Lamb once told a droll story of an India-house clerk accused of eating man's flesh, and remarked that "among cannibals those who rejected the favorite dish would be called misanthropists."

The eternal barbarisms must not be forgotten by the reformer while he is reforming the barbarians. The pagan Frisians, that illustrious northern German tribe, afterward known as the "free Frisians," "whose name is synonymous with liberty,—nearest blood-relations of the Anglo-Saxon race,"—struggled for centuries against the dominion of the Franks, and were only eventually subjugated by Charlemagne, who left them their name of free Frisians. "The Frisians," says their statute-book, "shall be free as long as the wind blows out of the clouds and the world stands." Radbod, their chief, was first overcome by Pepin the younger, and Pepin's bastard, Charles the Hammer, with his "tremendous blows, completed his father's work;" he "drove the Frisian chief into submission, and even into Christianity. A bishop's indiscretion, however, neutralized the apostolic blows" of the Christian conqueror. "The pagan Radbod had already immersed one of his royal legs in the baptismal font, when a thought struck him. 'Where are my dead forefathers at present?' he said, turning suddenly upon Bishop Wolfran. 'In hell, with all other unbelievers,' was the imprudent answer. 'Mighty well,' replied Radbod, removing his leg, 'then will I rather feast with my ancestors in the halls of Woden, than dwell with your little starveling band of Christians in heaven.' Entreaties and threats were unavailing. The Frisian declined positively a rite which was to cause an eternal separation from his buried kindred, and he died as he had lived, a heathen."

Tomochichi, chief of the Chickasaws, said to Wesley, "I will go up and speak to the wise men of the nation, and I hope they will hear. But we would not be made Christians as the Spaniards make Christians; we would be taught before we are baptised." He felt the want unconsciously acknowledged by the King of Siam, spoken of by John Locke in his chapter on Probability. A Dutch ambassador, when entertaining the king with the peculiarities of Holland, amongst other things told the sovereign that the water in Holland would sometimes in cold weather be so hard that men walked upon it, and that it would bear an elephant if he were there. To which the king replied, "Hitherto I have believed the strange things you have told me, because I looked upon you as a sober, fair man, but now I am sure you lie." But Tomochichi had an eye that saw the faults of the colonists, if he did not understand their religion. When urged to listen to the doctrines of Christianity he keenly replied, "Why, these are Christians at Savannah! these are Christians at Frederica! Christian much drunk! Christian beat men! Christian tell lies! Devil Christian! Me no Christian!" This recalls the pathetic story of the West Indian cazique, who, at the stake, refused life, temporal or eternal, at the price of conversion, asking where he should go to live so happily. He was told—in heaven; and then he at once refused, on the ground that the whites would be there; and he had rather live anywhere, or nowhere, than dwell with such people as he had found the white Christians to be. Almost the first word, says Dr. Medhurst, uttered by a Chinese, when anything is said concerning the excellence of Christianity, is, "Why do Christians bring us opium, and bring it directly in defiance of our laws? The vile drug has destroyed my son, has ruined my brother, and well-nigh led me to beggar my wife and children. Surely those who import such a deleterious substance, and injure me for the sake of gain, cannot wish me well, or be in possession of a religion better than my own. Go first and persuade your own countrymen to relinquish their nefarious traffic; and give me a prescription to correct this vile habit, and then I will listen to your exhortations on the subject of Christianity!" Dr. Livingstone says he found a tribe of men in the interior of Africa so pure and simple that they seemed to have no idea of untruthfulness and dishonesty until they were brought into contact with Asiatics and Europeans. Some of Dr. Kane's men, "while resting at Kalutunah's tent, had appropriated certain fox-skins, boots, and sledges, which their condition seemed to require. The Esquimaux complained of the theft, and Dr. Kane, after a careful inquiry into the case, decided in their favor. He gave each five needles, a file, and a stick of wood, and knives and other extras to Kalutunah and Shanghu, and after regaling them with a hearty supper, he returned the stolen goods, and tried to make them believe that his people did not steal, but only took the articles to save their lives! In imitation of this Arctic morality the natives, on their departure, carried off a few knives and forks, which they deemed as essential to their happiness as the fox-dresses were to the white men."

Among the airy visions which had been generated in the teeming brain of Coleridge, says a writer in The London Quarterly, was the project of pantisocracy—a republic to be founded in the wilds of America, of which the fundamental principles were an equality of rank and property, and where all who composed it were to be under the perpetual dominion of reason, virtue, and love. Southey was inflamed by it and converted. Through it he saw a way out of all his troubles. There he would enjoy the felicity of living in a pure democracy, where he could sit unelbowed by kings and aristocrats. "You," he wrote to his brother Tom, "are unpleasantly situated, so is my mother, so were we all till this grand scheme of pantisocracy flashed upon our minds, and now all is perfectly delightful." Coleridge, contented to have delivered a glowing description of Utopia, did nothing further, and departed on a pedestrian tour through Wales, where, as the ridiculous will sometimes mingle itself with the sublime, he feared he had caught the itch from an admiring democratical auditor at an inn, who insisted upon shaking hands with him. Some time after, Southey, having tried his panacea upon a few select pantisocratic friends, wrote, "There was a time when I believed in the persuadability of man, and had the mania of man-mending. Experience has taught me better. The ablest physician can do little in the great lazar-house of society. He acts the wisest part who retires from the contagion."

"Nature goes her own way," said Goethe, "and all that to us seems an exception is really according to order." He quoted the saying of Rousseau, that you cannot hinder an earthquake by building a city near a burning mountain. Peter the Great, he said, repeated Amsterdam so dear to his youth, in locating St. Petersburg at the mouth of the Neva. The ground rises in the neighborhood, and the emperor could have had a city quite free from all the trouble arising from overflow if he had but gone a little higher up. An old shipmaster represented this to him, and prophesied that the people would be drowned every seventy years. There stood also an old tree, with various marks from times when the waters had risen to a great height. But all was in vain; the emperor stood to his whim, and had the tree cut down, that it might not be witness against him! Sydney Smith said of a certain fanatical member of Parliament, that "he was losing his head. When he brings forward his Suckling Act, he will be considered as quite mad. No woman to be allowed to suckle her own child without medical certificates. Three classes, viz., free-sucklers, half-sucklers, and spoon-meat mothers. Mothers, whose supply is uncertain, to suckle upon affidavit! How is it possible that an act of Parliament can supply the place of nature and natural affection?"

"There is in nature," said Goethe to Soret, "an accessible and an inaccessible. Be careful to discriminate between the two, be circumspect, and proceed with reverence." "The sight of a primitive phenomenon," he said to Eckermann, "is generally not enough for people; they think they must go still further; and are thus like children who, after peeping into a mirror, turn it round directly to see what is on the other side." "When one," said he on another occasion, "has looked about him in the world long enough to see how the most judicious enterprises frequently fail, and the most absurd have the good fortune to succeed, he becomes disinclined to give any one advice. At bottom, he who asks advice shows himself limited; he who gives it gives also proof that he is presumptuous. If any one asks me for good advice, I say, I will give it, but only on condition that you will promise not to take it.... Much is said of aristocracy and democracy; but the whole affair is simply this: in youth, when we either possess nothing, or know not how to value the tranquil possession of anything, we are democrats; but when we, in a long life, have come to possess something of our own, we wish not only ourselves to be secure of it, but that our children and grandchildren should be secure of inheriting it. Therefore, we always lean to aristocracy in our old age, whatever were our opinions in youth."

Lord Eldon said in his old age, "that, if he were to begin life again, he would be damned but he would begin as agitator." "I am no more ashamed of having been a republican," said Southey, "than I am of having been a child." Barère, who said that "the tree of liberty cannot flourish unless it is watered by the blood of kings and aristocrats"—who proposed the famous decree for the annihilation of Lyons—devoted a great part of his later life to declaiming on the necessity of entirely abolishing capital punishments.

Elliott, the Corn-Law Rhymer, being asked, "What is a communist?" answered, "One who has yearnings for equal division of unequal earnings. Idler or bungler, he is willing to fork out his penny and pocket your shilling."

"Sir," said Johnson, "your levelers wish to level down as far as themselves; but they cannot bear leveling up to themselves. They would all have some people under them; why not then have some people above them?"

Margaret Fuller, speaking of the greatest of German poets, says, "He believes more in man than men, effort than success, thought than action, nature than providence. He does not insist on my believing with him."

"He who would help himself and others," says Emerson, "should not be a subject of irregular and interrupted impulses of virtue, but a continent, persisting, immovable person,—such as we have seen a few scattered up and down in time for the blessing of the world; men who have in the gravity of their nature a quality which answers to the fly-wheel in a mill, which distributes the motion equally over all the wheels, and hinders it from falling unequally and suddenly in destructive shocks. It is better that joy should be spread over all the day in the form of strength, than that it should be concentrated into ecstasies, full of danger, and followed by reactions." "It only needs that a just man should walk in our streets, to make it appear how pitiful and inartificial a contrivance is our legislation. The man whose part is taken, and who does not wait for society in anything, has a power which society cannot choose but feel."

What a character was Sir Isaac Newton! He is described as modest, candid, and affable, and without any of the eccentricities of genius, suiting himself to every company, and speaking of himself and others in such a manner that he was never even suspected of vanity. "But this," says Dr. Pemberton, "I immediately discovered in him, which at once both surprised and charmed me. Neither his extreme great age, nor his universal reputation, had rendered him stiff in opinion, or in any degree elated." His modesty arose from the depth and extent of his knowledge, which showed him what a small portion of nature he had been able to examine, and how much remained to be explored in the same field in which he had himself labored. In a letter to Leibnitz, 1675, he observes, "I was so persecuted with discussions arising out of my theory of light, that I blamed my own imprudence for parting with so substantial a blessing as my quiet, to run after a shadow." Nearly a year after his complaint to Leibnitz, he uses the following remarkable expression in a communication to Oldenburg: "I see I have made myself a slave to philosophy; but if I get free of Mr. Linus's business, I will resolutely bid adieu to it eternally, excepting what I do for my private satisfaction, or leave to come out after me; for I see a man must either resolve to put out nothing new, or to become a slave to defend it." His assistant and amanuensis for five years (Humphrey Newton) never heard him laugh but once in all that time: "'Twas upon occasion of asking a friend, to whom he had lent Euclid to read, what progress he had made in that author, and how he liked him. He answered by desiring to know what use and benefit in life that study would be to him. Upon which Sir Isaac was very merry." He was once disordered with pains, at the stomach, which confined him for some days to his bed, but which he bore with a great deal of patience and magnanimity, seemingly indifferent either to live or to die. "He seeing me," said his assistant, "much concerned at his illness, bid me not trouble myself; 'For if I die,' said Sir Isaac, 'I shall leave you an estate,' which he then for the first time mentioned." Says Bishop Atterbury, "In the whole air of his face and make there was nothing of that penetrating sagacity which appears in his compositions. He had something rather languid in his look and manner, which did not raise any great expectations in those who did not know him." When Pope expressed a wish for "some memoirs and character of Newton, as a private man," he did "not doubt that his life and manners would make as great a discovery of virtue and goodness and rectitude of heart, as his works have done of penetration and the utmost stretch of human knowledge." When Vigani told him "a loose story about a nun," he gave up his acquaintance; and when Dr. Halley ventured to say anything disrespectful to religion, he invariably checked him with the remark, "I have studied these things,—you have not." When he was asked to take snuff or tobacco, he declined, remarking "that he would make no necessities to himself." Bishop Burnet said that he "valued him for something still more valuable than all his philosophy,—for having the whitest soul he ever knew."

Slowly and modestly the great in all things is developed. "Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small." Look at the Netherlands. "Three great rivers—the Rhine, the Meuse, and the Scheldt—had deposited their slime for ages among the dunes and sand-banks heaved up by the ocean around their mouths. A delta was thus formed, habitable at last for man. It was by nature a wide morass, in which oozy islands and savage forests were interspersed among lagoons and shallows; a district lying partly below the level of the ocean at its higher tides, subject to constant overflow from the rivers, and to frequent and terrible inundations by the sea. Here, within a half submerged territory, a race of wretched ichthyophagi dwelt upon mounds, which they had raised, like beavers, above the almost fluid soil. Here, at a later day, the same race chained the tyrant Ocean and his mighty streams into subserviency, forcing them to fertilize, to render commodious, to cover with a beneficent net-work of veins and arteries, and to bind by watery highways, with the farthest ends of the world, a country disinherited by nature of its rights. A region outcast of ocean and earth wrested at last from both domains their richest treasures. A race engaged for generations in stubborn conflict with the angry elements was unconsciously educating itself for its great struggle with the still more savage despotism of man."

In the central part of a range of the Andes, at an elevation of about seven thousand feet, on a bare slope, may be observed some snow-white projecting columns. These are petrified trees, eleven being silicified, and from thirty to forty converted into coarsely crystallized white calcaraeous spar. They are abruptly broken off, the upright stumps projecting a few feet above the ground. The trunks measured from three to five feet each in circumference. They stood a little way apart from each other, but the whole formed one group. The volcanic sandstone in which the trees were imbedded, and from the lower part of which they must have sprung, had accumulated in successive thin layers around their trunks, and the stone yet retained the impression of the bark. "It required," says the eminent scientific man who visited the spot in 1835, "little geological practice to interpret the marvelous story which this scene at once unfolded. I saw the spot where a cluster of fine trees once reared their branches on the shores of the Atlantic, when that ocean, now driven back seven hundred miles, came to the foot of the Andes. I saw that they had sprung from a volcanic soil which had been raised above the level of the sea, and that subsequently this dry land, with its upright trees, had been let down into the depths of the ocean. In these depths, the formerly dry land was covered by sedimentary beds, and these again by enormous streams of submarine lava—one such mass attaining the thickness of a thousand feet; and these deluges of molten stone and aqueous deposits five times alternately had been spread out. The ocean which received such thick masses must have been profoundly deep; but again the subterranean forces exerted themselves, and I now beheld the bed of that ocean, forming a chain of mountains more than seven thousand feet in height. Nor had those antagonist forces been dormant which are always at work, wearing down the surface of the land; the great piles of strata had been intersected by many wide valleys, and the trees, now changed into silex, were exposed projecting from the volcanic soil, now changed into rocks, whence formerly, in a green and budding state, they had raised their lofty heads."

"The world," said Goethe, "is not so framed that it can keep quiet; the great are not so that they will not permit misuse of power; the masses not so that, in hope of a gradual amelioration, they will keep tranquil in an inferior condition. Could we perfect human nature, we might expect perfection everywhere; but as it is, there will always be this wavering hither and thither; one part must suffer while the other is at ease." "It is with human things," says Froude, "as it is with the great icebergs which drift southward out of the frozen seas. They swim two thirds under water, and one third above; and so long as the equilibrium is sustained you would think that they were as stable as the rocks. But the sea water is warmer than the air. Hundreds of fathoms down, the tepid current washes the base of the berg. Silently in those far deeps the centre of gravity is changed; and then, in a moment, with one vast roll, the enormous mass heaves over, and the crystal peaks which had been glancing so proudly in the sunlight are buried in the ocean forever." "The secret which you would fain keep, as soon as you go abroad, lo! there is one standing on the door-step to tell you the same." The revolution is all at once ripe, and the bottom is at the top again. Nobody and everybody is responsible. "It is seldom," says John Galt, in his life of Wolsey, "that any man can sway the current of national affairs; but a wide and earnest system of action never fails to produce results which resemble the preëxpected effects of particular designs." At the gorgeous coronation of Napoleon, some one asked the republican general Augereau whether anything was wanting to the splendor of the scene. "Nothing," replied Augereau, "but the presence of the million of men who have died to do away with all this."

You remember the value, to the cause of civil liberty and Christianity, of the accidental epithet of "beggars," applied to the three hundred nobles who petitioned Margaret of Parma for a stay of the edicts of Philip and the Inquisition, about to be terribly executed upon the rebellious Protestants under the leadership of William of Orange. Motley, in his Dutch Republic, gives a vivid account of it. The duchess was agitated and irritated by the petition. "The Prince of Orange addressed a few words to the duchess, with the view of calming her irritation. He observed that the confederates were no seditious rebels, but loyal gentlemen, well-born, well-connected, and of honorable character. They had been influenced, he said, by an honest desire to save their country from impending danger,—not by avarice or ambition. 'What, madam,' cried Berlaymont in a passion, 'is it possible that your highness can entertain fears of these beggars? Is it not obvious what manner of men they are? They have not had wisdom enough to manage their own estates, and are they now to teach the king and your highness how to govern the country? By the living God, if my advice were taken, their petition should have a cudgel for a commentary, and we would make them go down the steps of the palace a great deal faster than they mounted them!' Afterward, as the three hundred gentlemen and nobles passed by the house of Berlaymont, that nobleman, standing at his window in company with Count Aremberg, repeated his jest: 'There go our fine beggars again. Look, I pray you, with what bravado they are passing before us!' 'They call us beggars,' said Brederode to the three hundred banqueting with him in the Calemburg mansion on that famous April night. 'Let us accept the name. We will contend with the Inquisition, but remain loyal to the king, even till compelled to wear the beggar's sack.' He then beckoned to one of his pages, who brought him a leathern wallet, such as was worn at that day by professional mendicants, together with a large wooden bowl, which also formed part of their regular appurtenances. Brederode immediately hung the wallet around his neck, filled the bowl with wine, lifted it with both hands, and drained it at a draught. 'Long live the beggars!' he cried, as he wiped his beard and set the bowl down. 'Long live the beggars!' Then for the first time from the lips of those reckless nobles rose the famous cry, which was so often to ring over land and sea, amid blazing cities, on blood-stained decks, through the smoke and carnage of many a stricken field. The humor of Brederode was hailed with deafening shouts of applause. The count then threw the wallet round the neck of his nearest neighbor, and handed him the wooden bowl. Each guest, in turn, donned the mendicant's knapsack. Pushing aside his golden goblet, each filled the beggar's bowl to the brim, and drained it to the beggars' health. Roars of laughter and shouts of 'Long live the beggars!' shook the walls of the stately mansion, as they were doomed never to shake again. The shibboleth was invented. The conjuration which they had been anxiously seeking was found. Their enemies had provided them with a spell which was to prove, in after days, potent enough to start a spirit from palace or hovel, forest or wave, as the deeds of the 'wild beggars,' the 'wood beggars,' and the 'beggars of the sea' taught Philip at last to understand the nation which he had driven to madness."

Johnny Appleseed, by which name Jonathan Chapman was known in every log-cabin from the Ohio River to the Northern Lakes, is an interesting character to remember. Barefooted, and with scanty clothing, he traversed the wilderness for many years, planting appleseeds in the most favorable situations. His self sacrificing life made him a favorite with the frontier settlers—men, women, and especially children; even the savages treated him with kindness, and the rattlesnakes, it was said, hesitated to bite him. "During the war of 1812, when the frontier settlers were tortured and slaughtered by the savage allies of Great Britain, Johnny Appleseed continued his wanderings, and was never harmed by the roving bands of hostile Indians. On many occasions the impunity with which he ranged the country enabled him to give the settlers warning of approaching danger, in time to allow them to take refuge in their block-houses before the savages could attack them. An informant refers to one of these instances, when the news of Hull's surrender came like a thunderbolt upon the frontier. Large bands of Indians and British were destroying everything before them, and murdering defenseless women and children, and even the block-houses were not always a sufficient protection. At this time Johnny traveled day and night, warning the people of the impending danger. He visited every cabin and delivered this message: 'The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, and He hath anointed me to blow the trumpet in the wilderness, and sound an alarm in the forest; for behold, the tribes of the heathen are round about your doors, and a devouring flame followeth after them!' The aged man who narrated this incident said that he could feel even then the thrill that was caused by this prophetic announcement of the wild-looking herald of danger, who aroused the family on a bright moonlight midnight with his piercing cry. Refusing all offers of food, and denying himself a moment's rest, he traversed the border day and night until he had warned every settler of the impending peril. Johnny also served as colporteur, systematically leaving with the settlers chapters of certain religious books, and calling for them afterward; and was the first to engage in the work of protecting dumb brutes. He believed it to be a sin to kill any creature for food. No Brahman could be more concerned for the preservation of insect life, and the only occasion on which he destroyed a venomous reptile was a source of long regret, to which he could never refer without manifesting sadness. He had selected a suitable place for planting appleseeds on a small prairie, and in order to prepare the ground, he was mowing the long grass, when he was bitten by a rattlesnake. In describing the event he sighed heavily, and said, 'Poor fellow, he only just touched me, when I, in the heat of my ungodly passion, put the heel of my scythe in him, and went away. Some time afterward I went back, and there lay the poor fellow, dead!'" "He was a man, after all,"—Hawthorne might have exclaimed of him, too,—"his Maker's own truest image, a philanthropic man!—not that steel engine of the devil's contrivance—a philanthropist!"

John Brown, when he was twelve years old, from seeing a negro slave of his own age cruelly beaten, began to hate slavery and love the slaves so intensely as "sometimes to raise the question, Is God their Father?" At forty, "he conceived the idea of becoming a liberator of the Southern slaves;" at the same time "determined to let them know that they had friends, and prepared himself to lead them to liberty. From the moment that he formed this resolution, he engaged in no business which he could not, without loss to his friends and family, wind up in fourteen days." His favorite texts of Scripture were, "Remember them that are in bonds as bound with them;" "Whoso stoppeth his ear at the cry of the poor, he also shall cry himself, but shall not be heard;" "Whoso mocketh the poor reproacheth his Maker, and he that is glad at calamities shall not be unpunished;" "Withhold not good from them to whom it is due, when it is in the power of thine hand to do it." His favorite hymns were, "Blow ye the trumpet, blow!" and "Why should we start and fear to die?" "I asked him," said a child, "how he felt when he left the eleven slaves, taken from Missouri, safe in Canada? His answer was, 'Lord, permit now thy servant to die in peace, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation. I could not brook the idea that any ill should befall them, or they be taken back to slavery. The arm of Jehovah protected us.'" "Upon one occasion, when one of the ex-governors of Kansas said to him that he was a marked man, and that the Missourians were determined, sooner or later, to take his scalp, the old man straightened himself up, with a glance of enthusiasm and defiance in his gray eye. 'Sir,' said he, 'the angel of the Lord will camp round about me.'" On leaving his family the first time he went to Kansas, he said, "If it is so painful for us to part, with the hope of meeting again, how dreadful must be the separation for life of hundreds of poor slaves." "He deliberately determined, twenty years before his attack upon Harper's Ferry," says Higginson, "that at some future period he would organize an armed party, go into a slave State, and liberate a large number of slaves. Soon after, surveying professionally in the mountains of Virginia, he chose the very ground for the purpose. He said 'God had established the Alleghany Mountains from the foundation of the world that they might one day be a refuge for fugitive slaves. Visiting Europe afterward, he studied military strategy for this purpose, even making designs for a new style of forest fortifications, simple and ingenious, to be used by parties of fugitive slaves when brought to bay. He knew the ground, he knew his plans, he knew himself; but where should he find his men? Such men as he needed are not to be found ordinarily; they must be reared. John Brown did not merely look for men, therefore; he reared them in his sons. Mrs. Brown had been always the sharer of his plans. 'Her husband always believed,' she said, 'that he was to be an instrument in the hands of Providence, and she believed it too.' 'This plan had occupied his thoughts and prayers for twenty years.' 'Many a night he had lain awake and prayed concerning it.'" "He believed in human brotherhood, and in the God of Battles; he admired Nat Turner, the negro patriot, equally with George Washington, the white American deliverer." "He secretly despised even the ablest antislavery orators. He could see 'no use in this talking,' he said. 'Talk is a national institution; but it does no manner of good to the slave.'" The year before his attack, he uttered these sentences in conversation: "Nat Turner, with fifty men, held Virginia five weeks. The same number, well organized and armed, can shake the system out of the State." "Give a slave a pike, and you make him a man. Deprive him of the means of resistance, and you keep him down." "The land belongs to the bondsman. He has enriched it, and been robbed of its fruits." "Any resistance, however bloody, is better than the system which makes every seventh woman a concubine." "A few men in the right, and knowing they are, can overturn a king. Twenty men in the Alleghanies could break slavery to pieces in two years." "When the bondsmen stand like men, the nation will respect them. It is necessary to teach them this." About the same time he said, in another conversation, "that it was nothing to die in a good cause, but an eternal disgrace to sit still in the presence of the barbarities of American slavery." "Providence," said he, "has made me an actor, and slavery an outlaw." "Duty is the voice of God, and a man is neither worthy of a good home here, or a heaven, that is not willing to be in peril for a good cause." He scouted the idea of rest while he held "a commission direct from God Almighty to act against slavery." After his capture, and while he lay in blood upon the floor of the guard-house, he was asked by a bystander upon what principle he justified his acts? "Upon the Golden Rule," he answered. "I pity the poor in bondage that have none to help them. That is why I am here; it is not to gratify any personal animosity, or feeling of revenge, or vindictive spirit. It is my sympathy with the oppressed and the wronged, that are as good as you, and as precious in the sight of God. I want you to understand, gentlemen, that I respect the rights of the poorest and weakest of the colored people, oppressed by the slave system, just as much as I do those of the most wealthy and powerful. That is the idea that has moved me, and that alone. We expected no reward except the satisfaction of endeavoring to do for those in distress—the greatly oppressed—as we would be done by. The cry of distress, of the oppressed, is my reason, and the only thing that prompted me to come here. I wish to say, furthermore, that you had better, all you people of the South, prepare yourselves for a settlement of this question. It must come up for settlement sooner than you are prepared for it, and the sooner you commence that preparation, the better for you. You may dispose of me very easily. I am nearly disposed of now; but this question is still to be settled—this negro question, I mean. The end of that is not yet." In his "last speech," before sentence was passed upon him, he said, "This court acknowledges, as I suppose, the validity of the law of God. I see a book kissed here which I suppose to be the Bible, or, at least, the New Testament. That teaches me that all things 'whatsoever I would that men should do unto me I should do even so to them.' It teaches me further, to 'remember them that are in bonds as bound with them.' I endeavored to act up to that instruction. I say, I am yet too young to understand that God is any respecter of persons. I believe that to have interfered as I have done, as I have always freely admitted I have done, in behalf of his despised poor, was not wrong, but right. Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children, and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments—I submit: so let it be done." In a postscript to a letter to a half-brother, written in prison, he said, "Say to my poor boys never to grieve for one moment on my account; and should any of you live to see the time when you will not blush to own your relation to old John Brown, it will not be more strange than many things that have happened." In a letter to his old school-master, he said, "I have enjoyed much of life, as I was enabled to discover the secret of this somewhat early. It has been in making the prosperity and happiness of others my own; so that really I have had a great deal of prosperity." To another he wrote, "I commend my poor family to the kind remembrance of all friends, but I well understand that they are not the only poor in our world. I ought to begin to leave off saying our world." In his last letter to his family, he said, "I am waiting the hour of my public murder with great composure of mind and cheerfulness, feeling the strong assurance that in no other possible way could I be used to so much advantage to the cause of God and of humanity, and that nothing that I or all my family have sacrificed or suffered will be lost. Do not feel ashamed on my account, nor for one moment despair of the cause, or grow weary of well-doing. I bless God I never felt stronger confidence in the certain and near approach of a bright morning and glorious day than I have felt, and do now feel, since my confinement here." In a previous letter to his family, he said, "Never forget the poor, nor think anything you bestow on them to be lost to you, even though they may be as black as Ebedmelech, the Ethiopian eunuch, who cared for Jeremiah in the pit of the dungeon, or as black as the one to whom Philip preached Christ. 'Remember them that are in bonds as bound with them.'" As he stepped out of the jail-door, on his way to the gallows, "a black woman, with a little child in her arms, stood near his way. The twain were of the despised race for whose emancipation and elevation to the dignity of the children of God he was about to lay down his life. His thoughts at that moment none can know except as his acts interpret them. He stopped for a moment in his course, stooped over, and with the tenderness of one whose love is as broad as the brotherhood of man, kissed it affectionately. As he came upon an eminence near the gallows, he cast his eye over the beautiful landscape, and followed the windings of the Blue Ridge Mountains in the distance. He looked up earnestly at the sun, and sky, and all about, and then remarked, 'This is a beautiful country. I have not cast my eyes over it before.'" "You are more cheerful than I am, Captain Brown," said the undertaker, who sat with him in the wagon. "Yes," answered the old man, "I ought to be." "'Gentlemen, good-by,' he said to two acquaintances, as he passed from the wagon to the scaffold, which he was first to mount. As he quietly awaited the necessary arrangements, he surveyed the scenery unmoved, looking principally in the direction of the people, in the far distance. 'There is no faltering in his step, wrote one who saw him, 'but firmly and erect he stands amid the almost breathless lines of soldiery that surround him. With a graceful motion of his pinioned right arm he takes the slouched hat from his head and carelessly casts it upon the platform by his side. His elbows and ankles are pinioned, the white cap is drawn over his eyes, the hangman's rope is adjusted around his neck.' 'Captain Brown,' said the sheriff, 'you are not standing on the drop. Will you come forward?' 'I can't see you, gentlemen,' was the old man's answer, unfalteringly spoken; 'you must lead me.' The sheriff led his prisoner forward to the centre of the drop. 'Shall I give you a handkerchief,' he then asked, 'and let you drop it as a signal?' 'No; I am ready at any time; but do not keep me needlessly waiting.'"

"Give the corpse a good dose of arsenic, and make sure work of it!" exclaimed a captain of Virginia militia.

"The saint, whose martyrdom will make the gallows glorious like the cross!" exclaimed the Massachusetts sage and seer.

Froude's reflections upon the death of John Davis, the navigator, one of England's Forgotten Worthies, may well be applied to John Brown: "A melancholy end for such a man—the end of a warrior, not dying Epaminondas-like on the field of victory, but cut off in a poor brawl or ambuscade. Life with him was no summer holiday, but a holy sacrifice offered up to duty, and what his Master sent was welcome." It was "hard, rough, and thorny, trodden with bleeding feet and aching brow; the life of which the cross is the symbol; a battle which no peace follows, this side the grave; which the grave gapes to finish, before the victory is won; and—strange that it should be so—this is the highest life of man. Look back along the great names of history; there is none whose life has been other than this. They to whom it has been given to do the really highest work in this earth, whoever they are, Jew or Gentile, Pagan or Christian, warriors, legislators, philosophers, priests, poets, kings, slaves—one and all, their fate has been the same: the same bitter cup has been given to them to drink."

V.

REWARDS.

The Bishop of Llandaff was standing in the House of Lords, in company with Lords Thurlow and Loughborough, when Lord Southampton accosted him: "I want your advice, my lord; how am I to bring up my son so as to make him get forward in the world?" "I know of but one way," replied the bishop; "give him parts and poverty." Poussin, being shown a picture by a person of rank, remarked, "You only want a little poverty, sir, to make you a good painter."

"The advantage of riches remains with him who procured them, not with the heir." Yet, says Froude, "The man who with no labor of his own has inherited a fortune, ranks higher in the world's esteem than his father who made it. We take rank by descent. Such of us as have the longest pedigree, and are therefore the farthest removed from the first who made the fortune and founded the family, we are the noblest. The nearer to the fountain, the fouler the stream; and that first ancestor, who has soiled his fingers by labor, is no better than a parvenu."

Labor, curse though we call it, as things are, seems to be life's greatest blessing. "There is more fatigue," says Tom Brown, "and trouble in a lady than in the most laborious life; who would not rather drive a wheelbarrow with nuts about the streets, or cry brooms, than be Arsennus?" (a fine gentleman). When Sir Horace Vere died, it was asked what had occasioned his death; to which some one replied, "By doing nothing." "Too much idleness," said Burke, "fills up a man's time much more completely, and leaves him less his own master than any sort of employment whatsoever." What to do? how to do? become distressing questions to him, and he finds himself in as great extremity as the man in the story of the Persian poet: "I saw," says Saadi, "an Arab sitting in a circle of jewelers of Básráh, and relating as follows: 'Once on a time having missed my way in the desert, and having no provisions left, I gave myself up for lost; when I happened to find a bag full of pearls. I shall never forget the relish and delight that I felt on supposing it to be fried wheat; nor the bitterness and despair which I suffered on discovering that the bag contained pearls.'"

In the executive chamber one evening, there were present a number of gentlemen, among them Mr. Seward. A point in the conversation suggesting the thought, the president said, "Seward, you never heard, did you, how I earned my first dollar?" "No," rejoined Mr. Seward. "Well," continued Lincoln, "I was about eighteen years of age; I belonged, you know, to what they call down South the 'scrubs;' people who do not own slaves are nobody there. But we had succeeded in raising, chiefly by my labor, sufficient produce, as I thought, to justify me in taking it down the river to sell. After much persuasion, I got the consent of mother to go, and constructed a little flat-boat, large enough to take a barrel or two of things that we had gathered, with myself and little bundle, down to New Orleans. A steamer was coming down the river. We have, you know, no wharves on the Western streams; and the custom was, if passengers were at any of the landings, for them to go out in a boat, the steamer stopping and taking them on board. I was contemplating my new flat-boat, wondering whether I could make it stronger or improve it in any particular, when two men came down to the shore in carriages, with trunks, and looking at the different boats, singled out mine, and asked, 'Who owns this?' I answered, somewhat modestly, 'I do.' 'Will you,' said one of them, 'take us and our trunks out to the steamer?' 'Certainly,' said I. I was very glad to have the chance of earning something. I supposed that each of them would give me two or three bits. The trunks were put on my flat-boat, the passengers seated themselves on the trunks, and I sculled them out to the steamboat. They got on board, and I lifted up their heavy trunks, and put them on deck. The steamer was about to put on steam again, when I called out that they had forgotten to pay me. Each of them took from his pocket a silver half-dollar, and threw it on the floor of my boat. I could scarcely believe my eyes as I picked up the money. Gentlemen, you may think it was a very little thing, and in these days it seems to me a trifle; but it was a most important incident in my life. I could scarcely credit that I, a poor boy, had earned a dollar in less than a day,—that by honest work I had earned a dollar. The world seemed wider and fairer before me. I was a more hopeful and confident being from that time."

Only such persons interest us, it has been said, who have stood in the jaws of need, and have by their own wit and might extricated themselves, and made man victorious. Young and old, all of us, have been intensely interested in knowing what Robinson Crusoe was to do with his few small means. Wonderful Robert Burns! "While his youthful mother was still on the straw, the miserable clay cottage fell above her and the infant bard, who both narrowly escaped, first being smothered to death, and then of being starved by cold, as they were conveyed through frost and snow by night to another dwelling." While he was yet a child, the poverty of the family increased to wretchedness. The "cattle died, or were lost by accident; the crops failed, and debts were accumulating. To these buffetings of misfortune the family could oppose only hard labor and the most rigid economy. They lived so sparingly that butcher-meat was a stranger in their dwelling for years." "The farm proved a ruinous bargain," said the poet; "and to clinch the misfortune, we fell into the hands of a factor, who sat for the picture I have drawn of one in my tale of Twa Dogs. My indignation yet boils at the recollection of the scoundrel factor's insolent letters, which used to set us all in tears. This kind of life—the cheerless gloom of a hermit, with the unceasing moil of a galley-slave—brought me to my sixteenth year; a little before which period I first committed the sin of rhyme.... My passions, when once lighted up, raged like so many devils, till they got vent in rhyme; and then the conning over my verses, like a spell, soothed all into quiet."

Edmund Kean's early life was very wretched. It was after his marriage that we find him "strolling in the old misery, giving an entertainment at Dumfries to pay his lodging. One six-penny auditor alone came." (Once, we are told, he absented himself from his home in Exeter for three days. To the question of where he had been, he replied, grandiloquently, "I have been doing a noble action; I have been drinking these three days with a brother actor who is leaving Exeter, to keep up his spirits.") After rehearsal, and before his appearance at Drury Lane, he exclaimed prophetically, "My God! if I succeed I shall go mad!" Drunk with delight, he rushed home, and with half-frenzied incoherency poured forth the story of his triumph. "The pit rose at me!" he cried. "Mary, you shall ride in your carriage yet!" "Charles," lifting the child from his bed, "shall go to Eton." Then his voice faltered, and he murmured, "If Howard (his recently deceased child) had but lived to see it!"

Among the companions of Reynolds, when he was studying his art at Rome, was a fellow-pupil of the name of Astley. They made an excursion, with some others, on a sultry day, and all except Astley took off their coats. After several taunts he was persuaded to do the same, and displayed on the back of his waistcoat a foaming waterfall. Distress had compelled him to patch his clothes with one of his own landscapes. Henderson, the actor, after a simple reading of a newspaper, repeated such an enormous portion of it as seemed utterly marvelous. "If you had been obliged, like me," he said, in reply to the surprise expressed by his auditors, "to depend during many years for your daily bread on getting words by heart, you would not be so much astonished at habit having produced the facility." Amyot was a servant at college, and studied, like Ramus, by the light of burning charcoal from want of candles; but his translations earned him a mitre as well as renown. Duchâtel rose from being reader in a printing-office to be grand almoner of France; and was paid by the king to talk to him during his meals.

Excellence is not matured in a day, and the cost of it is an old story. The beginning of Plato's Republic was found in his tablets written over and over in a variety of ways. It took Virgil, it is stated, three years to compose his ten short eclogues; seven years to elaborate his Georgics, which comprise little more than two thousand verses; and he employed more than twelve years in polishing his Æneid, being even then so dissatisfied with it, that he wished before his death to commit it to the flames. Horace was equally indefatigable, and there are single odes in his works which must have cost him months of labor. Lucretius's one poem represents the toil of a whole life-time. Thucydides was twenty years writing his history, which is comprised in one octavo volume. Gibbon wrote the first chapter of his work three times before he could please himself. Montesquieu, alluding in a letter to one of his works, says to his correspondent, "You will read it in a few hours, but the labor expended on it has whitened my hair." Henri Beyle transcribed his History of Painting in Italy seventeen times. Sainte-Beuve often spent a whole week on two or three octavo pages. Gray was so fastidious in polishing and perfecting his Elegy, that he kept it nearly twenty years, touching it up and improving it. There is a poem of ten lines in Waller's works, which he himself informs us, took him a whole summer to put into shape. Malherbe would spoil half a quire of paper in composing and discomposing and recomposing a stanza. It is reckoned that during the twenty-five most prolific years of his life he composed no more than, on the average, thirty-three verses per annum. There is a good story told of him, which illustrates amusingly the elaborate care he took with his poems. A certain nobleman of his acquaintance had lost his wife, and was anxious that Malherbe should dedicate an ode to her memory, and condole with him in verse on the loss he had sustained. Malherbe complied, but was so fastidious in his composition, that it was three years before the elegy was completed. Just before he sent it in, he was intensely chagrined to find that his noble friend had solaced himself with a new bride, and was, consequently, in no humor to be pestered with an elegy on his old one. When dying, his confessor, in speaking of the happiness in heaven, expressed himself inaccurately. "Say no more about it," said Malherbe, "or your style will disgust me with it." Miss Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Hume, and Fox, have all recorded the trouble they took. Tasso was unwearied in correcting; so were Pope and Boileau. The Cambridge manuscript of Milton's Lycidas shows numerous erasures and interlineations. Pascal spent twenty days in perfecting a single letter. The fables of La Fontaine were copied and re-copied over and over again. Alfieri was laboriously painstaking in composition. We are told that if he approved of his first sketch of a piece—after laying it by for some time, nor approaching it again until his mind was free of the subject—he submitted it to what he called "development"—writing out in prose the indicated scenes, with all the force at his command, but without stopping to analyze a thought or correct an expression. He then proceeded to verify at his leisure the prose he had written, selecting with care the ideas he thought best, and rejecting those which he deemed unworthy of a place. Nor did he even yet regard his work as finished, but incessantly polished it verse by verse, and made continual alterations. Molière composed very slowly, although he liked the contrary to be understood, and many pieces supposed to have been written upon the spur of a royal command, had been prepared some time previously. He said to Boileau, "I have never done anything with which I am truly content." Sheridan, when urged by the publisher, Ridgeway, to finish his manuscript of The School for Scandal, declared that he had been nineteen years endeavoring to satisfy himself with the style of it, but had not succeeded. Joubert had a habit from his twentieth year to his seventieth, of jotting down with pencil the best issues of his meditation as they arose; and out of this chaos of notes was shaped, many years after his death, a full volume of Thoughts, "which," says the translator, "from their freshness and insight, their concise symmetry of expression, their pithiness, their variety, make a rich, enduring addition to the literature of France, and to all literature." Addison wore out the patience of his printer; frequently, when nearly a whole impression of a Spectator was worked off, he would stop the press to insert a new preposition. Lamb's most sportive essays were the result of most intense labor; he used to spend a week at a time in elaborating a single humorous letter to a friend. Tennyson is reported to have written Come into the Garden, Maud, more than fifty times over before it pleased him; and Locksley Hall, the first draught of which was written in two days, he spent the better part of six weeks, for eight hours a day, in altering and polishing. Dickens, when he intended to write a Christmas story, shut himself up for six weeks, lived the life of a hermit, and came out looking as haggard as a murderer. His manuscripts show that he wrote with the greatest care, and scrupulously revised his writing in order to render each sentence as perfect as might be. He made his alterations so carefully that it is difficult to trace the words which he had originally written. In many instances "the primary words have been erased so carefully that it is next to impossible to form an idea of how the passages originally stood." Balzac, after he had thought out thoroughly one of his philosophical romances, and amassed his materials in a most laborious manner, retired to his study, and from that time until his book had gone to press, society saw him no more. When he appeared again among his friends, he looked, said his publisher, in the popular phrase, like his own ghost. The manuscript was afterward altered and copied, when it passed into the hands of the printer, from whose slips the book was re-written for the third time. Again it went into the hands of the printer,—two, three, and sometimes four separate proofs being required before the author's leave could be got to send the perpetually re-written book to press at last, and so have done with it. He was literally the terror of all printers and editors. Moore thought it quick work if he wrote seventy lines of Lalla Rookh in a week. Kinglake's Eothen, we are told, was re-written five or six times, and was kept in the author's writing-desk almost as long as Wordsworth kept the White Doe of Rylstone, and kept like that to be taken out for review and correction almost every day. Buffon's Studies of Nature cost him fifty years of labor, and he re-copied it eighteen times before he sent it to the printer. "He composed in a singular manner, writing on large-sized paper, in which, as in a ledger, five distinct columns were ruled. In the first column he wrote down the first thoughts; in the second, he corrected, enlarged, and pruned it; and so on, until he had reached the fifth column, within which he finally wrote the result of his labor. But even after this, he would re-compose a sentence twenty times, and once devoted fourteen hours to finding the proper word with which to round off a period." John Foster often spent hours on a single sentence. Ten years elapsed between the first sketch of Goldsmith's Traveller and its completion. The poet's habit was to set down his ideas in prose, and, when he had turned them carefully into rhyme, to continue retouching the lines with infinite pains to give point to the sentiment and polish to the verse. La Rochefoucauld spent fifteen years in preparing his little book of Maxims, altering some of them, Segrais says, nearly thirty times. Rogers showed a friend a note to his Italy, which, he said, took him a fortnight to write. It consists of a very few lines. We all know how Sheridan polished his wit and finished his jokes, the same surprising things being found on different bits of paper, differently expressed. Not long before his death Adam Smith told Dugald Stewart that he wrote with just as much difficulty then as when he first began. The Benedictine editor of Bossuet's works stated that his manuscripts were bleared over with such numerous interlineations that they were nearly illegible. Sterne was incessantly employed for six months in perfecting one very diminutive volume. Herrick was a painstaking elaborator: with minute and curious care he polished and strengthened his work: "his airy facility, his seemingly spontaneous melodies, as with Shelley, were earned by conscious labor; perfect freedom was begotten of perfect art." It seems, no doubt, to many a reader of Macaulay's History, as if he wrote without effort, and as if the charms of his style were the gift of nature rather than the product of art, so spontaneously do they appear to flow from his pen. It was the general opinion of his literary friends that he wrote with great rapidity, and made few corrections in his manuscripts. On the contrary, we are told by his nephew and biographer, that he never allowed a sentence to pass until it was as good as he could make it, and would often re-write paragraphs and whole chapters that he might gain even a slight improvement in arrangement or expression. After writing thus carefully, he corrected again remorselessly, and his manuscripts were covered with erasures. He paid equal attention to proof-sheets. "He could not rest until the lines were level to a hair's breadth, and the punctuation correct to a comma; until every paragraph concluded with a telling sentence, and every sentence flowed like running water." To Napier, the editor of The Edinburgh Review, he wrote from Calcutta: "At last I send you an article of interminable length about Lord Bacon. I never bestowed so much care on anything that I have written. There is not a sentence in the latter half of the article which has not been repeatedly recast." Carlyle, Miss Martineau says, erred on the side of fastidiousness. "Almost every word was altered, and revise followed revise." Giardini, when asked how long it would take to learn to play on the violin, answered, "Twelve hours a day for twenty years together." Bülow is reported to have said, "If I stop practice for one day, I notice it in my playing; if I stop two days, my friends notice it; if I stop three days, the public notices it." Leonardo da Vinci would walk the whole length of Milan that he might alter a single tint in his picture of the Last Supper. Titian, we are told, after laying his foundation with a few bold strokes, would turn the picture to the wall, and leave it there perhaps for months, turning it round again after a time to look at it carefully, and scan the parts as he would the face of his greatest enemy. If at this time any portion of it should appear to him to have been defective, he would set to work to correct it, applying remedies as a surgeon would apply them, cutting off excrescences here, superabundant flesh there, redressing an arm, adjusting or setting a limb, regardless of the pain which it might cause. In this way he would reduce the whole to a certain symmetry, put it aside, and return again a third or more times till the first quintessence had been covered over with its padding of flesh. Then came the finishing, which was done at as many more different paintings, to say nothing of the innumerable last touches—with his fingers as well as with his brush—of which he is said to have been particularly fond. It is a received opinion that Edmund Kean's acting was wholly spontaneous and unstudied; this is a mistake. A contemporary, writing of his earlier professional life, says, "He used to mope about for hours, walking miles and miles alone with his hands in his pockets, thinking intensely on his characters. No one could get a word from him; he studied and slaved beyond any actor I ever knew." Neither did he relax his labors when he had reached the highest pinnacle of fame. It is related of him, that when studying Maturin's Bertram, he shut himself up for two days to study the one line, "Bertram has kissed the child!" It made one of those electrical effects which from their vividness were supposed to be merely impulsive. His wife said her husband would often stand up all night before a pier glass in his chamber, endeavoring to acquire the right facial expression for some new part. John Kemble's new readings of Hamlet were many and strange, and excited much comment. "The performance was eminently graceful, calm, deep studied—during his life he wrote out the entire part forty times—but cold and unsympathetic." As to orators, the greatest of antiquity were not ashamed to confess the industry of the closet. Demosthenes gloried in the smell of the lamp; and it is recorded of Cicero, that he not only so laboriously prepared his speeches, but even so minutely studied the effect of their delivery, that on one occasion, when he had to oppose Hortensius, the reiterated rehearsals of the night before so diminished his strength as almost to incapacitate him in the morning. Lord Erskine corrected and corrected his very eloquent orations, and Burke literally worried his printer into a complaint against the fatigue of his continual revises. Indeed, it is said, such was the fastidiousness of his industry, that the proof-sheet not unfrequently exhibited a complete erasure of the original manuscript. Whitefield's eloquence was a natural gift improved by diligent study; and Garrick said that each repetition of the same sermon showed a constant improvement,—as many as forty repetitions being required before the discourse reached its full perfection. "I composed," says Lord Brougham, "the peroration of my speech for the queen, in the Lords, after reading and repeating Demosthenes for three or four weeks, and I composed it twenty times over at least, and it certainly succeeded in a very extraordinary degree, and far above any merits of its own." He says that Erskine wrote down word for word the passage about the savage and his bundle of sticks. His mind having acquired a certain excitement and elevation, and received an impetus from the tone and quality of the matured and premeditated composition, retained that impetus, after the impelling cause had died away. Webster, it is said, was in the habit of writing and re-writing most of the fine passages of his senatorial and forensic speeches, and sometimes prepared them, in order that they might afterward be introduced when occasion should offer. He was wont to say that the following passage in his speech upon President Jackson's protest, in May, 1834, had been changed by him twelve times, before he reduced it to a shape that entirely met his approval. Perhaps it is not surpassed, for poetical beauty, by anything that ever fell from his eloquent lips. Speaking of resistance by the United States of the aggressions of Great Britain, he said: "They raised their flag against a power, to which, for the purposes of foreign conquest and subjugation, Rome, in the height of her glory, is not to be compared. A power which has dotted over the surface of the whole globe with her possessions and military posts—whose morning drum-beat following the sun, and keeping company with the hours, circles the earth daily with one continuous and unbroken strain of the martial airs of England."

As to compensation, it is stated that Goethe's works were not in his own time commercially successful. After his return from Italy, the edition of his collected works, which he had compared and revised with labor and with care, sold, as his publisher complained, only "very slowly." Coleridge gained little or no money by his writings. He says, "I question whether there ever existed a man of letters so utterly friendless, or so unconnected as I am with the dispensers of contemporary reputation, or the publishers in whose service they labor." When Newton lectured, a Lucasian professor, "so few went to hear him, that ofttimes he did, in a manner, for want of hearers, read to the walls." The Paradise Lost had a very limited sale, till, fifty years after its publication, it was brought into light by the criticisms of Addison. Campbell for years could not find a bookseller who would buy The Pleasures of Hope. In the first thirteen years after the publication of Boswell's Life of Johnson, less than four thousand copies were sold. There were only forty-five copies of Hume's History sold in the first twelvemonth. Twelve years elapsed before the first five hundred copies of Emerson's Nature were purchased by the public. Washington Irving was nearly seventy years old before the sale of his works at home met the expenses of his simple life at Sunnyside. It has been related that while Madame Titiens was receiving an ovation for her singing of Kathleen Mavourneen, the author of the song sat weeping in the audience, the poorest and obscurest man present. Willis, breakfasting at the Temple with a friend, met Charles and Mary Lamb. He mentioned having bought a copy of Elia the last day he was in America, to send as a parting gift to one of the most lovely and talented women in his country. "What did you give for it?" said Lamb. "About seven and six-pence." "Permit me to pay you that," said he; and with the utmost earnestness he counted out the money upon the table. "I never yet wrote anything that would sell," he continued. "I am the publishers' ruin."

Fortune, it has been truly said, has rarely condescended to be the companion of genius; others find a hundred by-roads to her palace; there is but one open, and that a very indifferent one, for men of letters. Cervantes, the immortal genius of Spain, is supposed to have wanted bread; Le Sage was a victim of poverty all his life; Camoëns, the solitary pride of Portugal, deprived of the necessaries of life, perished in a hospital at Lisbon. The Portuguese, after his death, bestowed on the man of genius they had starved the appellation of Great. Vondel, the Dutch Shakespeare, to whom Milton was greatly indebted, after composing a number of popular tragedies, lived in great poverty, and died at ninety years of age; then he had his coffin carried by fourteen poets, who, without his genius, probably partook of his wretchedness. The great Tasso was reduced to such a dilemma that he was obliged to borrow a crown from a friend to subsist through the week. He alludes to his dress in a pretty sonnet, which he addresses to his cat, entreating her to assist him, during the night, with the lustre of her eyes, having no candle to see to write his verses. One day Louis the Fourteenth asked Racine what there was new in the literary world. The poet answered that he had seen a melancholy spectacle in the house of Corneille, whom he found dying, deprived even of a little broth. Spenser, the child of Fancy, languished out his life in misery. Lord Burleigh, it is said, prevented the queen giving him a hundred pounds, thinking the lowest clerk in his office a more deserving person. Sydenham, who devoted his life to a laborious version of Plato, died in a miserable spunging-house. "You," said Goldsmith to Bob Bryanton, "seem placed at the centre of fortune's wheel, and, let it revolve ever so fast, are insensible to the motion. I seem to have been tied to the circumference, and whirled disagreeably round, as if on a whirligig.... Oh gods! gods! here in a garret, writing for bread, and expecting to be dunned for a milk-score." To another, about the same time, he wrote, "I have been some years struggling with a wretched being—with all that contempt that indigence brings with it—with all those passions which make contempt insupportable. What, then, has a jail that is formidable? I shall at least have the society of wretches, and such is to me true society." Cervantes planned and commenced Don Quixote in prison. John Bunyan wrote the first part, at least, of Pilgrim's Progress in jail. Both of these immortal works are the delight and solace of reading people wherever there is a literature. The latter is said to have been translated into a greater number of languages than any other book in the world, with two exceptions, the Bible and the Imitation of Christ. Sir James Harrington, author of Oceana, on pretense of treasonable practices, was put into confinement, which lasted until he became deranged, when he was liberated. Sir Roger L'Estrange was tried and condemned to death, and lay in prison nearly four years; constantly expecting to be led forth to execution. Ben Jonson, John Selden, Jeremy Taylor, and Edmund Waller were imprisoned. Sir Walter Raleigh, during his twelve years' imprisonment, wrote his best poems and his History of the World, a work accounted vastly superior to all the English historical productions which had previously appeared. "Written," says the historian Tytler, "in prison, during the quiet evening of a tempestuous life, we feel, in its perusal, that we are the companions of a superior mind, nursed in contemplation and chastened and improved by sorrow, in which the bitter recollection of injury and the asperity of resentment have passed away, leaving only the heavenly lesson, that all is vanity." Old George Wither wrote his Shepherd's Hunting during his first imprisonment. The superiority of intellectual pursuits over the gratification of sense and all the malice of fortune, has never been more touchingly or finely illustrated, it has been well said, than in this poem.

"Can anything be so elegant," asks Emerson, "as to have few wants and serve them one's self? It is more elegant to answer one's own needs than to be richly served; inelegant perhaps it may look to-day, and to a few, but it is an elegance forever and to all.... Parched corn, and a house with one apartment, that I may be free of all perturbations, that I may be serene and docile to what the mind shall speak, and girt and road-ready for the lowest mission of knowledge or good-will, is frugality for gods and heroes." Said Confucius, "With coarse rice to eat, with water to drink, and my bended arm for a pillow,—I have still joy in the midst of these things." "For my own private satisfaction," said Bishop Berkeley, "I had rather be master of my own time than wear a diadem." "I would rather," said Thoreau, "sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself, than to be crowded on a velvet cushion.... If you have any enterprise before you, try it in your old clothes. All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be. Perhaps we should never procure a new suit, however ragged or dirty the old, until we have so conducted, so enterprised or sailed in some way, that we feel like new men in the old, and that to retain it would be like keeping new wine in old bottles. Our moulting season, like that of fowls, must be a crisis in our lives. The loon retires to solitary ponds to spend it. Thus also the snake casts its slough, and the caterpillar its wormy coat, by an internal industry and expansion; for clothes are but our outmost cuticle and mortal coil.... It is desirable that a man be clad so simply that he can lay his hands on himself in the dark, and that he live in all respects so compactly and preparedly, that, if an enemy take the town, he can, like the old philosopher, walk out the gate empty-handed without anxiety."

"You see in my chamber," said Goethe, near the close of his life, "no sofa; I sit always in my old wooden chair, and never, till a few weeks ago, have permitted even a leaning place for my head to be added. If surrounded by tasteful furniture, my thoughts are arrested, and I am placed in an agreeable, but passive state. Unless we are accustomed to them from early youth, splendid chambers and elegant furniture had best be left to people who neither have nor can have any thoughts."

Rogers, the banker poet, once said to Wordsworth, "If you would let me edit your poems, and give me leave to omit some half-dozen, and make a few trifling alterations, I would engage that you should be as popular a poet as any living." Wordsworth's answer is said to have been, "I am much obliged to you, Mr. Rogers; I am a poor man, but I would rather remain as I am."

Thomson solicited Burns to supply him with twenty or thirty songs for the musical work in which he was engaged, with an understanding distinctly specified, that the bard should receive a regular pecuniary remuneration for his contributions. With the first part of the proposal Burns instantly complied, but peremptorily rejected the last. "As to any remuneration, you may think my songs either above or below price; for they shall absolutely be the one or the other. In the honest enthusiasm with which I embark in your undertaking, to talk of money, wages, fee, hire, etc., would be downright prostitution of soul." Thomson, some time after, notwithstanding the prohibition, ventured to acknowledge his services by a small pecuniary present, which the poet with some difficulty restrained himself from returning. "I assure you, my dear sir," he wrote to the donor, "that you truly hurt me with your pecuniary parcel. It degrades me in my own eyes. However, to return it would savor of affectation; but as to any more traffic of that debtor and creditor kind, I swear by that honor which crowns the upright statue of Robert Burns' integrity—on the least motion of it, I will indignantly spurn the by-past transaction, and from that moment commence entire stranger to you! Burns' character for generosity of sentiment and independence of mind will, I trust, long outlive any of his wants which the cold, unfeeling ore can supply; at least, I will take care that such a character he shall deserve." His sensitive nature inclined him to reject the present, as proud old Sam Johnson threw away with indignation the new shoes which had been placed at his chamber door. "I ought not," says Emerson, "to allow any man, because he has broad lands, to feel that he is rich in my presence. I ought to make him feel that I can do without his riches, that I cannot be bought,—neither by comfort, neither by pride,—and though I be utterly penniless, and receiving bread from him, that he is the poor man beside me."

Isaac Disraeli, when a young man, was informed that a place in the establishment of a great merchant was prepared for him; he replied that he had written and intended to publish a poem of considerable length against commerce, which was the corrupter of man; and he at once inclosed his poem to Dr. Johnson, who, however, was in his last illness, and was unable to read it. Coleridge, on being offered a half share in the Morning Post and Courier, with a prospect of two thousand pounds a year, announced that he would not give up country life, and the lazy reading of old folios, for two thousand times that income. "In short," he added, "beyond three hundred and fifty pounds a year, I regard money as a real evil." Professor Agassiz, when once invited to lecture, replied to the munificent lecture association that he was very sorry, but he was just then busy with some researches that left him no time to make money. There is a familiar story told of Marvell, who is said to have so greatly pleased Charles II. at a private interview, by his wit and agreeable conversation, that the latter dispatched the lord treasurer Danby to offer him a thousand pounds, with a promise of a lucrative place at court, which Marvell refused, notwithstanding he was immediately afterward compelled to borrow a guinea of a friend. Just at the time when the English mind was agitated upon the subject of American taxation, and Goldsmith was most needy, an effort was made to bring him into the ministerial ranks. Dr. Scott was sent to negotiate with the poet. "I found him," said Scott, "in a miserable suite of chambers in the Temple. I told him my authority: I told him I was empowered to pay most liberally for his exertions; and, would you believe it! he was so absurd as to say, 'I can earn as much as will supply my wants without writing for any party; the assistance you offer is therefore unnecessary to me;' and so I left him in his garret!" Sir John Hawkins one day met Goldsmith; his lordship told him he had read his poem, The Traveller, and was much delighted with it; that he was going lord lieutenant to Ireland, and that hearing that he was a native of that country, he should be glad to do him any kindness. The honest poor man and sincere lover of literature replied that he "had a brother there, a clergyman, that stood in need of help. As for myself, I have no dependence upon the promises of great men; I look to the booksellers for support; they are my best friends, and I am not inclined to forsake them for others." For this frank expression of magnanimity and manly self-dependence, the pricked Hawkins, and the envious Boswell, speaking of the incident afterward, called Goldsmith an "idiot." Some of Walter Scott's friends offered him, or rather proposed to offer him, enough of money, as was supposed, to enable him to arrange with his creditors. He paused for a moment; and then recollecting his powers, said proudly, "No! this right hand shall work it all off!" Lady Blessington said to Willis, Disraeli and Dr. Beattie being present: "Moore went to Jamaica with a profitable appointment. The climate disagreed with him, and he returned home, leaving the business in the hands of a confidential clerk, who embezzled eight thousand pounds in the course of a few months and absconded. Moore's misfortunes awakened a great sympathy among his friends. Lord Lansdowne was the first to offer his aid. He wrote to Moore, that for many years he had been in the habit of laying aside from his income eight thousand pounds, for the encouragement of the arts and literature, and that he should feel that it was well disposed of for that year if Moore would accept it, to free him from his difficulties. It was offered in the most delicate and noble manner, but Moore declined it. The members of 'White's' (mostly noblemen) called a meeting, and (not knowing the amount of the deficit) subscribed in one morning twenty-five thousand pounds, and wrote to the poet that they would cover the sum, whatever it might be. This was declined. Longman and Murray then offered to pay it, and wait for their remuneration from his works. He declined even this, and went to Passy with his family, where he economized and worked hard till it was canceled. At one time two different counties of Ireland sent committees to him, to offer him a seat in Parliament; and as he depended on his writings for a subsistence, offering him at the same time twelve hundred pounds a year while he continued to represent them. Moore was deeply touched with it, and said no circumstance of his life had ever gratified him so much. He admitted that the honor they proposed him had been his most cherished ambition, but the necessity of receiving a pecuniary support at the same time was an insuperable obstacle. He could never enter Parliament with his hands tied, and his opinions and speech fettered, as they would be irresistibly in such circumstances." Southey was offered by Walter the editorship of The Times, but declined it, saying, "No emolument, however great, would induce me to give up a country life, and those pursuits in literature to which the studies of so many years have been directed." "Will you be created a count? a title is sometimes useful," said Louis Philippe to M. Guizot. The proffered honor was declined, and the king replied, "You are right; your name alone is sufficient, and is a higher dignity." D'Alembert, when in receipt of but a limited income,—more than half of which he gave away in charity,—declined an invitation of Frederick the Great to reside at the court of Berlin. The Empress Catherine offered him the post of tutor or governor to the czarowitch, with an income of one hundred thousand livres, and on his refusal wrote: "I know that your refusal arises from your desire to cultivate your studies and your friendships in quiet. But this is of no consequence; bring all your friends with you, and I promise you, that both you and they shall have every accommodation in my power." Still he refused; the "powers and potentialities of the courts and royalty" being insufficient to seduce his independence. Béranger, the "French Burns," the poet of the people, from 1820 to the end of his life called "the real monarch of France," had the same proud spirit of independence. General Sebastiani, then minister of war, and dangerously ill, received one day a visit from Béranger. "Ah! my dear friend," said the old soldier to the poet, "I am very ill. Come, my dear Béranger, we must do something for our friends. I declare to you that I shall not die quietly if I leave you in poverty behind me. Madame de Praslin has a fortune of her own; therefore it will not be doing any injustice to my children. Listen; I have there in my bureau a few small savings, about two hundred thousand francs; let us divide them. It is an old friend, an old soldier, who offers you this; and I swear, on my cross of honor, that no one shall know the pleasure you will have done me in accepting the small present." The poet refused. Spinoza, at one time, we are informed, did not spend six sous a day, on an average, and did not drink more than a pint of wine in a month. "Nature is satisfied with little," he used to say, "and when she is content, I am so too." A good friend brought him one day a present of two thousand florins. The philosopher, "in the presence of his host, civilly excused himself from accepting the money, saying that he was in need of nothing, and that the possession of so much money would only serve to distract him from his studies and occupations."