of these preparations is striking even to an unlearned eye; and their scientific value is such as to render the collection one of the most precious of its kind in the world. It is certainly one of the most splendid monuments of labour, skill, and munificence, ever raised by an individual.

It is important to remark, that, with all his powers, this wonderful man never entirely overcame the disadvantages entailed upon him by the neglect in which he had been allowed to spend his early years. He used to dwell, we are told, on the advantage which is gained in regard to clearness of conception by the committing of one's ideas to writing,-comparing the process to the taking of stock by a tradesman, without which he cannot know with certainty either what he has or what he wants. Yet he himself continued to the end of his life an awkward, though by no means an unpractised, writer. After coming to London, he entered himself of St. Mary's Hall, Oxford, probably with the view of being able to maintain at least some pretension to scholarship, but it does not appear that he carried his assumption of the academical character much farther. attained little acquaintance with the literature even of his own profession; and it not unfrequently happened indeed, we are told, that upon communicating a supposed discovery of his own to some one of his more erudite friends, he had to suffer the disappointment of learning that the same thing had been already found out by some other well known anatomist. But he felt his literary deficiences chiefly as a lecturer, the capacity in which his more regularly educated brother so greatly excelled. It is asserted by Dr. Adams, who has written a life of John Hunter, that he always used to swallow thirty drops of laudanum before going to lecture. If these were heavy penalties, however, which he had to pay for what

He

was not so much his fault as that of others, the eminence to which he attained in spite of them is only the more demonstrative of his extraordinary natural powers, and his determined perseverance.

The portrait which we have given of this great man, is engraved from an original painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds, the property of the College of Surgeons (by the permission of whose council our engraver has had access to it); it was also engraved by the late Mr. Sharp. Sharp's plate has now become of considerable rarity.* The picture is reputed to be a very happy and characteristic likeness, and certainly bears on it the impress of great vigour and originality of mind. Every eye will acknowledge the justice of the remark made upon it by Lavater,"This man thinks for himself."

We do not quote these names as those of individuals, the single or chief peculiarity in whose history is, that they commenced life in a low station, and ended it in a high, or a higher, one. If it were our object to exemplify either the freaks of fortune in lifting humbly-born men to the upper places of society, or that particular sort of talent or dexterity in men themselves, which fits them to battle with fortune, and in either way to elevate themselves to conspicuous stations, as it were in spite and mockery of all her endeavours to keep them downit would be easy to bring together an assemblage of far more extraordinary and surprising instances than any we have yet noticed, of such good luck or persevering and triumphant ambition. But our business

* Sharp was himself a very extraordinary character. He raised himself from the lower walks of his profession as an en

graver chiefly by his print of Hunter. He worked for a year

or more on this plate. In England, it found few purchasers, originally; but coming into great demand on the Continent as a specimen of art, it gradually became valued in this country. See page 59.

is not either with mere luck, or mere ambition,—at least in the worldly acceptation of that term. If some of the individuals we have mentioned have risen to great wealth or high civil dignities, it is not for this that we have mentioned them. We bring them forward to shew that neither knowledge, nor any of the advantages which naturally flow from it, are the exclusive inheritance of those who have been enabled to devote themselves entirely to its acquisition from their youth upwards. We shall have occasion to shew this still more strikingly, when we come to trace the history of some of those powerful minds, whose very education has been actually their own work,-who, without even the assistance of a master, any how obtained, are recorded to have made themselves learned scholars, or able philosophers, or accomplished artists. For all, or nearly all, of the individuals we have hitherto enumerated, many as may have been the difficulties they have had to contend with in the endeavour to procure instruction, have nevertheless obtained and enjoyed at last the advantages of a regular education. Still the love of knowledge, at least, must have sprung up in many of them long before the opportunity of acquiring it had been found; and their merit, and the praise due to them, is that, surrounded, as they were, by all manner of difficulties and discouragements, they rested not until they had fought their way to the instruction for which they longed. Their example also shews that many of those impediments, which, in ordinary cases, altogether prevent the pursuit of knowledge, are impediments only to the indolent or unaspiring, who make, in truth, their poverty or their low station bear the blame which ought properly to be laid upon their own irresolution or indifference. It was not wealth or ease which these noble enthusiasts sought; it was the bondage and degrada

tion of ignorance alone from which they panted to emancipate themselves. All they wanted was an opportunity of acquiring that knowledge, which might lift them to a higher station in society, but would certainly elevate their moral and intellectual being, and bring them an inexhaustible multitude of gratifications, such as no wealth, no station, no wordly circumstances whatever, could confer. Some of them, as we have remarked, even continued to work at their original employments long after they had obtained that superior education which might have entitled them to aspire to a higher place; and we shall have to quote numerous other instances in the sequel, of persons who, although possessed of the highest mental cultivation, have not permitted that circumstance to withdraw them even from occupations that are generally supposed to be very uncongenial to literary tastes and habits.

Looking generally upon these examples, we may safely affirm that no man was ever induced to engage with any degree of eagerness in the pursuit of knowledge by the mere hope of thereby bettering his worldly circumstances. That may have sometimes been temptation enough to allure an individual to procure for himself a few lessons in arithmetic, or navigation, or any of those kindred branches of education the utility of which is equally obvious; but it demands a much stronger and more deep-seated excitement to sustain the mind in that long and carnest pursuit of knowledge, which alone can ever lead to intellectual acquirements of any lofty order. Such a pursuit will never be entered upon, or at least very far proceeded in, by any one, except him who loves knowledge entirely or chiefly for her own sake, It is to such a person only that we hold up the examples of Heyne, and Winckelman, and the other illustrious conquerors of fortune whom we have named, as

guides and encouragements. To none besides are they fitted to be either the one or the other. With regard to the great mass of the population, any counsel or exhortation which would attempt to raise them above the rank in which they have been born and reared, must, from the nature of things, be totally inoperative. But it is right, that the individual who, although poor, and unknown, and uneducated, longs for education as his chief earthly good, and feels within himself the strength and resolution to undergo all things for the sake of obtaining it, should be shown by the example of those who, under the same impulse, have surmounted difficulties as formidable as his own, that no difficulties, however great, are any reason for despair.