" For the
labours of their lives they have received no compensation at all. Health,
eyesight, and even life itself have been devoted to the service of
mankind, who have shown themselves somewhat ungrateful recipients of their
bounty.
Some of the more illustrious scholars indeed enjoy a posthumous fame,--
their names are still honoured; their works are still read and studied by
the learned,--but what countless multitudes are those who have sacrificed
their all, and yet slumber in nameless graves, the ocean of oblivion
having long since washed out the footprints they hoped to leave upon the
shifting sands of Time! Of these we have no record; let us enumerate a few
of the scholars of an elder age whose books proved fatal to them, and
whose sorrows and early deaths were brought on by their devotion to
literature.
What antiquary has not been grateful to Leland, the father of English
archaeology! He possessed that ardent love for the records of the past
which must inspire the heart and the pen of every true antiquary; that
accurate learning and indefatigable spirit of research without which the
historian, however zealous, must inevitably err; and that sturdy
patriotism which led him to prefer the study of the past glories of his
own to those of any other people or land. His _Cygnea Cantio_ will live as
long as the silvery Thames, whose glories he loved to sing, pursues its
beauteous way through the loveliest vales of England.
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