18 minute read
These records of the Triumphs of Perseverance and Enterprise have been written with the view to inspire the youthful reader with a glow of emulation, and to induce him to toil and to advance in the peaceful achievements of science and benevolence, remembering the adage, “Whatever man has done, man may do.”...
3 minute read
“If that boy were left naked and friendless on Salisbury Plain, he would find the road to fame and riches!” the tutor of Sir William Jones was accustomed to say of his illustrious pupil. His observation of the great quality of perseverance , evinced in every act of study prescribed to his scholar, doubtless impelled the teacher to utter that remarkable affirmation. A discernment of high genius in young Jones, with but little of the great quality we have named, would have led Dr. Thackeray to modify his remark. It would have been couched in some such form as this: “If that boy had as much perseverance as genius, he would find the road to fame and riches, even if he were left naked and friendless on Salisbury Plain.” But, had the instructor regarded his pupil as one endowed with the most brilliant powers of mind, yet entirely destitute of...
14 minute read
Happily, had early admonitions of perseverance from his mother, in whose widowed care he was left at three years old; and who, “to his incessant importunities for information, which she watchfully stimulated,” says his biographer, Lord Teignmouth, “perpetually answered, ‘Read, and you will know,’” His earnest mind cleaved to the injunction. He could read any English book rapidly at four years of age; and, though his right eye was injured by an accident at five, and the sight of it ever remained imperfect, his determination to learn triumphed over that impediment. Again, the commencement of life seemed discouraging: he had been placed at Harrow School, at the age of seven, but had his thigh-bone broken at nine, and was compelled to be from school for twelve months. Such was his progress, in spite of these untoward circumstances, and although characterised, let it be especially observed, as a boy “remarkable for...
5 minute read
Now Regius Professor of Hebrew in the University of Cambridge, being the son of a poor widow, who was left to struggle for the support of two younger children, was apprenticed to a carpenter, at twelve years of age, after receiving a merely elementary instruction in reading, writing, and arithmetic in the charity-school of the village of Longmore, in Shropshire. His love of books became fervent, and the Latin quotations he found in such as were within his reach kindled a desire to penetrate the mystery of their meaning. The sounds of the language, too, which he heard in a Catholic chapel, where his master had undertaken some repairs, increased this desire. At seventeen he purchased “Ruddiman’s Latin Rudiments,” and soon committed the whole to memory. With the help of “Corderius’ Colloquies,” “Entick’s Dictionary,” and “Beza’s Testament,” he began to make his way into the vestibule of Roman learning; but...
1 minute read
The most highly endowed of human intelligences, was under as great necessity of learning the vocabulary of the English tongue as the very commonest mind. He, like all other men, however inferior to him in understanding or imagination, was born without any innate knowledge of things, or their natures, words, or the rules for fashioning them in order, or combining them with grace and harmony, eloquence and strength. Every author of the first class was in the same predicament mentally at birth; they had everything to learn, and the perfection of their learning depended on their own effort. It may be equally affirmed, then, of the highest poet and the greatest linguist, of Shakspeare and Sir William Jones, that neither had any “royal road” for gaining his peculiar eminence. The little we know of the personal history of Shakspeare renders it necessary for us to attribute a very ample measure...
1 minute read
Was not less an exemplar of diligence than of skill in the architecture of verse. The mere task-work of constructing three thousand eight hundred and fifty-four stanzas, comprising forty-four thousand six hundred and sixty-eight lines, would have wearied out the industry of any mind whose powers were not indefatigable. He died, too, before his magnificent design was complete, or the elaborate monument of his fame might have been still more colossal. Superiority to mental indolence, so manifest in the lives of Shakspeare and Spenser, is equally noticeable in the cases of Chaucer and Milton, of Ben Jonson and Beaumont and Fletcher, of Dryden and Pope, of Byron and Wordsworth, our other great poets; and, indeed, in the histories of the great poets of all nations. When the quantity of their composition is considered, and it is remembered how much thought must have been expended in the bringing together of choice...
7 minute read
Afterwards so famous as the great arbiter of literary criticism, is found leaving college without a degree, and, from sheer poverty, at the age of twenty-two. The sale of his deceased father’s effects, a few months after, affords him but twenty pounds, and he is constrained to become an usher in a grammar school in Leicestershire. In the next year he performs a translation of “Lobo’s Voyage to Abyssinia” for a Birmingham bookseller, returns to Lichfield, his birth-place, and publishes proposals for printing, by subscription, the Latin poems of Politian, the life of that author, and a history of Latin poetry from the era of Petrarch to the time of Politian. His project failed to attract patrons, and he next offered his services to Cave, the original projector of the “Gentleman’s Magazine.” Cave accepted his offer, but on conditions which compelled Johnson to make application elsewhere for earning the means...
7 minute read
In the early circumstances of his life, is a still more striking exemplar of the virtue of perseverance. He was left an orphan at thirteen years of age, was sent to sea for a twelvemonth, and was then taken home by his godfather, who had seized upon whatever his mother had left, as a means of repaying himself for money lent to her, and was now constrained to pay some attention to the boy, by the keen remonstrances of his neighbours. He was sent to school, and made such rapid progress in arithmetic that, in a few months, he was at the head of the school, and frequently assisted his master. The receipt of a trifle for these services raised in him the thought of one day becoming a schoolmaster, in the room of a teacher in the town of Ashburton, who was growing old and infirm. He mentioned his...
9 minute read
The author of the unrivalled “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” was born to considerable fortune. He left the University at eighteen, after great loss of time, as he tells us in his instructive autobiography, and with what was worse, habits of expense and dissipation. His father being under distressing anxiety on account of his son’s irregularities, and, afterwards, from what he deemed of greater moment, young Gibbon’s sudden avowal of conversion to the doctrines of the Roman Catholic church, placed him abroad, under the strict care of a Protestant minister. Gibbon began to awake to reflection; and, without prescription from his new guardian, voluntarily entered on severe study. He diligently translated the best Roman writers, turned them into French, and then again into Latin, comparing Cicero and Livy, and Seneca and Horace, with the best orators and historians, philosophers and poets, of the moderns. He next advanced to...
5 minute read
The greatest of modern sculptors, was born in a mud-walled cabin of an Alpine valley within the Venetian territories; and remained in the care of Pasino, his grandfather, who was a stone-cutter, till his twelfth year. Pasino, evermore employing enticement and tenderness rather than compulsion began to instruct the child in drawing, as soon as his little hand could hold a pencil; and even taught him to model in clay at an early age. At nine years old, however, he was set to work at stone-cutting; and, thenceforward, his essays in art were but pursued as relaxations. Yet his boyish performances were sufficiently remarkable to attract notice from the chief of the patrician family of Falieri, for whom Pasino worked. This nobleman took young Canova under his patronage, and placed him with Toretto, a sculptor. His new preceptor was not very liberal in his instructions; but the young genius secretly...
2 minute read
The most eminent of our sculptors, was another noble example of successful perseverance. From a boy, accustomed to drive an ass laden with sand into Sheffield, he rose to the highest honours of an exalted profession; a large proportion of the persons of rank and distinction in his own time sat to him for busts and statues: he was knighted, and, like Canova, left considerable wealth at his death, to be devoted through future time to the encouragement of Art. His father, who was a small farmer in the neighbourhood of Sheffield, wished to place him with a grocer or an attorney; but, at his own urgent desire, he was apprenticed with a carver and gilder in that town. An engraver and portrait-painter, perceiving his devotion to Art, gave him some valuable instruction; but his master did not incline to forward his favourite pursuits, fearing they would interfere with his...
8 minute read
One of those high names which are everlasting monuments of the success with which true genius bids defiance to the hostilities of poverty and envy might be claimed, with pride and fondness, by either of the sister arts of Poetry and Music, were it not that his greatest triumphs were won in Painting. The wildness and sublimity of his canvas had their types in the scenery of his birth-place—the ancient and decayed villa of Renella, within view of Mount Vesuvius, and near to Naples. His father was a poverty-stricken artist, and descended from a family to whom poverty and painting had been heirlooms for generations. Determined to avert the continuance of this inauspicious union of inheritances in the life of his child, he took counsel with his wife, and they resolved to dedicate him to the service of the Church. He was, accordingly, taken to the font in the grand...
5 minute read
An American Quaker by birth, was the youngest of a family of ten children, and was nurtured with great tenderness and care; a prophecy uttered by a preacher of the sect having impressed his parents with the belief that their child would, one day, become a great man. In what way the prophecy was to be realised they had formed to themselves no definite idea; but an incident, which occurred in young West’s sixth year, led his father to ponder deeply as to whether its fulfilment were not begun. Benjamin, being left to watch the infant child of one of his relatives while it was left asleep in the cradle, had drawn its smiling portrait, in red and black ink, there being paper and pens on the table in the room. This spontaneous and earliest essay of his genius was so strikingly truthful that it was instantly and rapturously recognised...
2 minute read
The time may come when Music will be universally recognised as the highest branch of Art; as the most powerful divulger of the intellect’s profoundest conceptions and noblest aspirations; as the truest interpreter of the heart’s loves and hates, joys and woes; as the purest, least sensual, disperser of mortal care and sorrow; as the all-glorious tongue in which refined, good, and happy beings can most perfectly utter their thoughts and emotions. Perhaps this cannot be till the realm of the physical world be more fully subdued by man. The human faculties have hitherto been, necessarily, too much occupied with the struggle for existence, for security against want and protection from the elements, with the invention of better and swifter modes of locomotion and of transmission of thought, to advance to a general apprehension of the superior nature of Music. “Practical men”—men fitted for the discharge of the world’s present...
9 minute read
The first of the four highest names in Music, was the son of a physician of Halle, in Lower Saxony, and was designed by his father for the study of the civil law. The child’s early attachment to music—for he could play well on the old instrument called a clavichord before he was seven years old—was, therefore, witnessed by his parent with great displeasure. Unable to resist the dictates of his nature, the boy used to climb up into a lonely garret, shut himself up, and practise, chiefly when the family were asleep. He attached himself so diligently to the practice of his clavichord, that it enabled him, without ever having received the slightest instruction, to become an expert performer on the harpsichord. It was at this early age that the resolution of young Handel was manifested in the singular incident often told of his childhood. His father set out...
4 minute read
The son of a wood carver of Penzance, was apprenticed by his father to a surgeon and apothecary of that town, and afterwards with another of the same profession, but gave little satisfaction to either of his masters. Natural philosophy had become his absorbing passion; and, even while a boy, he dreamt of future fame as a chemist. The rich diversity of minerals in Cornwall offered the finest field for his empassioned inquiries; and he was in the habit of rambling alone for miles, bent upon his yearning investigation into the wonders of Nature. In his master’s garret, and with the assistance of such a laboratory as he could form for himself from the phials and gallipots of the apothecary’s shop, and the pots and pans of the kitchen, he brought the mineral and other substances he collected to the test. The surgeon of a French vessel wrecked on the...
2 minute read
Was a poor barber till the age of thirty, and then changed his trade for that of an itinerant dealer in hair. Nothing is known of any early attachment he had for mechanical inventions; but, about four years after he had given up shaving beards, he is found enthusiastically bent on the project of discovering the “perpetual motion,” and, in his quest for a person to make him some wheels, gets acquainted with a clockmaker of Warrington, named Kay. This individual had also been for some time bent on the construction of new mechanic powers, and, either to him alone, or to the joint wit of the two, is to be attributed their entry on an attempt at Preston, in Lancashire, to erect a novel machine for spinning cotton-thread. The partnership was broken, and the endeavour given up, in consequence of the threats uttered by the working spinners, who dreaded...
4 minute read
Must be mentioned as the meritorious individual who completed the discovery of cotton manufacture, by the invention of the power-loom. His tendency towards mechanical contrivances had often displayed itself in his youth; but his love of literature, and settlement in the church, led him to lay aside such pursuits as trifles, and it was not till his fortieth year that a conversation occurred which roused his dormant faculty. His own account of it must be given, not only for the sake of its striking character, but for the powerful negative it puts upon the hackneyed observation, that almost all great and useful discoveries have resulted from “accident.” The narrative first appeared in the “Supplement to the Encyclopædia Britannica.” “Happening to be at Matlock, in the summer of 1784, I fell in company with some gentlemen of Manchester, when the conversation turned on Arkwright’s spinning-machinery. One of the company observed that,...
7 minute read
Was the son of a small merchant of Greenock, and, on account of his weakly state when a child, was unable at first to enjoy the advantages of school tuition, and was therefore taught chiefly at home. When but six years old he was frequently caught chalking diagrams and solving problems on the hearth; and at fourteen he made a rude electrical machine with his own hands. His aunt, it is related, often chided him for indolence and mischief when he was found playing with the tea-kettle on the fire, watching the steam coming out of the spout, and trying the steam’s force by obstructing its escape; the might of the vaporous element seeming even then to have begun to present itself, unavoidably, to his imagination and understanding. He grew to be an extensive manufacturer of philosophical toys while a boy, and used to increase his pocket-money by standing with...
28 minute read
Starts before the mind with the enunciation of the sentence just quoted. He whose indomitable perseverance carried his mutinous sailors onward—and onward—across the dreary Atlantic, in a frail bark, until fidelity to his own convictions issued in the magnificent proof of their verity, the discovery of the new world. But our space demands that we pass to the incomparable name which towers, alone, above that of James Watt, in the world’s list of the scientific benefactors of mankind; and, perhaps, above all human names in its peerless excellence. Return of Columbus....
5 minute read
It is so well known, as scarcely to need repeating here, displayed his wondrous and incontrollable tendency for scientific inquiry in boyhood. In him, too, as in the minds of almost all philosophical discoverers, was evinced the faculty for mechanical contrivance, as well as acuteness for demonstration. The anecdotes of his boyish invention, of his windmill with a mouse for the miller, his water-clock, carriage, and sun-dials, and of his kites and paper lanterns, are familiar. His mother having been persuaded, by an intelligent relative, to give him up from agricultural cares, to which his genius could not be tied down, he was sent to Cambridge, and entered Trinity College in his eighteenth year. He proceeded, at once, to the study of “Descartes’ Geometry,” regarding “Euclid’s Elements” as containing self-evident truths, when he had gone through the titles of the propositions. Yet he afterwards regretted this neglect of the rigid...
3 minute read
Newton’s greatest successor in astronomical discovery, may claim an equality with him, as a true and noble disciple of perseverance. The son of a poor Hanoverian musician, he was brought over to England, with his father, in the band of the Guards. The father returned to Hanover, but young Herschel remained, and at the age of twenty began to seek his fortune in this country. After many difficulties, wanderings from place to place, as a teacher of music in families, and a few slight glimpses of favour from fortune, he obtained the office of organist in the Octagon Chapel at Bath. The emoluments of this situation, with his receipts from tuition of pupils and other engagements, were such that an ordinary mortal would have been content “to make himself comfortable” upon them, in worldly phrase. But ease and competence were not the object of Herschel’s ambition. In the midst of...
2 minute read
May be instanced as one of the most industrious toilers for the advancement of useful science, though he does not take rank with the unfolders of sublime truths. During a life of seventy-five years he was incessantly engaged in endeavouring to add something to the compass of human knowledge and convenience. At one time he is found pursuing an investigation into the mode of formation and growth of shells, endeavouring to account for the progressive motion of the different kinds of testaceous animals; anon, he publishes a “Natural History of Cobwebs,” evincing a mind capable of the most minute and ingenious search; and is afterwards found showing the facility with which iron and steel may be made magnetic by percussion. For revealing to his countrymen, the French, a method of converting forged or bar-iron into steel, of making steel of what quality they pleased, and of rendering even cast-iron ductile,...
4 minute read
By a life of virtue and usefulness, merits the epithet to which his birth by courtesy entitled him. He was the youngest son of the first Earl of Cork, and after being educated at Eton was sent out to travel on the continent. A residence at Florence at the time of Galileo’s death, and the almost universal conversation then caused by the discoveries of that great philosopher, seem to have induced Boyle’s first attention to science. On returning to this country he very soon joined a knot of scientific men, who had begun to meet at each other’s houses, on a certain day in each week, for inquiry and discussion into what was then called “The New or Experimental Philosophy.” These weekly meetings eventually gave rise to the Royal Society of London; but part of the original members of the little club, a few years after its commencement, removed to...
4 minute read
The younger son of Sir Richard, who was a knight, alderman, sheriff, and Lord Mayor of London, and a prosperous merchant, had the twofold example set him by his father, of an intelligent pursuit of trade, and of public spirit and munificence. He was sent to Cambridge, distinguished himself in study, and might, undoubtedly, have risen to reputation in one of the learned professions; but, by his father’s wish, he turned his attention to business, and was admitted a member of the Mercers’ Company at the age of twenty-four. Having, through his father’s eminence as a merchant, succeeded in obtaining the trust of agent to King Edward the Sixth, for taking up money of the merchants of Antwerp, he quickly discerned the abuses under which the king’s interest suffered. He proposed methods for preventing the Flemish merchants from extorting unfair commissions and brokages, and so turned the current of advantage...
8 minute read
The son of a journeyman shoemaker and of a weaver’s daughter, passed his early years amidst circumstances which must have enduringly impressed him with the miseries of vice and poverty. His father was a selfish and habitual drunkard, and his mother frequently worked nineteen or twenty hours out of the four-and-twenty to support her family. He was the eldest child of a numerous family, and was put two or three years to a dame’s school; but was less intent on learning than on “getting on in the world,” even while a boy. He heard a pieman cry his wares, and soon proposed to a baker to sell pies for him; and so successful did young Lackington prove as a pie-vender, that he heard the baker declare, a twelvemonth after, that he had been the means of extricating him from embarrassment. A boyish prank put an end to this engagement; and...
19 minute read
Inheriting a handsome competence from his father, whom he lost while young, went abroad early, and in Italy acquired a taste for art. He made purchases of such specimens of the great masters as his means would allow, and embellished therewith his paternal seat of Cardington, in Bedfordshire. His first wife, who had attended him with the utmost kindness during a severe illness, and whom, though much older than himself, he had married from a principle of gratitude, died within three years of their union; and to relieve his mind from the melancholy occasioned by her death, he resolved on leaving England for another tour. The then recent earthquake which had laid Lisbon in ruins, rendered Portugal a clime of interest with him, and he set sail for that country. The packet, however, was captured by a French privateer; and he and other prisoners were carried into Brest, and placed...
2 minute read
Work, and the true nobility of being devoted to it, distinguished every exemplar recorded in our sketch; and no name of eminence or excellence can be selected in human annals who has ever used the phrase, which can only console idiots, that “he is perfectly happy, for he has nothing to do, and nothing to think about!” “Nothing to do!” in a world whose elements are, as yet, but partially subdued by man, and whose happiness can be augmented so incalculably by the perfecting of his dominion over Nature. “Nothing to think about!” when language, and poetry, and art, and music, and science, and invention, afford ecstatic occupation for thought which could not be exhausted if a man’s life were even extended on the earth to a million of years. “Nothing to do, and nothing to think about!” while millions are doing and thinking,—for a human creature to profess that...
4 minute read
Without Enterprise there would have been no civilization, and there would now be no progress. To try, to attempt, to pass beyond an obstacle, marks the civilized man as distinguished from the savage. The advantage of passing beyond a difficulty by a single act of trial has offered itself, in innumerable instances, to the savage, but in vain; it has passed him by unobserved, unheeded. Nay, more: when led by the civilized man to partake of the advantages of higher life, the savage has repeatedly returned to his degradation. Thus it has often been with the native Australian. A governor of the colony, about sixty years ago, by an innocent stratagem took one of the native warriors into his possession, and strove to reconcile him to the habits of civilized life. Good clothes and the best food were given him; he was treated with the utmost kindness, and, when brought...
4 minute read
Who signalised his courage in the struggles with the French on the continent of North America about the middle of the last century, removed after the war to the State of Connecticut. The wolves, then very numerous, broke into his sheepfold, and killed seven fine sheep and goats, besides wounding many lambs and kids. The chief havoc was committed by a she-wolf, which, with her annual litter of whelps, had infested the neighbourhood. The young were generally destroyed by the vigilance of the hunters, but the mother-wolf was too wary to come within gun-shot, and upon being closely pursued would fly to the western woods, and return the next winter with another litter of whelps. This wolf at length became such an intolerable nuisance that Putnam entered into a combination with five of his neighbours to hunt alternately until they could destroy her; two, by rotation, were to be constantly...
11 minute read
Which occurred while the British army was lying at Agoada, near Goa, 1809. A report was one morning brought to the cantonment that a very large tiger had been seen on the rocks near the sea. About nine o’clock a number of horses and men assembled at the spot where it was said to have been seen, when, after some search, the animal was discovered to be in the recess of an immense rock; dogs were sent in in the hope of starting him, but without effect, having returned with several wounds. Finding it impossible to dislodge the animal by such means, Lieut. Davies, of the 7th regiment, attempted to enter the den, but was obliged to return, finding the passage extremely narrow and dark. He attempted it, however, a second time, with a pick-axe in his hand, with which he removed some obstructions that were in the way. Having...
29 minute read
Equally early with their contests with wild animals primeval men would have had to encounter peril, and to overcome difficulty in the fulfilment of the natural desire possessed by some of them to visit new regions of the earth. Even if the theory be true which is supported by hundreds of learned volumes, that man’s first habitation was in the most agreeable and fertile portion of Asia, by the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates, the native characteristic of enterprise would impel some among the first men to go in quest of new homes or on journeys of exploration and adventure; and, as the human family increased, removal for the youthful branches would be absolutely necessary. To these primal travellers the perils of unknown adventure and the pressure of want would most probably have proved excitements too absorbing to have permitted a chronicle of their experience, even had the art...
29 minute read
He who first committed himself to the perils of the great waters must have been peculiarly distinguished among men for his intrepidity. Modern adventure on the wide ocean, or in comparatively unknown seas, is not accompanied with that uncertainty and sense of utter desolation which must have filled the mind of early adventurers when driven out of sight of land by the tempest; but neither the discovery of the compass nor the many other aids to safety possessed by modern navigators free their enterprises from appalling dangers. The persevering courage of travellers evermore commands our admiration; but the voyager takes his life in his hand from the moment that he leaves the shore. The freedom from fear—nay, the cheerfulness and exultation he experiences when surrounded by the waste of waters, far away from the enjoyments of house and home; the unsubduable resolution with which he careers over the wave and...
31 minute read
One path of Enterprise belongs distinctly to modern adventurers—the search after interesting remains of antiquity, and investigation of their present actual condition. Such enterprises of discovery have often their source in a love of Art, which can only exist in the most cultivated minds. In other instances they arise from a laudable desire to verify ancient history, and thus serve the highly important purpose of confirming that branch of human knowledge which has hitherto depended simply on the testimony of written tradition. Perhaps the greatest contributor to certain knowledge in this department of enterprise and discovery was the celebrated Belzoni, though our acquaintance with the time-honoured and mysterious monuments of Egypt has been enlarged by many other travellers. Greece has also had her distinguished list of antiquarian explorers; and the glowing lands of the East, so famous in sacred and profane story, have been visited by numerous travellers, each and...
37 minute read
With the progress of civilization, Enterprise took more diversified forms. First, man was summoned to display this commanding quality of mind in the subjugation or destruction of the stronger and fiercer animals; then he had to enter on the perilous adventure into strange regions by land, and the hazardous transit of the ocean, in search of still more unknown countries. We have just glanced at another department of enterprise—the search for antiquities; and the subject was placed in this order because it seemed naturally connected with the perils of travel. But enterprise had taken a thousand forms before men began to venture on great dangers for the attainment of more certain knowledge of the past: the hewing of rocks and levelling of forests, the disembowelling of mines, the construction of highways and harbours, the erection of bridges and lighthouses, of Cyclopæan piles and pyramids, of obelisks and columns, of aqueducts...
2 minute read
To describe, even by a single sentence each, the great enterprises of England—her harbours, bridges, canals, railways, mines, manufactures, shipping—would occupy volumes. Suffice it to say that our country has become more and more the land of Enterprise. This, indeed, must be the grand characteristic of the civilised world, universally, if the old and evil passion for war be not renewed. In bygone ages the only path to prosperity for nations was supposed to be war. Nations seemed to think that without military “glory” they could not be great. Modern nations patterned by the ancient; every page of modern history, as well as ancient, is tilled with battles and successes. The farther we look back, the more we find it true, that violence led to splendour and renown. Much is told of the magnificence of the Eastern empires; but far above the glory of the temples of Tadmor, and the...