Self Help by Samuel Smiles (desktop ebook reader txt) 📖

acquired by any amount of mere literary training. With

his usual weight of words Bacon observes, that “Studies teach not

their own use; but that is a wisdom without them, and above them,

won by observation;” a remark that holds true of actual life, as

well as of the cultivation of the intellect itself. For all

experience serves to illustrate and enforce the lesson, that a man

perfects himself by work more than by reading,—that it is life

rather than literature, action rather than study, and character

rather than biography, which tend perpetually to renovate mankind.

 

Biographies of great, but especially of good men, are nevertheless

most instructive and useful, as helps, guides, and incentives to

others. Some of the best are almost equivalent to gospels—

teaching high living, high thinking, and energetic action for their

own and the world’s good. The valuable examples which they furnish

of the power of self-help, of patient purpose, resolute working,

and steadfast integrity, issuing in the formation of truly noble

and manly character, exhibit in language not to be misunderstood,

what it is in the power of each to accomplish for himself; and

eloquently illustrate the efficacy of self-respect and self-reliance in enabling men of even the humblest rank to work out for

themselves an honourable competency and a solid reputation.

 

Great men of science, literature, and art—apostles of great

thoughts and lords of the great heart—have belonged to no

exclusive class nor rank in life. They have come alike from

colleges, workshops, and farmhouses,—from the huts of poor men and

the mansions of the rich. Some of God’s greatest apostles have

come from “the ranks.” The poorest have sometimes taken the

highest places; nor have difficulties apparently the most

insuperable proved obstacles in their way. Those very

difficulties, in many instances, would ever seem to have been their

best helpers, by evoking their powers of labour and endurance, and

stimulating into life faculties which might otherwise have lain

dormant. The instances of obstacles thus surmounted, and of

triumphs thus achieved, are indeed so numerous, as almost to

justify the proverb that “with Will one can do anything.” Take,

for instance, the remarkable fact, that from the barber’s shop came

Jeremy Taylor, the most poetical of divines; Sir Richard Arkwright,

the inventor of the spinning-jenny and founder of the cotton

manufacture; Lord Tenterden, one of the most distinguished of Lord

Chief Justices; and Turner, the greatest among landscape painters.

 

No one knows to a certainty what Shakespeare was; but it is

unquestionable that he sprang from a humble rank. His father was a

butcher and grazier; and Shakespeare himself is supposed to have

been in early life a woolcomber; whilst others aver that he was an

usher in a school and afterwards a scrivener’s clerk. He truly

seems to have been “not one, but all mankind’s epitome.” For such

is the accuracy of his sea phrases that a naval writer alleges that

he must have been a sailor; whilst a clergyman infers, from

internal evidence in his writings, that he was probably a parson’s

clerk; and a distinguished judge of horse-flesh insists that he

must have been a horse-dealer. Shakespeare was certainly an actor,

and in the course of his life “played many parts,” gathering his

wonderful stores of knowledge from a wide field of experience and

observation. In any event, he must have been a close student and a

hard worker; and to this day his writings continue to exercise a

powerful influence on the formation of English character.

 

The common class of day labourers has given us Brindley the

engineer, Cook the navigator, and Burns the poet. Masons and

bricklayers can boast of Ben Jonson, who worked at the building of

Lincoln’s Inn, with a trowel in his hand and a book in his pocket,

Edwards and Telford the engineers, Hugh Miller the geologist, and

Allan Cunningham the writer and sculptor; whilst among

distinguished carpenters we find the names of Inigo Jones the

architect, Harrison the chronometer-maker, John Hunter the

physiologist, Romney and Opie the painters, Professor Lee the

Orientalist, and John Gibson the sculptor.

 

From the weaver class have sprung Simson the mathematician, Bacon

the sculptor, the two Milners, Adam Walker, John Foster, Wilson the

ornithologist, Dr. Livingstone the missionary traveller, and

Tannahill the poet. Shoemakers have given us Sir Cloudesley Shovel

the great Admiral, Sturgeon the electrician, Samuel Drew the

essayist, Gifford the editor of the ‘Quarterly Review,’ Bloomfield

the poet, and William Carey the missionary; whilst Morrison,

another laborious missionary, was a maker of shoe-lasts. Within

the last few years, a profound naturalist has been discovered in

the person of a shoemaker at Banff, named Thomas Edwards, who,

while maintaining himself by his trade, has devoted his leisure to

the study of natural science in all its branches, his researches in

connexion with the smaller crustaceae having been rewarded by the

discovery of a new species, to which the name of “Praniza

Edwardsii” has been given by naturalists.

 

Nor have tailors been undistinguished. John Stow, the historian,

worked at the trade during some part of his life. Jackson, the

painter, made clothes until he reached manhood. The brave Sir John

Hawkswood, who so greatly distinguished himself at Poictiers, and

was knighted by Edward III. for his valour, was in early life

apprenticed to a London tailor. Admiral Hobson, who broke the boom

at Vigo in 1702, belonged to the same calling. He was working as a

tailor’s apprentice near Bonchurch, in the Isle of Wight, when the

news flew through the village that a squadron of men-of-war was

sailing off the island. He sprang from the shopboard, and ran down

with his comrades to the beach, to gaze upon the glorious sight.

The boy was suddenly inflamed with the ambition to be a sailor; and

springing into a boat, he rowed off to the squadron, gained the

admiral’s ship, and was accepted as a volunteer. Years after, he

returned to his native village full of honours, and dined off bacon

and eggs in the cottage where he had worked as an apprentice. But

the greatest tailor of all is unquestionably Andrew Johnson, the

present President of the United States—a man of extraordinary

force of character and vigour of intellect. In his great speech at

Washington, when describing himself as having begun his political

career as an alderman, and run through all the branches of the

legislature, a voice in the crowd cried, “From a tailor up.” It

was characteristic of Johnson to take the intended sarcasm in good

part, and even to turn it to account. “Some gentleman says I have

been a tailor. That does not disconcert me in the least; for when

I was a tailor I had the reputation of being a good one, and making

close fits; I was always punctual with my customers, and always did

good work.”

 

Cardinal Wolsey, De Foe, Akenside, and Kirke White were the sons of

butchers; Bunyan was a tinker, and Joseph Lancaster a basket-maker.

Among the great names identified with the invention of the steam-engine are those of Newcomen, Watt, and Stephenson; the first a

blacksmith, the second a maker of mathematical instruments, and the

third an engine-fireman. Huntingdon the preacher was originally a

coalheaver, and Bewick, the father of wood-engraving, a coalminer.

Dodsley was a footman, and Holcroft a groom. Baffin the navigator

began his seafaring career as a man before the mast, and Sir

Cloudesley Shovel as a cabin-boy. Herschel played the oboe in a

military band. Chantrey was a journeyman carver, Etty a journeyman

printer, and Sir Thomas Lawrence the son of a tavern-keeper.

Michael Faraday, the son of a blacksmith, was in early life

apprenticed to a bookbinder, and worked at that trade until he

reached his twenty-second year: he now occupies the very first

rank as a philosopher, excelling even his master, Sir Humphry Davy,

in the art of lucidly expounding the most difficult and abstruse

points in natural science.

 

Among those who have given the greatest impulse to the sublime

science of astronomy, we find Copernicus, the son of a Polish

baker; Kepler, the son of a German public-house keeper, and himself

the “garcon de cabaret;” d’Alembert, a foundling picked up one

winter’s night on the steps of the church of St. Jean le Rond at

Paris, and brought up by the wife of a glazier; and Newton and

Laplace, the one the son of a small freeholder near Grantham, the

other the son of a poor peasant of Beaumont-en-Auge, near Honfleur.

Notwithstanding their comparatively adverse circumstances in early

life, these distinguished men achieved a solid and enduring

reputation by the exercise of their genius, which all the wealth in

the world could not have purchased. The very possession of wealth

might indeed have proved an obstacle greater even than the humble

means to which they were born. The father of Lagrange, the

astronomer and mathematician, held the office of Treasurer of War

at Turin; but having ruined himself by speculations, his family

were reduced to comparative poverty. To this circumstance Lagrange

was in after life accustomed partly to attribute his own fame and

happiness. “Had I been rich,” said he, “I should probably not have

become a mathematician.”

 

The sons of clergymen and ministers of religion generally, have

particularly distinguished themselves in our country’s history.

Amongst them we find the names of Drake and Nelson, celebrated in

naval heroism; of Wollaston, Young, Playfair, and Bell, in science;

of Wren, Reynolds, Wilson, and Wilkie, in art; of Thurlow and

Campbell, in law; and of Addison, Thomson, Goldsmith, Coleridge,

and Tennyson, in literature. Lord Hardinge, Colonel Edwardes, and

Major Hodson, so honourably known in Indian warfare, were also the

sons of clergymen. Indeed, the empire of England in India was won

and held chiefly by men of the middle class—such as Clive, Warren

Hastings, and their successors—men for the most part bred in

factories and trained to habits of business.

 

Among the sons of attorneys we find Edmund Burke, Smeaton the

engineer, Scott and Wordsworth, and Lords Somers, Hardwick, and

Dunning. Sir William Blackstone was the posthumous son of a silk-mercer. Lord Gifford’s father was a grocer at Dover; Lord Denman’s

a physician; judge Talfourd’s a country brewer; and Lord Chief

Baron Pollock’s a celebrated saddler at Charing Cross. Layard, the

discoverer of the monuments of Nineveh, was an articled clerk in a

London solicitor’s office; and Sir William Armstrong, the inventor

of hydraulic machinery and of the Armstrong ordnance, was also

trained to the law and practised for some time as an attorney.

Milton was the son of a London scrivener, and Pope and Southey were

the sons of linendrapers. Professor Wilson was the son of a

Paisley manufacturer, and Lord Macaulay of an African merchant.

Keats was a druggist, and Sir Humphry Davy a country apothecary’s

apprentice. Speaking of himself, Davy once said, “What I am I have

made myself: I say this without vanity, and in pure simplicity of

heart.” Richard Owen, the Newton of Natural History, began life as

a midshipman, and did not enter upon the line of scientific

research in which he has since become so distinguished, until

comparatively late in life. He laid the foundations of his great

knowledge while occupied in cataloguing the magnificent museum

accumulated by the industry of John Hunter, a work which occupied

him at the College of Surgeons during a period of about ten years.

 

Foreign not less than English biography abounds in illustrations of

men who have glorified the lot of poverty by their labours and

their genius. In Art we find Claude, the son of a pastrycook;

Geefs, of a baker; Leopold Robert, of a watchmaker; and Haydn, of a

wheelwright; whilst Daguerre was a scene-painter at the Opera. The

father of Gregory VII. was a carpenter; of Sextus V., a shepherd;

and of Adrian VI., a poor bargeman. When a boy, Adrian, unable to

pay for