Among the contemporaries of Franklin in England, unlike in the patrician circumstances of his birth, education, and life, most unlike in his topics of thought and study, but resembling him in the diligence and constancy of labor marking his career, was Edward Gibbon, author of the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. He also has left behind an autobiography,--in style and tone how unlike the simple narrative of Franklin!--where in living colors are depicted the labors and delights of a scholar's life. This book has always seemed to me, more than any other in the English language, calculated to enkindle the love of learning, and to train the student for its pursuit. Here he will find an example and guide in the various fields of scholarship, who will challenge his admiration in proportion as he shares the same generous aspiration. The autobiographies of Gibbon and Franklin are complements of each other. They teach the same lesson of labor and study in different spheres of life and to different classes of minds. Both have rare excellence as compositions, and constitute important contributions to that literature which illustrates the employment of time. There is another character, of our own age, whose example is, perhaps, more direct and practical, especially as described by himself: I mean William Cobbett. To appreciate this example, you must know something of his long life, from early and inauspicious youth to venerable years, filled always with labors various, incessant, and Herculean, under which his elastic nature seemed to rise with renewed strength. He died in 1835, supposed to be seventy-three years of age, although the exact date of his birth was never known, and such was the position he had acquired that he was characterized at that time, even by hostile pens, as one of the most remarkable men whom England, fertile in intellectual excellence, ever produced. The lapse of little more than ten years has begun to obscure his memory. It will be for posterity to determine whether he has connected his name with those great causes of human improvement which send their influence to future ages, and are destined to be the only consideration on which fame hereafter will be awarded or preserved. But the memory of his labors, and the voice of encouragement to the poor and lowly which sounds throughout his writings, must always be refreshing to those whose hopes of future usefulness are clouded by discouragement and poverty. There can be none so humble as not to derive succor from his example. He was conscious even to vanity of his own large powers, and at the close of his long career surveyed his succession of labors--the hundred volumes from his sleepless pen, and the wide influence they had exercised--with the self-gratulation of the miser in counting his stores of gold and silver.