Isaac or Isac, was commenced by the author, while confined in the Bastile; the New Testament and a consid erable part of the Old having been finished by him, in the three years and a half during which his imprisonment lasted. LORENZO LORENZINI, a learned Italian, who lived in the early part of the last century, is said to have relieved the weariness of an imprisonment of nearly twenty years, by the composition of a work on Conic Sections. The famous WILLIAM PRYNNE, after having been condemned to imprisonment for life, (from which, however, he was subsequently released,) continued to write as actively and with as unconquered a spirit as he had done while at liberty. The celebrated Madame ROLAND, who perished in the storm of the Revolution, wrote her Memoirs, (afterwards published under the title of Appel a l' Impartiale Postérité,) during the two months she spent in prison, immediately before her execution, while her own fate was full in her view, and that of her husband, to whom she was tenderly attached, and who so soon followed her, was in suspense; and yet the manuscript, it has been remarked, scarcely exhibited an erasure. Another name, which naturally suggests itself to us, under this head, is that of Sir WALTER RALEIGH, whose History of the World' is, perhaps, the greatest literary work ever accomplished, under the circumstances we are now considering. He was one of those rare and wonderful men, who, supereminently endowed, both with the reflective and active powers, seem equally qualified to distinguish themselves, in studious solitude, and on the theatre of affairs. His life was a busy one, from his earliest years, having been passed chiefly in the camp and on shipboard, amid the toils and agitations of war, and every other variety of daring and hazardous adventure. Yet, thus occupied, it was his custom to spend four hours, every day, in reading and study, only five being given to sleep. The duties of his situation, and the exercises he underwent to improve himself in his profession, employed the rest of his time. The first part of his History of the World' appeared, when its illustrious author was sixty-two years of age, having been written in the Tower, to which he had been consigned more than ten years before, after a trial on a charge of high-treason, which violated all the customary forms of legal procedure, as well as the rules of natural justice. All the time, during which he was employed in composing the work, he was lying under that sentence of death, which, a few years after his book was finished, was carried into execution, by a singularly barbarous perversion of law. He had, in the interim, as is well known, been not only liberated from confinement, but restored to public employment, and thus, by implication, at least, pardoned, when advantage was taken of his con demnation fifteen years before, to destroy him for his commission of certain other alleged offences, for which he was never brought to trial. Yet, although, at last, the victim of an iniquitous conspiracy, it was his own immoderate ambition, that led this great man to his ruin. But for this "infirmity of noble minds," he was one of the very chief glories of an age crowded with towering spirits. His History is very precious, as one of the classical works of our language; exhibiting, in its style, one of the most perfect models we possess, of that easy, but vigorous and graphic, eloquence, which testifies both the learning of the scholar, and a mind fertilized by converse with the living world. It was the largest, but not the only, literary performance, with which he occupied the hours of his long imprisonment of twelve years, a period of his life, during which he may be said, through these labors, to have earned his best and most enduring renown. The unfortunate LADY JANE GREY, and her equally unfortunate, if not guilty, cousin, QUEEN MARY of Scotland, both solaced hours of captivity, destined to ter minate only on the scaffold, by learned labors. The ancestor of the latter, JAMES I., of Scotland, one of the most amiable and accomplished of princes, having been, in his twelfth year, taken captive, on his way to France, by one of the ships of the King of England, was detained by him, in close confinement, for nearly twenty years, having been lodged, in the first instance, in the Tower, afterwards in the Castle of Nottinghain, and eventually in 6 that of Windsor. It was while in this last-mentioned prison, that he wrote his beautiful allegory, The King's Quhair,' certainly the finest poem that had been yet produced, in the English language, with the exception of the immortal works of Chaucer. It was occasioned by his passion for the Lady Joanna Beaufort, a young person of distinguished beauty, and nearly allied to the royal family, whom he afterwards married, and of whom he became enamored, by beholding her from the window of his apartments, walking in the gardens of the Castle. But, as another of our poets, the elegant LOVELACE, has beautifully said, writing also, as it would seem, from a place of confinement, "Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage; CHAPTER XIV. Natural Defects overcome:-Demosthenes; De Beaumont; Navarete. Blindness :-Saunderson; Rugendas; Diodotus; Didymus; Eusebius; Nicaise; De Pagan ; Euler; Moyes. STILL more depressing, than any of those deprivations which we have yet considered, are such natural inflictions, as close up, altogether, some one or more of the ordinary avenues, by which knowledge finds its way into the mind; and thus seem to oppose an almost insurmountable obstacle to the pursuit, perhaps, of the very studies in which the intellectual powers, thus cramped or darkened, might otherwise have been best fitted to excel. Several instances might be mentioned, in which individuals, strongly attached to a particular path of ambition, have, by mere perseverance, entirely overcome the slight DEMOSTHENES. BEAUMONT. NAVARETE. 217 er impediments presented by physical maleconformation. Thus, for example, DEMOSTHENES strengthened a weak voice, and cured his natural indistinctness of articulation, by exercising himself in declamation, while ascending the brow of a hill, or walking, amid the noise of the waves, along the seashore. Others have contrived to prosecute certain professional employments, with distinguished success, under disadvantages of this sort, which no discipline could cure. The French advocate, ELIE DE BEAUMONT, after having been educated for the bar, found his voice so weak, as completely to prevent his making any figure as a speaker; but, by devoting himself to the writing of memorials for his clients, he soon established for himself the most brilliant reputation, as a master, both of law and eloquence. The celebrated Spanish painter, FERNANDEZ NAVARETE, was seized with an illness, when only two years old, which left him deaf and dumb for life. Yet, in this state, he displayed, from his infancy, the strongest passion for drawing, covering the walls of the apartments with pictures, of all sorts of objects, done with charcoal; and, having afterwards studied under Titian, he became, eventually, one of the greatest artists of his age. Navarete, who flourished in the sixteenth century, could both read and write, and even possessed considerable learning. Blindness, however, is the calamity that seems most effectually to shut the mind up from the acquisition of knowledge. Yet we have many examples, of the attainment of distinguished eminence in intellectual pursuits, under this severe deprivation. Of these, we shall now proceed to lay a few of the more remarkable before our readers. NICHOLAS SAUNDERSON, was born at the village of Thurston, in Yorkshire, in 1682. He was only a year old, when he was deprived, by smallpox, not only of his sight, but even of his eyes, themselves, which were destroyed by abscess. Yet it was probably to this apparent misfortune, that Saunderson chiefly owed both a good education, and the leisure he enjoyed, from his earliest years, for the cultivation of his mind and the acquisition I. 19 P. K. of knowledge. He was sent, when very young, to the free school at Penniston, in the neighborhood of his native place; and here, notwithstanding the mighty disadvantage under which it would seem that he must have contended with his schoolfellows, he soon distinguished himself by his proficiency in Greek and Latin. It is to be regretted that we have no account of the mode of teaching that was adopted by his master in so singular a case, or the manner in which the poor boy contrived to pursue his studies, in the absence of that sovereign organ, to which the mind is wont to be chiefly indebted for knowledge. Some one must have read the lesson to him, till his memory, strengthened by the habit, and the necessity of exertion, had obtained complete possession of it, and the mind, as it were, had made a book for itself, which it would read without the assistance of the eye. At all events, it is certain that the progress he made, in this part of his education, was such, as is not often equalled, even by those, to whom Nature has given all the ordinary means of study; for he acquired so great a familiarity with the Greek language, as to be in the habit of having the works written in it, read to him, and following the meaning of the author as if the composition had been in English, while he showed his perfect mastery over Latin, on many occasions in the course of his life, by both dictating and speaking it with the utmost fluency and command of expression. These acquirements were due, of course, in a great measure, to an excellent memory, which again owed, no doubt, much of its power and aptitude to the very difficulties under which it was obliged to exert itself. Every one of our faculties, corporeal and mental, is to a certain extent weakened, or at least prevented from reaching its utmost possible vigor and developement, by the assistance it usually receives, in its labors, from other faculties. Individuals, deprived of the use of their hands, have learned to write and paint with their toes; no reason in the world, certainly, why those in possession of the fitter and more natural instrument should relinquish it for the other, but yet an evidence of how much more some of our members |