Men of science are for the most part exempt from the necessity of shining in society; and hence they furnish but a small number of instances of illustrious debtors.  Many of them have been poor, but they have usually lived within their means.  Kepler’s life was indeed a struggle with poverty and debt; arising principally from the circumstance of his salary, as principal mathematician to the Emperor of Germany, having been always in arrear.  This drove him to casting nativities in order to earn a living.  “I pass my time,” he once wrote, “in begging at the doors of crown treasurers.”  At his death he left only twenty-two crowns, the dress he wore, two shirts, a few books, and many manuscripts.  Leibnitz left behind him a large amount of debt; but this may have been caused by the fact that he was a politician as well as a philosopher, and had frequent occasion to visit foreign courts, and to mix on equal terms with the society of the great.

Spinoza was poor in means; yet inasmuch as what he earned by polishing glasses for the opticians was enough to supply his wants, he incurred no debts.  He refused a professorship, and refused a pension, preferring to live and die independent.  Dalton had a philosophical disregard for money.  When his fellow-townsmen at Manchester once proposed to provide him with an independence, that he might devote the rest of his life to scientific investigation, he declined the offer, saying that “teaching was a kind of recreation to him, and that if richer he would probably not spend more time in his investigations than he was accustomed to do.”  Faraday’s was another instance of moderate means and noble independence.  Lagrange was accustomed to attribute his fame and happiness to the poverty of his father, the astronomer royal of Turin.  “Had I been rich,” he said, “probably I should not have become a mathematician.”

The greatest debtor connected with science was John Hunter, who expended all his available means—­and they were wholly earned by himself—­in accumulating the splendid collection now known as the Hunterian Museum.  All that he could collect in fees went to purchase new objects for preparation and dissection, or upon carpenters’ and bricklayers’ work for the erection of his gallery.  Though his family were left in straitened circumstances at his death, the sale of the collection to the nation for L15,000 enabled all his debts to be paid, and at the same time left an enduring monument to his fame.

Great artists have nearly all struggled into celebrity through poverty, and some have never entirely emerged from it.  This, however, has been mainly because of their improvidence.  Jan Steen was always in distress, arising principally from the habit he had acquired of drinking his own beer; for he was first a brewer, and afterwards a tavern-keeper.  He drank and painted alternately, sometimes transferring the drinking scenes of which he had been a witness to the canvas, even while himself in a state of intoxication.  He died in debt, after which his pictures rose in value, until now they are worth their weight in gold.