An unfortunate lad, who at thirteen fell
from a scaffolding and was taken up for dead, and escaped only with
total deafness and a supposed permanent injury to the brain. A hapless
apprentice, who suffered at the hands of a cruel taskmaster all that
brutality and drunken fury could suggest. A youth, thirsting for
knowledge, but able to obtain it only by the hardest ways, peering into
booksellers' windows, reading at book-stalls, purchasing cheap books
with pennies stained all over with the sweat of his toil. An heroic
student, who labored for more than twenty years with almost unparalleled
industry, and with an equally unparalleled neglect of the laws of
health; of whom it is scarcely too much to say literally, that he knew
no change, but from his desk to his bed, and from his bed to his desk
again. A voluminous writer, who, if he produced no work of positive
genius, has done more than any other man to illustrate the Scriptures,
and to make familiar and vivid the scenery, the life, the geography, and
the natural history of the Holy Land. And he died in the harness,--but
not so very early,--at fifty.
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