completed his invention. At the same time he was perfecting his own
education--learning French, German, mathematics, and the principles of
natural philosophy. This lasted for many years; and by the time that
Watt developed his steam-engine and discovered Mathew Boulton, he had,
by his own efforts, become an accomplished and scientific man.

These great workers did not feel ashamed of labouring with their hands
for a living; but they also felt within themselves the power of doing
head-work as well as hand-work. And while thus labouring with their
hands, they went on with their inventions, the perfecting of which has
proved of so much advantage to the world. Hugh Miller furnished, in his
own life, an excellent instance of that practical common sense in the
business of life which he so strongly recommended to others. When he
began to write poetry, and felt within him the growing powers of a
literary man, he diligently continued his labour as a stone-cutter.

Horace Walpole has said that Queen Caroline's patronage of Stephen Duck,
the thresher poet, ruined twenty men, who all turned poets. It was not
so with the early success of Hugh Miller. "There is no more fatal
error," he says, "into which a working man of a literary turn can fall,
than the mistake of deeming himself too good for his humble employments;
and yet it is a mistake as common as it is fatal. I had already seen
several poor wrecked mechanics, who, believing themselves to be poets,
and regarding the manual occupation by which they could alone live in
independence as beneath them, and become in consequence little better
than mendicants,--too good to work for their bread, but not too good
virtually to beg it; and looking upon them as beacons of warning, I
determined that, with God's help, I should give their error a wide
offing, and never associate the idea of meanness with an honest calling,
or deem myself too good to be independent."