he well knew what it was to feel the restraint of "Poverty's unconquerable bar." Yet he had _courage_, an indispensable quality in a youth so situated, and it was the courage that "mounteth with the occasion," and all these bars to self-culture only acted as a stimulus to more resolute toil. Strange to say, one of his greatest incentives to study at this time was an account of the life of Dr. Samuel Lee, Professor of Hebrew in the University of Cambridge, which the young student had read in the _Imperial Magazine_, then edited by another of our illustrious shoemakers, Samuel Drew. Lee had been a carpenter, ignorant of English grammar, had bought Ruddiman's Latin Rudiments, and having mastered the book, had learned to read Cæsar and Virgil, and had taught himself Greek, Hebrew, and Syriac by the time he was six-and-twenty years of age! Cooper said within himself, "If one man can teach himself a language, another can." So he went to work, following in Lee's steps so far as to take Ruddiman's book and commit "the entire volume to memory--notes and all!" Then came the study of _Hebrew_ with the help of Lyon's small grammar, bought for a shilling at an old bookstall; and a year after he was busy at _Greek_, and created for himself a pleasing diversion by the comparatively easy task of mastering _French_. All this time his general reading was not neglected. By the advice of a valued friend, John Hough, he fortified his mind against the sceptical thoughts which previous reading had awakened by going carefully through the chief works on Christian evidences. Few divinity students at the end of their course have read more carefully or extensively than this occupant of a cobbler's stall had done by the time he was twenty-three years old. Paley's "Horæ Paulinæ," "Natural Theology," and "Evidences," Bishop Watson's "Apologies," Soame Jenyns' "Internal Evidences," Lord Lyttleton's "Conversion of St. Paul," Sherlock's "Trial of the Witnesses," besides profounder works like Butler's "Analogy," Bentley's "Folly of Atheism," Dr. Samuel Clarke's "Being and Attributes of God," Stillingfleet's "Origines Sacræ," and Warburton's "Divine Legation of Moses," were as familiar to him as the "Paradise Lost" and most of the plays of Shakespeare were to his companion Thomas Miller.[62] The labors of this period, from 1824 to 1828, were tremendous, or, as one of Sir Walter Scott's characters was wont to say, "prodigious." Cooper had left Don Cundell's, and now worked at home, so that he could arrange his time for study and work as he pleased. Like Drew, he had learned to do a fair day's work and not to neglect the means of earning his daily bread for the more fascinating occupations of reading and study. But if ordinary work was not neglected, it must be confessed that the work of the scholar was overdone. No one can live as Cooper lived from the age of nineteen to twenty-three without incurring fearful risk to body and mind.