Every nation that has a history has a long list of men who began life in the humblest stations, yet rose to high station in honor and service. No inheritance and environments can do for a man what he can do for himself. Cook, the navigator, Brindley, the engineer, and Burns, the poet, are three men who began life as day laborers; the most poetic of clergymen, Jeremy Taylor; the inventor of the spinning-jenny and founder of cotton manufacture, Sir Richard Arkwright; the greatest of landscape painters, Turner, and that most distinguished Chief-justice Tenterden were barbers. Ben Jonson, the poet; Telford, the engineer; Hugh Miller, the geologist; Cunningham, the sculptor, were English stone-masons. Inigo Jones, the architect; Hunter, the physiologist; Romney and Poie, the painters; Gibson, the sculptor; Fox, the statesman; Wilson, the ornithologist; Livingstone, the missionary--started life as weavers. Admiral Sir Cloudesly Shovel; Bloomfield, the poet; Carey, the missionary--were shoemakers. Bunyan, was a tinker; Herschel, a musician; Lincoln, a rail-splitter; Faraday, a book-binder; Stephenson, the inventor of the locomotive, a stoker; Watt, the discoverer of steam-power, a watchmaker; Franklin, a printer; President Johnson, a tailor; President Garfield, an employee on a canal-boat; Louisa Alcott, both housemaid and laundress; James Whitcomb Riley, an itinerant sign-painter; Thoreau, a man-of-all-work for Emerson; the poets, Keats and Drake, as well as Sir Humphry Davy, were druggists. Benjamin Thompson was a humble New Hampshire schoolmaster whose industry, perseverance, and integrity, coupled to his genius and a truly benevolent spirit, ultimately made him the companion of kings and philosophers, Count Rumford of the Holy Roman Empire. He declined to participate in the Revolution, and was compelled to flee from his home in Rumford, now Concord (New Hampshire), leaving behind his mother, wife, and friends; but this persecution by his countrymen led to his greatness. In the spring of 1776 General Howe sent him to England with important despatches for the Ministry. At once the English government appreciated his worth and scientific men sought his acquaintance. In less than four years after he landed in England he became Under-Secretary of State. In 1788, he left England with letters to the Elector of Bavaria, who immediately offered him honorable employment which the English government permitted him to accept after he had been knighted by the king.