CHAPTER XXXII.

Usefulness of such encouragements as the examples here given are cal culated to afford to youthful genius in every department of study. Self-educated Poets; John Taylor; Antonio Bianchi; Ramsay; Bloomfield.

THE individuals with whom our three last chapters have been occupied have not earned their distinction by the cultivation of any branch of what is properly called science or literature; but their lives do not on that account furnish us with less suitable illustrations of the subject of the present work. Our object is to inculcate the importance, to demonstrate the practicability, and to point out the method, of intellectual improvement generally; and especially to make the young reader understand and feel, by an array of examples taken from every condition of society and every walk of mental exertion, that, in the pursuit of any description of knowledge, no difficulties arising from external circumstances can eventually resist a steady determination to excel; so that a man's success or failure in such an attempt depends, in fact, more upon himself than upon any circumstances in which he may be placed. Wherever, therefore, we have been able to find a case of extraordinary attainments made in despite of such obstacles as usually repress all endeavour after intellectual cultivation, we have not hesitated to bring it forward, whether it was that of an individual who had distinguished himself in philosophy, in scholarship, or in art. What we have wished to establish and make evident is, the power which every man really desirous of education has, in the absence of all aid from others, to educate himself; and that this power is not confined to the case of any particular sort of acquirement, but exists in nearly an equal degree in regard to every species of

knowledge or skill of which any one may be ambitious to possess himself. And a moment's consideration will show the vast importance of such a truth being generally diffused and felt in all its universality. How much apprehension and despondency would even those of the children of poverty and neglect, who have been eventually most successful in their efforts to educate themselves, been saved from, had they all possessed such an assurance as these examples are calculated to afford, that many others had triumphed in the same or a harder struggle before them! Would not this of itself have helped to smooth the roughest of their difficulties, and carried them forward on their way with new strength, even when their hearts were most ready to fail them? Nay, how many might not such an assurance have led to high attainments, and perhaps to achievements beneficial to themselves and to mankind, in some one of the va rious paths of intellectual enterprise, who, frightened by the apprehended arduousness of the task, have either never made an attempt to emancipate themselves from the ignorance in which they were reared, or, having begun the pursuit of knowledge, have stopped in their career ere they had made any considerable progress? Nor let it be said that the mere force of talent, where it really exists, will of itself be sufficient to overcome everything that may tend to repress it. Even genius of the highest order is often diffident, and easily dismayed; its quickness of sensibility makes it apprehensive, and prone both to exaggerate difficulties where they do exist, and to create them where they do not. On these accounts it frequently needs encouragement where a coarser nature, and faculties of immeasurably less real power, might safely be left to make their way without any pains being taken to invigorate or sustain their possessor's confidence of success. We cannot then doubt the usefulness of diversifying our illustrations as much as possible by selecting them from all the different departments of biography. We would offer to every aspirant, in every line of intellectual pursuit, an example by which he may at least learn that he is setting out upon no impracticable or hitherto

unaccomplished journey, but that a road as difficult as his own, if not the very same, has been travelled by another before him. Whether, therefore, it be literature or science, or any branch of art, in which it is his desire to accomplish himself, let him be as destitute at the commencement of his career of all the ordinary means of instruction as he may, here is his assurance that the way is still open to him, not only to mediocrity of attainment in his chosen pursuit, but even, it may be, to the highest distinction,

We propose now to notice a few of the more remarkable instances, not already adverted to, in which a genius for another of the fine arts, Poetry, which is, however, at the same time, a department of literature also, has burst through all the impediments of an unfavourable worldly lot, and prompted its possessor to the successful pursuit of that education which here, as everywhere else, can alone enable even the most extraordinary native powers of mind to produce anything of much value. For it is certainly a very unfounded, though by no means an uncommon notion, that the case of poetic talent forms an exception to this general rule, and that to be a great poet a man has only to be born such. There is no instance on record of an individual either securing or deserving any considerable or permanent distinction by his poetical productions, who had not stored his mind with much and various knowledge,-in other words, who had not educated himself well, although never, it may be, matriculated in any university. The germ of a genius for poetry has no doubt sometimes made its appearance in individuals nearly altogether uneducated; but where is to be found the case of this description in which the seed, so buried in an uncultivated soil, has ever grown to anything worth the gathering? It is indeed very much to be apprehended that this mistaken notion in regard to the uselessness of education to a poet, which is sometimes carried so far as to amount to a belief that a poet is actually spoiled by being educated, has not unfrequently had the effect of preventing persons who felt, or supposed, themselves to be gifted with poetic powers,

from exerting themselves with so much ardour and perseverance as they otherwise might have done in the general cultivation of their faculties, or even, in some cases, from making any such attempt at all. Some poets of the humbler class, at any rate, might probably be mentioned, who would have written better if they had taken more pains to add other acquirements to their talent for versifying. We had in this country, in the seventeenth century, a famous popular writer, named 1 JOHN TAYLOR, but who was generally called the Water Poet, from the occupation by which he won his livelihood, which was that of a waterman. Taylor, whose parents were poor people, had learned a very little Latin at a school in the city of Gloucester, where he was born; but this, which was in truth merely a few pages of the rudiments very imperfectly conned, he soon forgot, and he never attempted to recover it. Yet he showed considerable industry in tagging rhymes, both while engaged in the laborious employment we have mentioned, and at an after period, when he kept a victualling-house at Oxford. During the civil wars he published a great many effusions on the royalist side of the question, some of which show considerable powers of humour, and give ground for believing that, with more study and a larger acquaintance with literature, the author would have produced compositions of much greater value. The mention of Taylor reminds us of another water-poet, ANTONIO BIANCHI, a common Venetian gondolier, whose epic, entitled 'David, King of Israel,' in twelve cantos, made its appearance at Venice about the middle of the last century. From the accounts, however, given of this poem, which is written in the Venetian dialect, it appears to be, notwithstanding the provincial and unclassical character of the language, a work of a very superior order to anything that the English waterman ever produced, both in genius and in the evidence which it affords of the author's reading and information. Bianchi afterwards published a critical tract, which was deemed to display considerable ability. But an acquaintance even with the most classic poetical productions of their coun

try is, or was, far from uncommon among the Venetian gondoliers. Sir J. Cam Hobhouse, in the notes to the fourth canto of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage,' tells us that many portions of Tasso's Jerusalem' used to be familiar to most of them, and that editions of the entire poem, translated into the Venetian dialect, were formerly in general circulation. On one occasion, in January, 1817, he mentions that he himself, accompanied by Lord Byron and another Englishman, went to an island a short way from the city in a boat rowed by two men, one of whom was a carpenter and the other a gon dolier, the former of whom placed himself at the prow, the latter at the stern. "A little after leaving the quay of the Piazetta," continues the account," they began to sing, and continued their exercise until we arrived at the island, They gave us, among other essays, the death of Clorinda, and the palace of Armida; and did not sing the Venetian, but the Tuscan verses. The carpenter, however, who was the cleverer of the two, and was frequently obliged to prompt his companion, told us that he could translate the original. He added, that he could sing almost three hundred stanzas, but had not spirits (morbin was the word he used) to learn any more, or to sing what he already knew: a man must have idle time on his hands to acquire, or to repeat, and, said the poor fellow, Look at my clothes and at me; I am starving.' Bianchi, we ought to add, was also the author of a second poem, of considerable extent, entitled 'Solomon, or the Temple,' as well as of several minor productions.

In our own country we have had many writers of verse who have arisen among the ranks of the labouring population, but, with the exception of Burns, no great poet. Perhaps the name that should be placed next to that of Burns is that of his countryman, ALLAN RAMSAY, the author of the Gentle Shepherd, certainly one of the most natural, if not most poetical, pastorals to be found in any language, Ramsay was the son of one of the common workmen in the lead-mines belonging to the Earl of Hopetoun, in the south of Scotland; and, as soon as his strength permitted, he was himself employed in the