the soil, and forget that knowledge was abroad? Was I to starve my mind, that I might keep alive my body? Beg I could not. Where ever lived the real student, the true minister and priest of knowledge, who was not filled with the lofty sense of the dignity of his calling? Was I to shew the sores of my pride, and strip my heart from its clothing, and ask the dull fools of wealth not to let a scholar starve? Pah!--He whom the vilest poverty ever stooped to this, may be the quack, but never the true disciple, of Learning. Steal, rob--worse--ay, all those I or any of my brethren might do:--beg? never! What did I then? I devoted the lowliest part of my knowledge to the procuring the bare means of life, and the grandest,--the knowledge that pierced to the depths of earth, and numbered the stars of heaven--why, that was valueless, save to the possessor. “In Knaresbro’, at this time, I met a distant relation, Richard Houseman. Sometimes in our walks we encountered each other; for he sought me, and I could not always avoid him. He was a man like myself, born to poverty, yet he had always enjoyed what to him was wealth. This seemed a mystery to me; and when we met, we sometimes conversed upon it. ‘You are poor, with all your wisdom,’ said he. ‘I know nothing; but I am never poor. Why is this? The world is my treasury.--I live upon my kind.--Society is my foe.--Laws order me to starve; but self-preservation is an instinct more sacred than society, and more imperious then laws.’ “The undisguised and bold manner of his discourse impressed while it revolted me. I looked upon him as a study, and I combated, in order to learn, him. He had been a soldier--he had seen the greatest part of Europe--he possessed a strong shrewd sense--he was a villain--but a villain bold--adroit--and not then thoroughly unredeemed. His conversation created dark and perturbed reflections. What was that state of society--was it not at war with its own elements--in which vice prospered more than virtue? Knowledge was my dream, that dream I might realize, not by patient suffering, but by active daring. I might wrest from society, to which I owed nothing, the means to be wise and great. Was it not better and nobler to do this, even at my life’s hazard, than lie down in a ditch and die the dog’s death? Was it not better than such a doom--ay better for mankind--that I should commit one bold wrong, and by that wrong purchase the power of good? I asked myself that question. It is a fearful question; it opens a labyrinth of reasonings, in which the soul may walk and lose itself for ever.