santly visited by pilgrims from all parts of the world. Opposite is the statue of the Doctor, its pedestal sculptured with bassreliefs of incidents in his life; and near a footpath in the town is a willow, from a shoot of the tree planted by Johnson's hands. These are trifling memorials compared with the works which his genius, learning, and understanding produced in the service of religion and virtue, and which have led even his most grudging critic to pronounce Johnson to have been "both a great and a good man."

HOW JAMES FERGUSON TAUGHT HIMSELF THE CLASSICS AND

ASTRONOMY.

Ferguson has been characterized as literally his own instructor in the very elements of knowledge; without the assistance either of books or a living teacher. He was born in 1710, in Banffshire, where his father was a day-laborer, but religious and honest. He taught his children to read and write, as they reached the proper age; but James was too impatient to wait till his regular turn came, and after listening to his father teaching his elder brother, he would get hold of the book, and try hard to master the lesson which he had thus heard gone over; and, ashamed to let his father know what he was about, he used to apply to an old woman to solve his difficulties. In this way he learned to read tolerably well before his father suspected that he knew his letters.

When about seven or eight years of age, Ferguson, seeing that to raise the fallen roof of his cottage, his father applied to it a beam, resting on a prop, in the manner of a lever, the young philosopher, by experiment with models which he made by a simple turning-lathe and a little knife, actually discovered two of the most important elementary truths in mechanics-the lever, and the wheel and axle; and he afterward hit upon other discoveries, without either book or teacher to assist him. While tending sheep in the fields, he used to make models of mills, spinning-wheels, etc.; and at night, he used to lie down on his back in the fields, observing the heavenly bodies. "I used to stretch,” says he, "a thread with small beads on it, at armslength, 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." His master encouraged him in these and similar pursuits; and, says Ferguson, "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." He also tells us how

he made an artificial globe from a description in Gordon's Geographical Grammar; a wooden clock, with the neck of a broken bottle for the bell; and a timepiece or watch, moved by a spring of whalebone. After many years he came to London, became a popular lecturer on astronomy, and had George III., then a boy, among his auditors: Ferguson was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, and wrote several works valuable for the simplicity and ingenuity of their elucidations.

LORD CAMDEN AT ETON AND CAMBRIDGE.

Charles Pratt, Lord Camden, the profound jurist and enlightened statesman, was born of good family, in 1714, at Colhampton, in Devonshire. His father, Sir John Pratt, Chief Justice of the King's Bench, in George the First's reign, died when hist son Charles was ten years old; soon after, he was sent to Eton, and elected on the foundation. He pursued his classical studies with great diligence. Here he was a bosom friend of William Pitt, afterward Earl of Chatham: this friendship did not cease with their college days, for Pratt owed to Pitt his first legal promotion, his introduction to political life, and his Chancellorship; and in return, Lord Camden proved "a tower of strength" to Chatham in his constitutional campaigns.

:

Pratt left Eton for King's College, Cambridge, in 1731 here "he read with genius;" his favorite authors being Livy and Claudian. He had been, when a little child, destined by his father for the bar; he had entered at the Inner Temple before he went to Cambridge; and at the university, as the best basis for legal excellence, he studied the English history and constitution, the science of jurisprudence, and the masterpieces of Greece and Rome. Having taken his degree, in 1735, he left Cambridge for London, and was called to the bar in 1738.

SHENSTONE'S "SCHOOLMISTRESS."

William Shenstone, "the poet of the Leasowes," was born upon that estate, at Hales-Owen, Shropshire, in 1714. He learned to read at what is termed a dame-school, and his venerable teacher has been immortalized in his poem of "The Schoolmistress." He soon received such delight from books, that he was always calling for fresh entertainment, and expected that when any of the family went to market, a new book should be brought to him, which, when it came, was in fondness carried to bed, and laid by him. It is related that when his request had been neglected, his mother wrapped up a piece of wood of the same form, and pacified him for the night. As he grew older, he went for a time to the grammar-school at Hales-Owen, and was

afterward placed with an eminent schoolmaster at Solihull, where he distinguished himself by the quickness of his progress. He was next sent to Pembroke College, Oxford, where he continued his name in the book ten years, but took no degree. At Oxford, in 1737, he published his first work, a small poetical miscellany, without his name. In 1740, appeared his Judgment of Hercules; and in two years afterward his pleasing poem, in the stanza of Spenser, entitled the Schoolmistress, "so delightfully quaint and ludicrous, yet true to nature, that it has all the force and vividness of a painting by Teniers or Wilkie." The cottage of the dame was long preserved as a picturesque memorial of the poet. How vividly has he portrayed the teacher of a bygone age in these stanzas!

In every village marked with little spire,

Embowered in trees, and hardly known to fame,
There dwells in lowly shed and mean attire,
A matron old, whom we schoolmistress name;
Who boasts unruly brats with birch to tame :
They grievous sore, in piteous durance pent,
Awed by the power of this relentless dame;
And ofttimes on vagaries idly bent,

For unkempt hair, or task unconned, are sorely shent.
And all in sight doth rise a birchen tree,

Which learning near her little dome did stowe;
Whilom a twig of small regard to see,

Though now so wide its waving branches flow,

And work the simple vassals mickle wo;

For not a wind might curl the leaves that blew,

But their limbs shuddered, and their pulse beat low;
And as they looked, they found their horror grew,

And shaped it into rods, and tingled at the view.

Near to this dome is found a patch so green,
On which the tribe their gambols do display ;
And at the door imprisoning board is seen,
Lest weakly wights of smaller size should stray;
Eager, perdie, to bask in sunny day!

The noises intermixed, which thence resound,

Do learning's little tenement betray;

Where sits the dame disguised in look profound,
And eyes her fairy throng, and turns her wheel around.

Her cap far whiter than the driven snow,
Emblem right meet of decency does yield:
Her apron, dyed in grain, as blue, I trow,
As is the harebell that adorns the field;
And, in her hand, for sceptre, she does wield
Tway birchen sprays; with anxious fear entwined,
With dark distrust, and sad repentance filled;
And steadfast hate, and sharp affliction joined,
And fury uncontrolled, and chastisement unkind.

*

*

Yet, nursed with skill, what dazzling fruits appear!
Even now sagacious foresight points to show
A little bench of headless bishops here,

And there a chancellor in embryo,

Or bard sublime, if bard may e'er be so,

As Milton, Shakspeare,-names that ne'er shall die!
Though now he crawl along the ground so low,
Nor weeting how the Muse should soar so high,
Wisheth, poor starveling elf, his paper kite may fly.*

*This stanza is thought to have suggested to Gray the fine reflection in his Elegy"Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest," etc.

Shenstone wrote also some graceful letters and essays; and showed much taste in embellishing the Leasowes. He died, here, in the prime of life, in 1763.

GRAY AT ETON AND CAMBRIDGE.

Thomas Gray, of all English poets, the most finished artist, was born in Cornhill, in 1716, and was the only one of twelve children who survived the period of infancy. His father was a money-scrivener, and of harsh and violent disposition, whose wife was forced to separate from him; and to the exertions of this excellent woman, as partner with her sister in a millinery business, the poet owed the advantages of a learned education, toward which his father had refused all assistance. He was sent to be educated at Eton, where a maternal uncle, named Antrobus, was one of the assistant-masters. He remained here six years, and made himself a good classic; he was an intimate associate of the accomplished Richard West, this being one of the most interesting school-friendships on record. West went to Oxford, whence he thus wrote to Gray:

"You use me very cruelly: you have sent me but one letter since I have been at Oxford, and that too agreeable not to make me sensible how great my loss is in not having more. Next to seeing you is the pleasure of seeing your handwriting; next to hearing you is the pleasure of hearing from you. Really and sincerely, I wonder at you, that you thought it not worth while to answer my last letter. I hope this will have better success in behalf of your quondam school-fellow; in behalf of one who has walked hand in hand with you, like the two children in the wood,

Thro' many a flow'ry path and shelly grot,

Where learning lull'd her in her private* maze.

The very thought, you see, tips my pen with poetry, and brings Eton to my view."

Another of Gray's associates at Eton was Horace Walpole; they removed together to Cambridge; Gray resided at Peterhouse from 1735 to 1738, when he left without a degree. The spirit of Jacobitism and its concomitant hard drinking, which then prevailed at Cambridge, ill suited the taste of Gray; nor did the uncommon proficiency he had made at Eton hold first rank, for he complains of college impertinences, and the endurance of lectures, daily and hourly. "Must I pore into metaphysics?" asks Gray. "Alas, I cannot see in the dark; nature has not furnished me with the optics of a cat. Must I pore upon mathematics? Alas, I cannot see in too much light: I am no eagle. It is very possible that two and two make four, but I would not give four farthings to demonstrate this ever so clearly; and if these be the profits of life, give me the amusements of it." Yet Gray subsequently much regretted that he had never applied his mind to the study of mathematics; and once, rather late in

*This expression prettily distinguishes their studies when out of the public school, which would, naturally, at their age, be vague and desultory.-Mason.

life, had an intention to undertake it. His time at Cambridge was devoted to classics, modern languages, and poetry; and a few Latin poems and English translations were made by him at this period. In "the agonies of leaving college," he complains of "the dust, the old boxes, the bedsteads, and tutors," that were about his ears. "I am coming away," he says, “all so fast, and leaving behind me without the least remorse, all the beauties of Stourbridge Fair. Its white bears may roar, its apes may wring their hands, and crocodiles cry their eyes out, all's one for that; I shall not once visit them, nor so much as take my leave."

In a letter to Mr. West, he says: "I learn Italian like any dragon, and in two months am got through the 16th Book of Tasso, whom I hold in great admiration; I want you to learn too, that I may know your opinion of him; nothing can be easier than that language to any one who knows Latin and French already, and there are few so copious and expressive." In the same letter he tells him, "that his college has set him a versifying on a public occasion (viz., those verses which are called Tripos), on the theme of Luna est habitabilis." The poem is to be found in the Musa Etonenses. (vol. ii, p 107 ) "His hexameters are, as far as modern ones can be, after the manner of Virgil. They move in the succession of his pauses, and close with his elisions.”—Mason.

In 1739, Gray accompanied Horace Walpole on a tour through France and Italy; but, as they could not agree, Gray being, as Walpole has it, "too serious a companion," the former returned to England in 1741. He next went to Cambridge, to take his degree in Civil Law. He now devoted himself to the classics, and at the same time cultivated his muse. At Cambridge he was considered an unduly fastidious man, and the practical jokes and "incivilities" played off upon him by his fellow-inmates at Peterhouse-one of which was a false alarm of fire, through which he descended from his window to the ground by a ropewas the cause of his migrating to Pembroke Hall. He subsequently obtained the professorship of Modern History in the University. He usually passed the summer with his mother at Stoke, near Eton, in which picturesque locality he composed his two most celebrated poems-the Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College, and his Elegy written in a Country Churchyard. In the Ode, he exclaims with filial fervor to the College where he had spent six years of his life as a boy:

Ye distant spires, ye antique towers,
That crown the wa'ery glade,
Where grateful Science still adores
Her Henry's holy shade;

And ye, that from the stately brow

Of Windsor's heights, th' expanse below

Of grove, of lawn, of mead survey,

Whose turf, whose shade, whose flowers among
Wanders the hoary Thames along

His silver-winding way:

Ah, happy hills! ah, pleasing shade!
Ah, fields beloved in vain!