colliery for seven years, and was to receive wages beginning with five shillings a-week, and increasing to twelve. Sometimes, he tells us, with extra work he doubled the amount of his wages, by which he was enabled to render assistance to his parents. This, we take it, shows the lad was a good one, and the bad manners of his mates had not corrupted him. This appears still further when we see how resolute were his efforts after self-improvement. “I became,” he writes, “dissatisfied with the persons I had to associate with at the shop; and feeling my own ignorance, I became fired with ambition to remedy the evil, and cut out for myself a new path of life. I shortly came to the conclusion that no difficulties should frighten, nor the severer labour discourage me in the attainment of the object I had in view. Armed with the resolution, I set to work in the first year of my apprenticeship, and having written out a programme, I commenced the winter course in double capacity of both scholar and schoolmaster, and arranged my study as follows:—Monday evenings for arithmetic, mensuration, &c.; Tuesday reading, history, and poetry; Wednesday, recreation, reading novels and romances; Thursday, mathematics; Friday Euclid, trigonometry; Saturday, recreation and sundries; Sunday, church, Milton, and recreation.” In this noble course the young man persevered, in spite of the ridicule of his mates. The battle thus manfully begun was fought bravely to the last. He was aided in his studies by a ticket, given him by his father, to the North Shields Subscription Library; and by the same tender passion which turned Quentin Mastys from a blacksmith into an artist. We quote Sir William’s account of his intellectual improvement whilst making love to the lady whom, however, he did not ultimately marry. During his courtship, he tells us, “I was led into a course of letter-writing, which improved my style, and gave me greater facilities of expression. The truth is, I could not have written on any subject if it had not been for this circumstance; and my attempts at essays, in the shape of papers which I had read with avidity in the _Spectator_, may be traced to my admiration of this divinity.