vain in the compositions of more learned wits. In Defoe's political works, too, there is often all the vigour and dexterity of a most consummate rhetoric, rendered only more effective by many a racy idiom which would probably have been rejected by a mere rhetorician of the schools. Lillo's tragedies, again, full of power and pathos, are unlike anything else in the dramatic literature either of our own or any other country. It seems as if we could tell almost by the perusal of them that their author must have been in business- that he was a regularly-bred tradesman, as well as a self-taught poet. The humblest and the highest walks of life are both favourite regions of poetry; Lillo is the only poet of middle life. His personages are merely the ordinary men and women we meet with every day-neither heroes and emperors, nor beggars and banditti; and his scenes are mostly in streets or on country roads by daylight, and at evening in domestic parlours. Yet even to this atmosphere of common life he has communicated not a little of the excitement of poetry. This is true originality; one of the miracles of that power of genius, to which nothing is impossible.

CHAPTER XII.

SELF-EDUCATED MEN CONTINUED: FERGUSON. INFLUENCE OF ACCIDENT IN DIRECTING PURSUITS: RENNIE; LINNÆUS; VERNET; CARAVAGGIO; TASSIE; CHATTERTON; HARRISON; EDWARDS; VILLARS ; JOLY; JOURDAIN; BANDINELLI; PALISSY.

AMONG the histories of self-educated men there are few more remarkable than that of JAMES FERGUSON. If ever any one was literally his own instructor in the very elements of knowledge, it was he. Acquisitions that have scarcely in any other case, and probably never by one so young, been made without the assistance either of books or a living teacher, were the discoveries of his solitary and almost illiterate boyhood. There are few more interesting narratives in any language than the account which Ferguson himself has given of his early history. He was born in the year 1710, a few miles from the village of Keith, in Banffshire; his parents, as he tells us, being in the humblest condition of life (for his father was merely a day-labourer), but religious and honest. It was his father's practice to teach his children himself to read and write, as they successively reached what he deemed the proper age; but James was too impatient to wait till his regular turn came. While his father was teaching one of his elder brothers, "the eager child" was

secretly occupied in listening to what was going on; and, as soon as he was left alone, used to get hold of the book, and work hard in endeavour ing to master the lesson which he had thus heard gone over. Being ashamed, as he says, to let his father know what he was about, he was wont to apply to an old woman who lived in a neighbouring cottage to solve his difficulties. In this way he actually learned to read tolerably well before his father had any suspicion that he knew his letters. His father at last, very much to his surprise, detected him one day reading by himself, and thus found out his secret.

When he was about seven or eight years of age, a simple incident occurred which seems to have given his mind its first bias to what became afterwards its favourite line of pursuit. The roof of the cottage having partly fallen in, his father, in order to raise it again, applied to it a beam, resting on a prop in the manner of a lever, and was thus enabled, with comparative ease, to produce what seemed to his son quite a stupendous effect. The circumstance set our young philosopher thinking; and, after a while, it struck him that his father, in using the beam, had applied his strength to its extremity, and this, he immediately concluded, was probably an important circumstance in the matter. He proceeded to verify his notion by experiment; and having made several levers, which he called bars, soon not only found that he was right in his conjecture as to the importance of applying the moving force at the point most distant from the fulcrum, but discovered the rule or law of the machine, namely, that the effect of any force or weight made to bear upon it is always exactly proportioned to the distance of the point on which it rests from the fulcrum. "I then," says he, "thought that it was a great pity that, by means of this bar, a weight could be raised but a very little way. On this, I soon imagined that, by pulling round a wheel, the weight might be raised to any height, by tying a ropě to the weight, and winding the rope round the axle of the wheel; and that the power gained must be just as great as the wheel was broader than the axle was thick; and found it to be exactly so, by hanging one weight to a rope put round the wheel, and another to the rope that coiled round the axle." The boy had thus, it will be observed, actually discovered two of the most important of the elementary truths in mechanics—the principles of the lever, and of the wheel and axle; he afterwards hit upon others; and, all the while, he had not only possessed neither book nor teacher to assist him, but was without any other tools than a simple turning-lathe of his father's, and a little knife wherewith to fashion his blocks and wheels, and the other contrivances he needed for his experiments. After having made his discoveries, however, he next, he tells us, proceeded to write an account of them; thinking his little work, which contained sketches of the different machines drawn with a pen, to be the first treatise ever composed of the sort. When, some time after,

a gentleman showed him the whole in a printed book, although he found that he had been anticipated in his inventions, he was much pleased, as he was well entitled to be, on thus perceiving that his unaided genius had already carried hin so far into what was acknowledged to be the region of true philosophy.

It is a ludicrous blunder that the French astronomer Lalande makes in speaking of Ferguson, when he designates him as "Berger au Roi d'Angleterre en Ecosse "-the King of England's Shepherd for Scotland. He had no claim to this pompous title: but it is true that he spent some of his early years as a keeper of sheep, though in the employment, not of the state, but of a small farmer in the neighbourhood of his native place. He was sent to this occupation, he tells us, as being of weak body; and, while his flock was feeding around him, he used to busy himself in making models of mills, spinning-wheels, &c., during the day, and in studying the stars at night, like his predecessors of Chaldea. When a little older, he went into the service of another farmer, a respectable man called James Glasham, whose name well deserves to be remembered. After the labours of the day, young Ferguson used to go at night to the fields, with a blanket about him and a lighted candle, and there, laying himself down on his back, pursued for long hours his observations on the heavenly bodies. "I used to stretch," he says, “a thread with small beads on it, at arm's length, between my eye and the stars; sliding the beads upon it, till they hid such and such stars from my eye, in order to take their apparent distances from one another; and then laying the thread down on a paper, I marked the stars thereon by the beads. My master," he adds, "at first laughed at me; but, when I explained my meaning to him, he encouraged me to go on; and, that I might make fair copies in the daytime of what I had done in the night, he often worked for me himself. I shall always have respect for the memory of that man." Having been employed by his master to carry a message to Mr. Gilchrist, the minister of Keith, he took with him the drawings he had been making, and showed them to that gentleMr. Gilchrist upon this put a map into his hands, and having supplied him with compasses, ruler, pens, ink, and paper, desired him to take it home with him, and bring back a copy of it. "For this pleasant employment," says he, "my master gave me more time than I could reasonably expect; and often took the threshing flail out of my hands, and worked himself, while I sat by him in the barn, busy with my compasses, ruler, and pen." This is a beautiful, we may well say, and even a touching picture-the good man so generously appreciating the worth of knowledge and genius, that, although the master, he voluntarily exchanges situations with his servant, and insists upon doing the work that must be done himself, in order that the latter may give his more precious talents to their more appropriate vocation. We know

man.