Page:History of Oregon Literature.djvu/398

 any rate, not easily applicable by the charm schools—and perhaps still too broad to say it was so of pioneers who liked Shakespeare, but, by way of example, there was Ewing Young, who carried his two volumes up and down and across the wilderness while he trapped, and Judge Matthew P. Deady, who bought his Theobold edition at an auction in Oregon City in the early 70's. With equal ardor and with more understanding, Harvey W. Scott made a close companion of the great Elizabethan.

His lifelong habit of labor was also an attractive force in his personality, though it was likewise an alienating force, because he preached that work would conquer all circumstances for all men, just as it had conquered a difficult set of circumstances for him. He discounted other factors, including ability and some rather good breaks, like Judge Deady's taking his pieces to the Oregonian and Pittock's offering him a job, and placed all emphasis on work. He saw "the individual deficiencies which lay behind personal distress, rather than the distress itself."

This efficacious philosophy may, in the ultimate of destiny, prove a boomerang in his own case. No lack of earnest and sustained toil, but a lack of a necessary final something to go with it, may keep him from the immortality that he cherished.

His life was so full of effort and success, often in a calm and confident struggle with obstacles, that in this book, the interests and judgments of which are literary, the main factual events of his career will only be listed, with his age at the time of his various activities and achievements: