remonstrance, in which he admits that, as he dwelt on the banks of the Rhine, he had indeed been sometimes accustomed to employ himself, at leisure hours, in catching with a hook the floating wood which it carries down in its inundations, in order to warm his family,-the wood being in fact, he remarks, public property, and belonging to the first taker. And this he did, he says, being at the time wholly occupied with his translation of the Scriptures, and resolved rather to beg than to quit it.

Pope ADRIAN VI. was the son of a poor bargebuilder of Utrecht, who, desirous of procuring for his son a good education, and yet unable to pay for it, found means at last to get him admitted among the boys educated gratuitously at the university of Louvaine. While attending this seminary, however, the pecuniary resources of the young scholar were so extremely scanty, that he was unable to afford himself candles whereby to study at night. But he did not on that account spend his time in idleness. He used to take his station, we are told, with his book in his hand, in the church porches, or at the corners of the streets, where lamps were generally kept burning, and to read by their light. After passing through a succession of ecclesiastical preferments, which he owed to his eminent acquirements and unimpeachable character, Adrian was appointed preceptor to the young Archduke Charles, grandson to Ferdinand, King of Spain, who afterwards became so powerful and celebrated, under the title of the Emperor Charles V. To this connexion he was indebted for his elevation to the papal throne, which he ascended in the sixtysecond year of his age, and occupied for two years, having died in 1523. The short time he held this lofty station was not, however, the happiest period of Adrian's life, as the following inscription which he desired to be placed over his tomb may testify :

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"Here lies Adrian VI., who esteemed no misfortune which happened to him in life so great as his being called to govern.”

The

We have already had occasion to quote several examples of the enthusiasm with which cultivators of the fine arts have devoted themselves to the acquisition of that knowledge and skill to which they afterwards owed their eminence and fame. The dream of every young artist's ambition is Rome. French painter, FRANCIS PERRIER, when a young man, living in poverty and obscurity at Lyons, was haunted by so eager a desire of visiting "the eternal city," that he gladly consented to act as guide to a blind person who was travelling thither, on condition that the latter should pay the expenses of both; and in this way, after a journey of above four hundred miles on foot, he arrived among those monuments of ancient and modern genius, which, ere he had yet seen them, he had so long and fondly worshipped in fancy. The first engagement he obtained was a humble and laborious one-to make copies for a dealer in paintings from originals of merit; but he profited by the advantage it afforded him of studying the works of several distinguished masters. Perrier afterwards appeared in Paris, and obtained a high reputation among the artists of his day. He died in that city in 1660.

CLAUDE LORRAINE is said to have been originally apprenticed to a pastry-cook, and to have been, on his first appearance in Rome, so destitute of resources, that he was obliged to accept of the meanest employment connected with the art he was desirous of studying, and in which he afterwards attained so rare an eminence. SALVATOR ROSA, who was born in 1615, a few years later than Claude, had made himself already an able painter, principally by the study of nature, while still residing in his native

village, in the neighbourhood of Naples, and before he had ever been able to gratify his earnest desire of visiting Rome. Salvator's genius, indeed, was nursed in hardships and sorrows, which yet had only the effect of strengthening and exalting it. When very young, he had been left, by the death of his father, the sole support of his mother and sisters; and so heavily did this burthen press upon him, that, although he wrought hard, he was sometimes, it has been said, after finishing a picture, scarcely able to save enough from the scanty price he received for it, to purchase the canvas for another. He was in his twentieth year, when a friend and brother artist, somewhat richer than himself, proposed to take him to Rome with him, and to pay the expenses of both; an offer which Salvator gladly accepted. When he found himself at last in that celebrated capital, his ardour would scarcely suffer him to take sustenance or repose, while he examined, with the enthusiasm of a painter and a poet, the precious remains of ancient art by which he was surrounded; and the incessant fatigue to which he exposed himself at last brought on an attack of fever, which rendered it necessary for him to be carried back to Naples. It was some years before it was again in his power to visit Rome; but it continued to fill all his visions of the future, and to make his residence at Naples seem an exile. At length, however, his eye rested once more on the objects among which his heart had so long been. Rome was at this time crowded with painters, whose names have now become the household words of fame, and several of whom were even already regarded with an admiration as great as is ever bestowed on living genius. But, undismayed by their glory, Salvator aspired from the first to be, not the imitator of any of them, but their competitor and rival,-to form

a style, and found a school, of his own.

We need not say how greatly he succeeded in this object, since his name, too, is now familiar to every ear, as one of the most distinguished in the second generation of the great painters of Italy.

The celebrated MARMONTEL was born of parents who belonged to the humblest rank of the people, and was indebted for the elements of education to the charity of a priest. The late French general HOCHE, who distinguished himself in the wars of the Revolution, was originally a stable-boy. While in that situation, and after having enlisted in the army, which he did at the age of sixteen, he used to work at any employment he could find during the day, to get money to buy books, which he would often spend the greater part of the night in reading. LAGRANGE, the French translator of Lucretius, was so poor while attending the university, that his only food for the day was a little bread, which he carried with him from home in the morning, and used to eat in an alley, or the vestibule of a church, during the intervals between the different classes. Dr. JOHNSON was indebted for his maintenance at college to the scanty aid of a wealthy individual, who professed to keep him there as a companion to his son. The late learned Dr. PARR, after having, at the early age of fourteen, distinguished himself above all his schoolfellows at Harrow, was taken from school by his father, who wished to initiate him in his own business of a surgeon and apothecary. Young Parr, however, continued still to pursue his studies with as much benefit as before, by getting one or other of his old companions to report to him the master's remarks on the lesson of every day as it was read ; until his father, finding the contest with nature likely in this case to turn out a vain one, at last consented that he should proceed to the university. He had been but

a short time, however, at Cambridge, when his father died; and this event leaving him almost literally pennyless, compelled him with a heavy heart to bid farewell also to this new theatre of his ambition. Yet these cruel disappointments, and a long succession of other struggles with indigence and misfortune, by which they were followed, did not prevent Parr from attaining eventually the distinction he merited, and becoming one of the greatest scholars of his time. Such early difficulties form often, indeed, the very influences to which no small portion of the future eminence of their victims is to be attributed. The late illustrious mathematician Lagrange used to say, that he certainly never should have been the mathematician he had turned out, if he had been born to a fortune, instead of having had to make his own way

to one.

It is related of the painter Joseph Ribera, commonly called Lo SPAGNOLETTO, that after having for some time pursued his art at Rome in great indigence, he was patronised by one of the cardinals, who, giving him apartments in his palace, enabled him to live at his ease; but that, after a while, finding himself growing indolent amidst his new comforts and luxuries, he actually withdrew himself from their corrupting influence, and voluntarily returned to poverty and labour-thus exhibiting the choice of Hercules in real life, and verifying the beautiful fiction of Xenophon.

Many of the devotees of literature have pursued the objects upon which their hearts were set with a resolution which no difficulties seem to have had any effect in alarming or impairing. The French Polyglot Bible of 1645, in ten volumes folio, was the undertaking of an advocate of Paris, GUY MICHEL LE Jay, who, having spent his fortune on its completion, declined the overtures of Cardinal Richelieu to repay part