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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Biographies of Working Men, by Grant Allen
+#9 in our series by Grant Allen
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+Title: Biographies of Working Men
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+Author: Grant Allen
+
+Release Date: September, 2004 [EBook #6492]
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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BIOGRAPHIES OF WORKING MEN ***
+
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+Produced by Tonya Allen, Juliet Sutherland, Charles Franks
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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 THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BIOGRAPHIES OF WORKING MEN ***
+
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