"
"But may I keep the books a little while, Mr. Mackaye?"
"Keep them till ye die, gin ye will. What is the worth o' them to me? What
is the worth o' anything to me, puir auld deevil, that ha' no half a dizen
years to live at the furthest. God bless ye, my bairn; gang hame, and mind
your mither, or it's little gude books'll do ye."
CHAPTER IV.
TAILORS AND SOLDIERS.
I was now thrown again utterly on my own resources. I read and re-read
Milton's "Poems" and Virgil's "AEneid" for six more months at every spare
moment; thus spending over them, I suppose, all in all, far more time than
most gentlemen have done. I found, too, in the last volume of Milton, a few
of his select prose works: the "Areopagitica," the "Defence of the English
People," and one or two more, in which I gradually began to take an
interest; and, little of them as I could comprehend, I was awed by their
tremendous depth and power, as well as excited by the utterly new trains of
thought into which they led me. Terrible was the amount of bodily fatigue
which I had to undergo in reading at every spare moment, while walking to
and fro from my work, while sitting up, often from midnight till dawn,
stitching away to pay for the tallow-candle which I burnt, till I had to
resort to all sorts of uncomfortable contrivances for keeping myself awake,
even at the expense of bodily pain--Heaven forbid that I should weary
my readers by describing them! Young men of the upper classes, to whom
study--pursue it as intensely as you will--is but the business of the day,
and every spare moment relaxation; little you guess the frightful drudgery
undergone by a man of the people who has vowed to educate himself,--to live
at once two lives, each as severe as the whole of yours,--to bring to the
self-imposed toil of intellectual improvement, a body and brain already
worn out by a day of toilsome manual labour.
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