exertion, and long sustained under it, by those mo tives that act most strongly upon the noblest natures, the conciousness of honourable pursuit, and a trust in the verdict of posterity. It is true this temper of mind might have been more wisely exercised; and the patience, ingenuity, and toil which were expended upon a performance of no great use in itself, bestowed upon something better fitted to benefit both the zealous labourer and his fellowmen. Yet this consideration does not entitle us to refuse our admiration to so rare an example of the unwearied and inflexible prosecution of an object, in the absence of all those vulgar encouragements which are generally believed and felt to be so indispensable.

There is nothing more depressing to the spirit than protracted exile or imprisonment; yet we have many instances of the successful pursuit of literary labours under these heavy inflictions. The case of OVID will occur to the recollection of many of our readers. He spent the last years of his life in banishment, among the barbarians inhabiting the inhospitable coasts of the Black or Euxine Sea, where he was sent, after being stripped of his possessions in Rome, by the Emperor Augustus, one of the vilest tyrants that ever lived, and whose almost single good quality was his patronage of letters. For a long time despair was the only feeling which the mind of the poet could indulge under his changed fortunes; but he rose at last above the pressure of his deprivations, and some of the finest works that he has left us were written in that abode of universal rudeness and desolation, for which he had been obliged so suddenly to exchange the splendid and luxurious capital of the world. He even learned the language of the Getæ, among whom he lived; and, as he tells us himself, took the trouble of composing a poem in that barbaric tongue, which procured him unmeasured admiration from his new as

sociates. Ovid never again beheld his family or native country, but died among the Getæ, after an exile of seven or eight years, and in the fifty-ninth year of his age. BOETHIUS's beautiful treatise, "Consolations of Philosophy," which was transted by Alfred the Great, was written in the beginning of the sixth century by Boethius, while confined under sentence of death in the tower of Pavia, and when he was not even allowed the use of books. In more modern times, BUCHANAN commenced his elegant Latin version of the Psalms while lying in prison at Coimbra, in Portugal; and Don Quixote was written in a dungeon, to which an unjust judgment had consigned its great author. TASSO was shut up in a cell of the monastery of St. Anne, at Ferrara, under the imputation of being deranged, when he produced several of the ablest of his ininor pieces both in prose and verse. An English poetical composition of great power, entitled "A Song of David," which was reprinted a few years ago, and attracted considerable notice in consequence of a resemblance which some stanzas of it were conceived to present to a celebrated passage in one of Lord Byron's works, was written by its author, CHRISTOPHER SMART, with charcoal, on the walls of his cell, while confined in a madhouse. The learned JEROME MAGGI, who occupied a high situation under the Venetian government, in the island of Cyprus, when it was attacked and taken by the Turks in 1571, contrived, during the captivity to which he was afterward subjected by the conquerors, to write his two Latin works, entitled "On Bells" and "On the Wooden Horse," both displaying great erudition. He was altogether deprived of books, and obliged to toil so constantly the whole day, that the only leisure he had was what he stole from the hours allotted him for sleep; and his life was spared only

for about a year by his barbarous jailers, who at last finished their cruelties by strangling him in his dungeon. The French translation of the Scriptures, in thirty-two volumes, octavo, by LE MAISTRE, or SACI, as he chose to call himself by a transposition of his Christian name Isaac or Isac, was commenced by the author while confined in the Bastile; the New Testament and a considerable part of the Old having been finished by him in the three years and a half during which his imprisonment lasted. LORENZO LORENZINI, a learned Italian, who lived in the early part of the last century, is said to have relieved the weariness of an imprisonment of nearly twenty years by the composition of a work on Conic Sections. WILLIAM PRYNNE, after having been condemned to imprisonment for life (from which, however, he was subsequently released), continued to write as actively and with as uncon quered a spirit as he had done while at liberty.

Another name which naturally suggests itself to us under this head, is that of the celebrated Sir WALTER RALEIGH, whose " History of the World" is perhaps the greatest literary work ever accomplished under the circumstances we are now considering. He was one of those rare and wonderful men who, supereminently endowed both with the reflective and active powers, seem equally qualified to distinguish themselves in studious solitude and on the theatre of affairs. His life was a busy one from his earliest years, having been passed chiefly in the camp and on shipboard, amid the toils and agitations of war, and every other variety of daring and hazardous adventure. Yet, thus oc cupied, it was his custom to spend four hours every day in reading and study, only five being given to sleep. The duties of his situation, and the exercises he underwent to improve himself in his profession, employed the rest of his time. The first part of his "History of the World" appeared when

its illustrious author was sixty-two years of age, having been written in the Tower, to which he had been consigned more than ten years before, after a trial on a charge of high-treason, which violated all the customary forms of legal procedure, as well as the rules of natural justice. All the time during which he was employed in composing the work, he was lying under that sentence of death which, a few years after his book was finished, was carried into execution by a singularly barbarous perversion of law. He had in the interim, as is well known, been not only liberated from confinement, but restored to public employment, and thus, by implication at least, pardoned, when advantage was taken of his condemnation fifteen years before to destroy him for his commission of certain other alleged offences, for which he was never brought to trial. Yet, although at last the victim of an iniquitous conspiracy, it was his own immoderate ambition that led this great man to his ruin. But for this "infirmity of noble minds,” he was one of the very chief glories of an age crowded with towering spirits. His History is very precious as one of the classical works of our language; exhibiting in its style one of the most perfect models we possess of that easy but vigorous and graphic eloquence, which testifies both the learning of the scholar and a mind fertilized by converse with the living world. It was the largest, but not the only literary performance with which he occupied the hours of his long imprisonment of twelve years, a period of his life during which he may be said, through these labours, to have earned his best and most enduring renown.

AMONG narratives which illustrate the power of the Love of Knowledge in overcoming the opposition of circumstances, there are few more interesting than that which has been given us of his early life by the late WILLIAM GIFFORD. Mr. Gifford was born in 1755 at Ashburton, in Devonshire. His father, although the descendant of a respectable and even wealthy family, had early ruined himself by his wildness and prodigality; and even after he was married had run off to sea, where he remained serving on board a man-of-war for eight or nine years. On his return home, with about a hundred pounds of prize-money, he attempted to obtain a subsistence as a glazier, having before apprenticed himself to that business; but in a few years he died of a broken-down constitution, before he was forty, leaving his wife with two children, the youngest only about eight months old, and with no means of support except what she might make by continuing the business, of which she was quite ignorant. In about a twelvemonth she followed her husband to the grave. "I was not quite thirteen," says her son, "when this happened; my little brother was hardly two; and we had not a relation or a friend in the world."

His brother was now sent to the workhouse, and he was himself taken home to the house of a person named Carlile, who was his godfather, and had seized upon whatever his mother had left, under the pretence of repaying himself for money which he had advanced to her. By this person, William, who