his first serious
+engineering work.  Many of the stones still bear his private mark,
+hewn with the tool into their solid surface, with honest
+workmanship which helps to explain his later success.  But the
+young mason was beginning to discover that Eskdale was hardly a
+wide enough field for his budding ambition.  He could carve the
+most careful headstones; he could cut the most ornamental copings
+for doors or windows; he could even build a bridge across the
+roaring flooded Esk; but he wanted to see a little of the great
+world, and learn how men and masons went about their work in the
+busy centres of the world's activity.  So, like a patriotic
+Scotchman that he was, he betook himself straight to Edinburgh,
+tramping it on foot, of course, for railways did not yet exist, and
+coaches were not for the use of such as young Thomas Telford.
+
+He arrived in the grey old capital of Scotland in the very nick
+of time.  The Old Town, a tangle of narrow alleys and close
+courtyards, surrounded by tall houses with endless tiers of floors,
+was just being deserted by the rich and fashionable world for the
+New Town, which lies beyond a broad valley on the opposite
+hillside, and contains numerous streets of solid and handsome stone
+houses, such as are hardly to be found in any other town in
+Britain, except perhaps Bath and Aberdeen.  Edinburgh is always,
+indeed, an interesting place for an enthusiastic lover of building,
+be he architect or stonemason; for instead of being built of brick
+like London and so many other English centres, it is built partly
+of a fine hard local sandstone and partly of basaltic greenstone;
+and besides its old churches and palaces, many of the public
+buildings are particularly striking and beautiful architectural
+works.  But just at the moment when young Telford walked wearily
+into Edinburgh at the end of his long tramp, there was plenty for a
+stout strong mason to do in the long straight stone fronts of the
+rising New Town.  For two years, he worked away patiently at his
+trade in "the grey metropolis of the North;" and he took advantage
+of the special opportunities the place afforded him to learn
+drawing, and to make minute sketches in detail of Holyrood Palace,
+Heriot's Hospital, Roslyn Chapel, and all the other principal old
+buildings' in which the neighbourhood of the capital is particularly
+rich.  So anxious, indeed, was the young mason to perfect himself by
+the study of the very best models in his own craft, that when at the
+end of two years he walked back to revisit his good mother in
+Eskdale, he took the opportunity of making drawings of Melrose
+Abbey, the most exquisite and graceful building that the artistic
+stone-cutters of the Middle Ages have handed down to our time in all
+Scotland.
+
+This visit to Eskdale was really Telford's last farewell to his old
+home, before setting out on a journey which was to form the
+turning-point in his own history, and in the history of British
+engineering as well.  In Scotch phrase, he was going south.  And
+after taking leave of his mother (not quite for the last time) he
+went south in good earnest, doing this journey on horseback; for
+his cousin the steward had lent him a horse to make his way
+southward like a gentleman.  Telford turned where all enterprising
+young Scotchmen of his time always turned: towards the unknown
+world of London--that world teeming with so many possibilities of
+brilliant success or of miserable squalid failure.  It was the year
+1782, and the young man was just twenty-five.  No sooner had he
+reached the great city than he began looking about him for suitable
+work.  He had a letter of introduction to the architect of Somerset
+House, whose ornamental fronts were just then being erected, facing
+the Strand and the river; and Telford was able to get a place at
+once on the job as a hewer of the finer architectural details, for
+which both his taste and experience well fitted him.  He spent some
+two years in London at this humble post as a stone-cutter; but
+already he began to aspire to something better.  He earned first-
+class mason's wages now, and saved whatever he did not need for
+daily expenses.  In this respect, the improvidence of his English
+fellow-workmen struck the cautious young Scotchman very greatly.
+They lived, he said, from week to week entirely; any time beyond a
+week seemed unfortunately to lie altogether outside the range of
+their limited comprehension.
+
+At the end of two years in London, Telford's skill and study began
+to bear good fruit.  His next engagement was one which raised him
+for the first time in his life above the rank of a mere journeyman
+mason.  The honest workman had attracted the attention of competent
+judges.  He obtained employment as foreman of works of some
+important buildings in Portsmouth Dockyard.  A proud man indeed was
+Thomas Telford at this change of fortune, and very proudly he wrote
+to his old friends in Eskdale, with almost boyish delight, about
+the trust reposed in him by the commissioners and officers, and the
+pains he was taking with the task entrusted to him.  For he was
+above all things a good workman, and like all good workmen he felt
+a pride and an interest in all the jobs he took in hand.  His sense
+of responsibility and his sensitiveness, indeed, were almost too
+great at times for his own personal comfort.  Things WILL go wrong
+now and then, even with the greatest care; well-planned undertakings
+will not always pay, and the best engineering does not necessarily
+succeed in earning a dividend; but whenever such mishaps occurred to
+his employers, Telford felt the disappointment much too keenly, as
+though he himself had been to blame for their miscalculations or
+over-sanguine hopes.  Still, it is a good thing to put one's heart
+in one's work, and so much Thomas Telford certainly did.
+
+About this time, too, the rising young mason began to feel that he
+must get a little more accurate scientific knowledge.  The period
+for general study had now passed by, and the period for special
+trade reading had set in.  This was well.  A lad cannot do better
+than lay a good foundation of general knowledge and general
+literature during the period when he is engaged in forming his
+mind: a young man once fairly launched in life may safely confine
+himself for a time to the studies that bear directly upon his own
+special chosen subject.  The thing that Telford began closely to
+investigate was--lime.  Now, lime makes mortar; and without lime,
+accordingly, you can have no mason.  But to know anything really
+about lime, Telford found he must read some chemistry; and to know
+anything really about chemistry he must work at it hard and
+unremittingly.  A strict attention to one's own business, understood
+in this very broad and liberal manner, is certainly no bad thing for
+any struggling handicraftsman, whatever his trade or profession may
+happen to be.
+
+In 1786, when Telford was nearly thirty, a piece of unexpected good
+luck fell to his lot.  And yet it was not so much good luck as due
+recognition of his sterling qualities by a wealthy and appreciative
+person.  Long before, while he was still in Eskdale, one Mr.
+Pulteney, a man of social importance, who had a large house in the
+bleak northern valley, had asked his advice about the repairs of
+his own mansion.  We may be sure that Telford did his work on that
+occasion carefully and well; for now, when Mr. Pulteney wished to
+restore the ruins of Shrewsbury Castle as a dwelling-house, he
+sought out the young mason who had attended to his Scotch property,
+and asked him to superintend the proposed alterations in his
+Shropshire castle.  Nor was that all: by Mr. Pulteney's influence,
+Telford was shortly afterwards appointed to be county surveyor of
+public works, having under his care all the roads, bridges, gaols,
+and public buildings in the whole of Shropshire.  Thus the Eskdale
+shepherd-boy rose at last from the rank of a working mason, and
+attained the well-earned dignity of an engineer and a professional
+man.
+
+Telford had now a fair opportunity of showing the real stuff of
+which he was made.  Those, of course, were the days when railroads
+had not yet been dreamt of; when even roads were few and bad; when
+communications generally were still in a very disorderly and
+unorganized condition.  It is Telford's special glory that he
+reformed and altered this whole state of things; he reduced the
+roads of half Britain to system and order; he made the finest
+highways and bridges then ever constructed; and by his magnificent
+engineering works, especially his aqueducts, he paved the way
+unconsciously but surely for the future railways.  If it had not
+been for such great undertakings as Telford's Holyhead Road, which
+familiarized men's minds with costly engineering operations, it is
+probable that projectors would long have stood aghast at the
+alarming expense of a nearly level iron road running through tall
+hills and over broad rivers the whole way from London to
+Manchester.
+
+At first, Telford's work as county surveyor lay mostly in very
+small things indeed--mere repairs of sidepaths or bridges, which
+gave him little opportunity to develop his full talents as a born
+engineer.  But in time, being found faithful in small things, his
+employers, the county magistrates, began to consult him more and
+more on matters of comparative importance.  First, it was a bridge
+to be built across the Severn; then a church to be planned at
+Shrewsbury, and next, a second church in Coalbrookdale.  If he was
+thus to be made suddenly into an architect, Telford thought, almost
+without being consulted in the matter, he must certainly set out to
+study architecture.  So, with characteristic vigour, he went to
+work to visit London, Worcester, Gloucester, Bath, and Oxford, at
+each place taking care to learn whatever was to be learned in the
+practice of his new art.  Fortunately, however, for Telford and for
+England, it was not architecture in the strict sense that he was
+finally to practise as a real profession.  Another accident, as
+thoughtless people might call it, led him to adopt engineering in
+the end as the path in life he elected to follow.  In 1793, he was
+appointed engineer to the projected Ellesmere Canal.
+
+In the days before railways, such a canal as this was an
+engineering work of the very first importance.  It was to connect
+the Mersey, the Dee, and the Severn, and it passed over ground
+which rendered necessary some immense aqueducts on a scale never
+before attempted by British engineers.  Even in our own time, every
+traveller by the Great Western line between Chester and Shrewsbury
+must have observed on his right two magnificent ranges as high
+arches, which are as noticeable now as ever for their boldness,
+their magnitude, and their exquisite construction.  The first of
+these mighty archways is the Pont Cysylltau aqueduct which carries
+the Ellesmere Canal across the wide valley of the Dee, known as the
+Vale of Llangollen; the second is the Chirk aqueduct, which takes
+it over the lesser glen of a minor tributary, the Ceriog.  Both
+these beautiful works were designed and carried out entirely by
+Telford.  They differ from many other great modern engineering
+achievements in the fact that, instead of spoiling the lovely
+mountain scenery into whose midst they have been thrown, they
+actually harmonize with it and heighten its natural beauty.  Both
+works, however, are splendid feats, regarded merely as efforts of
+practical skill; and the larger one is particularly memorable for
+the peculiarity that the trough for the water and the elegant
+parapet at the side are both entirely composed of iron.  Nowadays,
+of course, there would be nothing remarkable in the use of such a
+material for such a purpose; but Telford was the first engineer to
+see the value of iron in this respect, and the Pont Cysylltau
+aqueduct was one of the earliest works in which he applied the new
+material to these unwonted uses.  Such a step is all the more
+remarkable, because Telford's own education had lain entirely in
+what may fairly be called the "stone age" of English engineering;
+while his natural predilections as a stonemason might certainly
+have made him rather overlook the value of the novel material.  But
+Telford was a man who could rise superior to such little accidents
+of habit or training; and as a matter of fact there is no other
+engineer to whom the rise of the present "iron age" in engineering
+work is more directly and immediately to be attributed than to
+himself.
+
+Meanwhile, the Eskdale pioneer did not forget his mother.  For
+years he had constantly written to her, in PRINT HAND, so that the
+letters might be more easily read by her aged eyes; he had sent her
+money in full proportion to his means; and he had taken every
+possible care to let her declining years be as comfortable as his
+altered circumstances could readily make them.  And now, in the
+midst of this great and responsible work, he found time to "run
+down" to Eskdale (very different "running down" from that which we
+ourselves can do by the London and North Western Railway), to see
+his aged mother once more before she died.  What a meeting that
+must have been, between the poor old widow of the Eskdale shepherd,
+and her successful son, the county surveyor of Shropshire, and
+engineer of the great and important Ellesmere Canal!
+
+While Telford was working busily upon his wonderful canal, he had
+many other schemes to carry out of hardly less importance, in
+connection with his appointment as county surveyor.  His beautiful
+iron bridge across the Severn at Buildwas was another application
+of his favourite metal to the needs of the new world that was
+gradually growing up in industrial England; and so satisfied was he
+with the result of his experiment (for though not absolutely the
+first, it was one of the first iron bridges ever built) that he
+proposed another magnificent idea, which unfortunately was never
+carried into execution.  Old London Bridge had begun to get a
+trifle shaky; and instead of rebuilding it, Telford wished to span
+the whole river by a single iron arch, whose splendid dimensions
+would have formed one of the most remarkable engineering triumphs
+ever invented.  The scheme, for some good reason, doubtless, was
+not adopted; but it is impossible to look at Telford's grand
+drawing of the proposed bridge--a single bold arch, curving across
+the Thames from side to side, with the dome of St. Paul's rising
+majestically above it--without a feeling of regret that such a
+noble piece of theoretical architecture was never realized in
+actual fact.
+
+Telford had now come to be regarded as the great practical
+authority upon all that concerned roads or communications; and he
+was reaping the due money-reward of his diligence and skill.  Every
+day he was called upon to design new bridges and other important
+structures in all parts of the kingdom, but more especially in
+Scotland and on the Welsh border.  Many of the most picturesque
+bridges in Britain, which every tourist has admired, often without
+inquiring or thinking of the hand that planned them, were designed
+by his inventive brain.  The exquisite stone arch which links the
+two banks of the lesser Scotch Dee in its gorge at Tongueland is
+one of the most picturesque; for Telford was a bit of an artist at
+heart, and, unlike too many modern railway constructors, he always
+endeavoured to make his bridges and aqueducts beautify rather than
+spoil the scenery in whose midst they stood.  Especially was he
+called in to lay out the great system of roads by which the Scotch
+Highlands, then so lately reclaimed from a state of comparative
+barbarism, were laid open for the great development they have since
+undergone.  In the earlier part of the century, it is true, a few
+central highways had been run through the very heart of that great
+solid block of mountains; but these were purely military roads, to
+enable the king's soldiers more easily to march against the
+revolted clans, and they had hardly more connection with the life
+of the country than the bare military posts, like Fort William and
+Fort Augustus, which guarded their ends, had to do with the
+ordinary life of a commercial town.  Meanwhile, however, the
+Highlands had begun gradually to settle down; and Telford's roads
+were intended for the far higher and better purpose of opening out
+the interior of northern Scotland to the humanizing influences of
+trade and industry.
+
+Fully to describe the great work which the mature engineer
+constructed in the Highland region, would take up more space than
+could be allotted to such a subject anywhere save in a complete
+industrial history of roads and travelling in modern Britain.  It
+must suffice to say that when Telford took the matter in hand, the
+vast block of country north and west of the Great Glen of Caledonia
+(which divides the Highlands in two between Inverness and Ben
+Nevis)--a block comprising the counties of Caithness, Sutherland,
+Ross, Cromarty, and half Inverness--had literally nothing within it
+worthy of being called a road.  Wheeled carts or carriages were
+almost unknown, and all burdens were conveyed on pack-horses, or,
+worse still, on the broad backs of Highland lassies.  The people
+lived in small scattered villages, and communications from one to
+another were well-nigh impossible.  Telford set to work to give the
+country, not a road or two, but a main system of roads.  First, he
+bridged the broad river Tay at Dunkeld, so as to allow of a direct
+route straight into the very jaws of the Highlands.  Then, he also
+bridged over the Beauly at Inverness, so as to connect the opposite
+sides of the Great Glen with one another.  Next, he laid out a
+number of trunk lines, running through the country on both banks,
+to the very north of Caithness, and the very west of the Isle of
+Skye.  Whoever to this day travels on the main thoroughfares in the
+greater Scottish Islands--in Arran, Islay, Jura, Mull; or in the
+wild peninsula of Morvern, and the Land of Lorne; or through the
+rugged regions of Inverness-shire and Ross-shire, where the railway
+has not yet penetrated,--travels throughout on Telford's roads.
+The number of large bridges and other great engineering
+masterpieces on this network of roads is enormous; among the most
+famous and the most beautiful, are the exquisite single arch which
+spans the Spey just beside the lofty rearing rocks of Craig
+Ellachie, and the bridge across the Dee, beneath the purple
+heather-clad braes of Ballater.  Altogether, on Telford's Highland
+roads alone, there are no fewer than twelve hundred bridges.
+
+Nor were these the only important labours by which Telford
+ministered to the comfort and well-being of his Scotch fellow-
+countrymen.  Scotland's debt to the Eskdale stonemason is indeed
+deep and lasting.  While on land, he improved her communications by
+his great lines of roads, which did on a smaller scale for the
+Highland valleys what railways have since done for the whole of the
+civilized world; he also laboured to improve her means of transit
+at sea by constructing a series of harbours along that bare and
+inhospitable eastern coast, once almost a desert, but now teeming
+with great towns and prosperous industries.  It was Telford who
+formed the harbour of Wick, which has since grown from a miserable
+fishing village into a large town, the capital of the North Sea
+herring fisheries.  It was he who enlarged the petty port of
+Peterhead into the chief station of the flourishing whaling trade.
+It was he who secured prosperity for Fraserburgh, and Banff, and
+many other less important centres; while even Dundee and Aberdeen,
+the chief commercial cities of the east coast, owe to him a large
+part of their present extraordinary wealth and industry.  When one
+thinks how large a number of human beings have been benefited by
+Telford's Scotch harbour works alone, it is impossible not to envy
+a great engineer his almost unlimited power of permanent usefulness
+to unborn thousands of his fellow-creatures.
+
+As a canal-maker, Telford was hardly less successful than as a
+constructor of roads and harbours.  It is true, his greatest work
+in this direction was in one sense a failure.  He was employed by
+Government for many years as the engineer of the Caledonian Canal,
+which runs up the Great Glen of Caledonia, connecting the line of
+lakes whose basins occupy that deep hollow in the Highland ranges,
+and so avoiding the difficult and dangerous sea voyage round the
+stormy northern capes of Caithness.  Unfortunately, though the
+canal as an engineering work proved to be of the most successful
+character, it has never succeeded as a commercial undertaking.  It
+was built just at the exact moment when steamboats were on the
+point of revolutionizing ocean traffic; and so, though in itself a
+magnificent and lordly undertaking, it failed to satisfy the
+sanguine hopes of its projectors.  But though Telford felt most
+bitterly the unavoidable ill success of this great scheme, he might
+well have comforted himself by the good results of his canal-
+building elsewhere.  He went to Sweden to lay out the Gotha Canal,
+which still forms the main high-road of commerce between Stockholm
+and the sea; while in England itself some of his works in this
+direction--such as the improvements on the Birmingham Canal, with
+its immense tunnel--may fairly be considered as the direct
+precursors of the great railway efforts of the succeeding
+generation.
+
+The most remarkable of all Telford's designs, however, and the one
+which most immediately paved the way for the railway system, was
+his magnificent Holyhead Road.  This wonderful highway he carried
+through the very midst of the Welsh mountains, at a comparatively
+level height for its whole distance, in order to form a main road
+from London to Ireland.  On this road occurs Telford's masterpiece
+of engineering, the Menai suspension bridge, long regarded as one
+of the wonders of the world, and still one of the most beautiful
+suspension bridges in all Europe.  Hardly less admirable, however,
+in its own way is the other suspension bridge which he erected at
+Conway, to carry his road across the mouth of the estuary, beside
+the grey old castle, with which its charming design harmonizes so
+well.  Even now it is impossible to drive or walk along this famous
+and picturesque highway without being struck at every turn by the
+splendid engineering triumphs which it displays throughout its
+entire length.  The contrast, indeed, between the noble grandeur of
+Telford's bridges, and the works on the neighbouring railways, is
+by no means flattering in every respect to our too exclusively
+practical modern civilization.
+
+Telford was now growing an old man.  The Menai bridge was begun in
+1819 and finished in 1826, when he was sixty-eight years of age;
+and though he still continued to practise his profession, and to
+design many valuable bridges, drainage cuts, and other small jobs,
+that great undertaking was the last masterpiece of his long and
+useful life.  His later days were passed in deserved honour and
+comparative opulence; for though never an avaricious man, and
+always anxious to rate his services at their lowest worth, he had
+gathered together a considerable fortune by the way, almost without
+seeking it.  To the last, his happy cheerful disposition enabled
+him to go on labouring at the numerous schemes by which he hoped to
+benefit the world of workers; and so much cheerfulness was surely
+well earned by a man who could himself look back upon so good a
+record of work done for the welfare of humanity.  At last, on the
+2nd of September, 1834, his quiet and valuable life came gently to
+a close, in the seventy-eighth year of his age.  He was buried in
+Westminster Abbey, and few of the men who sleep within that great
+national temple more richly deserve the honour than the Westerkirk
+shepherd-boy.  For Thomas Telford's life was not merely one of
+worldly success; it was still more pre-eminently one of noble ends
+and public usefulness.  Many working men have raised themselves by
+their own exertions to a position of wealth and dignity far
+surpassing his; few indeed have conferred so many benefits upon
+untold thousands of their fellow-men.  It is impossible, even now,
+to travel in any part of England, Wales, or Scotland, without
+coming across innumerable memorials of Telford's great and useful
+life; impossible to read the full record of his labours without
+finding that numberless structures we have long admired for their
+beauty or utility, owe their origin to the honourable, upright,
+hardworking, thorough-going, journeyman mason of the quiet little
+Eskdale village.  Whether we go into the drained fens of
+Lincolnshire, or traverse the broad roads of the rugged Snowdon
+region; whether we turn to St. Katharine's Docks in London, or to
+the wide quays of Dundee and those of Aberdeen; whether we sail
+beneath the Menai suspension bridge at Bangor, or drive over the
+lofty arches that rise sheer from the precipitous river gorge at
+Cartland, we meet everywhere the lasting traces of that inventive
+and ingenious brain.  And yet, what lad could ever have started in
+the world under apparently more hopeless circumstances than widow
+Janet Telford's penniless orphan shepherd-boy Tam, in the bleakest
+and most remote of all the lonely border valleys of southern
+Scotland?
+
+
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+GEORGE STEPHENSON, ENGINE-MAN.
+
+
+
+
+
+Any time about the year 1786, a stranger in the streets of the
+grimy colliery village of Wylam, near Newcastle, might have passed
+by without notice a ragged, barefooted, chubby child of five years
+old, Geordie Stephenson by name, playing merrily in the gutter and
+looking to the outward eye in no way different from any of the
+other colliers' children who loitered about him.  Nevertheless,
+that ragged boy was yet destined in after-life to alter the whole
+face of England and the world by those wonderful railways, which he
+more than any other man was instrumental in first constructing; and
+the story of his life may rank perhaps as one of the most marvellous
+in the whole marvellous history of able and successful British
+working men.
+
+George Stephenson was born in June, 1781, the son of a fireman who
+tended the pumping engine of the neighbouring colliery, and one of
+a penniless family of six children.  So poor was his father,
+indeed, that the whole household lived in a single room, with bare
+floor and mud wall; and little Geordie grew up in his own unkempt
+fashion without any schooling whatever, not even knowing A from B
+when he was a big lad of seventeen.  At an age when he ought to
+have been learning his letters, he was bird's-nesting in the fields
+or running errands to the Wylam shops; and as soon as he was old
+enough to earn a few pence by light work, he was set to tend cows
+at the magnificent wages of twopence a day, in the village of
+Dewley Burn, close by, to which his father had then removed.  It
+might have seemed at first as though the future railway engineer
+was going to settle down quietly to the useful but uneventful life
+of an agricultural labourer; for from tending cows he proceeded in
+due time (with a splendid advance of twopence) to leading the
+horses at the plough, spudding thistles, and hoeing turnips on his
+employer's farm.  But the native bent of a powerful mind usually
+shows itself very early; and even during the days when Geordie was
+still stumbling across the freshly ploughed clods or driving the
+cows to pasture with a bunch of hazel twigs, his taste for
+mechanics already made itself felt in a very marked and practical
+fashion.  During all his leisure time, the future engineer and his
+chum Bill Thirlwall occupied themselves with making clay models of
+engines, and fitting up a winding machine with corks and twine like
+those which lifted the colliery baskets.  Though Geordie Stephenson
+didn't go to school at the village teacher's, he was teaching
+himself in his own way by close observation and keen comprehension
+of all the machines and engines he could come across.
+
+Naturally, to such a boy, the great ambition of his life was to be
+released from the hoeing and spudding, and set to work at his
+father's colliery.  Great was Geordie's joy, therefore, when at
+last he was taken on there in the capacity of a coal-picker, to
+clear the loads from stones and rubbish.  It wasn't a very
+dignified position, to be sure, but it was the first step that led
+the way to the construction of the Liverpool and Manchester
+Railway.  Geordie was now fairly free from the uncongenial drudgery
+of farm life, and able to follow his own inclinations in the
+direction of mechanical labour.  Besides, was he not earning the
+grand sum of sixpence a day as picker, increased to eightpence a
+little later on, when he rose to the more responsible and serious
+work of driving the gin-horse?  A proud day indeed it was for him
+when, at fourteen, he was finally permitted to aid his father in
+firing the colliery engine; though he was still such a very small
+boy that he used to run away and hide when the owner went his
+rounds of inspection, for fear he should be thought too little to
+earn his untold wealth of a shilling a day in such a grown-up
+occupation.  Humbler beginnings were never any man's who lived to
+become the honoured guest, not of kings and princes only, but of
+the truly greatest and noblest in the land.
+
+A coal-miner's life is often a very shifting one; for the coal in
+particular collieries gets worked out from time to time; and he has
+to remove, accordingly, to fresh quarters, wherever employment
+happens to be found.  This was very much the case with George
+Stephenson and his family; all of them being obliged to remove
+several times over during his childish days in search of new
+openings.  Shortly after Geordie had attained to the responsible
+position of assistant fireman, his father was compelled, by the
+closing of Dewley Burn mine, to get a fresh situation hard by at
+Newburn.  George accompanied him, and found employment as full
+fireman at a small working, whose little engine he undertook to
+manage in partnership with a mate, each of them tending the fire
+night and day by twelve-hour shifts.  Two years later, his wages
+were raised to twelve shillings a week, a sure mark of his diligent
+and honest work; so that George was not far wrong in remarking to a
+fellow-workman at the time that he now considered himself a made
+man for life.
+
+During all this time, George Stephenson never for a moment ceased
+to study and endeavour to understand the working of every part in
+the engine that he tended.  He was not satisfied, as too many
+workmen are, with merely learning the routine work of his own
+trade; with merely knowing that he must turn such and such a tap or
+valve in order to produce such and such a desired result: he wanted
+to see for himself how and why the engine did this or that, what
+was the use and object of piston and cylinder and crank and joint
+and condenser--in short, fully to understand the underlying
+principle of its construction.  He took it to pieces for cleaning
+whenever it was needful; he made working models of it after his old
+childish pattern; he even ventured to tinker it up when out of
+order on his own responsibility.  Thus he learnt at last something
+of the theory of the steam-engine, and learnt also by the way a
+great deal about the general principles of mechanical science.
+Still, even now, incredible as it seems, the future father of
+railways couldn't yet read; and he found this terrible drawback
+told fatally against his further progress.  Whenever he wanted to
+learn something that he didn't quite understand, he was always
+referred for information to a Book.  Oh, those books; those
+mysterious, unattainable, incomprehensible books; how they must
+have bothered and worried poor intelligent and aspiring but still
+painfully ignorant young George Stephenson!  Though he was already
+trying singularly valuable experiments in his own way, he hadn't
+yet even begun to learn his letters.
+
+Under these circumstances, George Stephenson, eager and anxious for
+further knowledge, took a really heroic resolution.  He wasn't
+ashamed to go to school.  Though now a full workman on his own
+account, about eighteen years old, he began to attend the night
+school at the neighbouring village of Walbottle, where he took
+lessons in reading three evenings every week.  It is a great thing
+when a man is not ashamed to learn.  Many men are; they consider
+themselves so immensely wise that they look upon it as an
+impertinence in anybody to try to tell them anything they don't
+know already.  Truly wise or truly great men--men with the
+capability in them for doing anything worthy in their generation--
+never feel this false and foolish shame.  They know that most other
+people know some things in some directions which they do not, and
+they are glad to be instructed in them whenever opportunity offers.
+This wisdom George Stephenson possessed in sufficient degree to
+make him feel more ashamed of his ignorance than of the steps
+necessary in order to conquer it.  Being a diligent and willing
+scholar, he soon learnt to read, and by the time he was nineteen he
+had learnt how to write also.  At arithmetic, a science closely
+allied to his native mechanical bent, he was particularly apt, and
+beat all the other scholars at the village night school.  This
+resolute effort at education was the real turning-point in George
+Stephenson's remarkable career, the first step on the ladder whose
+topmost rung led him so high that he himself must almost have felt
+giddy at the unwonted elevation.
+
+Shortly after, young Stephenson gained yet another promotion in
+being raised to the rank of brakesman, whose duty it was to slacken
+the engine when the full baskets of coal reached the top of the
+shaft.  This was a more serious and responsible post than any he
+had yet filled, and one for which only the best and steadiest
+workmen were ever selected.  His wages now amounted to a pound a
+week, a very large sum in those days for a skilled working-man.
+
+Meanwhile, George, like most other young men, had fallen in love.
+His sweetheart, Fanny Henderson, was servant at the small farmhouse
+where he had taken lodgings since leaving his father's home; and
+though but little is known about her (for she unhappily died before
+George had begun to rise to fame and fortune), what little we do
+know seems to show that she was in every respect a fitting wife for
+the active young brakesman, and a fitting mother for his equally
+celebrated son, Robert Stephenson.  Fired by the honourable desire
+to marry Fanny, with a proper regard for prudence, George set
+himself to work to learn cobbling in his spare moments; and so
+successfully did he cobble the worn shoes of his fellow-colliers
+after working hours, that before long he contrived to save a whole
+guinea out of his humble earnings.  That guinea was the first step
+towards an enormous fortune; a fortune, too, all accumulated by
+steady toil and constant useful labour for the ultimate benefit of
+his fellow-men.  To make a fortune is the smallest and least noble
+of all possible personal ambitions; but to save the first guinea
+which leads us on at last to independence and modest comfort is
+indeed an important turning-point in every prudent man's career.
+Geordie Stephenson was so justly proud of his achievement in this
+respect that he told a friend in confidence he might now consider
+himself a rich man.
+
+By the time George was twenty-one, he had saved up enough by
+constant care to feel that he might safely embark on the sea of
+housekeeping.  He was able to take a small cottage lodging for
+himself and Fanny, at Willington Quay, near his work at the moment,
+and to furnish it with the simple comfort which was all that their
+existing needs demanded.  He married Fanny on the 28th of November,
+1802; and the young couple proceeded at once to their new home.
+Here George laboured harder than ever, as became the head of a
+family.  He was no more ashamed of odd jobs than he had been of
+learning the alphabet.  He worked overtime at emptying ballast from
+ships; he continued to cobble, to cut lasts, and even to try his
+hand at regular shoemaking; furthermore, he actually acquired the
+art of mending clocks, a matter which lay strictly in his own line,
+and he thus earned a tidy penny at odd hours by doctoring all the
+rusty or wheezy old timepieces of all his neighbours.  Nor did he
+neglect his mechanical education meanwhile for he was always at
+work upon various devices for inventing a perpetual motion machine.
+Now, perpetual motion is the most foolish will-o'-the-wisp that
+ever engaged a sane man's attention: the thing has been proved to
+be impossible from every conceivable point of view, and the attempt
+to achieve it, if pursued to the last point, can only end in
+disappointment if not in ruin.  Still, for all that, the work
+George Stephenson spent upon this unpractical object did really
+help to give him an insight into mechanical science which proved
+very useful to him at a later date.  He didn't discover perpetual
+motion, but he did invent at last the real means for making the
+locomotive engine a practical power in the matter of travelling.
+
+A year later, George's only son Robert was born; and from that
+moment the history of those two able and useful lives is almost
+inseparable.  During the whole of George Stephenson's long upward
+struggle, and during the hard battle he had afterwards to fight on
+behalf of his grand design of railways, he met with truer sympathy,
+appreciation, and comfort from his brave and gifted son than from
+any other person whatsoever.  Unhappily, his pleasure and delight
+in the up-bringing of his boy was soon to be clouded for a while by
+the one great bereavement of an otherwise singularly placid and
+happy existence.  Some two years after her marriage, Fanny
+Stephenson died, as yet a mere girl, leaving her lonely husband to
+take care of their baby boy alone and unaided.  Grief for this
+irretrievable loss drove the young widower away for a while from
+his accustomed field of work among the Tyneside coal-pits; he
+accepted an invitation to go to Montrose in Scotland, to overlook
+the working of a large engine in some important spinning-works.  He
+remained in this situation for one year only; but during that time
+he managed to give clear evidence of his native mechanical insight
+by curing a defect in the pumps which supplied water to his engine,
+and which had hitherto defied the best endeavours of the local
+engineers.  The young father was not unmindful, either, of his duty
+to his boy, whom he had left behind with his grandfather on
+Tyneside; for he saved so large a sum as 28 pounds during his
+engagement, which he carried back with him in his pocket on his
+return to England.
+
+A sad disappointment awaited him when at last he arrived at home.
+Old Robert Stephenson, the father, had met with an accident during
+George's absence which made him quite blind, and incapacitated him
+for further work.  Helpless and poor, he had no resource to save
+him from the workhouse except George; but George acted towards him
+exactly as all men who have in them a possibility of any good thing
+always do act under similar circumstances.  He spent 15 pounds of
+his hard-earned savings to pay the debts the poor blind old engine-
+man had necessarily contracted during his absence, and he took a
+comfortable cottage for his father and mother at Killingworth,
+where he had worked before his removal to Scotland, and where he
+now once more obtained employment, still as a brakesman.  In that
+cottage this good and brave son supported his aged parents till
+their death, in all the simple luxury that his small means would
+then permit him.
+
+That, however, was not the end of George's misfortunes.  Shortly
+after, he was drawn by lot as a militiaman; and according to the
+law of that time (for this was in 1807, during the very height of
+the wars against Napoleon) he must either serve in person or else
+pay heavily to secure a substitute.  George chose regretfully the
+latter course--the only one open to him if he wished still to
+support his parents and his infant son.  But in order to do so, he
+had to pay away the whole remainder of his carefully hoarded
+savings, and even to borrow 6 pounds to make up the payment for the
+substitute.  It must have seemed very hard to him to do this, and
+many men would have sunk under the blow, become hopeless, or taken
+to careless rowdy drinking habits.  George Stephenson felt it
+bitterly, and gave way for a while to a natural despondency; he
+would hardly have been human if he had not; but still, he lived
+over it, and in the end worked on again with fuller resolution and
+vigour than ever.
+
+For several years Geordie, as his fellow-colliers affectionately
+called him, continued to live on at one or other of the Killingworth
+collieries.  In a short time, he entered into a small contract with
+his employers for "brakeing" the engines; and in the course of this
+contract, he invented certain improvements in the matter of saving
+wear and tear of ropes, which were both profitable to himself and
+also in some small degree pointed the way toward his future plans
+for the construction of railways.  It is true, the two subjects have
+not, apparently, much in common; but they are connected in this way,
+that both proceed upon the principle of reducing the friction to the
+smallest possible quantity.  It was this principle that Stephenson
+was gradually learning to appreciate more and more at its proper
+value; and it was this which finally led him to the very summit of a
+great and pre-eminently useful profession.  The great advantage,
+indeed, of a level railway over an up-and-down ordinary road is
+simply that in the railway the resistance and friction are almost
+entirely got rid of.
+
+It was in 1810, when Stephenson was twenty-nine, that his first
+experiment in serious engineering was made.  A coal-pit had been
+sunk at Killingworth, and a rude steam-engine of that time had been
+set to pump the water out of its shaft; but, somehow, the engine
+made no headway against the rising springs at the bottom of the
+mine.  For nearly a year the engine worked away in vain, till at
+last, one Saturday afternoon, Geordie Stephenson went over to
+examine her.  "Well, George," said a pitman, standing by, "what do
+you think of her?"  "Man," said George, boldly, "I could alter her
+and make her draw.  In a week I could let you all go the bottom."
+The pitman reported this confident speech of the young brakesman
+to the manager; and the manager, at his wits' end for a remedy,
+determined to let this fellow Stephenson try his hand at her.
+After all, if he did no good, he would be much like all the others;
+and anyhow he seemed to have confidence in himself, which, if well
+grounded, is always a good thing.
+
+George's confidence WAS well grounded.  It was not the confidence
+of ignorance, but that of knowledge.  He UNDERSTOOD the engine now,
+and he saw at once the root of the evil.  He picked the engine to
+pieces, altered it to suit the requirements of the case, and set it
+to work to pump without delay.  Sure enough, he kept his word; and
+within the week, the mine was dry, and the men were sent to the
+bottom.  This was a grand job for George's future.  The manager, a
+Mr. Dodds, not only gave him ten pounds at once as a present, in
+acknowledgment of his practical skill, but also appointed him
+engine-man of the new pit, another rise in the social scale as well
+as in the matter of wages.  Dodds kept him in mind for the future,
+too; and a couple of years later, on a vacancy occurring, he
+promoted the promising hand to be engine-wright of all the
+collieries under his management, at a salary of 100 pounds a year.
+When a man's income comes to be reckoned by the year, rather than
+by the week or month, it is a sign that he is growing into a person
+of importance.  George had now a horse to ride upon, on his visits
+of inspection to the various engines; and his work was rather one
+of mechanical engineering than of mere ordinary labouring
+handicraft.
+
+The next few years of George Stephenson's life were mainly taken up
+in providing for the education of his boy Robert.  He had been a
+good son, and he was now a good father.  Feeling acutely how much
+he himself had suffered, and how many years he had been put back,
+by his own want of a good sound rudimentary education, he
+determined that Robert should not suffer from a similar cause.
+Indeed, George Stephenson's splendid abilities were kept in the
+background far too long, owing to his early want of regular
+instruction.  So the good father worked hard to send his boy to
+school; not to the village teacher's only, but to a school for
+gentlemen's sons at Newcastle.  By mending clocks and watches in
+spare moments, and by rigid economy in all unnecessary expenses
+(especially beer), Stephenson had again gathered together a little
+hoard, which mounted up this time to a hundred guineas.  A hundred
+guineas is a fortune and a capital to a working man.  He was
+therefore rich enough, not only to send little Robert to school,
+but even to buy him a donkey, on which the boy made the journey
+every day from Killingworth to Newcastle.  This was in 1815, when
+George was thirty-four, and Robert twelve.  Perhaps no man who ever
+climbed so high as George Stephenson, had ever reached so little of
+the way at so comparatively late an age.  For in spite of his
+undoubted success, viewed from the point of view of his origin and
+early prospects, he was as yet after all nothing more than the
+common engine-wright of the Killingworth collieries--a long way off
+as yet from the distinguished father of the railway system.
+
+George Stephenson's connection with the locomotive, however, was
+even now beginning.  Already, in 1816, he and his boy had tried a
+somewhat higher flight of mechanical and scientific skill than
+usual, in the construction of a sun-dial, which involves a
+considerable amount of careful mathematical work; and now George
+found that the subject of locomotive engines was being forced by
+circumstances upon his attention.  From the moment he was appointed
+engine-wright of the Killingworth collieries, he began to think
+about all possible means of hauling coal at cheaper rates from the
+pit's mouth to the shipping place on the river.  For that humble
+object alone--an object that lay wholly within the line of his own
+special business--did the great railway projector set out upon his
+investigations into the possibilities of the locomotive.  Indeed,
+in its earliest origin, the locomotive was almost entirely
+connected with coals and mining; its application to passenger
+traffic on the large scale was quite a later and secondary
+consideration.  It was only by accident, so to speak, that the true
+capabilities of railways were finally discovered in the actual
+course of their practical employment.
+
+George Stephenson was not the first person to construct either a
+locomotive or a tramway.  Both were already in use, in more or less
+rude forms, at several collieries.  But he WAS the first person to
+bring the two to such a pitch of perfection, that what had been at
+first a mere clumsy mining contrivance, became developed into a
+smooth and easy iron highway for the rapid and convenient
+conveyance of goods and passengers over immense distances.  Of
+course, this great invention, like all other great inventions, was
+not the work of one day or one man.  Many previous heads had helped
+to prepare the way for George Stephenson; and George Stephenson
+himself had been working at the subject for many years before he
+even reached the first stage of realized endeavour.  As early as
+1814 he constructed his first locomotive at Killingworth colliery;
+it was not until 1822 that he laid the first rail of his first
+large line, the Stockton and Darlington Railway.
+
+Stephenson's earliest important improvement in the locomotive
+consisted in his invention of what is called the steam-blast, by
+which the steam is made to increase the draught of the fire, and
+so largely add to the effectiveness of the engine.  It was this
+invention that enabled him at last to make the railway into the
+great carrier of the world, and to begin the greatest social and
+commercial upheaval that has ever occurred in the whole history of
+the human race.
+
+Meanwhile, however, George was not entirely occupied with the
+consideration of his growing engine.  He had the clocks and watches
+to mend; he had Robert's schooling to look after; and he had
+another practical matter even nearer home than the locomotive on
+which to exercise his inventive genius.  One day, in 1814, the main
+gallery of the colliery caught fire.  Stephenson at once descended
+into the burning pit, with a chosen band of volunteers, who
+displayed the usual heroic courage of colliers in going to the
+rescue of their comrades; and, at the risk of their lives, these
+brave men bricked up the burning portion, and so, by excluding the
+air, put out the dangerous fire.  Still, even so, several of the
+workmen had been suffocated, and one of the pitmen asked Geordie in
+dismay whether nothing could be done to prevent such terrible
+disasters in future.  "The price of coal-mining now," he said, "is
+pitmen's lives."  Stephenson promised to think the matter over; and
+he did think it over with good effect.  The result of his thought
+was the apparatus still affectionately known to the pitmen as "the
+Geordie lamp."  It is a lamp so constructed that the flame cannot
+pass out into the air outside, and so cause explosions in the
+dangerous fire-damp which is always liable to occur abundantly in
+the galleries of coal mines.  By this invention alone George
+Stephenson's name and memory might have been kept green for ever;
+for his lamp has been the means of saving thousands of lives from a
+sudden, a terrible, and a pitiful death.  Most accidents that now
+occur in mines are due to the neglect of ordinary precautions, and
+to the perverse habit of carrying a naked lighted candle in the
+hand (contrary to regulations) instead of a carefully guarded
+safety lamp.  Yet so culpably reckless of their own and other men's
+lives are a large number of people everywhere, that in spite of the
+most stringent and salutary rules, explosions from this cause (and,
+therefore, easily avoidable) take place constantly to the present
+day, though far less frequently than before the invention of the
+Geordie lamp.
+
+Curiously enough, at the very time when George Stephenson was busy
+inventing his lamp at Killingworth, Sir Humphrey Davy was working
+at just the same matter in London; and the two lamps, though a
+little different in minor points of construction, are practically
+the same in general principle.  Now, Sir Humphrey was then the
+great fashionable natural philosopher of the day, the favourite of
+London society, and the popular lecturer of the Royal Institution.
+His friends thought it a monstrous idea that his splendid life-
+saving apparatus should have been independently devised by "an
+engine-wright of Killingworth of the name of Stephenson--a person
+not even possessing a knowledge of the elements of chemistry."
+This sounds very odd reading at the present day, when the engine-
+wright of the name of Stephenson has altered the whole face of the
+world, while Davy is chiefly remembered as a meritorious and able
+chemist; but at the time, Stephenson's claim to the invention met
+with little courtesy from the great public of London, where a
+meeting was held on purpose to denounce his right to the credit of
+the invention.  What the coal-owners and colliers of the North
+Country thought about the matter was sufficiently shown by their
+subscription of 1000 pounds, as a Stephenson testimonial fund.
+With part of the money, a silver tankard was presented to the
+deserving engine-wright, while the remainder of the sum was handed
+over to him in ready cash.  A very acceptable present it was, and
+one which George Stephenson remembered with pride down to his dying
+day.  The Geordie lamp continues in use to the present moment in
+the Tyneside collieries with excellent effect.
+
+For some years more, Mr. Stephenson (he is now fairly entitled to
+that respectable prefix) went on still further experimenting on the
+question of locomotives and railways.  He was now beginning to
+learn that much unnecessary wear and tear arose on the short lines
+of rail down from the pit's mouths to the loading-places on the
+river by the inequalities and roughnesses of the joints; and he
+invented a method of overlapping the rails which quite got over
+this source of loss--loss of speed, loss of power, and loss of
+material at once.  It was in 1819 that he laid down his first
+considerable piece of road, the Hetton railway.  The owners of a
+colliery at the village of Hetton, in Durham, determined to replace
+their waggon road by a locomotive line; and they invited the now
+locally famous Killingworth engine-wright to act as their engineer.
+Stephenson gladly undertook the post; and he laid down a railway of
+eight miles in length, on the larger part of which the trucks were
+to be drawn by "the iron horse," as people now began to style the
+altered and improved locomotive.  The Hetton railway was opened in
+1822, and the assembled crowd were delighted at beholding a single
+engine draw seventeen loaded trucks after it, at the extraordinary
+rate of four miles an hour--nearly as fast as a man could walk.
+Whence it may be gathered that Stephenson's ideas upon the question
+of speed were still on a very humble scale indeed.
+
+Before the Hetton railway was opened, however, George Stephenson
+had shown one more proof of his excellence as a father by sending
+his boy Robert, now nineteen, to Edinburgh University.  It was a
+serious expense for a man who was even now, after all, hardly more
+than a working man of the superior grade; but George Stephenson was
+well repaid for the sacrifice he thus made on behalf of his only
+son.  He lived to see him the greatest practical engineer of his
+own time, and to feel that his success was in large measure due to
+the wider and more accurate scientific training the lad had
+received from his Edinburgh teachers.
+
+In 1819 George married again, his second wife being the daughter of
+a farmer at Black Callerton.
+
+The work which finally secured the position of George Stephenson
+and of his dearly loved locomotive was the Stockton and Darlington
+railway.  Like all the other early railways, it was originally
+projected simply as a mineral line.  Darlington lies in the centre
+of a rich inland mining district; but the impossibility of getting
+the coal carried to the sea by cart or donkey, long prevented the
+opening up of its immense natural wealth.  At last, as early as
+1817, Edward Pease and a few other enterprising Darlington Quakers
+determined to build a line of railway from the mining region to
+Stockton, on the river Tees, where the coal could be loaded into
+sea-going ships.  It was a very long line, compared to any railway
+that had yet been constructed; but it was still only to be worked
+by horse-power--to be, in fact, what we now call a tramway, rather
+than a railway in the modern sense.  However, while the plan was
+still undecided, George Stephenson, who had heard about the
+proposed scheme, went over to Darlington one day, and boldly asked
+to see Mr. Pease.  The good Quaker received him kindly, and
+listened to his arguments in favour of the locomotive.  "Come over
+to Killingworth some day and see my engine at work," said
+Stephenson, confidently; "and if you do you will never think of
+horses again."  Mr. Pease, with Quaker caution, came and looked.
+George put the engine through its paces, and showed off its
+marvellous capabilities to such good effect that Edward Pease was
+immediately converted.  Henceforth, he became a decided advocate of
+locomotives, and greatly aided by his wealth and influence in
+securing their final triumph.
+
+Not only that, but Mr. Pease also aided Stephenson in carrying out
+a design which George had long had upon his mind--the establishment
+of a regular locomotive factory, where the work of engine-making
+for this particular purpose might be carried on with all the
+necessary finish and accuracy.  George himself put into the concern
+his precious 1000 pounds, not one penny of which he had yet
+touched; while Pease and a friend advanced as much between them.  A
+factory was forthwith started at Newcastle on a small scale, and
+the hardworking engine-wright found himself now fully advanced to
+the commercial dignity of Stephenson and Co.  With the gradual
+growth of railways, that humble Newcastle factory grew gradually
+into one of the largest and wealthiest manufacturing establishments
+in all England.
+
+Meanwhile, Stephenson was eagerly pushing on the survey of the
+Stockton and Darlington railway, all the more gladly now that he
+knew it was to be worked by means of his own adopted child, the
+beloved locomotive.  He worked at his line early and late; he took
+the sights with the spirit-level with his own eye; he was
+determined to make it a model railway.  It was a long and heavy
+work, for railway surveying was then a new art, and the appliances
+were all fresh and experimental; but in the end, Stephenson brought
+it to a happy conclusion, and struck at once the death-blow of the
+old road-travelling system.  The line was opened successfully in
+1825, and the engine started off on the inaugural ceremony with a
+magnificent train of thirty-eight vehicles.  "Such was its
+velocity," says a newspaper of the day, "that in some parts the
+speed was frequently twelve miles an hour."
+
+The success of the Stockton and Darlington railway was so immense
+and unexpected, the number of passengers who went by it was so
+great, and the quantity of coal carried for shipment so far beyond
+anything the projectors themselves could have anticipated, that a
+desire soon began to be felt for similar works in other places.
+There are no two towns in England which absolutely need a railway
+communication from one to the other so much as Liverpool and
+Manchester.  The first is the great port of entry for cotton, the
+second is the great centre of its manufacture.  The Bridgewater
+canal had helped for a time to make up for the want of water
+communication between those two closely connected towns; but as
+trade developed, the canal became too small for the demands upon
+it, and the need for an additional means of intercourse was deeply
+felt.  A committee was formed to build a railway in this busy
+district, and after a short time George Stephenson was engaged to
+superintend its construction.
+
+A long and severe fight was fought over the Liverpool and Manchester
+railway, and it was at first doubtful whether the scheme would ever
+be carried out.  Many great landowners were strongly opposed to it,
+and tried their best to keep the bill for authorizing it from
+passing through Parliament.  Stephenson himself was compelled to
+appear in London as a witness before a parliamentary committee, and
+was closely cross-examined as to the possibilities of his plan.  In
+those days, even after the success of the Stockton and Darlington
+line, his views about the future of railways were still regarded by
+most sober persons as ridiculously wild and enthusiastic; while the
+notion that trains might be made to travel twice as fast as
+stage-coaches, was scouted as the most palpable and ridiculous
+delusion.  One of the members of the committee pressed Stephenson
+very hard with questions.  "Suppose," he said, "a cow were to get
+upon the line, and the engine were to come into collision with it;
+wouldn't that be very awkward, now?"  George looked up at him with
+a merry twinkle of the eye, and answered in his broad North Country
+dialect, "Oo, ay, very awkward for the COO."
+
+In spite of all Stephenson's earnestness and mother wit, however,
+Parliament refused to pass the bill (in 1825), and for the moment
+the engineer's vexation was bitter to behold.  He and his friends
+plucked up heart, however; they were fighting the winning battle
+against prejudice and obstruction, and they were sure to conquer in
+the long run.  The line was resurveyed by other engineers; the
+lands of the hostile owners were avoided; the causes of offence
+were dexterously smoothed down; and after another hard fight, in
+1826, the bill authorizing the construction of the Liverpool and
+Manchester railway was finally passed.  The board at once appointed
+Stephenson engineer for constructing the line, at a salary of 1000
+pounds a year.  George might now fairly consider himself entitled
+to the honours of an Esquire.
+
+The line was a difficult one to construct; but George Stephenson
+set about it with the skill and knowledge acquired during many
+years of slow experience; and he performed it with distinguished
+success.  He was now forty-four; and he had had more to do with the
+laying down of rails than any other man then living.  The great
+difficulty of the Liverpool and Manchester line lay in the fact
+that it had to traverse a vast shaking bog or morass, Chat Moss,
+which the best engineers had emphatically declared it would be
+impossible to cross.  George Stephenson, however, had a plan for
+making the impossible possible.  He simply floated his line on a
+broad bottom, like a ship, on the top of the quaking quagmire; and
+proceeded to lay down his rails on this seemingly fragile support
+without further scruple.  It answered admirably, and still answers
+to the present day.  The other works on the railway, especially the
+cuttings, were such as might well have appalled the boldest heart
+in those experimental ages of railway enterprise.  It is easy
+enough for us now to undertake tunnelling great hills or filling up
+wide valleys with long ranges of viaduct, because the thing has
+been done so often, and the prospect of earning a fair return on
+the money sunk can be calculated with so high a degree of
+reasonable probability.  But it required no little faith for George
+Stephenson and his backers to drive a level road, for the first
+time, through solid rocks and over trembling morasses, the whole
+way from Liverpool to Manchester.  He persevered, however, and in
+1830, after four years' toilsome and ceaseless labour, during which
+he had worked far-harder than the sturdiest navvy on the line, his
+railway was finally opened for regular traffic.
+
+Before the completion of the railway, George Stephenson had taken
+part in a great contest for the best locomotive at Liverpool, a
+prize of 500 pounds having been offered by the company to the
+successful competitor.  Stephenson sent in his improved model, the
+Rocket, constructed after plans of his own and his son Robert's,
+and it gained the prize against all its rivals, travelling at what
+was then considered the incredible rate of 35 miles an hour.  It
+was thus satisfactorily settled that the locomotive was the best
+power for drawing carriages on railways, and George Stephenson's
+long battle was thus at last practically won.
+
+The opening of the Liverpool and Manchester railway was an era in
+the history of the world.  From the moment that great undertaking
+was complete, there could no longer be any doubt about the utility
+and desirability of railways, and all opposition died away almost
+at once.  New lines began immediately to be laid out, and in an
+incredibly short time the face of England was scarred by the main
+trunks in that network of iron roads with which its whole surface
+is now so closely covered.  The enormous development of the railway
+system benefited the Stephenson family in more than one way.
+Robert Stephenson became the engineer of the vast series of lines
+now known as the London and North Western; and the increased demand
+for locomotives caused George Stephenson's small factory at
+Newcastle to blossom out suddenly into an immense and flourishing
+manufacturing concern.
+
+The rest of George Stephenson's life is one long story of unbroken
+success.  In 1831, the year after the opening of the Liverpool and
+Manchester line, George, being now fifty, began to think of
+settling down in a more permanent home.  His son Robert, who was
+surveying the Leicester and Swannington railway, observed on an
+estate called Snibston, near Ashby-de-la-Zouch, what to his
+experienced geological eye looked like the probable indications of
+coal beneath the surface.  He wrote to his father about it, and as
+the estate was at the time for sale, George, now a comparatively
+wealthy man, bought it up on his son's recommendation.  He also
+pitched his home close by at Alton Grange, and began to sink shafts
+in search of coal.  He found it in due time; and thus, in addition
+to his Newcastle works, he became a flourishing colliery
+proprietor.  It is pleasing to note that Stephenson, unlike too
+many other self-made men, always treated his workmen with the
+greatest kindness and consideration, erecting admirable cottages
+for their accommodation, and providing them with church, chapel,
+and schools for their religious and social education.
+
+While living at Alton Grange, Stephenson was engaged in laying out
+several new lines in the middle and north of England, especially
+the Grand Junction and the Midland, both of which he constructed
+with great boldness and practical skill.  As he grew older and more
+famous, he began to mix in the truly best society of England; his
+acquaintance being sought by all the most eminent men in
+literature, science, and political life.  Though but an uneducated
+working man by origin, George Stephenson had so improved his mind
+by constant thought and expansive self-education, that he was able
+to meet these able and distinguished friends of his later days on
+terms of perfect intellectual and social equality.  To the last,
+however, he never forgot his older and poorer friends, nor was he
+ever ashamed of their acquaintance.  A pleasant trait is narrated
+by his genial biographer, Dr. Smiles, who notices that on one
+occasion he stopped to speak to one of his wealthy acquaintances in
+a fine carriage, and then turned to shake hands with the coachman
+on the box, whom he had known and respected in his earlier days.
+He enjoyed, too, the rare pleasure of feeling his greatness
+recognized in his own time: and once, when he went over to Brussels
+on a visit to the king of the Belgians, he was pleased and
+surprised, as the royal party entered the ball-room at the Town
+Hall, to hear a general murmur among the guests of "Which is
+Stephenson?"
+
+George Stephenson continued to live for sixteen years, first at
+Alton Grange, and afterwards at Tapton House, near Chesterfield, in
+comfort and opulence; growing big pines and melons, keeping birds
+and dogs, and indulging himself towards the end in the well-earned
+repose to which his useful and laborious life fully entitled him.
+At last, on the 12th of August, 1848, he died suddenly of
+intermittent fever, in his sixty-seventh year, and was peacefully
+buried in Chesterfield church.  Probably no one man who ever lived
+did so much to change and renovate the whole aspect of human life
+as George Stephenson; and, unlike many other authors of great
+revolutions, he lived long enough to see the full result of his
+splendid labours in the girdling of England by his iron roads.  A
+grand and simple man, he worked honestly and steadfastly throughout
+his days, and he found his reward in the unprecedented benefits
+which his locomotive was even then conferring upon his fellow-men.
+It is indeed wonderful to think how very different is the England
+in which we live to-day, from that in which we might possibly have
+been living were it not for the barefooted little collier boy who
+made clay models of engines at Wylam, and who grew at last into the
+great and famous engineer of the marvellous Liverpool and Manchester
+railway.  The main characteristic of George Stephenson was
+perseverance; and it was that perseverance that enabled him at last
+to carry out his magnificent schemes in the face of so much bitter
+and violent opposition.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+JOHN GIBSON, SCULPTOR.
+
+
+
+
+
+In most cases, the working man who raises himself to wealth and
+position, does so by means of trade, which is usually the natural
+outgrowth of his own special handicraft or calling.  If he attains,
+not only to riches, but to distinction as well, it is in general by
+mechanical talent, the direction of the mind being naturally biased
+by the course of one's own ordinary occupations.  England has been
+exceptionally rich in great engineers and inventive geniuses of
+such humble origin--working men who have introduced great
+improvements in manufactures or communications; and our modern
+English civilization has been immensely influenced by the lives of
+these able and successful mechanical toilers.  From Brindley, the
+constructor of the earliest great canal, to Joseph Gillott, the
+inventor of the very steel pen with which this book is written;
+from Arkwright the barber who fashioned the first spinning-machine,
+to Crompton the weaver, whose mule gave rise to the mighty
+Manchester cotton trade; from Newcomen, who made the first rough
+attempt at a steam-engine, to Stephenson, who sent the iron horse
+from end to end of the land,--the chief mechanical improvements in
+the country have almost all been due to the energy, intelligence,
+and skill of our labouring population.  The English mind is
+intensely practical, and the English working man, for the last two
+centuries at least, has been mainly distinguished for his great
+mechanical aptitude, bursting out, here and there, in exceptional
+persons, under the form of exceedingly high inventive genius.
+
+At our very doors, however, there is a small nation of largely
+different blood and of wholly different speech from our own; a
+nation forming a part of our own kingdom, even more closely than
+the Scotch or the Irish, and yet in some respects further from us
+in mind and habit of life than either; a nation marked rather by
+the poetical and artistic, than by the mechanical and practical
+temperament--the ancient and noble Welsh people.  It would hardly
+be reasonable to expect from the Welsh exactly the same kind of
+success in life which we often find in English workmen; the aims
+and ideals of the two races are so distinct, and it must be frankly
+confessed the advantage is not always on the side of the Englishman.
+The Welsh peasants, living among their own romantic hills and
+valleys, speaking their own soft and exquisite language, treasuring
+their own plaintive and melodious poetry, have grown up with an
+intense love for beauty and the beautiful closely intwined into the
+very warp and woof of their inmost natures.  They have almost always
+a natural refinement of manner and delicacy of speech which is
+unfortunately too often wanting amongst our rougher English
+labouring classes, especially in large towns.  They are intensely
+musical, producing a very large proportion of the best English
+singers and composers.  They are fond of literature, for which they
+have generally some natural capacity, and in which they exercise
+themselves to an extent unknown, probably, among people of their
+class in any other country.  At the local meetings of bards (as they
+call themselves) in Wales, it is not at all uncommon to hear that
+the first prize for Welsh poetry has been carried off by a shepherd,
+and the first prize for Welsh prose composition by a domestic
+servant.  In short, the susceptibilities of the race run rather
+toward art and imagination, than toward mere moneymaking and
+practical ingenuity.
+
+John Gibson, sculptor, of Rome, as he loved to call himself, was
+a remarkable embodiment, in many ways, of this self-respecting,
+artistic, ideal Welsh peasant temperament.  In a little village
+near Conway, in North Wales, there lived at the end of the last
+century a petty labouring market gardener of the name of Gibson,
+who knew and spoke no other tongue than his native Welsh.  In 1790,
+his wife gave birth to a son whom they christened John, and who
+grew up, a workman's child, under the shadow of the great castle,
+and among the exquisite scenery of the placid land-locked Conway
+river.  John Gibson's parents, like the mass of labouring Welsh
+people, were honest, God-fearing folk, with a great earnestness of
+principle, a profound love of truth, and a hatred of all mean or
+dirty actions.  They brought up the boy in these respects in the
+way he should go; and when he was old he indeed did not depart from
+them.  Throughout his life, John Gibson was remarkable for his
+calm, earnest, straightforward simplicity, a simplicity which
+seemed almost childish to those who could not understand so grand
+and uncommon and noble a nature as his.
+
+From his babyhood, almost, the love of art was innate in the boy;
+and when he was only seven years old, he began to draw upon a slate
+a scene that particularly pleased him--a line of geese sailing upon
+the smooth glassy surface of a neighbouring pond.  He drew them as
+an ordinary child almost always does draw--one goose after another,
+in profile, as though they were in procession, without any attempt
+at grouping or perspective in any way.  His mother praised the
+first attempt, saying to him in Welsh, "Indeed, Jack, this is very
+like the geese;" and Jack, encouraged by her praise, decided
+immediately to try again.  But not being an ordinary child, he
+determined this time to do better; he drew the geese one behind the
+other as one generally sees them in actual nature.  His mother then
+asked him to draw a horse; and "after gazing long and often upon
+one," he says, "I at last ventured to commit him to the slate."
+When he had done so, the good mother was even more delighted.  So,
+to try his childish art, she asked him to put a rider on the
+horse's back.  Jack went out once more, "carefully watched men on
+horseback," and then returning, made his sketch accordingly.  In
+this childish reminiscence one can see already the first workings
+of that spirit which made Gibson afterwards into the greatest
+sculptor of all Europe.  He didn't try even then to draw horse or
+man by mere guesswork; he went out and studied the subject at first
+hand.  There are in that single trait two great elements of success
+in no matter what line of life--supreme carefulness, and perfect
+honesty of workmanship.
+
+When Jack was nine years old, his father determined to emigrate to
+America, and for that purpose went to Liverpool to embark for the
+United States.  But when he had got as far as the docks, Mrs.
+Gibson, good soul, frightened at the bigness of the ships (a queer
+cause of alarm), refused plumply ever to put her foot on one of
+them.  So her husband, a dutiful man with a full sense of his
+wife's government upon him, consented unwillingly to stop in
+Liverpool, where he settled down to work again as a gardener.
+Hitherto, Jack and his brothers had spoken nothing but Welsh; but
+at Liverpool he was put to school, and soon learned to express
+himself correctly and easily in English.  Liverpool was a very
+different place for young Jack Gibson from Conway: there were no
+hills and valleys there, to be sure, but there were shops--such
+shops! all full of the most beautiful and highly coloured prints
+and caricatures, after the fashion of the days when George IV. was
+still Prince Regent.  All his spare time he now gave up to
+diligently copying the drawings which he saw spread out in tempting
+array before him in the shop-windows.  Flattening his little nose
+against the glass panes, he used to look long and patiently at a
+single figure, till he had got every detail of its execution fixed
+firmly on his mind's eye; and then he would go home hastily and
+sketch it out at once while the picture was still quite fresh in
+his vivid memory.  Afterwards he would return to the shop-window,
+and correct his copy by the original till it was completely
+finished.  No doubt the boy did all this purely for his own
+amusement; but at the same time he was quite unconsciously teaching
+himself to draw under a very careful and accurate master--himself.
+Already, however, he found his paintings had patrons, for he sold
+them when finished to the other boys; and once he got as much as
+sixpence for a coloured picture of Napoleon crossing the Alps--"the
+largest sum," he says brightly in his memoirs long after, "I had
+yet received for a work of art."
+
+Opportunities always arise for those who know how to use them.
+Little Jack Gibson used to buy his paper and colours at a
+stationer's in Liverpool, who one day said to him kindly, "My lad,
+you're a constant customer here: I suppose you're a painter."
+"Yes, sir," Jack answered, with childish self-complacency, "I do
+paint."  The stationer, who had himself studied at the Royal
+Academy, asked him to bring his pictures on view; and when Jack did
+so, his new friend, Mr. Tourmeau, was so much pleased with them
+that he lent the boy drawings to copy, and showed him how to draw
+for himself from plaster casts.  These first amateur lessons must
+have given the direction to all Gibson's later life: for when the
+time came for him to choose a trade, he was not set to till the
+ground like his father, but was employed at once on comparatively
+artistic and intelligent handicraft.
+
+Jack was fourteen when his father apprenticed him to a firm of
+cabinet-makers.  For the first year, he worked away contentedly at
+legs and mouldings; but as soon as he had learnt the rudiments of
+the trade he persuaded his masters to change his indentures, and
+let him take the more suitable employment of carving woodwork for
+ornamental furniture.  He must have been a good workman and a
+promising boy, one may be sure, or his masters would never have
+countenanced such a revolutionary proceeding on the part of a raw
+apprentice.  Young Gibson was delighted with his new occupation,
+and pursued it so eagerly that he carved even during his leisure
+hours from plaster casts.  But after another year, as ill-luck or
+good fortune would have it, he happened to come across a London
+marble-cutter, who had come down to Liverpool to carve flowers in
+marble for a local firm.  The boy was enchanted with his freer and
+more artistic work; when the marble-cutter took him over a big
+yard, and showed him the process of modelling and cutting, he began
+to feel a deep contempt for his own stiff and lifeless occupation
+of woodcarving.  Inspired with the desire to learn this higher
+craft, he bought some clay, took it home, and moulded it for
+himself after all the casts he could lay his hands on.  Mr.
+Francis, the proprietor of the marble works, had a German workman
+in his employ of the name of Luge, who used to model small figures,
+chiefly, no doubt, for monumental purposes.  Young Gibson borrowed
+a head of Bacchus that Luge had composed, and made a copy of it
+himself in clay.  Mr. Francis was well pleased with this early
+attempt, and also with a clever head of Mercury in marble, which
+Gibson carved in his spare moments.
+
+The more the lad saw of clay and marble, the greater grew his
+distaste for mere woodwork.  At last, he determined to ask Mr.
+Francis to buy out his indentures from the cabinet-makers, and let
+him finish his apprenticeship as a sculptor.  But unfortunately the
+cabinet-makers found Gibson too useful a person to be got rid of so
+easily: they said he was the most industrious lad they had ever
+had; and so his very virtues seemed as it were to turn against him.
+Not so, really: Mr. Francis thought so well of the boy that he
+offered the masters 70 pounds to be quit of their bargain; and in
+the end, Gibson himself having made a very firm stand in the
+matter, he was released from his indentures and handed over finally
+to Mr. Francis and a sculptor's life.
+
+And now the eager boy was at last "truly happy."  He had to model
+all day long, and he worked away at it with a will.  Shortly after
+he went to Mr. Francis's yard, a visitor came upon business, a
+magnificent-looking old man, with snowy hair and Roman features.
+It was William Roscoe, the great Liverpool banker, himself a poor
+boy who had risen, and who had found time not only to build up for
+himself an enormous fortune, but also to become thoroughly well
+acquainted with literature and art by the way.  Mr. Roscoe had
+written biographies of Lorenzo de Medici, the great Florentine, and
+of Leo X., the art-loving pope; and throughout his whole life he
+was always deeply interested in painting and sculpture and
+everything that related to them.  He was a philanthropist, too, who
+had borne his part bravely in the great struggle for the abolition
+of the slave trade; and to befriend a struggling lad of genius like
+John Gibson was the very thing that was nearest and dearest to his
+benevolent heart.  Mr. Francis showed Roscoe the boy's drawings and
+models; and Roscoe's appreciative eye saw in them at once the
+visible promise of great things to be.  He had come to order a
+chimney-piece for his library at Allerton, where his important
+historical works were all composed; and he determined that the
+clever boy should have a chief hand in its production.  A few days
+later he returned again with a valuable old Italian print.  "I want
+you to make a bas-relief in baked clay," he said to Gibson, "from
+this print for the centres of my mantelpiece."  Gibson was
+overjoyed.  The print was taken from a fresco of Raphael's in the
+Vatican at Rome, and Gibson's work was to reproduce it in clay in
+low relief, as a sculpture picture.  He did so entirely to his new
+patron's satisfaction, and this his first serious work is now duly
+preserved in the Liverpool Institution which Mr. Roscoe had been
+mainly instrumental in founding.
+
+Roscoe had a splendid collection of prints and drawings at Allerton;
+and he invited the clever Welsh lad over there frequently, and
+allowed him to study them all to his heart's content.  To a lad like
+John Gibson, such an opportunity of becoming acquainted with the
+works of Raphael and Michael Angelo was a great and pure delight.
+Before he was nineteen, he began to think of a big picture which he
+hoped to paint some day; and he carried it out as well as he was
+able in his own self-taught fashion.  For as yet, it must be
+remembered, Gibson had had no regular artistic instruction: there
+was none such, indeed, to be had at all in Liverpool in his day; and
+there was no real art going on in the town in any way.  Mr. Francis,
+his master, was no artist; nor was there anybody at the works who
+could teach him: for as soon as Mr. Francis found out the full
+measure of Gibson's abilities, he dismissed his German artist Luge,
+and put the clever boy entirely in his place.  At this time, Gibson
+was only receiving six shillings a week as wages; but Mr. Francis
+got good prices for many of his works, and was not ashamed even to
+put his own name upon the promising lad's artistic performances.
+
+Mr. Roscoe did not merely encourage the young sculptor; he set him
+also on the right road for ultimate success.  He urged Gibson to
+study anatomy, without which no sculpture worthy of the name is
+possible.  Gibson gladly complied, for he knew that Michael Angelo
+had been a great anatomist, and Michael was just at that moment the
+budding sculptor's idol and ideal.  But how could he learn?  A
+certain Dr. Vose was then giving lectures on anatomy to young
+surgeons at Liverpool, and on Roscoe's recommendation he kindly
+admitted the eager student gratis to his dissecting-room.  Gibson
+dissected there with a will in all his spare moments, and as he put
+his mind into the work he soon became well versed in the
+construction of the human body.
+
+From the day that Gibson arrived at man's estate, the great dream
+of his life was to go to Rome.  For Rome is to art what London is
+to industry--the metropolis in its own way of the entire earth.
+But travelling in 1810 cost a vast deal of money; and the poor
+Liverpool marble-cutter (for as yet he was really nothing more)
+could hardly hope to earn the immense sum that such an expedition
+would necessarily cost him.  So for six years more he went on
+working at Liverpool in his own native untaught fashion, doing his
+best to perfect himself, but feeling sadly the lack of training and
+competition.  One of the last works he executed while still in Mr.
+Francis's service was a chimney-piece for Sir John Gladstone,
+father of the future premier.  Sir John was so pleased with the
+execution, that he gave the young workman ten pounds as a present.
+But in spite of occasional encouragement like this, Gibson felt
+himself at Liverpool, as he says, "chained down by the leg, and
+panting for liberation."
+
+In 1817, when he was just twenty-seven, he determined to set off to
+London.  He took with him good introductions from Mr. Roscoe to Mr.
+Brougham (afterwards Lord Chancellor), to Christie, the big
+picture-dealer, and to several other influential people.  Later on,
+Roscoe recommended him to still more important leaders in the world
+of art--Flaxman the great sculptor, Benjamin West, the Quaker
+painter and President of the Royal Academy, and others of like
+magnitude.  Mr. Watson Taylor, a wealthy art patron, gave Gibson
+employment, and was anxious that he should stop in London.  But
+Gibson wanted more than employment; he wanted to LEARN, to perfect
+himself, to become great in his art.  He could do that nowhere but
+at Rome, and to Rome therefore he was determined to go.  Mr. Taylor
+still begged him to wait a little.  "Go to Rome I will," Gibson
+answered boldly, "even if I have to go there on foot."
+
+He was not quite reduced to this heroic measure, however, for his
+Liverpool friends made up a purse of 150 pounds for him (we may be
+sure it was repaid later on); and with that comparatively large sum
+in his pocket the young stone-cutter started off gaily on his
+continental tour, from which he was not to return for twenty-seven
+years.  He drove from Paris to Rome, sharing a carriage with a
+Scotch gentleman; and when he arrived in the Pope's city (as it
+then was) he knew absolutely not a single word of Italian, or of
+any other language on earth save Welsh and English.  In those days,
+Canova, the great Venetian sculptor, was the head of artistic
+society in Rome; and as ALL society in Rome is more or less
+artistic, he might almost be said to have led the whole life of the
+great and lively city.  Indeed, the position of such a man in Italy
+resembles far more that of a duke in England than of an artist as
+we here are accustomed to think of him.  Gibson had letters of
+introduction to this prince of sculptors from his London friends;
+and when he went to present them, he found Canova in his studio,
+surrounded by his numerous scholars and admirers.  The Liverpool
+stone-cutter had brought a few of his drawings with him, and Canova
+examined them with great attention.  Instinctively he recognized
+the touch of genius.  When he had looked at them keenly for a few
+minutes, he turned kindly to the trembling young man, and said at
+once, "Come to me alone next week, for I want to have a talk with
+you."
+
+On the appointed day, Gibson, quivering with excitement; presented
+himself once more at the great master's studio.  Canova was
+surrounded as before by artists and visitors; but in a short time
+he took Gibson into a room by himself, and began to speak with him
+in his very broken English.  Many artists came to Rome, he said,
+with very small means, and that perhaps might be Gibson's case.
+"Let me have the gratification, then," he went on, "of assisting
+you to prosecute your studies.  I am rich.  I am anxious to be of
+use to you.  Let me forward you in your art as long as you stay in
+Rome."
+
+Gibson replied, with many stammerings, that he hoped his slender
+means would suffice for his personal needs, but that if Canova
+would only condescend to give him instruction, to make him his
+pupil, to let him model in his studio, he would be eternally
+grateful.  Canova was one of the most noble and lovable of men.  He
+acceded at once to Gibson's request, and Gibson never forgot his
+kind and fatherly assistance.  "Dear generous master," the Welsh
+sculptor wrote many years after, when Canova had long passed away,
+"I see you before me now.  I hear your soft Venetian dialect, and
+your kindly words inspiring my efforts and gently correcting my
+defects.  My heart still swells with grateful recollection of you."
+
+Canova told his new pupil to devote a few days first to seeing the
+sights of Rome; but Gibson was impatient to begin at once.  "I
+shall be at your studio to-morrow morning," the ardent Welshman
+said; and he kept his word.  Canova, pleased with so much
+earnestness and promptitude, set him to work forthwith upon a clay
+model from his own statue of the Pugilist.  Gibson went to the task
+with a will, moulding the clay as best he could into shape; but he
+still knew so little of the technical ways of regular sculptors
+that he tried to model this work from the clay alone, though its
+pose was such that it could not possibly hold together without an
+iron framework.  Canova saw his error and smiled, but let him go on
+so that he might learn his business by experience.  In a day or two
+the whole thing, of course, collapsed by its own weight; and then
+Canova called in a blacksmith and showed the eager beginner how the
+mechanical skeleton was formed with iron bars, and interlacing
+crosses of wood and wire.  This was quite a new idea to Gibson, who
+had modelled hitherto only in his own self-taught fashion with
+moist clay, letting it support its own weight as best it might.
+Another pupil then fleshed out the iron skeleton with clay, and
+roughly shaped it to the required figure, so that it stood as firm
+as a rock for Gibson to work upon.  The new hand turned to
+vigorously once more; and, in spite of his seeming rawness,
+finished the copy so well that Canova admitted him at once to the
+Academy to model from life.  At this Academy Canova himself, who
+loved art far more than money, used to attend twice a week to give
+instruction to students without receiving any remuneration
+whatsoever.  It is of such noble men as this that the world of art
+is largely made up--that world which we too-practical English have
+always undervalued or even despised.
+
+Gibson's student period at Rome under Canova was a very happy
+episode in a uniformly happy and beautiful life.  His only trouble
+was that he had not been able to come there earlier.  Singularly
+free from every taint of envy (like all the great sculptors of his
+time), he could not help regretting when he saw other men turning
+out work of such great excellence while he was still only a
+learner.  "When I observed the power and experience of youths much
+younger than myself," he says in his generous appreciative fashion,
+"their masterly manner of sketching in the figure, and their
+excellent imitation of nature, my spirits fell many degrees, and I
+felt humbled and unhappy."  He need not have done so, for the man
+who thus distrusts his own work is always the truest workman; it is
+only fools or poor creatures who are pleased and self-satisfied
+with their own first bungling efforts.  But the great enjoyment of
+Rome to Gibson consisted in the free artistic society which he
+found there.  At Liverpool, he had felt almost isolated; there was
+hardly anybody with whom he could talk on an equality about his
+artistic interests; nobody but himself cared about the things that
+pleased and engrossed his earnest soul the most.  But at Rome,
+there was a great society of artists; every man's studio was open
+to his friends and fellow-workers; and a lively running fire of
+criticism went on everywhere about all new works completed or in
+progress.  He was fortunate, too, in the exact moment of his
+residence: Rome then contained at once, besides himself, the two
+truest sculptors of the present century, Canova the Venetian, and
+Thorwaldsen the Dane.  Both these great masters were singularly
+free from jealousy, rivalry, or vanity.  In their perfect
+disinterestedness and simplicity of character they closely
+resembled Gibson himself.  The ardent and pure-minded young
+Welshman, who kept himself so unspotted from the world in his utter
+devotion to his chosen art, could not fail to derive an elevated
+happiness from his daily intercourse with these two noble and
+sympathetic souls.
+
+After Gibson had been for some time in Canova's studio, his
+illustrious master told him that the sooner he took to modelling a
+life-size figure of his own invention, the better.  So Gibson hired
+a studio (with what means he does not tell us in his short sketch
+of his own life) close to Canova's, so that the great Venetian was
+able to drop in from time to time and assist him with his criticism
+and judgment.  How delightful is the friendly communion of work
+implied in all this graceful artistic Roman life!  How different
+from the keen competition and jealous rivalry which too often
+distinguishes our busy money-getting English existence!  In 1819,
+two years after Gibson's arrival at Rome, he began to model his
+Mars and Cupid, a more than life-size group, on which he worked
+patiently and lovingly for many months.  When it was nearly
+finished, one day a knock came at the studio door.  After the
+knock, a handsome young man entered, and announced himself
+brusquely as the Duke of Devonshire.  "Canova sent me," he said,
+"to see what you were doing."  Gibson wasn't much accustomed to
+dukes in those days--he grew more familiar with them later on--and
+we may be sure the poor young artist's heart beat a little more
+fiercely than usual when the stranger asked him the price of his
+Mars and Cupid in marble.  The sculptor had never yet sold a
+statue, and didn't know how much he ought to ask; but after a few
+minutes' consideration he said, "Five hundred pounds.  But,
+perhaps," he added timidly, "I have said too much."  "Oh no," the
+duke answered, "not at all too much;" and he forthwith ordered (or,
+as sculptors prefer to say, commissioned) the statue to be executed
+for him in marble.  Gibson was delighted, and ran over at once to
+tell Canova, thinking he had done a splendid stroke of business.
+Canova shared his pleasure, till the young man came to the price;
+then the older sculptor's face fell ominously.  "Five hundred
+pounds!" he cried in dismay; "why, it won't cover the cost of
+marble and workmanship."  And so indeed it turned out; for when the
+work was finished, it had stood Gibson in 520 pounds for marble and
+expenses, and left him twenty pounds out of pocket in the end.  So
+he got less than nothing after all for his many months of thought
+and labour over clay and marble alike.
+
+Discouraging as this beginning must have proved, it was nevertheless
+in reality the first important step in a splendid and successful
+career.  It is something to have sold your first statue, even if you
+sell it at a disadvantage.  In 1821 Gibson modelled a group of
+Pysche and the Zephyrs.  That winter Sir George Beaumont, himself a
+distinguished amateur artist, and a great patron of art, came to
+Rome; and Canova sent him to see the young Welshman's new
+composition.  Sir George asked the price, and Gibson, this time more
+cautious, asked for time to prepare an estimate, and finally named
+700 pounds.  To his joy, Sir George immediately ordered it, and also
+introduced many wealthy connoisseurs to the rising sculptor's
+studio.  That same winter, also, the Duke of Devonshire came again,
+and commissioned a bas-relief in marble (which is now at Chatsworth
+House, with many other of Gibson's works), at a paying price, too,
+which was a great point for the young man's scanty exchequer.
+
+Unfortunately, Gibson has not left us any notice of how he managed
+to make both ends meet during this long adult student period at
+Rome.  Information on that point would indeed be very interesting;
+but so absorbed was the eager Welshman always in his art, that he
+seldom tells us anything at all about such mere practical every-day
+matters as bread and butter.  To say the truth, he cared but little
+about them.  Probably he had lived in a very simple penurious style
+during his whole studenthood, taking his meals at a cafe or eating-
+house, and centering all his affection and ideas upon his beloved
+studio.  But now wealth and fame began to crowd in upon him, almost
+without the seeking.  Visitors to Rome began to frequent the
+Welshman's rooms, and the death of "the great and good Canova,"
+which occurred in 1822, while depriving Gibson of a dearly loved
+friend, left him, as it were, that great master's successor.
+Towards him and Thorwaldsen, indeed, Gibson always cherished a most
+filial regard.  "May I not be proud," he writes long after, "to
+have known such men, to have conversed with them, watched all their
+proceedings, heard all their great sentiments on art?  Is it not a
+pleasure to be so deeply in their debt for instruction?"  And now
+the flood of visitors who used to flock to Canova's studio began to
+transfer their interest to Gibson's.  Commission after commission
+was offered him, and he began to make money faster than he could
+use it.  His life had always been simple and frugal--the life of a
+working man with high aims and grand ideals: he hardly knew now how
+to alter it.  People who did not understand Gibson used to say in
+his later days that he loved money, because he made much and spent
+little.  Those who knew him better say rather that he worked much
+for the love of art, and couldn't find much to do with his money
+when he had earned it.  He was singularly indifferent to gain; he
+cared not what he eat or drank; he spent little on clothes, and
+nothing on entertainments; but he paid his workmen liberally or
+even lavishly; he allowed one of his brothers more than he ever
+spent upon himself, and he treated the other with uniform kindness
+and generosity.  The fact is, Gibson didn't understand money, and
+when it poured in upon him in large sums, he simply left it in the
+hands of friends, who paid him a very small percentage on it, and
+whom he always regarded as being very kind to take care of the
+troublesome stuff on his account.  In matters of art, Gibson was a
+great master; in matters of business, he was hardly more than a
+simple-minded child.
+
+Sometimes queer incidents occurred at Gibson's studio from the
+curious ignorance of our countrymen generally on the subject of
+art.  One day, a distinguished and wealthy Welsh gentleman called
+on the sculptor, and said that, as a fellow Welshman, he was
+anxious to give him a commission.  As he spoke, he cast an admiring
+eye on Gibson's group of Psyche borne by the Winds.  Gibson was
+pleased with his admiration, but rather taken aback when the old
+gentleman said blandly, "If you were to take away the Psyche and
+put a dial in the place, it'd make a capital design for a clock."
+Much later, the first Duke of Wellington called upon him at Rome
+and ordered a statue of Pandora, in an attitude which he described.
+Gibson at once saw that the Duke's idea was a bad one, and told him
+so.  By-and-by, on a visit to England, Gibson waited on the duke,
+and submitted photographs of the work he had modelled.  "But, Mr.
+Gibson," said the old soldier, looking at them curiously, "you
+haven't followed my idea."  "No," answered the sculptor, "I have
+followed MY OWN."  "You are very stubborn," said Wellington.
+"Duke," answered the sturdy sculptor, "I am a Welshman, and all the
+world knows that we are a stubborn race."  The Iron Duke ought to
+have been delighted to find another man as unbending as himself,
+but he wasn't; and in the end he refused the figure, which Gibson
+sold instead to Lady Marian Alford.
+
+For twenty-seven years Gibson remained at Rome, working assiduously
+at his art, and rising gradually but surely to the very first place
+among then living sculptors.  His studio now became the great
+centre of all fashionable visitors to Rome.  Still, he made no
+effort to get rich, though he got rich without wishing it; he
+worked on merely for art's sake, not for money.  He would not do as
+many sculptors do, keep several copies in marble of his more
+popular statues for sale; he preferred to devote all his time to
+new works.  "Gibson was always absorbed in one subject," says Lady
+Eastlake, "and that was the particular work or part of a work--were
+it but the turn of a corner of drapery--which was then under his
+modelling hands.  Time was nothing to him; he was long and
+fastidious."  His favourite pupil, Miss Hosmer, once expressed
+regret to him that she had been so long about a piece of work on
+which she was engaged.  "Always try to do the best you can," Gibson
+answered.  "Never mind how long you are upon a work--no.  No one
+will ask how long you have been, except fools.  You don't care what
+fools think."
+
+During his long life at Rome, he was much cheered by the presence
+and assistance of his younger brother, Mr. Ben, as he always called
+him, who was also a sculptor, though of far less merit than John
+Gibson himself.  Mr. Ben came to Rome younger than John, and he
+learned to be a great classical scholar, and to read those Greek
+and Latin books which John only knew at second hand, but from whose
+beautiful fanciful stories of gods and heroes he derived all the
+subjects for his works of statuary.  His other brother, Solomon, a
+strange, wild, odd man, in whom the family genius had degenerated
+into mere eccentricity, never did anything for his own livelihood,
+but lived always upon John Gibson's generous bounty.  In John's
+wealthy days, he and Mr. Ben used to escape every summer from the
+heat and dust of Rome--which is unendurable in July and August--to
+the delightfully cool air and magnificent mountain scenery of the
+Tyrol.  "I cannot tell you how well I am," he writes on one of
+these charming visits, "and so is Mr. Ben.  Every morning we take
+our walks in the woods here.  I feel as if I were new modelled."
+Another passage in one of these summer tourist letters well
+deserves to be copied here, as it shows the artist's point of view
+of labours like Telford's and Stephenson's.  "From Bormio," he
+says, "the famous road begins which passes over the Stelvio into
+the Tyrol; the highest carriage-road in the world.  We began the
+ascent early in the morning.  It is magnificent and wonderful.  Man
+shows his talents, his power over great difficulties, in the
+construction of these roads.  Behold the cunning little workman--he
+comes, he explores, and he says, 'Yes, I will send a carriage and
+horses over these mighty mountains;' and, by Jove, you are drawn up
+among the eternal snows.  I am a great admirer of these roads."
+
+In 1844 Gibson paid his first visit to England, a very different
+England indeed to the one he had left twenty-seven years earlier.
+His Liverpool friends, now thoroughly proud of their stone-cutter,
+insisted upon giving him a public banquet.  Glasgow followed the
+same example; and the simple-minded sculptor, unaccustomed to such
+honours, hardly knew how to bear his blushes decorously upon him.
+During this visit, he received a command to execute a statue of the
+queen.  Gibson was at first quite disconcerted at such an awful
+summons.  "I don't know how to behave to queens," he said.  "Treat
+her like a lady," said a friend; and Gibson, following the advice,
+found it sufficiently answered all the necessities of the
+situation.  But when he went to arrange with the Prince Consort
+about the statue, he was rather puzzled what he should do about
+measuring the face, which he always did for portrait sculpture with
+a pair of compasses.  All these difficulties were at last smoothed
+over; and Gibson was also permitted to drape the queen's statue in
+Greek costume, for in his artistic conscientiousness he absolutely
+refused to degrade sculpture by representing women in the
+fashionable gown of the day, or men in swallow-tail coats and high
+collars.
+
+Another work which Gibson designed during this visit possesses for
+us a singular and exceptional interest.  It was a statue of George
+Stephenson, to be erected at Liverpool.  Thus, by a curious
+coincidence, the Liverpool stone-cutter was set to immortalize the
+features and figure of the Killingworth engine-man.  Did those two
+great men, as they sat together in one room, sculptor and sitter,
+know one another's early history and strange struggles, we wonder?
+Perhaps not; but if they did, it must surely have made a bond of
+union between them.  At any rate, Gibson greatly admired
+Stephenson, just as he had admired the Stelvio road.  "I will
+endeavour to give him a look capable of action and energy," he
+said; "but he must be contemplative, grave, simple.  He is a good
+subject.  I wish to make him look like an Archimedes."
+
+If Gibson admired Stephenson, however, he did not wholly admire
+Stephenson's railways.  The England he had left was the England of
+mail-coaches.  In Italy, he had learnt to travel by carriage, after
+the fashion of the country; but these new whizzing locomotives,
+with their time-tables, and their precision, and their inscrutable
+mysteries of shunts and junctions, were quite too much for his
+simple, childish, old-world habits.  He had a knack of getting out
+too soon or too late, which often led him into great confusion.
+Once, when he wanted to go to Chichester, he found himself landed
+at Portsmouth, and only discovered his mistake when, on asking the
+way to the cathedral, he was told there was no cathedral in the
+town at all.  Another story of how he tried to reach Wentworth,
+Lord Fitzwilliam's place, is best told in his own words.  "The
+train soon stopped at a small station, and, seeing some people get
+out, I also descended; when, in a moment, the train moved on--
+faster and faster--and left me standing on the platform.  I walked
+a few paces backward and forward in disagreeable meditation.  'I
+wish to Heaven,' thought I to myself, 'that I was on my way back to
+Rome with a postboy.'  Then I observed a policeman darting his eyes
+upon me, as if he would look me through.  Said I to the fellow,
+'Where is that cursed train gone to?  It's off with my luggage and
+here am I.'  The man asked me the name of the place where I took my
+ticket.  'I don't remember,' said I.  'How should I know the name
+of any of these places?--it's as long as my arm.  I've got it
+written down somewhere.'  'Pray, sir,' said the man, after a little
+pause, 'are you a foreigner?'  'No,' I replied, 'I am not a
+foreigner; I'm a sculptor.'"
+
+The consequence of this almost childish carelessness was that
+Gibson had always to be accompanied on his long journeys either by
+a friend or a courier.  While Mr. Ben lived, he usually took his
+brother in charge to some extent; and the relation between them was
+mutual, for while John Gibson found the sculpture, Mr. Ben found
+the learning, so that Gibson used often to call him "my classical
+dictionary."  In 1847, however, Mr. Ben was taken ill.  He got a
+bad cold, and would have no doctor, take no medicine.  "I consider
+Mr. Ben," his brother writes, "as one of the most amiable of human
+beings--too good for this world--but he will take no care against
+colds, and when ill he is a stubborn animal."  That summer Gibson
+went again to England, and when, he came back found Mr. Ben no
+better.  For four years the younger brother lingered on, and in
+1851 died suddenly from the effects of a fall in walking.  Gibson
+was thus left quite alone, but for his pupil Miss Hosmer, who
+became to him more than a daughter.
+
+During his later years Gibson took largely to tinting his statues--
+colouring them faintly with flesh-tones and other hues like nature;
+and this practice he advocated with all the strength of his single-
+minded nature.  All visitors to the great Exhibition of 1862 will
+remember his beautiful tinted Venus, which occupied the place of
+honour in a light temple erected for the purpose by another
+distinguished artistic Welshman, Mr. Owen Jones, who did much
+towards raising the standard of taste in the English people.
+
+In January, 1866, John Gibson had a stroke of paralysis, from which
+he never recovered.  He died within the month, and was buried in
+the English cemetery at Rome.  Both his brothers had died before
+him; and he left the whole of his considerable fortune to the Royal
+Academy in England.  An immense number of his works are in the
+possession of the Academy, and are on view there throughout the
+year.
+
+John Gibson's life is very different in many respects from that of
+most other great working men whose story is told in this volume.
+Undoubtedly, he was deficient in several of those rugged and stern
+qualities to which English working men have oftenest owed their
+final success.  But there was in him a simple grandeur of
+character, a purity of soul, and an earnestness of aim which raised
+him at once far above the heads of most among those who would have
+been the readiest to laugh at and ridicule him.  Besides his
+exquisite taste, his severe love of beauty, and his marvellous
+power of expressing the highest ideals of pure form, he had one
+thing which linked him to all the other great men whose lives we
+have here recounted--his steadfast and unconquerable personal
+energy.  In one sense it may be said that he was not a practical
+man; and yet in another and higher sense, what could possibly be
+more practical than this accomplished resolve of the poor Liverpool
+stone-cutter to overcome all obstacles, to go to, Rome, and to make
+himself into a great sculptor?  It is indeed a pity that in writing
+for Englishmen of the present day such a life should even seem for
+a moment to stand in need of a practical apology.  For purity, for
+guilelessness, for exquisite appreciation of the true purpose of
+sculpture as the highest embodiment of beauty of form, John
+Gibson's art stands unsurpassed in all the annals of modern
+statuary.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+WILLIAM HERSCHEL, BANDSMAN.
+
+
+
+
+
+Old Isaac Herschel, the oboe-player of the King's Guard in Hanover,
+had served with his regiment for many years in the chilly climate
+of North Germany, and was left at last broken down in health and
+spirits by the many hardships of several severe European campaigns.
+Isaac Herschel was a man of tastes and education above his
+position; but he had married a person in some respects quite
+unfitted for him.  His good wife, Anna, though an excellent
+housekeeper and an estimable woman in her way, had never even
+learned to write; and when the pair finally settled down to old age
+in Hanover, they were hampered by the cares of a large family of
+ten children.  Respectable poverty in Germany is even more pressing
+than in England; the decent poor are accustomed to more frugal fare
+and greater privations than with us; and the domestic life of the
+Herschel family circle must needs have been of the most careful and
+penurious description.  Still, Isaac Herschel dearly loved his art,
+and in it he found many amends and consolations for the sordid
+shifts and troubles of a straitened German household.  All his
+spare time was given to music, and in his later days he was enabled
+to find sufficient pupils to eke out his little income with
+comparative comfort.
+
+William Herschel, the great astronomer (born in 1738), was the
+fourth child of his mother, and with his brothers he was brought up
+at the garrison school in Hanover, together with the sons of the
+other common soldiers.  There he learned, not only the three R's,
+but also a little French and English.  Still, the boy was not
+content with these ordinary studies; in his own playtime he took
+lessons in Latin and mathematics privately with the regimental
+schoolmaster.  The young Herschels, indeed, were exceptionally
+fortunate in the possession of an excellent and intelligent father,
+who was able to direct their minds into channels which few people
+of their position in life have the opportunity of entering.  Isaac
+Herschel was partly of Jewish descent, and he inherited in a marked
+degree two very striking Jewish gifts--a turn for music, and a turn
+for philosophy.  The Jews are probably the oldest civilized race
+now remaining on earth; and their musical faculties have been
+continuously exercised from a time long before the days of David,
+so that now they produce undoubtedly a far larger proportion of
+musicians and composers than any other class of the population
+whatsoever.  They are also deeply interested in the same profound
+theological and philosophical problems which were discussed with so
+much acuteness and freedom in the Book of Ecclesiastes and the
+subtle argument of Job and his friends.  There has never been a
+time when the Jewish mind has not exercised itself profoundly on
+these deep and difficult questions; and the Hanover bandsman
+inherited from his Jewish ancestry an unusual interest in similar
+philosophical subjects.  Thus, while the little ones were sleeping
+in the same common room at night, William and his father were often
+heard discussing the ideas of such abstruse thinkers as Newton and
+Leibnitz, whose names must have sounded strange indeed to the
+ordinary frequenters of the Hanover barracks.  On such occasions
+good dame Herschel was often compelled to interpose between them,
+lest the loudness of their logic should wake the younger children
+in the crib hard by.
+
+William, however, possessed yet another gift, which he is less
+likely to have derived from the Jewish side of the house.  He and
+his brother Alexander were both distinguished by a natural taste
+for mechanics, and early gave proof of their learning by turning
+neat globes with the equator and ecliptic accurately engraved upon
+them, or by making model instruments for their own amusement out of
+bits of pasteboard.  Thus, in early opportunities and educational
+advantages, the young Herschels certainly started in life far
+better equipped than most working men's sons; and, considering
+their father's doubtful position, it may seem at first sight rather
+a stretch of language to describe him as a working man at all.
+Nevertheless, when one remembers the humble grade of military
+bandsmen in Germany, even at the present day, and the fact that
+most of the Herschel family remained in that grade during all their
+lives, it is clear that William Herschel's life may be fairly
+included within the scope of the present series.  "In my fifteenth
+year," he says himself, "I enlisted in military service," and he
+evidently looked upon his enlistment in exactly the same light as
+that of any ordinary soldier.
+
+England and Hanover were, of course, very closely connected
+together at the middle of the last century.  The king moved about a
+great deal from one country to the other; and in 1755 the regiment
+of Hanoverian Guards was ordered on service to England for a year.
+William Herschel, then seventeen years of age, and already a member
+of the band, went together with his father; and it was in this
+modest capacity that he first made acquaintance with the land where
+he was afterwards to attain the dignity of knighthood and the post
+of the king's astronomer.  He played the oboe, like his father
+before him, and no doubt underwent the usual severe military
+discipline of that age of stiff stocks and stern punishments.  His
+pay was very scanty, and out of it he only saved enough to carry
+home one memento of his English experiences.  That memento was in
+itself a sufficient mark of the stuff from which young Herschel was
+compounded.  It was a copy of "Locke on the Human Understanding."
+Now, Locke's famous work, oftener named than read, is a very tough
+and serious bit of philosophical exposition; and a boy of seventeen
+who buys such a book out of his meagre earnings as a military
+bandsman is pretty sure not to end his life within the four dismal
+bare walls of the barrack.  It is indeed a curious picture to
+imagine young William Herschel, among a group of rough and
+boisterous German soldiers, discussing high mathematical problems
+with his father, or sitting down quietly in a corner to read "Locke
+on the Human Understanding."
+
+In 1757, during the Seven Years' War, Herschel was sent with his
+regiment to serve in the campaign of Rossbach against the French.
+He was not physically strong, and the hardships of active service
+told terribly upon the still growing lad.  His parents were alarmed
+at his appearance when he returned, and were very anxious to
+"remove" him from the service.  That, however, was by no means an
+easy matter for them to accomplish.  They had no money to buy his
+discharge, and so, not to call the transaction by any other than
+its true name, William Herschel was forced to run away from the
+army.  We must not judge too harshly of this desertion, for the
+times were hard, and the lives of men in Herschel's position were
+valued at very little by the constituted authorities.  Long after,
+it is said, when Herschel had distinguished himself by the
+discovery of the planet Uranus, a pardon for this high military
+offence was duly handed to him by the king in person on the
+occasion of his first presentation.  George III. was not a
+particularly wise or brilliant man; but even he had sense enough to
+perceive that William Herschel could serve the country far better
+by mapping out the stars of heaven than by playing the oboe to the
+royal regiment of Hanoverian Guards.
+
+William was nineteen when he ran away.  His good mother packed his
+boxes for him with such necessaries as she could manage, and sent
+them after him to Hamburg; but, to the boy's intense disgust, she
+forgot to send the copy of "Locke on the Human Understanding."
+What a sturdy deserter we have here, to be sure!  "She, dear
+woman," he says plaintively, "knew no other wants than good linen
+and clothing!"  So William Herschel the oboe-player started off
+alone to earn his living as best he might in the great world of
+England.  It is strange he should have chosen that, of all European
+countries; for there alone he was liable to be arrested as a
+deserter: but perhaps his twelvemonth's stay in London may have
+given him a sense of being at home amongst us which he would have
+lacked in any other part of Europe.  At any rate, hither he came,
+and for the next three years picked up a livelihood, we know not
+how, as many other excellent German bandsmen have done before and
+since him.  Our information about his early life is very meagre,
+and at this period we lose sight of him for a while altogether.
+
+About the year 1760, however, we catch another incidental glimpse
+of the young musician in his adopted country.  By that time, he had
+found himself once more a regular post as oboist to the Durham
+militia, then quartered for its muster at Pontefract.  A certain
+Dr. Miller, an organist at Doncaster, was dining one evening at the
+officers' mess; when his host happened to speak to him in high
+praise of a young German they had in their band, who was really, he
+said, a most remarkable and spirited performer.  Dr. Miller asked
+to see (or rather hear) this clever musician; so Herschel was
+called up, and made to go through a solo for the visitor's
+gratification.  The organist was surprised at his admirable
+execution, and asked him on what terms he was engaged to the Durham
+militia.  "Only from month to month," Herschel answered.  "Then
+leave them at the end of your month," said Miller, "and come to
+live with me.  I'm a single man; I think we can manage together;
+and I'm sure I can get you a better situation."  Herschel frankly
+accepted the offer so kindly made, and seems to have lived for much
+of the next five years with Miller in his little two-roomed cottage
+at Doncaster.  Here he took pupils and performed in the orchestra
+at public concerts, always in a very quiet and modest fashion.  He
+also lived for part of the time with a Mr. Bulman at Leeds, for
+whom he afterwards generously provided a place as clerk to the
+Octagon Chapel at Bath.  Indeed, it is a very pleasing trait in
+William Herschel's character that to the end he was constantly
+engaged in finding places for his early friends, as well as for the
+less energetic or less fortunate members of his own family.
+
+During these years, Herschel also seems to have given much
+attention to the organ, which enabled him to make his next step in
+life in 1765, when he was appointed organist at Halifax.  Now,
+there is a great social difference between the position of an oboe-
+player in a band and a church organist; and it was through his
+organ-playing that Herschel was finally enabled to leave his needy
+hand-to-mouth life in Yorkshire.  A year later, he obtained the
+post of organist to the Octagon Chapel at Bath, an engagement which
+gave him new opportunities of turning his mind to the studies for
+which he possessed a very marked natural inclination.  Bath was in
+those days not only the most fashionable watering-place in England,
+but almost the only fashionable watering-place in the whole
+kingdom.  It was, to a certain extent, all that Brighton,
+Scarborough, Buxton, and Harrogate are to-day, and something more.
+In our own time, when railways and steamboats have so altered the
+face of the world, the most wealthy and fashionable English society
+resorts a great deal to continental pleasure towns like Cannes,
+Nice, Florence, Vichy, Baden, Ems, and Homburg; but in the
+eighteenth century it resorted almost exclusively to Bath.  The
+Octagon Chapel was in one sense the centre of life in Bath; and
+through his connection with it, Herschel was thrown into a far more
+intelligent and learned society than that which he had left behind
+him in still rural Yorkshire.  New books came early to Bath, and
+were read and discussed in the reading-rooms; famous men and women
+came there, and contributed largely to the intellectual life of the
+place; the theatre was the finest out of London; the Assembly Rooms
+were famous as the greatest resort of wit and culture in the whole
+kingdom.  Herschel here was far more in his element than in the
+barracks of Hanover, or in the little two-roomed cottage at rustic
+Doncaster.
+
+He worked very hard indeed, and his work soon brought him comfort
+and comparative wealth.  Besides his chapel services, and his later
+engagement in the orchestra of the Assembly Rooms, he had often as
+many as thirty-eight private pupils in music every week; and he
+also composed a few pieces, which were published in London with
+some modest success.  Still, in spite of all these numerous
+occupations, the eager young German found a little leisure time to
+devote to self-education; so much so that, after a fatiguing day of
+fourteen or sixteen hours spent in playing the organ and teaching,
+he would "unbend his mind" by studying the higher mathematics, or
+give himself a lesson in Greek and Italian.  At the same time; he
+was also working away at a line of study, seemingly useless to him,
+but in which he was afterwards to earn so great and deserved a
+reputation.  Among the books he read during this Bath period were
+Smith's "Optics" and Lalande's "Astronomy."  Throughout all his own
+later writings, the influence of these two books, thoroughly
+mastered by constant study in the intervals of his Bath music
+lessons, makes itself everywhere distinctly felt.
+
+Meanwhile, the family at Hanover had not been flourishing quite so
+greatly as the son William was evidently doing in wealthy England.
+During all those years, the young man had never forgotten to keep
+up a close correspondence with his people in Germany.  Already, in
+1764, during his Yorkshire days, William Herschel had managed out
+of his Savings as an oboe-player to make a short trip to his old
+home; and his sister Carolina, afterwards his chief assistant in
+his astronomical labours, notes with pleasure the delight she felt
+in having her beloved brother with her once more, though she, poor
+girl, being cook to the household apparently, could only enjoy his
+society when she was not employed "in the drudgery of the
+scullery."  A year later, when William had returned to England
+again, and had just received his appointment as organist at
+Halifax, his father, Isaac, had a stroke of paralysis which ended
+his violin-playing for ever, and forced him to rely thenceforth
+upon copying music for a precarious livelihood.  In 1767 he died,
+and poor Carolina saw before her in prospect nothing but a life of
+that domestic drudgery which she so disliked.  "I could not bear
+the idea of being turned into a housemaid," she says; and she
+thought that if only she could take a few lessons in music and
+fancy work she might get "a place as governess in some family where
+the want of a knowledge of French would be no objection."  But,
+unhappily, good dame Herschel, like many other uneducated and
+narrow-minded persons, had a strange dread of too much knowledge.
+She thought that "nothing further was needed," says Carolina, "than
+to send me two or three months to a sempstress to be taught to make
+household linen; so all that my father could do was to indulge me
+sometimes with a short lesson on the violin when my mother was
+either in good humour or out of the way.  It was her certain belief
+that my brother William would have returned to his country, and my
+eldest brother would not have looked so high, if they had had a
+little less learning."  Poor, purblind, well-meaning, obstructive
+old dame Herschel! what a boon to the world that children like
+yours are sometimes seized with this incomprehensible fancy for
+"looking too high"!
+
+Nevertheless, Carolina managed by rising early to take a few
+lessons at daybreak from a young woman whose parents lived in the
+same cottage with hers; and so she got through a little work before
+the regular daily business of the family began at seven.  Imagine
+her delight then, just as the difficulties after her father's death
+are making that housemaid's place seem almost inevitable, when she
+gets a letter from William at Bath, asking her to come over to
+England and join him at that gay and fashionable city.  He would
+try to prepare her for singing at his concerts; but if after two
+years' trial she didn't succeed, he would take her back again to
+Hanover himself.  In 1772, indeed, William in person came over to
+fetch her, and thenceforth the brother and sister worked
+unceasingly together in all their undertakings to the day of the
+great astronomer's death.
+
+About this time Herschel had been reading Ferguson's "Astronomy,"
+and felt very desirous of seeing for himself the objects in the
+heavens, invisible to the naked eye, of which he there found
+descriptions.  For this purpose he must of course have a telescope.
+But how to obtain one? that was the question.  There was a small
+two-and-a-half foot instrument on hire at one of the shops at Bath;
+and the ambitious organist borrowed this poor little glass for a
+time, not merely to look through, but to use as a model for
+constructing one on his own account.  Buying was impossible, of
+course, for telescopes cost much money: but making would not be
+difficult for a determined mind.  He had always been of a
+mechanical turn, and he was now fired with a desire to build
+himself a telescope eighteen or twenty feet long.  He sent to
+London for the lenses, which could not be bought at Bath; and
+Carolina amused herself by making a pasteboard tube to fit them in
+her leisure hours.  It was long before he reached twenty feet,
+indeed: his first effort was a seven-foot, attained only "after
+many continuous determined trials."  The amateur pasteboard frame
+did not fully answer Herschel's expectations, so he was obliged to
+go in grudgingly for the expense of a tin tube.  The reflecting
+mirror which he ought to have had proved too dear for his still
+slender purse, and he thus had to forego it with much regret.  But
+he found a man at Bath who had once been in the mirror-polishing
+line; and he bought from him for a bargain all his rubbish of
+patterns, tools, unfinished mirrors and so forth, with which he
+proceeded to experiment on the manufacture of a proper telescope.
+In the summer, when the season was over, and all the great people
+had left Bath, the house, as Carolina says ruefully, "was turned
+into a workshop."  William's younger brother Alexander was busy
+putting up a big lathe in a bedroom, grinding glasses and turning
+eyepieces; while in the drawing-room itself, sacred to William's
+aristocratic pupils, a carpenter, sad to relate, was engaged in
+making a tube and putting up stands for the future telescopes.  Sad
+goings on, indeed, in the family of a respectable music-master and
+organist!  Many a good solid shopkeeper in Bath must no doubt have
+shaken his grey head solemnly as he passed the door, and muttered
+to himself that that young German singer fellow was clearly going
+on the road to ruin with his foolish good-for-nothing star-gazing.
+
+In 1774, when William Herschel was thirty six, he had at last
+constructed himself a seven-foot telescope, and began for the first
+time in his life to view the heavens in a systematic manner.  From
+this he advanced to a ten-foot, and then to one of twenty, for he
+meant to see stars that no astronomer had ever yet dreamt of
+beholding.  It was comparatively late in life to begin, but
+Herschel had laid a solid foundation already and he was enabled
+therefore to do an immense deal in the second half of those
+threescore years and ten which are the allotted average life of
+man, but which he himself really overstepped by fourteen winters.
+As he said long afterwards with his modest manner to the poet
+Campbell, "I have looked further into space than ever human being
+did before me.  I have observed stars of which the light, it can be
+proved, must take two millions of years to reach this earth."  That
+would have been a grand thing for any man to be able truthfully to
+say under any circumstances: it was a marvellous thing for a man
+who had laboured under all the original disadvantages of Herschel--
+a man who began life as a penniless German bandsman, and up to the
+age of thirty-six had never even looked through a telescope.
+
+At this time, Herschel was engaged in playing the harpsichord in
+the orchestra of the theatre; and it was during the interval
+between the acts that he made his first general survey of the
+heavens.  The moment his part was finished, he would rush out to
+gaze through his telescope; and in these short periods he managed
+to observe all the visible stars of what are called the first,
+second, third, and fourth magnitudes.  Henceforth he went on
+building telescope after telescope, each one better than the last;
+and now all his glasses were ground and polished either by his own
+hand or by his brother Alexander's.  Carolina meanwhile took her
+part in the workshop; but as she had also to sing at the oratorios,
+and her awkward German manners might shock the sensitive nerves of
+the Bath aristocrats, she took two lessons a week for a whole
+twelvemonth (she tells us in her delightfully straightforward
+fashion) "from Miss Fleming, the celebrated dancing mistress,
+to drill me for a gentlewoman."  Poor Carolina, there she was
+mistaken: Miss Fleming could make her into no gentlewoman, for she
+was born one already, and nothing proves it more than the perfect
+absence of false shame with which in her memoirs she tells us all
+these graphic little details of their early humble days.
+
+While they were thus working at Bath an incident occurred which is
+worth mentioning because it shows the very different directions in
+which the presence or the want of steady persistence may lead the
+various members of the very self-same family.  William received a
+letter from his widowed mother at Hanover to say, in deep distress,
+that Dietrich, the youngest brother, had run away from home, it was
+supposed for the purpose of going to India, "with a young idler no
+older than himself."  Forthwith, the budding astronomer left the
+lathe where he was busy turning an eye-piece from a cocoa-nut
+shell, and, like a good son and brother as he always was, hurried
+off to Holland and thence to Hanover.  No Dietrich was anywhere to
+be found.  But while he was away, Carolina at Bath received a
+letter from Dietrich himself, to tell her ruefully he was "laid up
+very ill" at a waterside tavern in Wapping--not the nicest or most
+savoury East End sailor-suburb of London.  Alexander immediately
+took the coach to town, put the prodigal into a decent lodging,
+nursed him carefully for a fortnight, and then took him down with
+him in triumph to the family home at Bath.  There brother William
+found him safe and sound on his return, under the sisterly care of
+good Carolina.  A pretty dance he had led the two earnest and
+industrious astronomers; but they seem always to have treated this
+black sheep of the family with uniform kindness, and long
+afterwards Sir William remembered him favourably in his last will.
+
+In 1779 and the succeeding years the three Herschels were engaged
+during all their spare time in measuring the heights of about one
+hundred mountains in the moon, which William gauged by three
+different methods.  In the same year, he made an acquaintance of
+some importance to him, as forming his first introduction to the
+wider world of science in London and elsewhere.  Dr. Watson, a
+Fellow of the Royal Society, happened, to see him working at his
+telescope; and this led to a visit from the electrician to the
+amateur astronomer.  Dr. Watson was just then engaged in getting up
+a Philosophical Society at Bath (a far rarer institution at that
+time in a provincial town than now), and he invited William
+Herschel to join it.  Here Herschel learned for the first time to
+mix with those who were more nearly his intellectual equals, and to
+measure his strength against other men's.
+
+It was in 1781 that Herschel made the great discovery which
+immediately established his fame as an astronomer, and enabled him
+to turn from conducting concerts to the far higher work of
+professionally observing the stars.  On the night of Tuesday, March
+13th, Herschel was engaged in his usual systematic survey of the
+sky, a bit at a time, when his telescope lighted among a group of
+small fixed stars upon what he at first imagined to be a new comet.
+It proved to be no comet, however, but a true planet--a veritable
+world, revolving like our own in a nearly circular path around the
+sun as centre, though far more remote from it than the most distant
+planet then known, Saturn.  Herschel called his new world the
+Georgium Sidus (King George's star) in honour of the reigning
+monarch; but it has since been known as Uranus.  Astronomers all
+over Europe were soon apprised of this wonderful discovery, and the
+path of the freshly found planet was computed by calculation, its
+distance from the sun being settled at nineteen times that of our
+own earth.
+
+In order faintly to understand the importance attached at the time
+to Herschel's observation of this very remote and seemingly petty
+world, we must remember that up to that date all the planets which
+circle round our own sun had been familiarly known to everybody
+from time immemorial.  To suggest that there was yet another world
+belonging to our system outside the path of the furthest known
+planet would have seemed to most people like pure folly.  Since
+then, we have grown quite accustomed to the discovery of a fresh
+small world or two every year, and we have even had another large
+planet (Neptune), still more remote than Herschel's Uranus, added
+to the list of known orbs in our own solar system.  But in
+Herschel's day, nobody had ever heard of a new planet being
+discovered since the beginning of all things.  A hundred years
+before, an Italian astronomer, it is true, had found out four small
+moons revolving round Saturn, besides the big moon then already
+known; but for a whole century, everybody believed that the solar
+system was now quite fully explored, and that nothing fresh could
+be discovered about it.  Hence Herschel's observation produced a
+very different effect from, say, the discovery of the two moons
+which revolve round Mars, in our own day.  Even people who felt no
+interest in astronomy were aroused to attention.  Mr. Herschel's
+new planet became the talk of the town and the subject of much
+admiring discussion in the London newspapers.  Strange, indeed,
+that an amateur astronomer of Bath, a mere German music-master,
+should have hit upon a planet which escaped the sight even of the
+king's own Astronomer Royal at Greenwich.
+
+Of course there were not people wanting who ascribed this wonderful
+discovery of Herschel's to pure chance.  If he hadn't just happened
+to turn his telescope in that particular direction on that
+particular night, he wouldn't have seen this Georgium Sidus they
+made such a fuss about at all.  Quite so.  And if he hadn't built a
+twenty-foot telescope for himself, he wouldn't have turned it
+anywhere at any time.  But Herschel himself knew better.  "This was
+by no means the result of chance," he said; "but a simple
+consequence of the position of the planet on that particular
+evening, since it occupied precisely that spot in the heavens which
+came in the order of the minute observations that I had previously
+mapped out for myself.  Had I not seen it just when I did, I must
+inevitably have come upon it soon after, since my telescope was so
+perfect that I was able to distinguish it from a fixed star in the
+first minute of observation."  Indeed, when once Herschel's twenty-
+foot telescope was made, he could not well have failed in the long
+run to discover Uranus, as his own description of his method
+clearly shows.  "When I had carefully and thoroughly perfected the
+great instrument in all its parts," he says, "I made a systematic
+use of it in my observation of the heaven, first forming a
+determination never to pass by any, the smallest, portion of them
+without due investigation.  This habit, persisted in, led to the
+discovery of the new planet (Georgium Sidus)."  As well might one
+say that a skilled mining surveyor, digging for coal, came upon the
+seam by chance, as ascribe to chance the necessary result of such a
+careful and methodical scrutiny as this.
+
+Before the year was out, the ingenious Mr. Herschel of Bath was
+elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, and was also presented with
+the Copley gold medal.  From this moment all the distinguished
+people in Bath were anxious to be introduced to the philosophical
+music-master; and, indeed, they intruded so much upon his time that
+the daily music lessons were now often interrupted.  He was soon,
+however, to give up lessons for ever, and devote himself to his
+more congenial and natural work in astronomy.  In May, 1782, he
+went up to London, to be formally admitted to his Fellowship of the
+Royal Society.  There he stayed so long that poor Carolina was
+quite frightened.  It was "double the time which my brother could
+safely be absent from his scholars."  The connection would be
+broken up, and the astronomy would be the ruin of the family.  (A
+little of good old dame Herschel's housewifely leaven here,
+perhaps.)  But William's letters from London to "Dear Lina" must
+soon have quieted her womanly fears.  William had actually been
+presented to the king, and "met with a very gracious reception."
+He had explained the solar system to the king and queen, and his
+telescope was to be put up first at Greenwich and then at Richmond.
+The Greenwich authorities were delighted with his instrument; they
+have seen what Herschel calls "MY fine double stars" with it.  "All
+my papers are printing," he tells Lina with pardonable pride, "and
+are allowed to be very valuable."  But he himself is far from
+satisfied as yet with the results of his work.  Evidently no small
+successes in the field of knowledge will do for William Herschel.
+"Among opticians and astronomers," he writes to Lina, "nothing now
+is talked of but WHAT THEY CALL my great discoveries.  Alas! this
+shows how far they are behind, when such trifles as I have seen and
+done are called GREAT.  Let me but get at it again!  I will make
+such telescopes and see such things!"  Well, well, William
+Herschel, in that last sentence we get the very keynote of true
+greatness and true genius.
+
+But must he go back quietly to Bath and the toils of teaching?
+"An intolerable waste of time," he thought it.  The king happily
+relieved him from this intolerable waste.  He offered Herschel a
+salary of 200 pounds a year if he would come and live at Datchet,
+and devote himself entirely to astronomical observations.  It was
+by no means a munificent sum for a king to offer for such labour;
+but Herschel gladly accepted it, as it would enable him to give up
+the interruption of teaching, and spend all his time on his beloved
+astronomy.  His Bath friend, Sir William Watson, exclaimed when he
+heard of it, "Never bought monarch honour so cheap."  Herschel was
+forty-three when he removed to Datchet, and from that day forth he
+lived almost entirely in his observatory, wholly given up to his
+astronomical pursuits.  Even when he had to go to London to read
+his papers before the Royal Society, he chose a moonlight night
+(when the stars would be mostly invisible), so that it might not
+interfere with his regular labours.
+
+Poor Carolina was horrified at the house at Datchet, which seemed
+terribly desolate and poor, even to her modest German ideas; but
+William declared his willingness to live permanently and cheerfully
+upon "eggs and bacon" now that he was at last free to do nothing on
+earth but observe the heavens.  Night after night he and Carolina
+worked together at their silent task--he noting the small features
+with his big telescope, she "sweeping for comets" with a smaller
+glass or "finder."  Herschel could have had no more useful or
+devoted assistant than his sister, who idolized him with all her
+heart.  Alexander, too, came to stay with them during the slack
+months at Bath, and then the whole strength of the family was bent
+together on their labour of love in gauging the heavens.
+
+But what use was it all?  Why should they wish to go star-gazing?
+Well, if a man cannot see for himself what use it was, nobody else
+can put the answer into him, any more than they could put into him
+a love for nature, or for beauty, or for art, or for music, if he
+had it not to start with.  What is the good of a great picture, a
+splendid oratorio, a grand poem?  To the man who does not care for
+them, nothing; to the man who loves them, infinite.  It is just the
+same with science.  The use of knowledge to a mind like Herschel's
+is the mere possession of it.  With such as he, it is a love, an
+object of desire, a thing to be sought after for its town sake; and
+the mere act of finding it is in itself purely delightful.  "Happy
+is the man that findeth wisdom, and the man that getteth
+understanding.  For the merchandise of it is better than the
+merchandise of silver, and the gain thereof than fine gold.  She is
+more precious than rubies; and all the things thou canst desire are
+not to be compared unto her."  So, to such a man as Herschel, that
+peaceful astronomer life at Datchet was indeed, in the truest sense
+of those much-abused words, "success in life."  If you had asked
+some vulgar-minded neighbour of the great Sir William in his later
+days whether the astronomer had been a successful man or not, he
+would doubtless have answered, after his kind, "Certainly.  He has
+been made a knight, has lands in two counties, and has saved 35,000
+pounds."  But if you had asked William Herschel himself, he would
+probably have said, with his usual mixture of earnestness and
+humility, "Yes, I have been a very fortunate man in life.  I have
+discovered Uranus, and I have gauged all the depths of heaven, as
+none before ever gauged them, with my own great telescope."
+
+Still, those who cannot sympathize with the pure love of knowledge
+for its own sake--one of the highest and noblest of human aims--
+should remember that astronomy is also of immense practical
+importance to mankind, and especially to navigation and commerce.
+Unless great astronomical calculations were correctly performed at
+Greenwich and elsewhere, it would be impossible for any ship or
+steamer to sail with safety from England to Australia or America.
+Every defect in our astronomical knowledge helps to wreck our
+vessels on doubtful coasts; every advance helps to save the lives
+of many sailors and the cargoes of many merchants.  It is this
+practical utility of astronomy that justifies the spending of
+national money on observatories and transits of Venus, and it is
+the best apology for an astronomer's life to those who do not
+appreciate the use of knowledge for its own beauty.
+
+At Datchet, Herschel not only made several large telescopes for
+sale, for which he obtained large prices, but he also got a grant
+of 2000 pounds from the king to aid him in constructing his huge
+forty-foot instrument.  It was here, too, in 1783, that Herschel
+married.  His wife was a widow lady of scientific tastes like his
+own, and she was possessed of considerable means, which enabled him
+henceforth to lay aside all anxiety on the score of money.  They
+had but one child, a son, afterwards Sir John Herschel, almost as
+great an astronomer as his father had been before him.  In 1785,
+the family moved to Clay Hall, in Old Windsor, and in 1786 to
+Slough, where Herschel lived for the remainder of his long life.
+How completely his whole soul was bound up in his work is shown in
+the curious fact recorded for us by Carolina Herschel.  The last
+night at Clay Hall was spent in sweeping the sky with the great
+glass till daylight; and by the next evening the telescope stood
+ready for observations once more in the new home at Slough.
+
+To follow Herschel through the remainder of his life would be
+merely to give a long catalogue of his endless observations and
+discoveries among the stars.  Such a catalogue would be interesting
+only to astronomers; yet it would truly give the main facts of
+Herschel's existence in his happy home at Slough.  Honoured by the
+world, dearly loved in his own family, and engrossed with a
+passionate affection for his chosen science, the great astronomer
+and philosopher grew grey in peace under his own roof, in the
+course of a singularly placid and gentle old age.  In 1802 he laid
+before the Royal Society a list of five thousand new stars, star-
+clusters, or other heavenly bodies which he had discovered, and
+which formed the great body of his personal additions to
+astronomical knowledge.  The University of Oxford made him Doctor
+of Laws, and very late in life he was knighted by the king--a too
+tardy acknowledgment of his immense services to science.  To the
+very last, however, he worked on with a will; and, indeed, it is
+one of the great charms of scientific interest that it thus enables
+a man to keep his faculties on the alert to an advanced old age.
+In 1819, when Herschel was more than eighty, he writes to his
+sister a short note--"Lina, there is a great comet.  I want you to
+assist me.  Come to dine and spend the day here.  If you can come
+soon after one o'clock, we shall have time to prepare maps and
+telescopes.  I saw its situation last night.  It has a long tail."
+How delightful to find such a living interest in life at the age of
+eighty!
+
+On the 25th of August, 1822, this truly great and simple man passed
+away, in his eighty-fifth year.  It has been possible here only to
+sketch out the chief personal points in his career, without
+dwelling much upon the scientific importance of his later life-long
+labours; but it must suffice to say briefly upon this point that
+Herschel's work was no mere mechanical star-finding; it was the
+most profoundly philosophical astronomical work ever performed,
+except perhaps Newton's and Laplace's.  Among astronomers proper
+there has been none distinguished by such breadth of grasp, such
+wide conceptions, and such perfect clearness of view as the self-
+taught oboe-player of Hanover.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+JEAN FRANCOIS MILLET, PAINTER.
+
+
+
+
+
+There is no part of France so singularly like England, both in the
+aspect of the country itself and in the features and character of
+the inhabitants, as Normandy.  The wooded hills and dales, the
+frequent copses and apple orchards, the numerous thriving towns and
+villages, the towers and steeples half hidden among the trees,
+recall at every step the very similar scenery of our own beautiful
+and fruitful Devonshire.  And as the land is, so are the people.
+Ages ago, about the same time that the Anglo-Saxon invaders first
+settled down in England, a band of similar English pirates, from
+the old common English home by the cranberry marshes of the Baltic,
+drove their long ships upon the long rocky peninsula of the
+Cotentin, which juts out, like a French Cornwall, from the mainland
+of Normandy up to the steep cliffs and beetling crags of busy
+Cherbourg.  There they built themselves little hamlets and villages
+of true English type, whose very names to this day remind one of
+their ancient Saxon origin.  Later on, the Danes or Northmen
+conquered the country, which they called after their own name,
+Normandy, that is to say, the Northmen's land.  Mixing with the
+early Saxon or English settlers, and with the still more primitive
+Celtic inhabitants, the Northmen founded a race extremely like that
+which now inhabits our own country.  To this day, the Norman
+peasants of the Cotentin retain many marks of their origin and
+their half-forgotten kinship with the English race.  While other
+Frenchmen are generally dark and thick-set, the Norman is, as a
+rule, a tall, fair-haired, blue-eyed man, not unlike in build to
+our Yarmouth fisherman, or our Kentish labourers.  In body and
+mind, there is something about him even now which makes him seem
+more nearly akin to us than the true Frenchmen who inhabit almost
+all the rest of France.
+
+In the village of Gruchy, near Greville, in this wild and beautiful
+region of the Cotentin, there lived at the beginning of the present
+century a sturdy peasant family of the name of Millet.  The father
+of the family was one of the petty village landholders so common in
+France; a labourer who owned and tilled his own tiny patch of farm,
+with the aid of his wife and children.  We have now no class in
+England exactly answering to the French peasant proprietors, who
+form so large and important an element in the population just
+across the Channel.  The small landholder in France belongs by
+position to about the same level as our own agricultural labourer,
+and in many ways is content with a style of dress and a mode of
+living against which English labourers would certainly protest with
+horror.  And yet, he is a proprietor, with a proprietor's sense of
+the dignity of his position, and an ardent love of his own little
+much-subdivided corner of agricultural land.  On this he spends all
+his energies, and however many children he may have, he will try to
+make a livelihood for all by their united labour out of the soil,
+rather than let one of them go to seek his fortune by any other
+means in the great cities.  Thus the ground is often tilled up to
+an almost ridiculous extent, the entire labour of the family being
+sometimes expended in cultivating, manuring, weeding, and tending a
+patch of land perhaps hardly an acre in size.  It is quite touching
+to see the care and solicitude with which these toilsome peasants
+will laboriously lay out their bit of garden with fruits or
+vegetables, making every line almost mathematically regular,
+planting every pea at a measured distance, or putting a smooth flat
+pebble under every strawberry on the evenly ridged-up vines.  It is
+only in the very last resort that the peasant proprietor will
+consent to let one of his daughters go out to service, or send one
+of his sons adrift to seek his fortune as an artisan in the big,
+unknown, outer world.
+
+Millet the elder, however, had nine children, which is an unusually
+large number for a French peasant family (where the women ordinarily
+marry late in life); and his little son Jean Francois (the second
+child and eldest boy), though set to weed and hoe upon the wee farm
+in his boyhood, was destined by his father for some other life than
+that of a tiller of the soil.  He was born in the year before
+Waterloo--1814--and was brought up on his father's plot of land, in
+the hard rough way to which peasant children in France are always
+accustomed.  Bronzed by sun and rain, poorly clad, and ill-fed, he
+acquired as a lad, from the open air and the toilsome life he led,
+a vigour of constitution which enabled him to bear up against the
+numerous hardships and struggles of his later days.  "A Norman
+Peasant," he loved to call himself always, with a certain proud
+humility; and happily he had the rude health of one all his life
+long.
+
+Hard as he worked, little Francois' time was not entirely taken up
+with attending to the fields or garden.  He was a studious boy, and
+learned not only to read and write in French, but also to try some
+higher flights, rare indeed for a lad of his position.  His family
+possessed remarkable qualities as French peasants go; and one of
+his great-uncles, a man of admirable strength of character, a
+priest in the days of the great Revolution, had braved the godless
+republicans of his time, and though deprived of his cure, and
+compelled to labour for his livelihood in the fields, had yet
+guided the plough in his priestly garments.  His grandmother first
+taught him his letters; and when she had instructed him to the
+length of reading any French book that was put before him, the
+village priest took him in hand.  In France, the priest comes often
+from the peasant class, and remains in social position a member of
+that class as long as he lives.  But he always possesses a fair
+knowledge of Latin, the language in which all his religious
+services are conducted; and this knowledge serves as a key to much
+that his unlearned parishioners could never dream of knowing.
+Young Millet's parish priest taught him as much Latin as he knew
+himself; and so the boy was not only able to read the Bible in the
+Latin or Vulgate translation, but also to make acquaintance with
+the works of Virgil and several others of the great Roman poets.
+He read, too, the beautiful "Confessions" of St. Augustine, and
+the "Lives of the Saints," which he found in his father's scanty
+library, as well as the works of the great French preachers,
+Bossuet and Fenelon.  Such early acquaintance with these and many
+other masterpieces of higher literature, we may be sure, helped
+greatly to mould the lad's mind into that grand and sober shape
+which it finally acquired.
+
+Jean Francois' love of art was first aroused by the pictures in an
+old illustrated Bible which belonged to his father, and which he
+was permitted to look at on Sundays and festivals.  The child
+admired these pictures immensely, and asked leave to be permitted
+to copy them.  The only time he could find for the purpose,
+however, was that of the mid-day rest or siesta.  It is the custom
+in France, as in Southern Europe generally, for labourers to cease
+from work for an hour or so in the middle of the day; and during
+this "tired man's holiday," young Millet, instead of resting, used
+to take out his pencil and paper, and try his hand at reproducing
+the pictures in the big Bible.  His father was not without an
+undeveloped taste for art.  "See," he would say, looking into some
+beautiful combe or glen on the hillside--"see that little cottage
+half buried in the trees; how beautiful it is!  I think it ought to
+be drawn so--;" and then he would make a rough sketch of it on some
+scrap of paper.  At times he would model things with a bit of clay,
+or cut the outline of a flower or an animal with his knife on a
+flat piece of wood.  This unexercised talent Francois inherited in
+a still greater degree.  As time went on, he progressed to making
+little drawings on his own account; and we may be sure the priest
+and all the good wives of Gruchy had quite settled in their own
+minds before long that Jean Francois Millet's hands would be able
+in time to paint quite a beautiful altar-piece for the village
+church.
+
+By-and-by, when the time came for Francois to choose a trade, he
+being then a big lad of about nineteen, it was suggested to his
+father that young Millet might really make a regular painter--that
+is to say, an artist.  In France, the general tastes of the people
+are far more artistic than with us; and the number of painters who
+find work for their brushes in Paris is something immensely greater
+than the number in our own smoky, money-making London.  So there
+was nothing very remarkable, from a French point of view, in the
+idea of the young peasant turning for a livelihood to the
+profession of an artist.  But Millet's father was a sober and
+austere man, a person of great dignity and solemnity, who decided
+to put his son's powers to the test in a very regular and critical
+fashion.  He had often watched Francois drawing, and he thought
+well of the boy's work.  If he had a real talent for painting, a
+painter he should be; if not, he must take to some other craft,
+where he would have the chance of making himself a decent
+livelihood.  So he told Francois to prepare a couple of drawings,
+which he would submit to the judgment of M. Mouchel, a local
+painter at Cherbourg, the nearest large town, and capital of the
+department.  Francois duly prepared the drawings, and Millet the
+elder went with his, son to submit them in proper form for M.
+Mouchel's opinion.  Happily, M. Mouchel had judgment enough to see
+at a glance that the drawings possessed remarkable merit.  "You
+must be playing me a trick," he said; "that lad could never have
+made these drawings."  "I saw him do them with my own eyes,"
+answered the father warmly.  "Then," said Mouchel, "all I can say
+is this: he has in him the making of a great painter."  He accepted
+Millet as his pupil; and the young man set off for Cherbourg
+accordingly, to study with care and diligence under his new master.
+
+Cherbourg, though not yet at that time a great naval port, as it
+afterwards became, was a busy harbour and fishing town, where the
+young artist saw a great deal of a kind of life with which he
+possessed an immense sympathy.  The hard work of the fishermen
+putting out to sea on stormy evenings, or toiling with their nets
+ashore after a sleepless night, made a living picture which stamped
+itself deeply on his receptive mind.  A man of the people himself,
+born to toil and inured to it from babyhood, this constant scene of
+toiling and struggling humanity touched the deepest chord in his
+whole nature, so that some of the most beautiful and noble of his
+early pictures are really reminiscences of his first student days
+at Cherbourg.  But after he had spent a year in Mouchel's studio,
+sad news came to him from Gruchy.  His father was dying, and
+Francois was only just in time to see him before he passed away.
+If the family was to be kept together at all, Francois must return
+from his easel and palette, and take once more to guiding the
+plough.  With that earnest resolution which never forsook him,
+Millet decided to accept the inevitable.  He went back home once
+more, and gave up his longings for art in order to till the ground
+for his fatherless sisters.
+
+Luckily, however, his friends at Gruchy succeeded after awhile in
+sending him back again to Cherbourg, where he began to study under
+another master, Langlois, and to have hopes once more for his
+artistic future, now that he was free at last to pursue it in his
+own way.  At this time, he read a great deal--Shakespeare, Walter
+Scott, Byron, Goethe's "Faust," Victor Hugo and Chateaubriand; in
+fact, all the great works he could lay his hands upon.  Peasant as
+he was, he gave himself, half unconsciously, a noble education.
+Very soon, it became apparent that the Cherbourg masters could do
+nothing more for him, and that, if he really wished to perfect
+himself in art, he must go to Paris.  In France, the national
+interest felt in painting is far greater and more general than in
+England.  Nothing is commoner than for towns or departments to
+grant pensions (or as we should call them, scholarships) to
+promising lads who wish to study art in Paris.  Young Millet had
+attracted so much attention at Cherbourg, that the Council General
+of the Department of the Manche voted him a present of six hundred
+francs (about 24 pounds) to start him on the way; and the town of
+Cherbourg promised him an annual grant of four hundred francs more
+(about 16 pounds).  So up to Paris Millet went, and there was duly
+enrolled as a student at the Government "School of Fine-Arts."
+
+Those student days in Paris were days of hunger and cold, very
+often, which Millet bore with the steady endurance of a Norman
+peasant boy.  But they were also days of something worse to him--of
+effort misdirected, and of constant struggling against a system for
+which he was not fitted.  In fact, Millet was an original genius,
+whereas the teachers at the School of Fine Arts were careful and
+methodical rule-of-thumb martinets.  They wished to train Millet
+into the ordinary pattern, which he could not follow; and in the
+end, he left the school, and attached himself to the studio of Paul
+Delaroche, then the greatest painter of historical pictures in all
+Paris.  But even Delaroche, though an artist of deep feeling and
+power, did not fully understand his young Norman pupil.  He himself
+used to paint historical pictures in the grand style, full of
+richness and beauty; but his subjects were almost always chosen
+from the lives of kings or queens, and treated with corresponding
+calmness and dignity.  "The Young Princes in the Tower," "The
+Execution of Marie Antoinette," "The Death of Queen Elizabeth,"
+"Cromwell viewing the Body of Charles I."--these were the kind of
+pictures on which Delaroche loved to employ himself.  Millet, on
+the other hand, though also full of dignity and pathos, together
+with an earnestness far surpassing Delaroche's, did not care for
+these lofty subjects.  It was the dignity and pathos of labour that
+moved him most; the silent, weary, noble lives of the uncomplaining
+peasants, amongst whom his own days had been mostly passed.
+Delaroche could not make him out at all; he was such a curious,
+incomprehensible, odd young fellow!  "There, go your own way, if
+you will," the great master said to him at last; "for my part, I
+can make nothing of you."
+
+So, shortly after, Millet and his friend Marolle set up a studio
+for themselves in the Rue de l'Est in Paris.  The precise occasion
+of their going was this.  Millet was anxious to obtain the Grand
+Prize of Rome annually offered to the younger artists, and
+Delaroche definitely told him that his own influence would be used
+on behalf of another pupil.  After this, the young Norman felt that
+he could do better by following out his own genius in his own
+fashion.  At the Rue de l'Est, he continued to study hard, but he
+also devoted a large part of his time to painting cheap portraits--
+what artists call "pot-boilers;" mere hasty works dashed off anyhow
+to earn his daily livelihood.  For these pictures he got about ten
+to fifteen francs apiece,--in English money from eight to twelve
+shillings.  They were painted in a theatrical style, which Millet
+himself detested--all pink cheeks, and red lips, and blue satin,
+and lace collars; whereas his own natural style was one of great
+austerity and a certain earnest sombreness the exact reverse of the
+common Parisian taste to which he ministered.  However, he had to
+please his patrons--and, like a sensible man, he went on producing
+these cheap daubs to any extent required, for a living, while he
+endeavoured to perfect himself meanwhile for the higher art he was
+meditating for the future.  In the great galleries of the Louvre at
+Paris he found abundant models which he could study in the works of
+the old masters; and there, poring over Michael Angelo and
+Mantegna, he could recompense himself a little in his spare hours
+for the time he was obliged to waste on pinky-white faces and
+taffeta gowns.  To an artist by nature there is nothing harder than
+working perforce against the bent of one's own innate and
+instinctive feelings.
+
+In 1840, Millet found his life in Paris still so hard that he
+seemed for a time inclined to give up the attempt, and returned to
+Greville, where he painted a marine subject of the sort that was
+dearest to his heart--a group of sailors mending a sail.  Shortly
+after, however, he was back in Paris--the record of these years of
+hard struggle is not very clear--with his wife, a Cherbourg girl
+whom he had imprudently married while still barely able to support
+himself in the utmost poverty.  It was not till 1844 that the hard-
+working painter at last achieved his first success.  It was with a
+picture of a milkwoman, one of his own favourite peasant subjects;
+and the poetry and sympathy which he had thrown into so commonplace
+a theme attracted the attention of many critics among the
+cultivated Parisian world of art.  The "Milkwoman" was exhibited at
+the Salon (the great annual exhibition of works of art in Paris,
+like that of the Royal Academy in London, but on a far larger
+scale); and several good judges of art began immediately to
+inquire, "Who is Jean Francois Millet?"  Hunting his address out,
+a party of friendly critics presented themselves at his lodgings,
+only to learn that Madame Millet had just died, and that her
+husband, half in despair, had gone back again once more to his
+native Norman hills and valleys.
+
+But Millet was the last man on earth to sit down quietly with his
+hands folded, waiting for something or other to turn up.  At
+Cherbourg, he set to work once more, no doubt painting more "pot-
+boilers" for the respectable shopkeepers of the neighbourhood--
+complacent portraits, perhaps, of a stout gentleman with a large
+watch-chain fully displayed, and of a stout lady in a black silk
+dress and with a vacant smile; and by hook or by crook he managed
+to scrape together a few hundred francs, with which once more he
+might return to Paris.  But before he did so, he married again,
+this time more wisely.  His wife, Catharine Lemaire, was a brave
+and good woman, who knew how to appreciate her husband, and to
+second him well in all his further struggles and endeavours.  They
+went for a while to Havre, where Millet, in despair of getting
+better work, and not ashamed of doing anything honest to pay his
+way, actually took to painting sign-boards.  In this way he saved
+money enough to make a fresh start in Paris.  There, he continued
+his hard battle against the taste of the time; for French art was
+then dominated by the influence of men like Delaroche, or like
+Delacroix and Horace Vernet, who had accustomed the public to
+pictures of a very lofty, a very romantic, or a very fiery sort;
+and there were few indeed who cared for stern and sympathetic
+delineations of the French peasant's unlovely life of unremitting
+toil, such as Millet loved to set before them.  Yet, in spite of
+discouragement, he did well to follow out this inner prompting of
+his own soul; for in that direction he could do his best work--and
+the best work is always the best worth doing in the long run.
+There are some minds, of which Franklin's is a good type, so
+versatile and so shifty that they can turn with advantage to any
+opening that chances to offer, no matter in what direction; and
+such minds do right in seizing every opportunity, wherever it
+occurs.  But there are other minds, of which Gibson and Millet are
+excellent examples, naturally restricted to certain definite lines
+of thought or work; and such minds do right in persistently
+following up their own native talent, and refusing to be led aside
+by circumstances into any less natural or less promising channel.
+
+While living in Paris at this time, Millet painted several of his
+favourite peasant pictures, amongst others "The Workman's Monday,"
+which is a sort of parallel in painting to Burns's "Cotter's
+Saturday Night" in poetry.  Indeed, there is a great deal in Millet
+which strongly reminds one at every step of Burns.  Both were born
+of the agricultural labouring class; both remained peasants at
+heart, in feelings and sympathies, all their lives long; neither
+was ashamed of his origin, even in the days of his greatest fame;
+painter and poet alike loved best to choose their themes from the
+simple life of the poor whose trials and hardships they knew so
+well by bitter experience; and in each case they succeeded best in
+touching the hearts of others when they did not travel outside
+their own natural range of subjects.  Only (if Scotchmen will allow
+one to say so) there was in Millet a far deeper vein of moral
+earnestness than in Burns; he was more profoundly impressed by the
+dignity and nobility of labour; in his tender sympathy there was a
+touch of solemn grandeur which was wanting in the too genial and
+easy-going Ayrshire ploughman.
+
+In 1848, the year of revolutions, Millet painted his famous picture
+of "The Winnower," since considered as one of his finest works.
+Yet for a long time, though the critics praised it, it could not
+find a purchaser; till at last M. Ledru Rollin, a well-known
+politician, bought it for what Millet considered the capital price
+of five hundred francs (about 20 pounds).  It would now fetch a
+simply fabulous price, if offered for sale.  Soon after this
+comparative success Millet decided to leave Paris, where the
+surroundings indeed were little fitted to a man of his peculiarly
+rural and domestic tastes.  He would go where he might see the
+living models of his peasant friends for ever before him; where he
+could watch them leaning over the plough pressed deep into the
+earth; cutting the faggots with stout arms in the thick-grown
+copses; driving the cattle home at milking time with weary feet,
+along the endless, straight white high-roads of the French rural
+districts.  At the same time, he must be within easy reach of
+Paris; for though he had almost made up his mind not to exhibit any
+more at the Salon--people didn't care to see his reapers or his
+fishermen--he must still manage to keep himself within call of
+possible purchasers; and for this purpose he selected the little
+village of Barbizon, on the edge of the forest of Fontainebleau.
+
+The woods of Fontainebleau stand to Paris in somewhat the same
+relation that Windsor Great Park stands to London; only, the
+scenery is more forest-like, and the trees are big and antique
+looking.  By the outskirts of this great wood stands the pretty
+hamlet of Barbizon, a single long street of small peasant cottages,
+built with the usual French rural disregard of beauty or
+cleanliness.  At the top of the street, in a little three-roomed
+house, the painter and his wife settled down quietly; and here they
+lived for twenty-seven years, long after Millet's name had grown to
+be famous in the history of contemporary French painting.  An
+English critic, who visited the spot in the days of Millet's
+greatest celebrity, was astonished to find the painter, whom he had
+come to see, strolling about the village in rustic clothes, and
+even wearing the sabots or wooden shoes which are in France the
+social mark of the working classes, much as the smock-frock used
+once to be in the remoter country districts of England.  Perhaps
+this was a little bit of affectation on Millet's part--a sort of
+proud declaration of the fact that in spite of fame and honours he
+still insisted upon counting himself a simple peasant; but if so,
+it was, after all, a very pretty and harmless affectation indeed.
+Better to see a man sticking pertinaciously to his wooden shoes,
+than turning his back upon old friends and old associations in the
+days of his worldly prosperity.
+
+At Barbizon Millet's life moved on so quietly that there is nothing
+to record in it almost, save a long list of pictures painted, and a
+gradual growth, not in popularity (for THAT Millet never really
+attained at all), but in the esteem of the best judges, which of
+course brought with it at last, first ease, then comfort, and
+finally comparative riches.  Millet was able now to paint such
+subjects as pleased him best, and he threw himself into his work
+with all the fervour of his intensely earnest and poetical nature.
+Whatever might be the subject which he undertook, he knew how to
+handle it so that it became instinct with his own fine feeling for
+the life he saw around him.  In 1852 he painted his "Man spreading
+Manure."  In itself, that is not a very exalted or beautiful
+occupation; but what Millet saw in it was the man, not the manure--
+the toiling, sorrowing, human fellow-being, whose labour and whose
+spirit he knew so well how to appreciate.  And in this view of the
+subject he makes us all at once sympathize.  Other pictures of this
+period are such as "The Gleaners," "The Reapers," "A Peasant
+grafting a Tree," "The Potato Planters," and so forth.  These were
+very different subjects indeed from the dignified kings and queens
+painted by Delaroche, or the fiery battle-pieces of Delacroix but
+they touch a chord in our souls which those great painters fail to
+strike, and his treatment of them is always truthful, tender,
+melancholy, and exquisite.
+
+Bit by bit, French artistic opinion began to recognize the real
+greatness of the retiring painter at Barbizon.  He came to be
+looked upon as a true artist, and his pictures sold every year for
+increasingly large prices.  Still, he had not been officially
+recognized; and in France, where everything, even to art and the
+theatre, is under governmental regulation, this want of official
+countenance is always severely felt.  At last, in 1867, Millet was
+awarded the medal of the first class, and was appointed a Chevalier
+of the Legion of Honour.  The latter distinction carries with it
+the right to wear that little tag of ribbon on the coat which all
+Frenchmen prize so highly; for to be "decorated," as it is called,
+is in France a spur to ambition of something the same sort as a
+knighthood or a peerage in England, though of course it lies within
+the reach of a far greater number of citizens.  There is something
+to our ideas rather absurd in the notion of bestowing such a tag of
+ribbon on a man of Millet's aims and occupations; but all honours
+are honours just according to the estimation of the man who
+receives them and the society in which he lives; and Millet no
+doubt prized his admission to the Legion of Honour all the more
+because it had been so long delayed and so little truckled for.
+
+To the end of his days, Millet never left his beloved Barbizon.
+He stopped there, wandering about the fields, watching peasants at
+work, imprinting their images firmly upon his eye and brain, and
+then going home again to put the figures he had thus observed upon
+his vivid canvas.  For, strange to say, unlike almost every other
+great painter, Millet never painted from a model.  Instead of
+getting a man or woman to sit for him in the pose he required, he
+would go out into the meadows and look at the men and women at
+their actual daily occupations; and so keen and acute was his power
+of observation, and so retentive was his inner eye, that he could
+then recall almost every detail of action or manner as clearly as
+if he had the original present in his studio before him.  As a
+rule, such a practice is not to be recommended to any one who
+wishes to draw with even moderate accuracy; constant study of the
+actual object, and frequent comparison by glancing from object to
+copy, are absolutely necessary for forming a correct draughtsman.
+But Millet knew his own way best; and how wonderfully minute and
+painstaking must his survey have been when it enabled him to
+reproduce the picture of a person afterwards in every detail of
+dress or movement.
+
+He did not paint very fast.  He preferred doing good work to much
+work--an almost invariable trait of all the best workmen.  During
+the thirty-one years that he worked independently, he produced only
+eighty pictures--not more, on an average, than two or three a year.
+Compared with the rate at which most successful artists cover
+canvas to sell, this was very slow.  But then, Millet did not paint
+mainly to sell; he painted to satisfy his own strict ideas of what
+constituted the highest art.  His pictures are usually very simple
+in their theme; take, for example, his "Angelus," painted at the
+height of his fame, in 1867.  A man and a woman are working in the
+fields--two poor, simple-minded, weather-beaten, devout French
+peasants.  It is nightfall; the bell called the "Angelus" rings out
+from the church steeple, and the two poor souls, resting for a
+moment from their labours, devote a few seconds to the silent
+prayers enjoined by their church.  That is all; and yet in that one
+picture the sorrows, the toils, and the consolations of the needy
+French peasantry are summed up in a single glimpse of a pair of
+working and praying partners.
+
+Millet died somewhat suddenly in 1875.  Strong and hearty as he
+was, even the sturdy health of the Norman peasant had been
+undermined by the long hardships of his early struggles, and his
+constitution gave way at last with comparative rapidity.  Still, he
+had lived long enough to see his fame established, to enjoy ten
+years of ease and honour, and to find his work cordially admired by
+all those for whose admiration he could have cared to make an
+effort.  After his death, the pictures and unfinished sketches in
+his studio were sold for 321,000 francs, a little less than 13,000
+pounds.  The peasant boy of Greville had at last conquered all the
+difficulties which obstructed his path, and had fought his own way
+to fame and dignity.  And in so fighting, he had steadily resisted
+the temptation to pander to the low and coarse taste in art of the
+men by whom he was surrounded.  In spite of cold, and hunger, and
+poverty, he had gone on trying to put upon his canvas the purer,
+truer, and higher ideas with which his own beautiful soul was
+profoundly animated.  In that endeavour he nobly succeeded.  While
+too many contemporary French pictures are vicious and sensual in
+tone and feeling, every one of Millet's pictures is a sermon in
+colour--a thing to make us sympathize more deeply with our kind,
+and to send us away, saddened perhaps, yet ennobled and purified.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+JAMES GARFIELD, CANAL BOY.
+
+
+
+
+
+At the present time, the neighbourhood of Cleveland, Ohio, the
+busiest town along the southern shore of Lake Erie, may fairly rank
+as one of the richest agricultural districts in all America.  But
+when Abram Garfield settled down in the township of Orange in 1830,
+it was one of the wildest and most unpeopled woodland regions in
+the whole of the United States.  Pioneers from the older states had
+only just begun to make little clearings for themselves in the
+unbroken forest; and land was still so cheap that Abram Garfield
+was able to buy himself a tract of fifty acres for no more than 20
+pounds.  His brother-in-law's family removed there with him; and
+the whole strength of the two households was immediately employed
+in building a rough log hut for their common accommodation, where
+both the Garfields and the Boyntons lived together during the early
+days of their occupation.  The hut consisted of a mere square box,
+made by piling logs on top of one another, the spaces between being
+filled with mud, while the roof was formed of loose stone slabs.
+Huts of that sort are everywhere common among the isolation of the
+American backwoods; and isolated indeed they were, for the
+Garfields' nearest neighbours, when they first set up house, lived
+as far as seven miles away, across the uncleared forest.
+
+When Abram Garfield came to this lonely lodge in the primaeval
+woodlands, he had one son and one daughter.  In 1831, the year
+after his removal to his new home, a second boy was born into the
+family, whom his father named James Abram.  Before the baby was
+eighteen months old, the father died, and was buried alone, after
+the only possible fashion among such solitary settlers, in a corner
+of the wheat field which he himself had cleared of its stumps.  A
+widow's life is always a hard one, but in such a country and under
+such conditions it is even harder and more lonely than elsewhere.
+Mrs. Garfield's eldest boy, Thomas, was only eleven years old; and
+with the aid of this one ineffectual helper, she managed herself to
+carry on the farm for many years.  Only those who know the hard
+toil of a raw American township can have any idea what that really
+means.  A farmer's work in America is not like a farmer's work in
+England.  The man who occupies the soil is there at once his own
+landlord and his own labourer; and he has to contend with nature as
+nobody in England has had to contend with it for the last five
+centuries at least.  He finds the land covered with trees, which he
+has first to fell and sell as timber; then he must dig or burn out
+the stumps; clear the plot of boulders and large stones; drain it,
+fence it, plough it, and harrow it; build barns for the produce and
+sheds for the cows; in short, MAKE his farm, instead of merely
+TAKING it.  This is labour from which many strong men shrink in
+dismay, especially those who have come out fresh from a civilized
+and fully occupied land.  For a woman and a boy, it is a task that
+seems almost above their utmost powers.  Nevertheless, Mrs.
+Garfield and her son did not fail under it.  With her own hands,
+the mother split up the young trees info rude triangular rails to
+make the rough snake fences of the country--mere zigzags of wood
+laid one bit above the other; while the lad worked away bravely at
+sowing fall and spring wheat, hoeing Indian corn, and building a
+little barn for the harvest before the arrival of the long cold
+Ohio winter.  To such a family did the future President originally
+belong; and with them he must have shared those strong qualities of
+perseverance and industry which more than anything else at length
+secured his ultimate success in life.
+
+For James Garfield's history differs greatly in one point from that
+of most other famous working men, whose stories have been told in
+this volume.  There is no reason to believe that he was a man of
+exceptional or commanding intellect.  On the contrary, his mental
+powers appear to have been of a very respectable but quite ordinary
+and commonplace order.  It was not by brilliant genius that James
+Garfield made his way up in life; it was rather by hard work,
+unceasing energy, high principle, and generous enthusiasm for the
+cause of others.  Some of the greatest geniuses among working men,
+such as Burns, Tannahill, and Chatterton, though they achieved
+fame, and though they have enriched the world with many touching
+and beautiful works, must be considered to have missed success in
+life, so far as their own happiness was concerned, by their
+unsteadiness, want of self-control, or lack of fixed principle.
+Garfield, on the other hand, was not a genius; but by his sterling
+good qualities he nevertheless achieved what cannot but be regarded
+as a true success, and left an honourable name behind him in the
+history of his country.
+
+However poor an American township may be, it is seldom too poor to
+afford its children a moderate and humble education.  While James
+Garfield was still very young, the settlers in the neighbourhood
+decided to import a schoolmaster, whom they "boarded about" between
+them, after a fashion very common in rural western districts.  The
+school-house was only a log hut; the master was a lad of twenty;
+and the textbooks were of the very meagrest sort.  But at least
+James Garfield was thus enabled to read and write, which after all
+is the great first step on the road to all possible promotion.  The
+raw, uncouth Yankee lad who taught the Ohio boys, slept at Widow
+Garfield's, with Thomas and James; and the sons of the neighbouring
+settlers worked on the farm during the summer months, but took
+lessons when the long ice and snow of winter along the lake shore
+put a stop almost entirely for the time to their usual labours.
+
+James continued at school till he was twelve years old, and then,
+his brother Thomas (being by that time twenty-one) went away by
+agreement still further west to Michigan, leaving young Jim to take
+his place upon the little farm.  The fences were all completed, by
+this time; the barn was built, the ground was fairly brought under
+cultivation, and it required comparatively little labour to keep
+the land cropped after the rough fashion which amply satisfies
+American pioneers, with no rent to pay, and only their bare living
+to make out of the soil.  Thomas was going to fell trees in
+Michigan, to clear land there for a farmer; and he proposed to use
+his earnings (when he got them) for the purpose of building a
+"frame house" (that is to say, a house built of planks) instead of
+the existing log hut.  It must be added, in fairness, that hard as
+were the circumstances under which the young Garfields lived, they
+were yet lucky in their situation in a new country, where wages
+were high, and where the struggle for life is far less severe or
+competitive than in old settled lands like France and England.
+Thomas, in fact; would get boarded for nothing in Michigan, and so
+would be able easily to save almost all his high wages for the
+purpose of building the frame house.
+
+So James had to take to the farm in summer, while in the winter he
+began to work as a sort of amateur carpenter in a small way.  As
+yet he had lived entirely in the backwoods, and had never seen a
+town or even a village; but his education in practical work had
+begun from his very babyhood, and he was handy after the usual
+fashion of American or colonial boys--ready to turn his hand to
+anything that happened to present itself.  In new countries, where
+everybody has not got neighbours and workmen within call, such
+rough-and-ready handiness is far more common than in old England.
+The one carpenter of the neighbourhood asked James to help him, on
+the proud day when Tom brought back his earnings from Michigan, and
+set about the building of the frame house, for which he had already
+collected the unhewn timber.  From that first beginning, by the
+time he was thirteen, James was promoted to assist in building a
+barn; and he might have taken permanently to a carpenter's life,
+had it not been that his boyish passion for reading had inspired
+him with an equal passion for going to sea.  He had read Marryatt's
+novels and other sailor tales--what boy has not?--and he was fired
+with the usual childish desire to embark upon that wonderful life
+of chasing buccaneers, fighting pirates, capturing prizes, or
+hunting hidden treasure, which is a lad's brilliantly coloured
+fancy picture of an everyday sailor's wet, cold, cheerless
+occupation.
+
+At last, when James was about fifteen, his longing for the sea grew
+so strong that his mother, by way of a compromise, allowed him to
+go and try his luck with the Lake Erie captains at Cleveland.
+Shipping on the great lakes, where one can see neither bank from
+the middle of the wide blue sheet of water, and where wrecks are
+unhappily as painfully frequent as on our own coasts, was quite
+sufficiently like going to sea to suit the adventurous young
+backwoodsman to the top of his bent.  But when he got to Cleveland,
+a fortunate disappointment awaited him.  The Cleveland captains
+declined his services in such vigorous seafaring language (not
+unmixed with many unnecessary oaths), that he was glad enough to
+give up the idea of sailoring, and take a place as driver of a
+canal boat from Cleveland to Pittsburg in Pennsylvania, the boat
+being under the charge of one of his own cousins.  Copper ore was
+then largely mined on Lake Superior, where it is very abundant,
+carried by ship to Cleveland, down the chain of lakes, and there
+transferred to canal boats, which took it on to Pittsburg, the
+centre of a great coal and manufacturing district in Pennsylvania,
+to be smelted and employed in various local arts.  Young Garfield
+stuck for a little while to the canal business.  He plodded along
+wearily upon the bank, driving his still wearier horse before him,
+and carrying ore down to Pittsburg with such grace as he best
+might; but it didn't somehow quite come up to his fancy picture of
+the seaman's life.  It was dull and monotonous, and he didn't care
+for it much.  In genuine American language, "he didn't find it up
+to sample."  The sea might be very well in its way; but a canal was
+a very different matter indeed.  So after a fair trial, James
+finally gave the business up, and returned to his mother on the
+little homestead, ill and tired with his long tramping.
+
+While he was at home, the schoolmaster of the place, who saw that
+the lad had abilities, was never tired of urging him to go to
+school, and do himself justice by getting himself a first-rate
+education, or at least as good a one as could be obtained in
+America.  James was ready enough to take this advice, if the means
+were forthcoming; but how was he to do so?  "Oh, that's easy
+enough," said young Bates, the master.  "You'll only have to work
+out of hours as a carpenter, take odd jobs in your vacations, live
+plainly, and there you are."  In England there are few schools
+where such a plan would be practicable; but in rough-and-ready
+America, where self-help is no disgrace, there are many, and they
+are all well attended.  In the neighbouring town of Chester, a
+petty Baptist sect had started a young school which they named
+Geauga Seminary (there are no plain schools in America--they are
+all "academies" or "institutes"); and to this simple place young
+Garfield went, to learn and work as best he might for his own
+advancement.  A very strange figure he must then have cut, indeed;
+for a person who saw him at the time described him as wearing a
+pair of trousers he had long outworn, rough cow-hide boots, a
+waistcoat much too short for him, and a thread-bare coat, with
+sleeves that only reached a little below the elbows.  Of such stuff
+as that, with a stout heart and an eager brain, the budding
+presidents of the United States are sometimes made.
+
+James soon found himself humble lodgings at an old woman's in
+Chester, and he also found himself a stray place at a carpenter's
+shop in the town, where he was able to do three hours' work out of
+school time every day, besides giving up the whole of his Saturday
+holiday to regular labour.  It was hard work, this schooling and
+carpentering side by side; but James throve upon it; and at the end
+of the first term he was not only able to pay all his bill for
+board and lodging, but also to carry home a few dollars in his
+pocket by way of savings.
+
+James stopped three years at the "seminary" at Chester; and in the
+holidays he employed himself by teaching in the little township
+schools among the country districts.  There is generally an opening
+for young students to earn a little at such times by instructing
+younger boys than themselves in reading, writing, and arithmetic;
+and the surrounding farmers, who want schooling for their boys, are
+glad enough to take the master in on the "boarding round" system,
+for the sake of his usefulness in overlooking the lads in the
+preparation of their home lessons.  It is a simple patriarchal
+life, very different from anything we know in England; and though
+Ohio was by this time a far more settled and populated place than
+when Abram Garfield first went there, it was still quite possible
+to manage in this extremely primitive and family fashion.  The fact
+is, though luxuries were comparatively unknown, food was cheap and
+abundant; and a young teacher who was willing to put his heart into
+his work could easily earn more than enough to live upon in rough
+comfort.  Sometimes the school-house was a mere log hut, like that
+in which young Garfield had been born; but, at any rate, it was
+work to do, and food to eat, and that alone was a great thing for
+a lad who meant to make his own way in the world by his own
+exertions.
+
+Near the end of his third year at Chester, James met, quite
+accidentally, with a young man who had come from a little embryo
+"college," of the sort so common in rising American towns, at a
+place called Hiram in Ohio.  American schools are almost as
+remarkable as American towns for the oddity and ugliness of their
+names; and this "college" was known by the queer and meaningless
+title of the "Eclectic Institute."  It was conducted by an obscure
+sect who dub themselves "The Disciples' Church," to which young
+Garfield's father and mother had both belonged.  His casual
+acquaintance urged upon him strongly the desirability of attending
+the institute; and James, who had already begun to learn Latin, and
+wished to learn more, was easily persuaded to try this particular
+school rather than any other.
+
+In August, 1851, James Garfield, then aged nearly twenty, presented
+himself at the "Eclectic Institute," in the farm-labourer's clothes
+which were his only existing raiment.  He asked to see the
+"president" of the school, and told him plainly that he wished to
+come there for education, but that he was poor, and if he came, he
+must work for his living.  "What can you do?" asked the president.
+"Sweep the floors, light the fires, ring the bell, and make myself
+generally useful," answered the young backwoodsman.  The president,
+pleased with his eagerness, promised to try him for a fortnight;
+and at the end of the fortnight, Garfield had earned his teaching
+so well that he was excused from all further fees during the
+remainder of his stay at the little institute.  His post was by no
+mean an easy one, for he was servant-of-all-work as well as
+student; but he cared very little for that as long as he could gain
+the means for self-improvement.
+
+Hiram was a small town, as ugly as its name.  Twelve miles from a
+railway, a mere agricultural centre, of the rough back-country
+sort, all brand new and dreary looking, with a couple of wooden
+churches, half a dozen wooden shops, two new intersecting streets
+with wooden sidewalks, and that was all.  The "institute" was a
+square brick block, planted incongruously in the middle of an
+Indian-corn plantation; and the students were the sons and
+daughters of the surrounding farmers, for (as in most western
+schools) both sexes were here educated together.  But the place
+suited Garfield far better than an older and more dignified
+university would have done.  The other students knew no more than
+he did, so that he did not feel himself at a disadvantage; they
+were dressed almost as plainly as himself; and during the time he
+was at Hiram he worked away with a will at Latin, Greek, and the
+higher mathematics, so as to qualify himself for a better place
+hereafter.  Meanwhile, the local carpenter gave him plenty of
+planing to do, with which he managed to pay his way; and as he had
+to rise before five every morning to ring the first bell, he was
+under no danger of oversleeping himself.  By 1853, he had made so
+much progress in his studies that he was admitted as a sort of
+pupil teacher, giving instruction himself in the English department
+and in rudimentary Greek and Latin, while he went on with his own
+studies with the aid of the other teachers.
+
+James had now learnt as much as the little "Eclectic Institute"
+could possibly teach him, and he began to think of going to some
+better college in the older-settled and more cultivated eastern
+states, where he might get an education somewhat higher than was
+afforded him by the raw "seminaries" and "academies" of his native
+Ohio.  True, his own sect, the "Disciples' Church," had got up a
+petty university of their own, "Bethany College"--such self-styled
+colleges swarm all over the United States; but James didn't much
+care for the idea of going to it.  "I was brought up among the
+Disciples," he said; "I have mixed chiefly among them; I know
+little of other people; it will enlarge my views and give me more
+liberal feelings if a try a college elsewhere, conducted otherwise;
+if I see a little of the rest of the world."  Moreover, those were
+stirring times in the States.  The slavery question was beginning
+to come uppermost.  The men of the free states in the north and
+west were beginning to say among themselves that they would no
+longer tolerate that terrible blot upon American freedom--the
+enslavement of four million negroes in the cotton-growing south.
+James Garfield felt all his soul stirred within him by this great
+national problem--the greatest that any modern nation has ever had
+to solve for itself.  Now, his own sect, the Disciples, and their
+college, Bethany, were strongly tinctured with a leaning in favour
+of slavery, which young James Garfield utterly detested.  So he
+made up his mind to having nothing to do with the accursed thing,
+but to go east to some New England college, where he would mix
+among men of culture, and where he would probably find more
+congenial feelings on the slavery question.
+
+Before deciding, he wrote to three eastern colleges, amongst others
+to Yale, the only American university which by its buildings and
+surroundings can lay any claim to compare, even at a long distance,
+in beauty and associations, with the least among European
+universities.  The three colleges gave him nearly similar answers;
+but one of them, in addition to the formal statement of terms and
+so forth, added the short kindly sentence, "If you come here, we
+shall be glad to do what we can for you."  It was only a small
+polite phrase; but it took the heart of the rough western boy.
+If other things were about the same, he said, he would go to the
+college which offered him, as it were, a friendly grasp of the
+hand.  He had saved a little money at Hiram; and he proposed now to
+go on working for his living, as he had hitherto done, side by side
+with his regular studies.  But his brother, who was always kind and
+thoughtful to him, would not hear of this.  Thomas had prospered
+meanwhile in his own small way, and he insisted upon lending James
+such a sum as would cover his necessary expenses for two years at
+an eastern university.  James insured his life for the amount, so
+that Thomas might not be a loser by his brotherly generosity in
+case of his death before repayment could be made; and then, with
+the money safe in his pocket, he started off for his chosen goal,
+the Williams College, in one of the most beautiful and hilly parts
+of Massachusetts.
+
+During the three years that Garfield was at this place, he studied
+hard and regularly, so much so that at one time his brain showed
+symptoms of giving way under the constant strain.  In the
+vacations, he took a trip into Vermont, a romantic mountain state,
+where he opened a writing school at a little country village; and
+another into the New York State, where he engaged himself in a
+similar way at a small town on the banks of the lovely Hudson
+river.  At college, in spite of his rough western dress and
+manners, he earned for himself the reputation of a thoroughly good
+fellow.  Indeed, geniality and warmth of manner, qualities always
+much prized by the social American people, were very marked traits
+throughout of Garfield's character, and no doubt helped him greatly
+in after life in, rising to the high summit which he finally
+reached.  It was here, too, that he first openly identified himself
+with the anti-slavery party, which was then engaged in fighting out
+the important question whether any new slave states should be
+admitted to the Union.  Charles Sumner, the real grand central
+figure of that noble struggle, was at that moment thundering in
+Congress against the iniquitous extension of the slave-holding
+area, and was employing all his magnificent powers to assail the
+abominable Fugitive Slave Bill, for the return of runaway negroes,
+who escaped north, into the hands of their angry masters.  The
+American colleges are always big debating societies, where
+questions of politics are regularly argued out among the students;
+and Garfield put himself at the head of the anti-slavery movement
+at his own little university.  He spoke upon the subject frequently
+before the assembled students, and gained himself a considerable
+reputation, not only as a zealous advocate of the rights of the
+negro, but also as an eloquent orator and a powerful argumentative
+debater.
+
+In 1856, Garfield took his degree at Williams College, and had now
+finished his formal education.  By that time, he was a fair though
+not a great scholar, competently read in the Greek and Latin
+literatures, and with a good knowledge of French and German.  He
+was now nearly twenty-five years old; and his experience was large
+and varied enough to make him already into a man of the world.  He
+had been farmer, carpenter, canal driver, and student; he had seen
+the primitive life of the forest, and the more civilized society of
+the Atlantic shore; he had taught in schools in many states; he had
+supported himself for years by his own labours; and now, at an age
+when many young men are, as a rule, only just beginning life on
+their own account, he had practically raised himself from his own
+class into the class of educated and cultivated gentlemen.  As soon
+as he had taken his degree, his old friends, the trustees of the
+"Eclectic Institute" at Hiram, proud of their former sweeper and
+bell-ringer, called him back at a good salary as teacher of Greek
+and Latin.  It was then just ten years since he had toiled wearily
+along the tow-path of the Ohio and Pennsylvania Canal.
+
+As a teacher, Garfield seems to have been eminently successful.
+His genial character and good-natured way of explaining things made
+him a favourite at once with the rough western lads he had to
+teach, who would perhaps have thought a more formal teacher stiff
+and stuckup.  Garfield was one of themselves; he knew their ways
+and their manners; he could make allowances for their awkwardness
+and bluntness of speech; he could adopt towards them the exact tone
+which put them at home at once with their easy-going instructor.
+Certainly, he inspired all his pupils with an immense love and
+devotion for him; and it is less easy to inspire those feelings in
+a sturdy Ohio farmer than in most other varieties of the essentially
+affectionate human species.
+
+From 1857 to 1861, Garfield remained at Hiram, teaching and working
+very hard.  His salary, though a good one for the time and place,
+was still humble according to our English notions; but it sufficed
+for his needs; and as yet it would have seemed hardly credible that
+in only twenty years the Ohio schoolmaster would rise to be
+President of the United States.  Indeed, it is only in America,
+that country of peculiarly unencumbered political action, where
+every kind of talent is most rapidly recognized and utilized, that
+this particular form of swift promotion is really possible.  But
+while Garfield was still at his Institute, he was taking a vigorous
+part in local politics, especially on the slavery question.
+Whenever there was a political meeting at Hiram, the young
+schoolmaster was always called upon to take the anti-slavery side;
+and he delivered himself so effectively upon this favourite topic
+that he began to be looked upon as a rising political character.
+In America, politics are less confined to any one class than in
+Europe; and there would be nothing unusual in the selection of a
+schoolmaster who could talk to a seat in the local or general
+legislature.  The practice of paying members makes it possible for
+comparatively poor men to offer themselves as candidates; and
+politics are thus a career, in the sense of a livelihood, far more
+than in any other country.
+
+In 1858, Garfield married a lady who had been a fellow-student of
+his in earlier days, and to whom he had been long engaged.  In the
+succeeding year, he got an invitation which greatly pleased and
+flattered him.  The authorities at Williams College asked him to
+deliver the "Master's Oration" at their annual festival; an unusual
+compliment to pay to so young a man, and one who had so recently
+taken his degree.  It was the first opportunity he had ever had for
+a pleasure-trip, and taking his young wife with him (proud indeed,
+we may be sure, at this earliest honour of his life, the precursor
+of so many more) he went to Massachusetts by a somewhat roundabout
+but very picturesque route, down the Great Lakes, through the
+Thousand Islands, over the St. Lawrence rapids, and on to Quebec,
+the only town in America which from its old-world look can lay
+claim to the sort of beauty which so many ancient European cities
+abundantly possess.  He delivered his address with much applause,
+and returned to his Ohio home well satisfied with this pleasant
+outing.
+
+Immediately on his return, the speech-making schoolmaster was met
+by a very sudden and unexpected request that he would allow himself
+to be nominated for the State legislature.  Every state of the
+Union has its own separate little legislative body, consisting of
+two houses; and it was to the upper of these, the Senate of Ohio,
+that James Garfield was asked to become a candidate.  The
+schoolmaster consented; and as those were times of very great
+excitement, when the South was threatening to secede if a President
+hostile to the slave-owning interest was elected, the contest was
+fought out almost entirely along those particular lines.  Garfield
+was returned as senator by a large majority, and took his seat in
+the Ohio Senate in January, 1860.  There, his voice was always
+raised against slavery, and he was recognized at once as one of the
+ablest speakers in the whole legislature.
+
+In 1861, the great storm burst over the States.  In the preceding
+November, Abraham Lincoln had been elected President.  Lincoln was
+himself, like Garfield, a self-made man, who had risen from the
+very same pioneer labourer class;--a wood-cutter and rail-splitter
+in the backwoods of Illinois, he had become a common boatman on the
+Mississippi, and had there improved his mind by reading eagerly in
+all his spare moments.  With one of those rapid rises so commonly
+made by self-taught lads in America, he had pushed his way into the
+Illinois legislature by the time he was twenty-five, and qualified
+himself to practise as a barrister at Springfield.  His shrewd
+original talents had raised him with wonderful quickness into the
+front ranks of his own party; and when the question between the
+North and South rose into the region of practical politics, Lincoln
+was selected by the republicans (the antislavery group) as their
+candidate for the Presidency of the United States.  This selection
+was a very significant one in several ways; Lincoln was a very
+strong opponent of slavery, and his candidature showed the southern
+slave-owners that if the Republicans were successful in the
+contest, a vigorous move against the slave-holding oligarchy would
+at once be made.  But it was also significant in the fact that
+Lincoln was a western man; it was a sign that the farmers and
+grangers of the agricultural west were beginning to wake up
+politically and throw themselves into the full current of American
+State affairs.  On both these grounds, Lincoln's nomination must
+have been deeply interesting to Garfield, whose own life had been
+so closely similar, and who was destined, twenty years later, to
+follow him to the same goal.
+
+Lincoln was duly elected, and the southern states began to secede.
+The firing upon Fort Sumter by the South Carolina secessionists was
+the first blow struck in that terrible war.  Every man who was
+privileged to live in America at that time (like the present
+writer) cannot recall without a glow of recollection the memory of
+the wild eagerness with which the North answered that note of
+defiance, and went forth with overpowering faith and eagerness to
+fight the good fight on behalf of human freedom.  Such a spontaneous
+outburst of the enthusiasm of humanity has never been known, before
+or since.  President Lincoln immediately called for a supply of
+seventy-five thousand men.  In the Ohio Senate, his message was read
+amid tumultuous applause; and the moment the sound of the cheers
+died away, Garfield, as natural spokesman of the republican party,
+sprang to his feet, and moved in a short and impassioned speech that
+the state of Ohio should contribute twenty thousand men and three
+million dollars as its share in the general preparations.  The
+motion was immediately carried with the wildest demonstrations of
+fervour, and Ohio, with all the rest of the North, rose like one man
+to put down by the strong hand the hideous traffic in human flesh
+and blood.
+
+During those fiery and feverish days, every citizen of the loyal
+states felt himself to be, in reserve at least, a possible soldier.
+It was necessary to raise, drill, and render effective in an
+incredibly short time a large army; and it would have been
+impossible to do so had it not been for the eager enthusiasm with
+which civilians of every sort enlisted, and threw themselves into
+their military duties with almost incredible devotion.  Garfield
+felt that he must bear his own part in the struggle by fighting it
+out, not in the Senate but on the field; and his first move was to
+obtain a large quantity of arms from the arsenal in the doubtfully
+loyal state of Missouri.  In this mission he was completely
+successful; and he was next employed to raise and organize two new
+regiments of Ohio infantry.  Garfield, of course, knew absolutely
+nothing of military matters at that time; but it was not a moment
+to stand upon questions of precedence or experience; the born
+organizers came naturally to the front, and Garfield was one of
+them.  Indeed, the faculty for organization seems innate in the
+American people, so that when it became necessary to raise and
+equip so large a body of men at a few weeks' notice, the task was
+undertaken offhand by lawyers, doctors, shopkeepers, and
+schoolmasters, without a minute's hesitation, and was performed on
+the whole with distinguished success.
+
+When Garfield had organized his regiments, the Governor asked him
+to accept the post of colonel to one of them.  But Garfield at
+first mistrusted his own powers in this direction.  How should he,
+who had hitherto been poring chiefly over the odes of Horace (his
+favourite poet), now take so suddenly to leading a thousand men
+into actual battle?  He would accept only a subordinate position,
+he said, if a regular officer of the United States army, trained at
+the great military academy at West Point, was placed in command.
+So the Governor told him to go among his own farmer friends in his
+native district, and recruit a third regiment, promising to find
+him a West Point man as colonel, if one was available.  Garfield
+accepted the post of lieutenant-colonel, raised the 42nd Ohio
+regiment, chiefly among his own old pupils at Hiram, and set off
+for the seat of operations.  At the last moment the Governor failed
+to find a regular officer to lead these raw recruits, every
+available man being already occupied, and Garfield found himself,
+against his will, compelled to undertake the responsible task of
+commanding the regiment.  He accepted the task thus thrust upon
+him, and as if by magic transformed himself at once from a
+schoolmaster into an able soldier.
+
+In less than one month, Colonel Garfield took his raw troops into
+action in the battle of Middle Creek, and drove the Confederate
+General Marshall, with far larger numbers, out of his intrenchments,
+compelling him to retreat into Virginia.  This timely victory did
+much to secure the northern advance along the line of the
+Mississippi.  During the whole of the succeeding campaign Garfield
+handled his regiment with such native skill and marked success that
+the Government appointed him Brigadier-General for his bravery and
+military talent.  In spite of all his early disadvantages, he had
+been the youngest member of the Ohio Senate, and now he was the
+youngest general in the whole American army.
+
+Shortly after, the important victory of Chickamauga was gained
+almost entirely by the energy and sagacity of General Garfield.
+For this service, he was raised one degree in dignity, receiving
+his commission as Major-General.  He served altogether only two
+years and three months in the army.
+
+But while Garfield was at the head of his victorious troops in
+Kentucky, his friends in Ohio were arranging, without his consent
+or knowledge, to call him away to a very different sphere of work.
+They nominated Garfield as their candidate for the United States
+House of Representatives at Washington.  The General himself was
+unwilling to accede to their request, when it reached him.  He
+thought he could serve the country better in the field than in
+Congress.  Besides, he was still a comparatively poor man.  His
+salary as Major-General was double that of a member of the House;
+and for his wife's and children's sake he hesitated to accept the
+lesser position.  Had he continued in the army to the end of the
+war, he would doubtless have risen to the very highest honours of
+that stirring epoch.  But President Lincoln was very anxious that
+Garfield should come into the Congress, where his presence would
+greatly strengthen the President's hands; and with a generous self-
+denial which well bespeaks his thorough loyalty, Garfield gave
+up his military post and accepted a place in the House of
+Representatives.  He took his seat in December, 1863.
+
+For seventeen years, General Garfield sat in the general
+legislature of the United States as one of the members for Ohio.
+During all that time, he distinguished himself most honourably as
+the fearless advocate of honest government, and the pronounced
+enemy of those underhand dodges and wire-pulling machinery which
+are too often the disgrace of American politics.  He was opposed to
+all corruption and chicanery, especially to the bad system of
+rewarding political supporters with places under Government, which
+has long been the chief blot upon American republican institutions.
+As a person of stalwart honesty and singleness of purpose, he made
+himself respected by both sides alike.  Politically speaking,
+different men will judge very differently of Garfield's acts in the
+House of Representatives.  Englishmen especially cannot fail to
+remark that his attitude towards ourselves was almost always one of
+latent hostility; but it is impossible for anybody to deny that his
+conduct was uniformly guided by high principle, and a constant
+deference to what he regarded as the right course of action.
+
+In 1880, when General Garfield had already risen to be the
+acknowledged leader of the House of Representatives, his Ohio
+supporters put him in nomination for the upper chamber, the Senate.
+They wished Garfield to come down to the state capital and canvas
+for support; but this the General would not hear of.  "I never
+asked for any place yet," he said, "except the post of bell-ringer
+and general sweeper at the Hiram Institute, and I won't ask for one
+now."  But at least, his friends urged, he would be on the spot to
+encourage and confer with his partisans.  No, Garfield answered; if
+they wished to elect him they must elect him in his absence; he
+would avoid all appearance, even, of angling for office.  The
+result was that all the other candidates withdrew, and Garfield was
+elected by acclamation.
+
+After the election he went down to Ohio and delivered a speech to
+his constituents, a part of which strikingly illustrates the
+courage and independence of the backwoods schoolmaster.  "During
+the twenty years that I have been in public life," he said, "almost
+eighteen of it in the Congress of the United States, I have tried
+to do one thing.  Whether I was mistaken or otherwise, it has been
+the plan of my life to follow my conviction, at whatever personal
+cost to myself.  I have represented for many years a district in
+Congress whose approbation I greatly desired; but though it may
+seem, perhaps, a little egotistical to say it, I yet desired still
+more the approbation of one person, and his name was Garfield.  He
+is the only man that I am compelled to sleep with, and eat with,
+and live with, and die with; and if I could not have his
+approbation I should have bad companionship."
+
+Only one higher honour could now fall to the lot of a citizen of
+the United States.  The presidency was the single post to which
+Garfield's ambition could still aspire.  That honour came upon him,
+like all the others, without his seeking; and it came, too, quite
+unexpectedly.  Five months later, in the summer of 1880, the
+National Republican Convention met to select a candidate for their
+party at the forthcoming presidential election.  Every four years,
+before the election, each party thus meets to decide upon the man
+to whom its votes will be given at the final choice.  After one or
+two ineffectual attempts to secure unanimity in favour of other and
+more prominent politicians, the Convention with one accord chose
+James Garfield for its candidate--a nomination which was quite as
+great a surprise to Garfield himself as to all the rest of the
+world.  He was elected President of the United States in November,
+1880.
+
+It was a marvellous rise for the poor canal boy, the struggling
+student, the obscure schoolmaster, thus to find himself placed at
+the head of one among the greatest nations of the earth.  He was
+still less than fifty, and he might reasonably have looked forward
+to many years of a happy, useful, and honourable life.  Nevertheless,
+it is impossible to feel that Garfield's death was other than a
+noble and enviable one.  He was cut off suddenly in the very moment
+of his brightest success, before the cares and disappointments of
+office had begun to dim the pleasure of his first unexpected
+triumph.  He died a martyr to a good and honest cause, and his
+death-bed was cheered and alleviated by the hushed sorrow and
+sympathy of an entire nation--one might almost truthfully add, of
+the whole civilized world.
+
+From the first, President Garfield set his face sternly against the
+bad practice of rewarding political adherents by allowing them to
+nominate officials in the public service--a species of covert
+corruption sanctioned by long usage in the United States.  This
+honest and independent conduct raised up for him at once a host of
+enemies among his own party.  The talk which they indulged in
+against the President produced a deep effect upon a half-crazy and
+wildly egotistic French-Canadian of the name of Guiteau, who had
+emigrated to the States and become an American citizen.  General
+Garfield had arranged a trip to New England in the summer of 1881,
+to attend the annual festival at his old school, the Williams
+College, Massachusetts; and for that purpose he left the White
+House (the President's official residence at Washington) on July 2.
+As he stood in the station of the Baltimore and Potomac Railway,
+arm in arm with Mr. Blaine, the Secretary of State, Guiteau
+approached him casually, and, drawing out a pistol, fired two shots
+in rapid succession, one of which took effect on the President
+above the third rib.  The assassin was at once secured, and the
+wounded President was carried back carefully to the White House.
+
+Almost everybody who reads this book will remember the long
+suspense, while the President lay stretched upon his bed for weeks
+and weeks together, with all Europe and America watching anxiously
+for any sign of recovery, and sympathizing deeply with the wounded
+statesman and his devoted wife.  Every effort that was possible was
+made to save him, but the wound was past all surgical skill.  After
+lingering long with the stored-up force of a good constitution,
+James Garfield passed away at last of blood-poisoning, more deeply
+regretted perhaps than any other man whom the present generation
+can remember.
+
+It is only in America that precisely such a success as Garfield's
+is possible for people who spring, as he did, from the midst of the
+people.  In old-settled and wealthy countries we must be content,
+at best, with slower and less lofty promotion.  But the lesson of
+Garfield's life is not for America only, but for the whole world of
+workers everywhere.  The same qualities which procured his success
+there will produce a different, but still a solid success, anywhere
+else.  As Garfield himself fittingly put it, with his usual keen
+American common sense, "There is no more common thought among young
+people than the foolish one, that by-and-by something will turn up
+by which they will suddenly achieve fame or fortune.  No, young
+gentlemen; things don't turn up in this world unless somebody turns
+them up."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+THOMAS EDWARD, SHOEMAKER.
+
+
+
+
+
+It is the object of this volume to set forth the lives of working
+men who through industry, perseverance, and high principle have
+raised themselves by their own exertions from humble beginnings.
+Raised themselves!  Yes; but to what?  Not merely, let us hope, to
+wealth and position, not merely to worldly respect and high office,
+but to some conspicuous field of real usefulness to their fellow
+men.  Those whose lives we have hitherto examined did so raise
+themselves by their own strenuous energy and self-education.
+Either, like Garfield and Franklin, they served the State zealously
+in peace or war; or else, like Stephenson and Telford, they
+improved human life by their inventions and engineering works; or,
+again, like Herschel and Fraunhofer, they added to the wide field
+of scientific knowledge; or finally, like Millet and Gibson, they
+beautified the world with their noble and inspiring artistic
+productions.  But in every one of these cases, the men whose lives
+we have been here considering did actually rise, sooner or later,
+from the class of labourers into some other class socially and
+monetarily superior to it.  Though they did great good in other
+ways to others, they did still as a matter of fact succeed
+themselves in quitting the rank in which they were born, and rising
+to some other rank more or less completely above it.
+
+Now, it will be clear to everybody that so long as our present
+social arrangements exist, it must be impossible for the vast mass
+of labouring men ever to do anything of the sort.  It is to be
+desired, indeed, that every labouring man should by industry and
+thrift secure independence in the end for himself and his family;
+but however much that may be the case, it will still rest certain
+that the vast mass of men will necessarily remain workers to the
+last; and that no attempt to raise individual working men above
+their own class into the professional or mercantile classes can
+ever greatly benefit the working masses as a whole.  What is most
+of all desirable is that the condition, the aims, and the tastes of
+working men, as working men, should be raised and bettered; that
+without necessarily going outside their own ranks, they should
+become more prudent, more thrifty, better educated, and wider-
+minded than many of their predecessors have been in the past.
+Under such circumstances, it is surely well to set before ourselves
+some examples of working men who, while still remaining members of
+their own class, have in the truest and best sense "raised
+themselves" so as to attain the respect and admiration of others
+whether their equals or superiors in the artificial scale.  Dr.
+Smiles, who has done much to illustrate the history of the picked
+men among the labouring orders, has chosen two or three lives of
+such a sort for investigation, and from them we may select a single
+one as an example of a working man's career rendered conspicuous by
+qualities other than those that usually secure external success.
+
+Thomas Edward, associate of the Linnean Society, though a Scotchman
+all his life long, was accidentally born (so to speak) at Gosport,
+near Portsmouth, on Christmas Day, 1814.  His father was in the
+Fifeshire militia, and in those warlike days, when almost all the
+regulars were on the Continent, fighting Napoleon, militia
+regiments used to be ordered about the country from one place to
+another, to watch the coast or mount guard over the French
+prisoners, in the most unaccountable fashion.  So it happened,
+oddly enough, that Thomas Edward, a Scotchman of the Scotch, was
+born close under the big forts of Portsmouth harbour.
+
+After Waterloo, however, the Fifeshire regiment was sent home
+again; and the militia being before long disbanded, John Edward,
+our hero's father, went to live at Aberdeen, where he plied his
+poor trade of a hand-loom linen weaver for many years.  It was on
+the green at Aberdeen, surrounded by small labourers' cottages,
+that Thomas Edward passed his early days.  From his babyhood,
+almost, the boy had a strong love for all the beasties he saw
+everywhere around him; a fondness for birds and animals, and a
+habit of taming them which can seldom be acquired, but which seems
+with some people to come instinctively by nature.  While Tam was
+still quite a child, he loved to wander by himself out into the
+country, along the green banks of the Dee, or among the tidal
+islands at the mouth of the river, overgrown by waving seaweeds,
+and fringed with great white bunches of blossoming scurvy-grass.
+He loved to hunt for crabs and sea-anemones beside the ebbing
+channels, or to watch the jelly-fish left high and dry upon the
+shore by the retreating water.  Already, in his simple way, the
+little ragged bare-footed Scotch laddie was at heart a born
+naturalist.
+
+Very soon, Tam was not content with looking at the "venomous
+beasts," as the neighbours called them, but he must needs begin to
+bring them home, and set up a small aquarium and zoological garden
+on his own account.  All was fish that came to Tam's net: tadpoles,
+newts, and stickleback from the ponds, beetles from the dung-heaps,
+green crabs from the sea-shore--nay, even in time such larger
+prizes as hedgehogs, moles, and nestfuls of birds.  Nothing
+delighted him so much as to be out in the fields, hunting for and
+taming these his natural pets.
+
+Unfortunately, Tam's father and mother did not share the boy's
+passion for nature, and instead of encouraging him in pursuing his
+inborn taste, they scolded him and punished him bitterly for
+bringing home the nasty creatures.  But nothing could win away Tam
+from the love of the beasties; and in the end, he had his own way,
+and lived all his life, as he himself afterwards beautifully put
+it, "a fool to nature."  Too often, unhappily, fathers and mothers
+thus try to check the best impulses in their children, under
+mistaken notions of right, and especially is this the case in many
+instances as regards the love of nature.  Children are constantly
+chidden for taking an interest in the beautiful works of creation,
+and so have their first intelligent inquiries and aspirations
+chilled at once; when a little care and sympathy would get rid of
+the unpleasantness of having white mice or lizards crawling about
+the house, without putting a stop to the young beginner's longing
+for more knowledge of the wonderful and beautiful world in whose
+midst he lives.
+
+When Tam was nearly five years old, he was sent to school, chiefly
+no doubt to get him out of the way; but Scotch schools for the
+children of the working classes were in those days very rough hard
+places, where the taws or leather strap was still regarded as the
+chief instrument of education.  Little Edward was not a child to be
+restrained by that particular form of discipline; and after he had
+had two or three serious tussles with his instructors, he was at
+last so cruelly beaten by one of his masters that he refused to
+return, and his parents, who were themselves by no means lacking in
+old Scotch severity, upheld him in his determination.  He had
+picked up reading by this time, and now for a while he was left
+alone to hunt about to his heart's content among his favourite
+fields and meadows.  But by the time he was six years old, he felt
+he ought to be going to work, brave little mortal that he was; and
+as his father and mother thought so too, the poor wee mite was sent
+to join his elder brother in working at a tobacco factory in the
+town, at the wages of fourteen-pence a week.  So, for the next two
+years, little Tam waited upon a spinner (as the workers are called)
+and began life in earnest as a working man.
+
+At the end of two years, however, the brothers heard that better
+wages were being given, a couple of miles away, at Grandholm, up
+the river Don.  So off the lads tramped, one fast-day (a recognized
+Scotch institution), to ask the manager of the Grandholm factory if
+he could give them employment.  They told nobody of their
+intention, but trudged away on their own account; and when they
+came back and told their parents what they had done, the father was
+not very well satisfied with the proposal, because he thought it
+too far for so small a boy as Tam to walk every day to and from his
+work.  Tam, however, was very anxious to go, not only on account of
+the increased wages, but also (though this was a secret) because of
+the beautiful woods and crags round Grandholm, through which he
+hoped to wander during the short dinner hour.  In the end, John
+Edward gave way, and the boys were allowed to follow their own
+fancy in going to the new factory.
+
+It was very hard work; the hours were from six in the morning till
+eight at night, for there was no Factory Act then to guard the
+interest of helpless children; so the boys had to be up at four in
+the morning, and were seldom home again till nine at night.  In
+winter, the snow lies long and deep on those chilly Aberdeenshire
+roads, and the east winds from the German Ocean blow cold and
+cutting up the narrow valley of the Don; and it was dreary work
+toiling along them in the dark of morning or of night in bleak and
+cheerless December weather.  Still, Tam liked it on the whole
+extremely well.  His wages were now three shillings a week; and
+then, twice a day in summer, there was the beautiful walk to and
+fro along the leafy high-road.  "People may say of factories what
+they please," Edward wrote much later, "but I liked this factory.
+It was a happy time for me whilst I remained there.  The woods were
+easy of access during our meal-hours.  What lots of nests!  What
+insects, wild flowers, and plants, the like of which I had never
+seen before."  The boy revelled in the beauty of the birds and
+beasts he saw here, and he retained a delightful recollection of
+them throughout his whole after life.
+
+This happy time, however, was not to last for ever.  When young
+Edward was eleven years old, his father took him away from
+Grandholm, and apprenticed him to a working shoemaker.  The
+apprenticeship was to go on for six years; the wages to begin at
+eighteen-pence a week; and the hours, too sadly long, to be from
+six in the morning till nine at night.  Tam's master, one Charles
+Begg, was a drunken London workman, who had wandered gradually
+north; a good shoemaker, but a quarrelsome, rowdy fellow, loving
+nothing on earth so much as a round with his fists on the slightest
+provocation.  From this unpromising teacher, Edward took his first
+lessons in the useful art of shoemaking; and though he learned
+fast--for he was not slothful in business--he would have learned
+faster, no doubt, but for his employer's very drunken and careless
+ways.  When Begg came home from the public-house, much the worse
+for whisky, he would first beat Tam, and then proceed upstairs to
+beat his wife.  For three years young Edward lived under this
+intolerable tyranny, till he could stand it no longer.  At last,
+Begg beat and ill-treated him so terribly that Tam refused outright
+to complete his apprenticeship.  Begg was afraid to compel him to
+do so--doubtless fearing to expose his ill-usage of the lad.  So
+Tam went to a new master, a kindly man, with whom he worked in
+future far more happily.
+
+The boy now began to make himself a little botanical garden in the
+back yard of his mother's house--a piece of waste ground covered
+with rubbish, such as one often sees behind the poorer class of
+cottages in towns.  Tam determined to alter all that, so he piled
+up all the stones into a small rockery, dug up the plot, manured
+it, and filled it with wild and garden flowers.  The wild flowers,
+of course, he found in the woods and hedgerows around him; but the
+cultivated kinds he got in a very ingenious fashion, by visiting
+all the rubbish heaps of the neighbourhood, on which garden refuse
+was usually piled.  A good many roots and plants can generally be
+found in such places, and by digging them up, Tam was soon able to
+make himself a number of bright and lively beds.  Such self-help in
+natural history always lay very much in Edward's way.
+
+At the same time, young Edward was now beginning to feel the desire
+for knowing something more about the beasts and birds of which he
+was so fond.  He used to go in all his spare moments among the
+shops in the town, to look at the pictures in the windows,
+especially the pictures of animals; and though his earnings were
+still small, he bought a book whenever he was able to afford one.
+In those days, cheap papers for the people were only just beginning
+to come into existence; and Tam, who was now eighteen, bought the
+first number of the Penny Magazine, an excellent journal of that
+time, which he liked so much that he continued to take in the
+succeeding numbers.  Some of the papers in it were about natural
+history, and these, of course, particularly delighted the young
+man's heart.  He also bought the Weekly Visitor, which he read
+through over and over again.
+
+In 1831, when Tam was still eighteen, he enlisted in the
+Aberdeenshire militia, and during his brief period of service an
+amusing circumstance occurred which well displays the almost
+irresistible character of Edward's love of nature.  While he was
+drilling with the awkward squad one morning, a butterfly of a kind
+that he had never seen before happened to flit in front of him as
+he stood in the ranks.  It was a beautiful large brown butterfly,
+and Edward was so fascinated by its appearance that he entirely
+forgot, in a moment, where he was and what he was doing.  Without a
+second's thought, he darted wildly out of the ranks, and rushed
+after the butterfly, cap in hand.  It led him a pretty chase, over
+sandhills and shore, for five minutes.  He was just on the point of
+catching it at last, when he suddenly felt a heavy hand laid upon
+his shoulder, and looking round, he saw the corporal of the company
+and several soldiers come to arrest him.  Such a serious offence
+against military discipline might have cost him dear indeed, for
+corporals have little sympathy with butterfly hunting; but luckily
+for Edward, as he was crossing the parade ground under arrest, he
+happened to meet an officer walking with some ladies.  The officer
+asked the nature of his offence, and when the ladies heard what it
+was they were so much interested in such a strange creature as a
+butterfly-loving militiaman, that they interceded for him, and
+finally begged him off his expected punishment.  The story shows us
+what sort of stuff Edward was really made of.  He felt so deep an
+interest in all the beautiful living creatures around him for their
+own sake, that he could hardly restrain his feelings even under the
+most untoward circumstances.
+
+When Edward was twenty, he removed from Aberdeen to Banff where he
+worked as a journeyman for a new master.  The hours were very long,
+but by taking advantage of the summer evenings, he was still able
+to hunt for his beloved birds, caterpillars, and butterflies.
+Still, the low wages in the trade discouraged him much, and he
+almost made up his mind to save money and emigrate to America.  But
+one small accident alone prevented him from carrying out this
+purpose.  Like a good many other young men, the naturalist
+shoemaker fell in love.  Not only so, but his falling in love took
+practical shape a little later in his getting married; and at
+twenty-three, the lonely butterfly hunter brought back a suitable
+young wife to his little home.  The marriage was a very happy one.
+Mrs. Edward not only loved her husband deeply, but showed him
+sympathy in his favourite pursuits, and knew how to appreciate his
+sterling worth.  Long afterwards she said, that though many of her
+neighbours could not understand her husband's strange behaviour,
+she had always felt how much better it was to have one who spent
+his spare time on the study of nature than one who spent it on the
+public-house.
+
+As soon as Edward got a home of his own, he began to make a regular
+collection of all the animals and plants in Banffshire.  This was a
+difficult thing for him to do, for he knew little of books, and had
+access to very few, so that he couldn't even find out the names of
+all the creatures he caught and preserved.  But, though he didn't
+always know what they were called, he did know their natures and
+habits and all about them; and such first-hand knowledge in natural
+history is really the rarest and the most valuable of all.  He saw
+little of his fellow-workmen.  They were usually a drunken,
+careless lot; Edward was sober and thoughtful, and had other things
+to think of than those that they cared to talk about with one
+another.  But he went out much into the fields, with invincible
+determination, having made up his mind that he would get to know
+all about the plants and beasties, however much the knowledge might
+cost him.
+
+For this object, he bought a rusty old gun for four-and-sixpence,
+and invested in a few boxes and bottles for catching insects.  His
+working hours were from six in the morning till nine at night, and
+for that long day he always worked hard to support his wife, and
+(when they came) his children.  He had therefore only the night
+hours between nine and six to do all his collecting.  Any other
+man, almost, would have given up the attempt as hopeless; but
+Edward resolved never to waste a single moment or a single penny,
+and by care and indomitable energy he succeeded in making his
+wished-for collection.  Sometimes he was out tramping the whole
+night; sometimes he slept anyhow, under a hedge or haystack;
+sometimes he took up temporary quarters in a barn, an outhouse, or
+a ruined castle.  But night after night he went on collecting,
+whenever he was able; and he watched the habits and manners of the
+fox, the badger, the otter, the weasel, the stoat, the pole-cat,
+and many other regular night-roamers as no one else, in all
+probability, had ever before watched them in the whole world.
+
+Sometimes he suffered terrible disappointments, due directly or
+indirectly to his great poverty.  Once, he took all his cases of
+insects, containing nine hundred and sixteen specimens, and
+representing the work of four years, up to his garret to keep them
+there till he was able to glaze them.  When he came to take them
+down again he found to his horror that rats had got at the boxes,
+eaten almost every insect in the whole collection, and left nothing
+behind but the bare pins, with a few scattered legs, wings, and
+bodies, sticking amongst them.  Most men would have been so
+disgusted with this miserable end to so much labour, that they
+would have given up moth hunting for ever.  But Edward was made of
+different stuff.  He went to work again as zealously as ever, and
+in four years more, he had got most of the beetles, flies, and
+chafers as carefully collected as before.
+
+By the year 1845, Edward had gathered together about two thousand
+specimens of beasts, birds, and insects found in the neighbourhood
+of his own town of Banff.  He made the cases to hold them himself,
+and did it so neatly that, in the case of his shells, each kind had
+even a separate little compartment all of its own.  And now he
+unfortunately began to think of making money by exhibiting his
+small museum.  If only he could get a few pounds to help him in
+buying books, materials, perhaps even a microscope, to help him in
+prosecuting his scientific work, what a magnificent thing that
+would be for him!  Filled with this grand idea, he took a room in
+the Trades Hall at Banff, and exhibited his collection during a
+local fair.  A good many people came to see it, and the Banff paper
+congratulated the poor shoemaker on his energy in gathering
+together such a museum of curiosities "without aid, and under
+discouraging circumstances which few would have successfully
+encountered."  He was so far lucky in this first venture that he
+covered his expenses and was able even to put away a little money
+for future needs.  Encouraged by this small triumph, the unwearied
+naturalist set to work during the next year, and added several new
+attractions to his little show.  At the succeeding fair he again
+exhibited, and made still more money out of his speculation.
+Unhappily, the petty success thus secured led him to hope he might
+do even better by moving his collection to Aberdeen.
+
+To Aberdeen, accordingly, Edward went.  He took a shop in the great
+gay thoroughfare of that cold northern city--Union Street--and
+prepared to receive the world at large, and to get the money for
+the longed-for books and the much-desired microscope.  Now,
+Aberdeen is a big, busy, bustling town; it has plenty of amusements
+and recreations; it has two colleges and many learned men of its
+own; and the people did not care to come and see the working
+shoemaker's poor small collection.  If he had been a president of
+the British Association for the Advancement of Science, now--some
+learned knight or baronet come down by special train from London--
+the Aberdeen doctors and professors might have rushed to hear his
+address; or if he had been a famous music-hall singer or an
+imitation negro minstrel, the public at large might have flocked to
+be amused and degraded by his parrot-like buffoonery; but as he was
+only a working shoemaker from Banff, with a heaven-born instinct
+for watching and discovering all the strange beasts and birds of
+Scotland, and the ways and thoughts of them, why, of course,
+respectable Aberdeen, high or low, would have nothing in particular
+to say to him.  Day after day went by, and hardly anybody came,
+till at last poor Edward's heart sank terribly within him.  Even
+the few who did come were loth to believe that a working shoemaker
+could ever have gathered together such a large collection by his
+own exertions.
+
+"Do you mean to say," said one of the Aberdeen physicians to
+Edward, "that you've maintained your wife and family by working at
+your trade, all the while that you've been making this collection?"
+
+"Yes, I do," Edward answered.
+
+"Oh, nonsense!" the doctor said.  "How is it possible you could
+have done that?"
+
+"By never losing a single minute or part of a minute," was the
+brave reply, "that I could by any means improve."
+
+It is wonderful indeed that when once Edward had begun to attract
+anybody's attention at all, he and his exhibition should ever have
+been allowed to pass so unnoticed in a great, rich, learned city
+like Aberdeen.  But it only shows how very hard it is for
+unassuming merit to push its way; for the Aberdeen people still
+went unheeding past the shop in Union Street, till Edward at last
+began to fear and tremble as to how he should ever meet the
+expenses of the exhibition.  After the show had been open four
+weeks, one black Friday came when Edward never took a penny the
+whole day.  As he sat there alone and despondent in the empty room,
+the postman brought him a letter.  It was from his master at Banff.
+"Return immediately," it said, "or you will be discharged."  What
+on earth could he do?  He couldn't remove his collection; he
+couldn't pay his debt.  A few more days passed, and he saw no way
+out of it.  At last, in blank despair, he offered the whole
+collection for sale.  A gentleman proposed to pay him the paltry
+sum of 20 pounds 10s. for the entire lot, the slow accumulations of
+ten long years.  It was a miserable and totally inadequate price,
+but Edward could get no more.  In the depths of his misery, he
+accepted it.  The gentleman took the collection home, gave it to
+his boy, and finally allowed it all, for want of care and
+attention, to go to rack and ruin.  And so that was the end of ten
+years of poor Thomas Edward's unremitting original work in natural
+history.  A sadder tale of unrequited labour in the cause of
+science has seldom been written.
+
+How he ever recovered from such a downfall to all his hopes and
+expectations is extraordinary.  But the man had a wonderful power
+of bearing up against adverse circumstances; and when, after six
+weeks' absence, he returned to Banff, ruined and dispirited, he set
+to work once more, as best he might, at the old, old trade of
+shoemaking.  He was obliged to leave his wife and children in
+Aberdeen, and to tramp himself on foot to Banff, so that he might
+earn the necessary money to bring them back; for the cash he had
+got for the collection had all gone in paying expenses.  It is
+almost too sad to relate; and no wonder poor Edward felt crushed
+indeed when he got back once more to his lonely shoemaker's bench
+and fireless fireside.  He was very lonely until his wife and
+children came.  But when the carrier generously brought them back
+free (with that kindliness which the poor so often show to the
+poor), and the home was occupied once more, and the fire lighted,
+he felt as if life might still be worth living, at least for his
+wife and children.  So he went back to his trade as heartily as he
+might, and worked at it well and successfully.  For it is to be
+noted, that though Thomas Edward was so assiduous a naturalist and
+collector, he was the best hand, too, at making first-class shoes
+in all Banff.  The good workman is generally the best man at
+whatever he undertakes.  Certainly the best man is almost always a
+good workman at his own trade.
+
+But of course he made no more natural history collections?  Not a
+bit of it.  Once a naturalist, always a naturalist.  Edward set to
+work once more, nothing daunted, and by next spring he was out
+everywhere with his gun, exactly as before, replacing the sold
+collection as fast as ever his hand was able.
+
+By this time Edward began to make a few good friends.  Several
+magistrates for the county signed a paper for him, stating that
+they knew him to be a naturalist, and no poacher; and on presenting
+this paper to the gamekeepers, he was generally allowed to pursue
+his researches wherever he liked, and shoot any birds or animals he
+needed for his new museum.  Soon after his return from Aberdeen,
+too, he made the acquaintance of a neighbouring Scotch minister,
+Mr. Smith of Monquhitter, who proved a very kind and useful friend
+to him.  Mr. Smith was a brother naturalist, and he had books--
+those precious books--which he lent Edward freely; and there for
+the first time the shoemaker zoologist learned the scientific names
+of many among the birds and animals with whose lives and habits he
+had been so long familiar.  Another thing the good minister did for
+his shoemaker friend: he constantly begged him to write to
+scientific journals the results of his observations in natural
+history.  At first Edward was very timid; he didn't like to appear
+in print; thought his grammar and style wouldn't be good enough;
+fought shy of the proposal altogether.  But at last Edward made up
+his mind to contribute a few notes to the Banffshire Journal, and
+from that he went on slowly to other papers, until at last he came
+to be one of the most valued occasional writers for several of the
+leading scientific periodicals in England.  Unfortunately, science
+doesn't pay.  All this work was done for love only; and Edward's
+only reward was the pleasure he himself derived from thus jotting
+down the facts he had observed about the beautiful creatures he
+loved so well.
+
+Soon Mr. Smith induced the indefatigable shoemaker to send a few
+papers on the birds and beasts to the Zoologist.  Readers began to
+perceive that these contributions were sent by a man of the right
+sort--a man who didn't merely read what other men had said about
+the creatures in books, but who watched their ways on his own
+account, and knew all about their habits and manners in their own
+homes.  Other friends now began to interest themselves in him; and
+Edward obtained at last, what to a man of his tastes must have been
+almost as much as money or position--the society of people who
+could appreciate him, and could sympathize in all that interested
+him.  Mr. Smith in particular always treated him, says Dr. Smiles,
+"as one intelligent man treats another."  The paltry distinctions
+of artificial rank were all forgotten between them, and the two
+naturalists talked together with endless interest about all those
+lovely creatures that surround us every one on every side, but that
+so very few people comparatively have ever eyes to see or hearts to
+understand.  It was a very great loss to Edward when Mr. Smith
+died, in 1854.
+
+In the year 1858 the untiring shoemaker had gathered his third and
+last collection, the finest and best of all.  By this time he had
+become an expert stuffer of birds, and a good preserver of fish and
+flowers.  But his health was now beginning to fail.  He was forty-
+four, and he had used his constitution very severely, going out at
+nights in cold and wet, and cheating himself of sleep during the
+natural hours of rest and recuperation.  Happily, during all these
+years, he had resisted the advice of his Scotch labouring friends,
+to take out whisky with him on his nightly excursions.  He never
+took a drop of it, at home or abroad.  If he had done so, he
+himself believed, he could not have stood the cold, the damp, and
+the exposure in the way he did.  His food was chiefly oatmeal-cake;
+his drink was water.  "Sometimes, when I could afford it," he says,
+"my wife boiled an egg or two, and these were my only luxuries."
+He had a large family, and the task of providing for them was quite
+enough for his slender means, without leaving much margin for beer
+or whisky.
+
+But the best constitution won't stand privation and exposure for
+ever.  By-and-by Edward fell ill, and had a fever.  He was ill for
+a month, and when he came round again the doctor told him that he
+must at once give up his nightly wandering.  This was a real and
+serious blow to poor Edward; it was asking him to give up his one
+real pleasure and interest in life.  All the happiest moments he
+had ever known were those which he had spent in the woods and
+fields, or among the lonely mountains with the falcons, and the
+herons, and the pine-martens, and the ermines.  All this delightful
+life he was now told he must abandon for ever.  Nor was that all.
+Illness costs money.  While a man is earning nothing, he is running
+up a doctor's bill.  Edward now saw that he must at last fall back
+upon his savings bank, as he rightly called it--his loved and
+cherished collection of Banffshire animals.  He had to draw upon it
+heavily.  Forty cases of birds were sold; and Edward now knew that
+he would never be able to replace the specimens he had parted with.
+
+Still, his endless patience wasn't yet exhausted.  No more of
+wandering by night, to be sure, upon moor or fell, gun in hand,
+chasing the merlin or the polecat to its hidden lair; no more of
+long watching after the snowy owl or the long-tailed titmouse among
+the frozen winter woods; but there remained one almost untried
+field on which Edward could expend his remaining energy, and in
+which he was to do better work for science than in all the rest--
+the sea.
+
+This new field he began to cultivate in a novel and ingenious way.
+He got together all the old broken pails, pots, pans, and kettles
+he could find in the neighbourhood, filled them with straw or bits
+of rag, and then sank them with a heavy stone into the rocky pools
+that abound along that weather-beaten coast.  A rope was tied to
+one end, by which he could raise them again; and once a month he
+used to go his rounds to visit these very primitive but effectual
+sea-traps.  Lots of living things had meanwhile congregated in the
+safe nests thus provided for them, and Edward sorted them all over,
+taking home with him all the newer or more valuable specimens.  In
+this way he was enabled to make several additions to our knowledge
+of the living things that inhabit the sea off the north-east coast
+of Scotland.
+
+The fishermen also helped him not a little, by giving him many rare
+kinds of fish or refuse from their nets, which he duly examined and
+classified.  As a rule, the hardy men who go on the smacks have a
+profound contempt for natural history, and will not be tempted,
+even by offers of money, to assist those whom they consider as
+half-daft gentlefolk in what seems to them a perfectly useless and
+almost childish amusement.  But it was different with Tam Edward,
+the strange shoemaker whom they all knew so well; if HE wanted fish
+or rubbish for his neat collection in the home-made glass cases,
+why, of course he could have them, and welcome.  So they brought
+him rare sand-suckers, and blue-striped wrasse, and saury pike, and
+gigantic cuttle-fish, four feet long, to his heart's content.
+Edward's daughters were now also old enough to help him in his
+scientific studies.  They used to watch for the clearing of the
+nets, and pick out of the refuse whatever they thought would
+interest or please their father.  But the fish themselves were
+Edward's greatest helpers and assistants.  As Dr. Smiles quaintly
+puts it, they were the best of all possible dredgers.  His
+daughters used to secure him as many stomachs as possible, and from
+their contents he picked out an immense number of beautiful and
+valuable specimens.  The bill of fare of the cod alone comprised an
+incredible variety of small crabs, shells, shrimps, sea-mice, star-
+fish, jelly-fish, sea anemones, eggs, and zoophytes.  All these
+went to swell Edward's new collection of marine animals.
+
+To identify and name so many small and little-known creatures was a
+very difficult task for the poor shoemaker, with so few books, and
+no opportunities for visiting museums and learned societies.  But
+his industry and ingenuity managed to surmount all obstacles.
+Naturalists everywhere are very willing to aid and instruct one
+another; especially are the highest authorities almost always eager
+to give every help and encouragement in their power to local
+amateurs.  Edward used to wait till he had collected a batch of
+specimens of a single class or order, and then he would send them
+by post to learned men in different parts of the country, who named
+them for him, and sent them back with some information as to their
+proper place in the classification of the group to which they
+belonged.  Mr. Spence Bate of Plymouth is the greatest living
+authority on crustaceans, such as the lobsters, shrimps, sea-fleas,
+and hermit crabs; and to him Edward sent all the queer crawling
+things of that description that he found in his original sea-traps.
+Mr. Couch, of Polperro in Cornwall, was equally versed in the true
+backboned fishes; and to him Edward sent any doubtful midges, or
+gurnards, or gobies, or whiffs.  So numerous are the animals and
+plants of the sea-shore, even in the north of Scotland alone, that
+if one were to make a complete list of all Edward's finds it would
+occupy an entire book almost as large as this volume.
+
+Naturalists now began to help Edward in another way, the way that
+he most needed, by kind presents of books, especially their own
+writings--a kind of gift which cost them nothing, but was worth to
+him a very great deal.  Mr. Newman, the editor of the Zoologist
+paper, was one of his most useful correspondents, and gave him
+several excellent books on natural history.  Mr. Bate made him a
+still more coveted present--a microscope, with which he could
+examine several minute animals, too small to be looked at by the
+naked eye.  The same good friend also gave him a little pocket-lens
+(or magnifying glass) for use on the sea-shore.
+
+As Edward went on, his knowledge increased rapidly, and his
+discoveries fully kept pace with it.  The wretchedly paid Banff
+shoemaker was now corresponding familiarly with half the most
+eminent men of science in the kingdom, and was a valued contributor
+to all the most important scientific journals.  Several new animals
+which he had discovered were named in his honour, and frequent
+references were made to him in printed works of the first
+importance.  It occurred to Mr. Couch and Mr. Bate, therefore, both
+of whom were greatly indebted to the working-man naturalist for
+specimens and information, that Edward ought to be elected a member
+of some leading scientific society.  There is no such body of
+greater distinction in the world of science than the Linnean
+Society; and of this learned institution Edward was duly elected an
+associate in 1866.  The honour was one which he had richly deserved,
+and which no doubt he fully appreciated.
+
+And yet he was nothing more even now than a working shoemaker, who
+was earning not more but less wages even than he once used to do.
+He had brought up a large family honestly and respectably; he had
+paid his way without running into debt; his children were all
+growing up; and he had acquired a wide reputation among naturalists
+as a thoroughly trustworthy observer and an original worker in many
+different fields of botany and zoology.  But his wages were now
+only eight shillings a week, and his science had brought him, as
+many people would say, only the barren honour of being an associate
+of the Linnean Society, or the respected friend of many among the
+noblest and greatest men of his country.  He began life as a
+shoemaker, and he remained a shoemaker to the end.  "Had I pursued
+money," he said, "with half the ardour and perseverance that I have
+pursued nature, I have no hesitation in saying that by this time I
+should have been a rich man."
+
+In 1876, Dr. Smiles, the historian of so many truly great working
+men, attracted by Edward's remarkable and self-sacrificing life,
+determined to write the good shoemaker's biography while he was
+still alive.  Edward himself gave Dr. Smiles full particulars as to
+his early days and his later struggles; and that information the
+genial biographer wove into a delightful book, from which all the
+facts here related have been borrowed.  The "Life of a Scotch
+Naturalist" attracted an immense deal of attention when it was
+first published, and led many people, scientific or otherwise, to
+feel a deep interest in the man who had thus made himself poor for
+the love of nature.  The result was such a spontaneous expression
+of generous feeling towards Edward that he was enabled to pass the
+evening of his days not only in honour, but also in substantial
+ease and comfort.
+
+And shall we call such a life as this a failure?  Shall we speak of
+it carelessly as unsuccessful?  Surely not.  Edward had lived his
+life happily, usefully, and nobly; he had attained the end he set
+before himself; he had conquered all his difficulties by his
+indomitable resolution; and he lived to see his just reward in the
+respect and admiration of all those whose good opinion was worth
+the having.  If he had toiled and moiled all the best days of his
+life, at some work, perhaps, which did not even benefit in any way
+his fellow-men; if he had given up all his time to enriching
+himself anyhow, by fair means or foul; if he had gathered up a
+great business by crushing out competition and absorbing to himself
+the honest livelihood of a dozen other men; if he had speculated in
+stocks and shares, and piled up at last a vast fortune by doubtful
+transactions, all the world would have said, in its unthinking
+fashion, that Mr. Edward was a wonderfully successful man.  But
+success in life does not consist in that only, if in that at all.
+Edward lived for an aim, and that aim he amply attained.  He never
+neglected his home duties or his regular work; but in his stray
+moments he found time to amass an amount of knowledge which
+rendered him the intellectual equal of men whose opportunities and
+education had been far more fortunate than his own.  The pleasure
+he found in his work was the real reward that science gave him.
+All his life long he had that pleasure: he saw the fields grow
+green in spring, the birds build nests in early summer, the insects
+flit before his eyes on autumn evenings, the stoat and hare put on
+their snow-white coat to his delight in winter weather.  And shall
+we say that the riches he thus beheld spread ever before him were
+any less real or less satisfying to a soul like his than the mere
+worldly wealth that other men labour and strive for?  Oh no.
+Thomas Edward was one of those who work for higher and better ends
+than outward show, and verily he had his reward.  The monument
+raised up to that simple and earnest working shoemaker in the "Life
+of a Scotch Naturalist" is one of which any scientific worker in
+the whole world might well be proud.  In his old age, he had the
+meed of public encouragement and public recognition, the one thing
+that the world at large can add to a scientific worker's happiness;
+and his name will be long remembered hereafter, when those of more
+pretentious but less useful labourers are altogether forgotten.
+How many men whom the world calls successful might gladly have
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Biographies of Working Men, by Grant Allen
+
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