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city. Few particulars of his history, however, have come down to us; nor do we know any thing of the education he received, although there is reason to believe that he owed his literary acquirements chiefly to his own application and love of reading. He is recorded to have been attentive to business, and to have acquired, as a tradesman, a high character for probity, and a competent, if not an abundant fortune. Yet, although he died at the early age of forty-six, he had already produced eight or nine dramas, several of them of great power. A few months after his death, his character was sketched in the following terms by his friend Fielding; "He had a perfect knowledge of human nature, though his contempt of all base means of application, which are the necessary steps to great acquaintance, restrained his conversation within very narrow bounds. He had the spirit of an old Roman, joined to the innocence of a primitive Christian; he was content with his little state of life, in which his excellent temper of mind gave him an happiness beyond the power of riches, and it was necessary for his friends to have a sharp insight into his want of their services, as well as good inclination or abilities to serve him. In short, he was one of the best of men, and those who knew him best will most regret his loss."

Men circumstanced like Walton, Defoe, and Lillo, are well fitted, it may be remarked, to give new vigour to the literature of a country, by infusing into it something of what we may call the spirit of the living world, when it is waxing feeble under the regimen of recluse students and dealers in mere erudition. Their works are almost sure to bear the stamp of originality in conception and manner, which is in literature the very principle of life and strength. The point from which they look to their subject is different from that which the mere scholar

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would naturally select; their subject itself is probably not one which he would have chosen; and, at all events, the conceptions it suggests will amalgamate with different associations, and take altogether a different shape and character. Erudition, that should be but the furniture, is too often made the food, of the mind; which, under such unfit sustenance, is apt to languish and dry away. A man who mixes much with the world is little liable to have his powers of thinking thus destroyed by being crushed under the worn and cast-off thoughts of his predecessors; for his mind cannot fail to be kept awake by the stir of the living world about him, which will act upon it like a healthy breeze, blowing away all dust and rubbish, and keeping its faculties in their proper tone. But if, in addition to this salutary intercourse, a man of true genius shall have been further exposed to the necessity of acquiring his knowledge of literature principally by his own efforts, and of working out his own way to that mastery over his thoughts and expressions which constitutes the power of writing, it is probable that, whatever may be his deficiencies in other respects (which if they were ever so many, the possession of true genius will go far to cover)» his productions will have the advantage, in respect of originality, over those of an equally gifted but more regularly educated mind. In the very style of the writers we have mentioned, especially of the two first, there is a charm of nature, which we generally look for in vain among the compositions of more learned wits. In Defoe's political works, too, there is often all the vigour and dexterity of a most consummate rhetorick, rendered only more effective by many a racy idiom which would probably have been rejected by a mere rhetorician of the schools. Lillo's tragedies, again, full of power and pathos, are unlike any thing else in

the dramatic literature, either of our own or any other country. It seems as if we could tell almost by the perusal of them that their author must have been in business-that he was a regularly bred tradesman, as well as a self-taught poet. The humblest and the highest walks of life are both favourite regions of poetry; Lillo is the only poet of middle life. His personages are merely the ordinary men and women we meet with every day,-neither heroes and emperors, nor beggars and banditti; and his scenes are mostly in streets or on country roads by daylight, and at evening in domestic parlours. Yet even to common life he has communicated not a little of the excite

ment of poetry. This is true originality; one of the feats of genius, to which nothing is impossible.

CHAPTER XII.

Self-educated men continued. Ferguson.-Influence of accident in directing pursuits. Rennie; Linnæus; Vernet; Caravaggio; Tassie; Chatterton; Harrison; Edwards; Villars; Joly; Jourdan; Bandinelli; Palissy.

AMONG self-educated men there are few who claim more of our admiration than the celebrated JAMES FERGUSON. If ever any one was literally his own instructor in the very elements of knowledge, it was he. Acquisitions that have scarcely in any other case, and probably never by one so young, been made without the assistance either of books or a living teacher, were the discoveries of his solitary and almost illiterate boyhood. There are few more interesting narratives in any language than the account which Ferguson himself has given of his early history. He was born in the year 1710, a few miles from the village of Keith, in Banffshire; his parents, as he tells us, being in the humblest condition of life (for his father was merely a day-labourer,) but religious and honest. It was his father's practice to teach his children himself to read and writè, as they successively reached what he deemed the proper age; but James was too impatient to wait till his regular turn came. While his father was teaching one of his elder brothers, James was secretly occupied in listening to what was going on; and, as soon as he was left alone, used to get hold of the book and work hard in endeavouring to master the lesson which he had thus heard gone over. Being ashamed, as he says, to let his father know what he was about, he was wont to apply to an old woman who lived in a neighbouring cottage to solve his difficulties. In

this way he actually learned to read tolerably well before his father had any suspicion that he knew his letters. His father at last, very much to his surprise, detected him one day reading by himself, and thus found out his secret.

When he was about seven or eight years of age, a simple incident occurred which seems to have given his mind its first bias to what became afterwards its favourite kind of pursuit. The roof of the cottage having partly fallen in, his father, in order to raise it again, applied to it a beam, resting on a prop in the manner of a lever, and was thus enabled, with comparative ease, to produce what seemed to his son quite a stupendous effect. The circumstance set our young philosopher thinking; and, after a while, it struck him that his father in using the beam had applied his strength to its extremity, and this, he immediately concluded, was probably an important circumstance in the matter. He proceeded to verify his notion by experiment; and having made several levers, which he called bars, soon not only found that he was right in his conjecture, as to the importance of applying the moving force at the point most distant from the fulcrum, but discovered the rule or law of the machine, namely, that the effect of any form or weight made to bear upon it is always exactly proportioned to the distance of the point on which it rests from the fulcrum. I then," says he, thought that it was a great pity that by means of this bar, a weight could be raised but a very little way. On this, I soon imagined that by pulling round a wheel, the weight might be raised to any height, by tying a rope to the weight, and winding the rope round the axle of the wheel; and that the power gained must be just as great as the wheel was broader than the axle was thick; and found it to be exactly so, by hanging one weight to a rope put

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