accounts of eminent men by their contemporaries," says Samuel Rogers. "None of us has any reason to slander Homer or Julius Caesar; but we find it difficult to divest ourselves of prejudices when we are writing about persons with whom we have been acquainted." It is tears which wash the eyes of poor humanity, and enable it to see the previously invisible land of beauty; it is threshing which separates the wheat from the chaff; every ripened genius has passed its Gethsemane hours. "The eternal stars shine out as soon as it is dark enough!" says Carlyle. Izaak Walton, the delightful biographer and charming miscellaneous writer, was an humble hosier in London in early life. It was sorrow caused by the death of his wife and children in the stived quarters of a poor city tradesman, which led him finally to turn his back upon the great metropolis and seek a home in the country. What seemed to him to be "dim funereal tapers," proved to be "heaven's distant lamps." Influenced by the inspiring surroundings of Nature, he produced his "Complete Angler;" of which Charles Lamb said, "It might sweeten a man's temper at any time to read it," and which modern criticism has pronounced one of the best pastorals in the English language. Spenser, author of the "Faerie Queene," of whose birth little is known, died in great destitution, though he was buried near Chaucer in Westminster Abbey. Of his poetry Campbell says: "He threw the soul of harmony into our verse, and made it more warmly, tenderly, and magnificently descriptive than it ever was before, or, with a few exceptions, it has ever been since." The best critics agree that the originality and richness of his allegorical personages vie with the splendor of ancient mythology. Let us not forget to speak of Schiller in his early indigence and distress, wanting friends and wanting bread, but yet bravely fighting the battle of life. The humble cottage is still extant, near Leipsic, where he wrote the "Song of Joy" in those trying days.[118] We recall Crabbe, stern poet of life's strivings and hardships, reduced to the verge of starvation, and only relieved by the noble charity of Edmund Burke; and Otway, one of the most admirable of English dramatists, author of "Venice Preserved," choked to death by the crust of bread he eagerly swallowed when weakened by famine. Butler, the author of "Hudibras,"[119] died in poverty in a London garret. Santara, the famous French painter, died neglected and penniless in a pauper hospital. Andrea del Sarto labored hard and patiently at a tailor's bench to procure the means of pursuing art; and Benvenuto Cellini[120] languished in the dungeons of San Angelo.