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was not so much his fault as that of others, the eminence to which he attained in spite of them is only the more demonstrative of his extraordinary natural powers, and his determined perseverence.

The portrait which we have given of this great man, is engraved from an original painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds, the property of the College of Surgeons (by the permission of whose council our engraver has had access to it); it was also engraved by the late Mr. Sharp. Sharp's plate has now become of considerable rarity.* The picture is reputed to be a very happy and characteristic likeness, and certainly bears on it the impress of great vigour and originality of mind. Every eye will acknowledge the justice of the remark made upon it by Lavater,— This man thinks for himself."

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We do not quote these names as those of individuals, the single or chief peculiarity in whose history is, that they commenced life in a low station, and ended it in a high, or a higher, one. If it were our object to exemplify either the freaks of fortune in lifting humbly-born men to the upper places of society, or that particular sort of talent or dexterity in men themselves, which fits them to battle with fortune, and in either way to elevate themselves to conspicuous stations, as it were in spite and mockery of all her endeavours to keep them downit would be easy to bring together an assemblage of far more extraordinary and surprising instances than any we have yet noticed, of such good luck or persevering and triumphant ambition. But our business

Sharp was himself a very extraordinary character. He raised himself from the lower walks of his profession as an engraver chiefly by his print of Hunter. He worked for a year or more on this plate. In England, it found few purchasers, originally; but coming into great demand on the Continent as a specimen of art, it gradually became valued in this country. See page 59.

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is not either with mere luck, or mere ambition,—at least in the worldly acceptation of that term. If some of the individuals we have mentioned have risen to great wealth or high civil dignities, it is not for this that we have mentioned them. We bring them forward to shew that neither knowledge, nor any of the advantages which naturally flow from it, are the exclusive inheritance of those who have been enabled to devote themselves entirely to its acquisition from their youth upwards. We shall have occasion to shew this still more strikingly, when we come to trace the history of some of those powerful minds, whose very education has been actually their own work,-who, without even the assistance of a master, any how obtained, are recorded to have made themselves learned scholars, or able philosophers, or accomplished artists. For all, or nearly all, of the individuals we have hitherto enumerated, many as may have been the difficulties they have had to contend with in the endeavour to procure instruction, have nevertheless obtained and enjoyed at last the advantages of a regular education. Still the love of knowledge, at least, must have sprung up in many of them long before the opportunity of acquiring it had been found; and their merit, and the praise due to them, is that, surrounded, as they were, by all manner of difficulties and discouragements, they rested not until they had fought their way to the instruction for which they longed. Their example also shews that many of those impediments, which, in ordinary cases, altogether prevent the pursuit of knowledge, are impediments only to the indolent or unaspiring, who make, in truth, their poverty or their low station bear the blame which ought properly to be laid upon their own irresolution or indifference. It was not wealth or ease which these noble enthusiasts sought; it was the bondage and degrada

tion of ignorance alone from which they panted to emancipate themselves. All they wanted was an opportunity of acquiring that knowledge, which might lift them to a higher station in society, but would certainly elevate their moral and intellectual being, and bring them an inexhaustible multitude of gratifications, such as no wealth, no station, no worldly circumstances whatever, could confer. Some of them, as we have remarked, even continued to work at their original employments long after they had obtained that superior education which might have entitled them to aspire to a higher place; and we shall have to quote numerous other instances in the sequel, of persons who, although possessed of the highest mental cultivation, have not permitted that circumstance to withdraw them even from occupations that are generally supposed to be very uncongenial to literary tastes and habits.

Looking generally upon these examples, we may safely affirm that no man was ever induced to engage with any degree of eagerness in the pursuit of knowledge by the mere hope of thereby bettering his worldly circumstances. That may have sometimes been temptation enough to allure an individual to procure for himself a few lessons in arithmetic, or navigation or any of those kindred branches of education the utility of which is equally obvious; but it demands a much stronger and more deep-seated excitement tó sustain the mind in that long and earnest pursuit of knowledge, which alone can ever lead to intellectual acquirements of any lofty order. Such a pursuit will never be entered upon, or at least very far proceeded in, by any one, except him who loves knowledge entirely or chiefly for her own sake. It is to such a person only that we hold up the examples of Heyne, and Winckelman, and the other illustrious conquerors of fortune whom we have named, as

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