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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Biographies of Working Men, by Grant Allen
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Biographies of Working Men
+
+Author: Grant Allen
+
+Posting Date: May 24, 2013 [EBook #6492]
+Release Date: September, 2004
+First Posted: December 22, 2002
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BIOGRAPHIES OF WORKING MEN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Tonya Allen, Juliet Sutherland, Charles Franks
+and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team. This file
+was produced from images generously made available by the
+Canadian Institute for Historical Microreproductions.
+
+
+
+
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+
+
+
+
+
+
+BIOGRAPHIES OF WORKING MEN
+
+BY
+
+GRANT ALLEN, B.A.
+
+
+
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+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 Build was 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, thoroughgoing, 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 L28 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 L15 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 L6 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 L100 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 L1000, 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 L1000,
+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 L1000 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
+L500 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 money-making 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
+guess-work; 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
+wood-carving. 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 L70 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
+centre 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 L150 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 L520 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 L700. 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 _caffe_ 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 L200 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 own 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 L35,000." 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 L2000
+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 L24) to start him on the way; and the town of Cherbourg promised
+him an annual grant of four hundred francs more (about L16). 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 shop-keepers 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 L20). 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 L13,000. 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 L20. 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 into
+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 I 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 stuck-up.
+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 anti-slavery 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 slaveowners 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
+mere 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 L20 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 sandsuckers, 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 changed places with that "fool
+to nature," the Banffshire shoemaker!
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Biographies of Working Men, by Grant Allen
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BIOGRAPHIES OF WORKING MEN ***
+
+***** This file should be named 6492.txt or 6492.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        http://www.gutenberg.org/6/4/9/6492/
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