Page:Walks in the Black Country and its green border-land.pdf/399

Rh like Bunyan's pilgrim, he had waded through sloughs of difficulty and despond, and had got almost within hand's reach of the wicket gate of the great goal of his hopes, Poverty, like a Giant Despair, clutched him and hurled him back from the temple of learning into the bitter vicissitudes of indigence. In his patient and baffled attempts to climb again, we find him in busy, noisy Birmingham, translating, in the din and dim of its mechanical industries, Lobo's account of Abyssinia. He lived for a time with a printer here, and gave to the public probably the first literary production that ever went to the press from the metropolis of the Black Country. How little know the masses of the great town that it ever had such a man wrestling his way in it to a fame wider than a hemisphere! Still, it must have been well known and appreciated in his day, for I have recently seen a halfpenny token bearing the image of the great writer and his name, struck in 1783, the year before his death. Here too lived a man who ought to have left a more definite history; for he was one whom Johnson held to the last in boyhood's affection, and often honoured with his company. His name was Edmund Hector, and the house in which he lived and received frequently the great man as his guest, is standing still in the Old Square. It is now a portion of the "Stork" hotel and