Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 42.djvu/378

362 by dressmaking in one of the back streets of the old town, and the boy was only able to gain the rudiments of an education in a charity school. His biographer tells us that he was of a peculiar temper, sullen and silent, and given to sudden fits of weeping or violent rage. When only ten years of age he began to write verses, and although he was too shy and diffident to make a confidant of any one, his secret soon became known among the little blue-coats of Colston's Charity School. His uncle, Richard Phillips, was the sexton of the church of St. Mary Redcliffe, in Bristol, one of the most beautiful specimens of parochial church architecture in all England, and many of this strange boy's days were passed studying the inscriptions on the altar tombs and in poring over the forgotten parchment deeds which had lain for years unheeded in the oaken chests in the old muniment-room above the porch. So much of his time was spent in solitude, and he seemed to have so few of the characteristics of children, that many regarded him as weak in intellect. But even then he was thirsting for fame, and while only a child was wont to say that a man might do anything he chose. It was the accidental discovery of the old parchment deeds in the parish church that led this child of genius to perpetrate the Rowley forgeries, and to claim that these products of his own imagination had lain in the old chest for more than three centuries. Failing to obtain the patronage of Sir Horace Walpole, he determined to seek his fortune in London, and in order to obtain his release from Lambert, an attorney into whose employ he had been bound, he sat down on Easter eve, April 17, 1770, and penned his Last Will and Testament, in which he intimated his intention of committing suicide. Among his satirical bequests he leaves his "humility" to the Rev. Mr. Camplin, his "religion" to Dean Barton, and his "spirit and disinterestedness" to Bristol. This strange document had the desired effect, and Lambert canceled his indentures. So, with a light heart, a lighter purse, and a bundle of valuable manuscript under his arm, he set out, at the age of seventeen, to gain fortune and fame as a man of letters in the great metropolis. His afterlife is well known. Nothing but disaster followed. He lacked the simplest necessities of life, but even when starving wrote cheerful words and sent small gifts to the mother and sister left behind. Failure met him at every hand, and by degrees he sank lower and lower into the depths of despair, until finally, with his last penny, he purchased sufficient arsenic to end his unhappy life. He was found on his cot of straw with torn manuscript all about him. Thus ended the brief, strange life of the "fatemarked babe who perished in his pride."

Another example of Winslow's doctrine is Hugh Miller, the self-taught genius, who was born at Cromarty, in the north of