more correct, and therefore he narrated the events of his own town. He saw errors in church discipline, which caused misery and strife, and he proclaimed honestly all that he saw. Having finally acquired much knowledge, and eliminated what he thought to be some valuable practical ideas, from the spreading of which over the country good would follow, it became his duty to spread them if he could.'—Vol. ii. p. 13.

Palissy's love of Nature was hardly less remarkable than his unswerving obedience to his moral sense. To it, indeed, he owed much of his elevation and simplicity. At her feet he was delighted to sit. He never wearied of her praises. In the striking and beautiful dialogue, entitled, 'The Naturalist looking out on Evil Days,' after characterising in language such as only a painter-poet could use, all the plants and animals of the woods and fields through which he would roam when the trials of life beset him on every hand, he says, All these things have made me such a lover of the fields, that it seems to me there are no treasures in the world so precious, or which ought to be held in such great esteem, as the little branches of trees and plants, although they are most despised. I hold them in more esteem than mines of gold and silver. And, when I consider the value of the very smallest branch of tree or thorn, I am filled with wonder at the great ignorance of men who seem in our day to study only how to break through, cut down, and destroy the beautiful forests, which their predecessors had been guarding as so precious.' Such a lover of nature would learn much of such a mistress, and many lessons in morals and science did Palissy learn of her. She taught him not to idle, for, in his own expressive language, the stars and planets are not idle, the sea wanders from one place to another, and labours to bring forth profitable things; the earth, likewise, is never idle; that which decays naturally in her she renews, she forms over again-if not in one shape, she will reproduce in another.' When in the crowded city, we may imagine Palissy saying, with the Gipsy Count in the Spanish Student: '

I hate the crowded town!

I cannot breathe shut up within its gates-
Air-I want air, and sunshine, and blue sky,
The feeling of the breeze upon my face,
The feeling of the turf beneath my feet,

And no walls but the far off mountain-tops.

Then I am free and strong.'

6

We have not left ourselves room for more than a word on Palissy the writer. His books, as we have already intimated, were three. The first, which is lost or unidentified, was published in opposition to the notion then very prevalent among doctors, that gold, as a medicine, had restorative virtues. The contents of his second work, published in 1564, we have already indicated, as also those of the third, published in 1580. With one or two exceptions, the treatises they contain relate to those scientific matters which were so often uppermost in his thoughts. They all display a keen and inquiring observation; much originality of thought; thorough honesty of purpose and intention; and are written in a manly and straightforward style. On these, his

reputation as a philosopher rests. many discoveries in natural history, in what has since been called They fairly establish his claim to geology, and in chemistry and its kindred sciences. Had he lived longer, doubtless something more would have issued from his pen, but the air of a prison was too corrupt for the already ripened corn, and he died, a martyr in whom the Church might well rejoice, and whom Death itself might be proud to receive.

My personal knowledge of the subject of this article dates from September, 1845. On the evening of one day in that month, an entertainment was given in a long room in the neighbourhood of Snow-hill to Mr. Thomas Cooper, who had recently been released from Stafford gaol, after a confinement of two years and ten months, and had just published The Purgatory of Suicides, a Prison Rhyme, in ten books.' A principal feature in the proceedings was the reading, by a working man, of an address to Mr. Cooper-a glowing, warm-hearted, but not adulatory composition; so elevated in sentiment and style, and so felicitously interwoven with lines from the Prison Rhyme,' as to excite the astonishment of one who did not then know the commonness of the literary faculty among journeymen tailors and shoemakers. Mr. Cooper's reply was brief and simple. There was no lack of self-estimation, certainly, either in his words or manner; but neither was there any apparent disposition to magnify what he had done and suffered. The little he said was chiefly in acknowledgment of the feeling manifested towards him by his own order,' and the generous appreciation of his book by the critics; an expression of unabated devotion to the Charter; and a hint, if I remember rightly, at his adoption of the views afterwards embodied in the Two Orations against taking away Human Life under any Circumstances.' It required no little moral courage at that time to make an avowal of this doctrine; for working men were then neither so averse to physical force, nor so tolerant of differences in opinion, as they now are-Thomas Cooper had been the boldest of the fighting men' in the conventions previous to his arrest-and we do not usually respect the repentance wrought out under chastisement.

6

The second anniversary of Mr. Cooper's liberation was celebrated, in May 1847, at the National Hall, Holborn. presided, and a very complimentary letter from Mr. W. J. Fox was Mr. William Howitt read. Several of the speakers were gentlemen not identified with Chartism. It was evident that the Chartist Poet,' as Mr. Cooper

loves to write himself, had gained new friends. On rising to respond to the sentiment of the evening, he said :

'I have just been thinking of a little boy of five years old, and a woman, who, somewhat more than thirty, but not forty years ago, were passing over Gainsborough bridge. The boy clung to a gate as a master chimney-sweeper went past. He wished to have the boy for an apprentice; and I remember the reply the mother made. I remember what that boy said "Mother, mother, do not let that ugly man take me!" That boy has become a man, and he now stands before you. If Thomas Cooper has done anything worth rememberingif, by any endurance of suffering, he has deserved this meed of approbation from his fellow-men, he owes it all to his hard-working mother, who had to work, and pine, and starve-and often gave her last penny to get him bread. I have heard her despair as her last shilling was taken from her by the taxgatherer, and by that bitter example Thomas Cooper came to be a Chartist before Chartism was known. I hope I am true to my order. I was reared among the people, and I cannot forget the sufferings of my poor mother. When in more advanced life-I think I see her now sitting in her old chair-I had frequently to rise from my weary task to help her. I think I see her now, weak and faint, sitting smoking her pipe, and listening to me while I recited pieces to her from Shakspere or from Milton. But it is all over now, and she lies in Gainsborough churchyard. No stone is there to mark the humble spot -but near her lies the tax-gatherer, and he has gilded letters on his stone. Why do you not send this lad to work?" the neighbours would say, when they came in and saw me trying to write. "Because I wish him to learn," replied my mother; "it will all come to something some day." I want to impress this upon mothers-to care for their children's education. Set them all the same example of honesty and uprightness-let them all set such an example as my mother set me, and I think you will have children with, at all events, some degree of talent.'

On a very different occasion, and to a less sympathetic audience, Mr. Cooper related the aftercourse of a life thus painfully, though not inauspiciously, commenced. On his trial at Stafford, before a special commission, in the autumn of 1842, a large part of his defence was autobiographical. He was born at Leicester, in March 1805. His widowed mother removed, while he was an infant, to Gainsborough, in Lincolnshire, her native place. A feeble, sickly constitution, indisposed him for the sports by which robust children evade the goads of poverty. He became, while yet a boy, devoted to reading, drawing, and music. This latter taste the poor mother encouraged by purchasing for her son, with great self-denial, one of the old-fashioned, but sweet-toned instruments, call a dulcimer.' At fifteen-after many promises of patronage had been broken '-his mother reluctantly apprenticed him to a shoemaker. At this humble craft, he laboured till his twentythird year. He found, as Gifford, Drew, and Carey, had done before him, that the mechanical monotony of his occupation was compensated by the freedom it permitted to his thoughts. A memoir of Samuel Lee, the Cambridge Hebraist, gave a new direction and fresh ardour to his mental ambition. He set himself to the acquisition of languages and mathematics, as well as to the pursuit of historical and poetical knowledge, while bending over the last and plying the awl. He wrought at his double task with self-consuming energy. During his apprenticeship, he learned to read in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and

French, went through a course of geometry and algebra, and committed to memory three books of Paradise Lost,' and the whole of 'Hamlet.' Throughout a great part of this time he suffered much from penury, for he earned but ten shillings a week, although he wrought twelve and fourteen hours a day; and his mother, growing old and feeble, could do little for her own support. In the winter,' he says, 'because poverty prevented my enjoyment of a fire, I used to place a stool upon a stand to rest my book, and a lamp upon it; and with a bit of old rug under my feet, and my mother's old red cloak over my shoulders, I used to keep up a kind of motion, so as to keep off cold and sleep at the same time. In this mode I used to pass the winter hours from nine or ten to twelve at night; and from three or four till seven in the morning, my mind being too enfevered after learning, to permit my sleeping long, even if I had remained in bed.' In the summer he rose with the dawn, and walked miles over the hills and among the woods above Gainsborough-but, still with the book in his hand. No wonder that he often swooned off his seat, and at last incurred a long and severe illness-during which, he records, the truly evangelical curate of Gainsborough,' Mr. Hensley, visited my bedside, and poured the consolation of truth into my ear.'

On recovering from this illness, he was persuaded to forsake shoemaking for the profession of a schoolmaster. He made the attempt with success. At thirty years of age, he removed to Lincoln, to conduct a school there. His volunteered report of a lecture at the Mechanics' Institute of that city, led to his connexion, first as reporter, and subsequently as assistant editor, with the Stamford Mercury.' Owing to 'family circumstances of a disagreeable nature,' he relinquished that engagement, and came to London, as many a provincial genius has done, to seek literary employment. He obtained only casual engagements; had to sell his books, and even pawn his cloak; and at the end of a twelvemonth, accepted the editorship of an expiring Kentish newspaper. In November, 1840, he returned to his birthplace, having been offered a situation on the Leicestershire Mercury.' That occupation brought him into contact, for the first time, with Chartism; and disclosed to him scenes of distress of which his own hard experience had given him no conception. He found stockingers struggling with existence on four shillings a week-he saw them sinking under the unequal conflict into bitter privation-and he had no answer to their fiercely or sadly urged complaints, that exclusion from political power lay at the root of their suffering. With men of poetic temperament, opinions are quickly formed and ardently acted upon. Thomas Cooper was, therefore, no sooner a Chartist in sympathy, than he proclaimed himself one in conviction, and connected himself with methods of agitation which neither his judgment nor taste could approve. He was invited, in August 1842, by the Hanley Chartists, to lecture in the Staffordshire potteries. He went thither, and addressed immense meetings of the colliers, then on strike. He avers-and it is not contradicted by direct evidence-that all his speeches were of a pacific tendency; that at one of the meetings, on a Sunday, he took for a text, Thou shalt do no murder;' and that 30,000 colliers held up their hands for

a resolution, pledging them to keep the peace. At all events, one of these assemblages and harangues was followed by a riot, including the demolition and burning of the parsonage and other houses. Cooper and others were arrested on a charge of aiding and abetting in these disturbances. He proved, on his trial, that he was on his way to Manchester, at the time of the outbreak; and was, therefore, acquitted, but was remanded for trial on a second and third indictment-for 'sedition,' and 'seditious conspiracy.' To the charge of sedition he offered to plead guilty, if the judge would say that it was sedition to advise men to cease labour until the People's Charter became the law of the land. Sir Nicholas Tyndal declined to say so, and Cooper was tried on the charge of seditious conspiracy.' On this indictment he was convicted, after a trial protracted, by the conduct of his own defence, through ten days; and was sentenced by the Court of Queen's Bench to three years' imprisonment.

The Purgatory of Suicides' was the work of these three years. It is dedicated, in a sonnet, to Thomas Carlyle-and the implied friendship of that great writer is not, I believe, an assumption. The Conservative Britannia' was the first to make generous recognition of the new poet, in an article attributed to Dr. Croly. The Eclectic Review' followed. Dickens, Douglas Jerrold, and Howitt, procured for the work laudatory reviews, and extended to the author the hand of friendship. It is incontestably a great poem-the production of a man of native genius and laborious culture. It is essential to an understanding of his character, opinions, and influence, that we should understand it.

The opening stanzas embody the sentiments of the luckless speech for which the author was then suffering. In his first night on a prison bed, brooding over the fate he has incurred, he cries:

Is life worth having? Or, is he most wise
Who, with death-potion, its fierce fever slakes,
And ends, self drugged, his mortal miseries?

Can he be guilty who at once forsakes

:

The agony which, sure as death, o'ertakes,
Early or late, all who with wrong contend?
Since Power this earth a clime of misery makes

For him who will not to its godhead bend,

Why to the enfranchised grave with sluggish footsteps wend?'

He

Sleep took its tinct from the mind's waking throes.' There came -the reader of this prison rhyme' is required to suppose, as we have all believed, in right earnest, when, in the happy susceptibility of childhood to poetic impression, we read it of Bunyan in Bedford gaol— there came to the sleeper, though on uneasy pallet stretching him,' a vision-a vision renewable with the nightly return of sleep. voyaged in the bark of death' upon a skyless sea '-a 'dismal sea,' athwart which a myriad monsters their hideous hugeness' rolled. He landed with his fellow-voyagers upon a soil of sullen barrenness or dank fertility, with a climate of parching heat and poisonous perfumes

·

'A crude excess

Of all things dim and doleful, dark and drear.'