Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 53, No. 329, March, 1843 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 350 pages of information about Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 53, No. 329, March, 1843.

Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 53, No. 329, March, 1843 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 350 pages of information about Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 53, No. 329, March, 1843.

For the clergyman, it is only necessary that he should be orthodox, humble, and pious; that he should on no occasion, right or wrong, set himself in opposition to his ecclesiastical superiors; that he should preach unpretending sermons; that he should never make jokes, nor understand the jokes of another:  this is all that he wants to get on respectably.  If he is ambitious, and wishes one of the great prizes, he must have been a free-thinking reviewer, have written pamphlets, or made a fuss about the Greek particle, or, what will avail him more than all, have been tutor to a minister of state.

Thus you perceive, for men whose education is intellectual, but whose practice is more or less mechanical, you have many great, intermediate, and little prizes in the lottery of life; but where, on the contrary, are the prizes for the historian, transmitting to posterity the events, and men, and times long since past; where the prize of the analyst of mind, of the dramatic, the epic, or the lyric poet, the essayist, and all whose works are likely to become the classics of future times; where the prize of the public journalist, who points the direction of public opinion, and, himself without place, station, or even name, teaches Governments their duty, and prevents Ministers of State becoming, by hardihood or ignorance, intolerable evils; where the prize of the great artist, who has not employed himself making faces for hire, but who has worked in loneliness and isolation, living, like Barry, upon raw apples and cold water, that he might bequeath to his country some memorial worthy the age in which he lived, and the art for which he lived?  For these men, and such as these, are no prizes in the lottery of life; a grateful country sets apart for them no places where they can retire in the full enjoyment of their fame; condemned to labour for their bread, not in a dull mechanical routine of professional, official, or business-like duties, but in the most severe, most wearing of all labour, the labour of the brain, they end where they begun.  With struggling they begin life, with struggling they make their way in life, with struggling they end life; poverty drives away friends, and reputation multiplies enemies.  The man whose thoughts will become the thoughts of our children, whose minds will be reflected in the mirror of his mind, who will store in their memories his household words, and carry his lessons in their hearts, dies not unwillingly, for he has nothing in life to look forward to; closes with indifference his eyes on a prospect where no gleam of hope sheds its sunlight on the broken spirit; he dies, is borne by a few humble friends to a lowly sepulchre, and the newspapers of some days after give us the following paragraph:—­

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Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 53, No. 329, March, 1843 from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.