finds her time too precious to be spent in reading, and sets little Robert to read to her as she works—­what a picture!—­to the last sad day, when, wanting money to come up to Leeds to see her dying darling, she “shore for the siller,” rather than borrow it.  And her son’s life is like her own—­a most pure, joyous, valiant little epic.  Robert does not even take to work as something beyond himself, uninteresting and painful, which, however, must be done courageously:  he lives in it, enjoys it as his proper element, one which is no more a burden and an exertion to him than the rush of the strid is to the trout who plays and feels in it day and night, unconscious of the amount of muscular strength which he puts forth in merely keeping his place in the stream.  Whether carrying “Kenilworth” in his plaid to the woods, to read while herding, or selling currants and whisky as the Perth storekeeper’s apprentice, or keeping his little circulating library in Dundee, tormenting his pure heart with the thought of the twenty pounds which his mother has borrowed wherewith to start him, or editing The Leeds Times, or lying on his early deathbed, just as life seems to be opening clear and broad before him, he

Bates not a jot of heart or hope,

but steers right onward, singing over his work, without bluster or self-gratulation, for very joy at having work to do.  There is a keen practical insight about him, rarely combined, in these days, with his single-minded determination to do good in his generation.  His eye is single, and his whole body full of light.

It would indeed (writes the grocer’s boy, encouraging his despondent and somewhat Werterean friend) be hangman’s work to write articles one day to be forgotten to-morrow, if that were all; but you forget the comfort—­the repayment.  If one prejudice is overthrown, one error rendered untenable; if but one step in advance be the consequence of your articles and mine—­the consequences of the labour of all true men—­are we not deeply repaid?

Or again, in a right noble letter to his noble mother: 

That money of R.’s hangs like a millstone about my neck.  If I had paid it, I would never borrow again from mortal man.  But do not mistake me, mother; I am not one of those men who faint and falter in the great battle of life.  God has given me too strong a heart for that.  I look upon earth as a place where every man is set to struggle and to work, that he may be made humble and pure-hearted, and fit for that better land for which earth is a preparation—­to which earth is the gate . . .  If men would but consider how little of real evil there is in all the ills of which they are so much afraid—­ poverty included—­there would be more virtue and happiness, and less world and Mammon-worship on earth than is.  I think, mother, that to me has been given talent; and if so, that talent was given to make it useful to man.

And yet there is a quiet self-respect about him withal: