unless enforced by will power to overcome the obstacles that hedge about
every one who would rise above the circumstances in which he was born,
or become greater than his calling. Was not Virgil the son of a porter,
Horace of a shopkeeper, Demosthenes of a cutler, Milton of a money
scrivener, Shakespeare of a wool stapler, and Cromwell of a brewer?



[Illustration: THURLOW WEED,
American Journalist and Politician.
_b. Cairo, N.Y., 1797; d. New York, 1882_.]



Ben Jonson, when following his trade of a mason, worked on Lincoln's Inn
in London with trowel in hand and a book in his pocket. Joseph Hunter
was a carpenter in youth, Robert Burns a plowman, Keats a druggist,
Thomas Carlyle and Hugh Miller masons. Dante and Descartes were
soldiers. Cardinal Wolsey, Defoe, and Kirke White were butchers' sons.
Faraday was the son of a hostler, and his teacher, Humphry Davy, was an
apprentice to an apothecary. Kepler was a waiter boy in a German hotel,
Bunyan a tinker, Copernicus the son of a Polish baker. They rose by
being greater than their callings, as Arkwright rose above mere
barbering, Bunyan above tinkering, Wilson above shoemaking, Lincoln
above rail-splitting, and Grant above tanning. By being first-class
barbers, tinkers, shoemakers, rail-splitters, tanners, they acquired the
power which enabled them to become great inventors, authors, statesmen,
generals. John Kay, the inventor of the fly-shuttle, James Hargreaves,
who introduced the spinning-jenny, and Samuel Compton, who originated
mule-spinning, were all artisans, uneducated and poor, but were endowed