wards the Emperor Joseph II., was the son of a poor peasant of Champagne, and lost his father when he was ten years of age. He was then taken into the service of a farmer in the village; but, being soon after turned off for some petty fault, he resolved to leave his native place altogether, that he might not be a burden to his mother. So he set out on his travels, without knowing in what direction he was proceeding, in the beginning of a dreadful winter; and for some time begged in vain even for a crust of bread and shelter against the inclemency of the elements, till, worn out with hunger, fatigue, and a tormenting headache, he was at last taken in by a poor shepherd, who permitted him to lie down in the place where he shut up his sheep. Here he was attacked by small-pox, and lay ill nearly a month; but having at last recovered, chiefly through the kind attentions of the village clergyman, he proceeded on his wanderings a second time, thinking that by getting farther to the east he should be nearer the sun, and therefore suffer less from the cold. Having arrived in this way at the foot of the Vosges mountains, nearly a hundred and fifty miles from his native village, he remained there for two years in the service of a farmer, who gave him his flocks to keep. Chancing then to make his appearance at the hut of a hermit, the recluse was so much struck by the intelligence of his answers, that he proposed he should take up his abode with him, and share his labours; an offer which Duval gladly accepted. Here he had an opportunity of reading a few books, chiefly devotional. After some time he was sent with a letter of recommendation from his master to another hermitage, or religious house, near Lunéville, the inmates of which set him to take charge of their little herd of cattle, consisting only of five or six cows, while one of them took the trouble of teaching him to write. He had here also a few books at command, which he perused with great eagerness. He sometimes, too, procured a little money by the produce of his skill and activity in the chase, and this he always bestowed in the purchase of books. One day, while pursuing his occupation, he was lucky enough to find a gold seal, which had been dropped by an English traveller of the name of Forster. Upon this gentleman coming to claim his property, Duval jestingly told him that he should not have the seal, unless he could describe the armorial bearings on it in correct heraldic phrase. Surprised at any appearance of an acquaintance with such subjects in the poor cow-herd, Forster, who was a lawyer, entered into conversation with him, and was so much struck by his information and intelligence, that he both supplied him with a number of books and maps, and instructed him in the manner of studying them. Some time after this, he was found by another stranger sitting at the foot of a tree, and apparently absorbed in the contemplation of a map which lay before him. Upon being asked what he was about, he replied that he was studying geography. "And whereabouts in the study may you be at present ?"

Bandinelli-Lope de Vega-Scaliger.

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inquired the stranger. "I am seeking the way to Quebec," answered Duval. "To Quebec? What should you want there?" "I wish to go to continue my studies at the university of that city." The stranger belonged to the establishment of the young princes of Lorraine, who, returning from the chase, came up with their suite at the moment; and the result was, that, after putting a great many questions to Duval, they were so delighted with the vivacity of his replies, that they proposed to send him immediately to a Jesuits' college in the neighbourhood. Here he continued for some time, until he was at last taken by his patron, the Duke of Lorraine, afterwards the Emperor Francis I., to Paris, where he speedily distinguished himself, and eventually acquired a high place among the literary men of the day. He never forgot, however, either his early benefactors, or that simplicity of character and manners which the humble nature of his origin and first fortunes had given him. It is gratifying indeed to have to tell, that even after he had become a courtier, and was living in intimate familiarity with the emperor, he took a journey to his native village, purchased the cottage in which his father had lived, and erected on its site, at his own expense, a commodious dwelling-house for the parish schoolmaster. He always kept up a correspondence, too, with the good hermits at Lunéville; and, in particular, on paying a visit to Brother Marin, who had taught him writing, and not finding his hut so comfortable as he could have wished, left with him a sum of money to rebuild it. Duval died in 1775, at the age of eighty.

Men are proud, and it is very intelligible why they should be so, of an illustrious ancestry; but to those who have achieved their own advancement in the face of disadvantages such as the individuals we have named, and many others, have had to struggle with, the obscurity of their origin is their most honourable distinction. Nothing, therefore, can be weaker, or more absurd, than the vanity which has led even some distinguished men, of humble or at least not high birth, to attempt to conceal their real extraction from the world, by the most unfounded and sometimes ridiculous fictions. BANDINELLI, the Italian sculptor, was the son of a goldsmith, and the grandson of a common coalman; but having in the course of his life acquired great wealth, and having been created by the Emperor Charles V. a knight of the order of St. James, he is said to have repeatedly changed his name, in order to hide his parentage, and to have fixed at last upon that by which he is generally known, in order that he might appear to have sprung from the noble family of the Bandinelli of Sienna. A similiar anxiety to secure for himself the reputation of noble descent is also recorded to have been one of the foibles of the celebrated Spanish dramatist LOPE DE VEGA. But, perhaps, the most extravagant pretensions of this kind that were ever brought forward, were those advanced by the famous

JULIUS CESAR SCALIGER, one of the greatest scholars and critics of the sixteenth century. This eminent person actually took the trouble of composing an elaborate memoir of his own life, in which he pretended to be the last surviving descendant of the princely house of La Scala of Verona, and consequently the lineal heir of that sovereignty, which, having been some time before conquered by the Venetians, had been incorporated by them with their own territory. In order to support this story, he went the length of inventing a series of adventures, which he said had befallen him, giving out that, having been preserved by his mother from the general persecution of his race, he had, after being carefully educated, been presented at the court of the Emperor Maximilian, who made him one of his pages. He added that he subsequently distinguished himself greatly; first in the wars of Italy, and then, in the service of France, in Piedmont: till, after passing through a succession of other fortunes, which we cannot afford space to relate, he was induced by the solicitations of La Rovère, Bishop of Agen, to accompany that prelate to his episcopal seat, and thus at last to terminate his vain endeavours to recover his lost principality. Now the truth is, as has been since abundantly proved, that Scaliger's real name was Bordoni; that he was in all probability the son of a miniature painter who resided at Padua; and that he never even assumed the name of Scaliger till he was pretty far advanced in life, having borne it only in conjunction with his own in his forty-fourth year, when he obtained letters of naturalization in France, which are still extant. Even at this time it would appear that the fable of his descent from the house of Verona, if it had entered his head at all, had certainly not been conceived in anything like the form which he afterwards gave it. It was, at least in all its wilder improbabilities, the romance of his old age. He persisted in it, however, as long as he lived, and left it as a legacy to his son, the learned Joseph Justus Scaliger, who, with an excess of filial observance, both maintained its truth as obstinately as his father had done, and augmented it by many additional fictions of his own invention.

It is a wiser and nobler spirit which, without despising such distinctions where they really exist, considers it more honourable to have achieved fame and eminence without the advantage of high birth than with their assistance; and does not disdain, therefore, where they have not been possessed, to find its best triumph in their absence. Such was the feeling in which the old Greek painter PROTOGENES acted, who, having passed the earlier years of his life in such obscurity and poverty, that he was obliged to spend the greater part of his time in merely painting the coarse ornaments on the prows of ships, was so far from showing himself ashamed of his humble origin, when he rose at last to fame and more honourable as well as lucrative employment, that he was wont to introduce representations of the different parts of ships round his

pictures, as symbols and memorials of his old occupation. BENEDICT BAUDOUIN (or BALDUINUS), a learned Frenchman of the sixteenth century, went still farther than this. His father had been a shoemaker and he had himself worked for some time at the same professioncircumstances which he was so little anxious to have forgotten, that, many years after, he wrote and published a very elaborate work on the Shoemaking of the Ancients, in which we find the history of that craft traced with a profusion of erudition, up to the time of Adam himself. But, perhaps, the most extraordinary example on record of indifference to such matters, is that afforded by the conduct of the Italian writer GIAMBATISTA GELLI, who, even after he had obtained so much distinction by his writings as to have been elected to the high dignity of Consul of the Florentine Academy, and appointed by the grand duke to deliver a course of lectures on Dante, still continued to work at his original profession of a tailor, which he had inherited from his father. He alludes to the circumstance, with much modesty and even dignity, in the introductory oration of his course delivered before the Academy, which has been published.

It would be easy to continue to a much greater length our enumeration of individuals who, smitten by the love of knowledge, have nobly surmounted the impediments thrown in the way of its acquisition by a humble birth or early indigence. Many of the most remarkable of these cases we shall have an opportunity of introducing under other heads of our subject; at present we shall merely mention a few of those which we may not afterwards find so convenient an occasion of noticing. The celebrated Italian poet METASTASIO was the son of a common mechanic, and used when a little boy to sing his extemporaneous verses about the streets. The father of HAYDN, the great musical composer, was a wheelwright, and filled also the humble occupation of sexton, while his mother was at the same time a servant in the establishment of a neighbouring nobleman. The father of our own painter, OPIE, was a working carpenter in Cornwall. The following is the account that Dr. Wolcot, better known by his assumed name of Peter Pindar, gives us, in his peculiar style, of the circumstances in which he discovered the uneducated artist:—“Being on a visit to a relation in Cornwall, I saw either the drawing or print of a farm-yard in the parlour, and, after looking at it slightly, remarked that it was a busy scene, but ill executed. This point was immediately contested by a she-cousin, who observed that it was greatly admired by many, and particularly by John Opie, a lad of great genius. Having learned the place of the artist's abode, I immediately sallied forth, and found him at the bottom of a sawpit, cutting wood by moving the lower part of an instrument which was regulated above by another person. Having inquired in the dialect of the country

if he could paint? Can you paient ?—I was instantly answered from below in a similar accent and language, that he could ‘paient Queen Charlotte and Duke William' (William Duke of Cumberland), 'and Mrs. Somebody's cat.' A specimen was immediately shown me, which was rude, incorrect, and incomplete. But when I learned that he was such an enthusiast in his art, that he got up by three o'clock of a summer's morning to draw with chalk and charcoal, I instantly conceived that he must possess all that zeal necessary for obtaining eminence. A gleam of hope then darted through my bosom; and I felt it possible to raise the price of his labours from eightpence or a shilling to a guinea a-day. Actuated by this motive, I instantly presented him with pencils, colours, and canvas, to which I added a few instructions." After some time, the Doctor adds, his pupil became so celebrated in the neighbourhood, that he obtained as much employment as he could undertake in painting heads at half-a-guinea each, and at last resolved to raise his price to a guinea. He afterwards came to London, and attained great eminence as a portrait painter: upon which he was admitted as an Associate of the Royal Academy, and was eventually elected Professor of Painting in that institution. "Born in a rank of life in which the road to eminence is rendered infinitely difficult," says another Academician, speaking of Opie, "unassisted by partial patronage, scorning with virtuous pride all slavery and dependence, he trusted alone for his reward to the force of his natural powers, and to welldirected and unremitting study. The toils and difficulties of his profession were by him considered as matter of honourable and delightful contest; and it might be said of him, that he did not so much paint to live, as live to paint."

The parents of SEBASTIAN CASTALIO, the elegant Latin translator of the Bible, were poor peasants, who lived among the mountains in Dauphiny. The Abbé HAUTEFEUILLE, who distinguished himself in the seventeenth century by his inventions in clock and watch making, was the son of a baker. PARINI, the modern Italian satiric poet, was the son of a peasant, who died when he was in his boyhood, and left him to be the only support of his widowed mother; while, to add to his difficulties, he was attacked in his nineteenth year by a paralysis, which rendered him a cripple for life. The parents of Dr. JOHN PRIDEAUX, who afterwards rose to be Bishop of Worcester, were in such poor circumstances, that they were with difficulty able to keep him at school till he had learned to read and write; and he obtained the rest of his education by walking on foot to Oxford, and getting employed in the first instance as assistant in the kitchen of Exeter College, in which society he remained till he gradually made his way to a fellowship. The father of INIGO JONES, the great architect, who built the Banquet