the working-man gets a pen into his hand, he is, as it were, possessed.
He is no longer himself. He has not the courage to come out naked
and show himself in all his grime and strength. The instant that he
conceives the idea of putting himself on paper he borrows somebody
else's clothes, and, instead of a free, manly figure, we have a wretched
scarecrow in a coat too small or too large for him,--generally the
latter. For it is a curious fact, that the more uneducated a man
is,--in which condition his ordinary language must of necessity be
proportionately idiomatic,--the greater pains he takes, when he has
formed the resolution of composing, to be splendid and expansive in his
style. He racks his brains until he rummages out imperfect memories of
the turgid paragraphs of cheap newspapers and novels which he has
some time or other read, and forthwith struts off with all the finest
feathers in the dictionary rustling about him.

Mr. John Brown, the hero of the Autobiography before us, is no exception
to this unhappy rule. The son of a butcher, he became in boyhood a
sheep-driver, was then apprenticed to a shoemaker, got into trouble and
a prison, enlisted as a soldier, deserted, turned strolling player,
shipped on board a man-of-war, tried again to desert, was flogged at the
gratings, beheld Napoleon on board the Bellerophon, was discharged from
the navy, consorted with thieves and prize-fighters, appeared on the
London stage with success, married and starved, became the pet of the
Cambridge students, whom he assisted in amateur theatricals, started a
stage-coach line to London and failed, set up a billiard-room, got into
innumerable street-fights and always came off conqueror, was elected
town-councillor of Cambridge and made a fortune, which it is to be hoped
he is now enjoying.

Here was material for a book. From the glimpses of his _personnel_ which