Mr. Roscoe, on the contrary, has claimed none of the accorded
privileges of talent. He has shut himself up in no garden of
thought, nor elysium of fancy; but has gone forth into the
highways and thoroughfares of life, he has planted bowers by the
wayside, for the refreshment of the pilgrim and the sojourner,
and has opened pure fountains, where the laboring man may turn
aside from the dust and heat of the day, and drink of the living
streams of knowledge. There is a "daily beauty in his life," on
which mankind may meditate, and grow better. It exhibits no lofty
and almost useless, because inimitable, example of excellence;
but presents a picture of active, yet simple and imitable
virtues, which are within every man's reach, but which,
unfortunately, are not exercised by many, or this world would be
a paradise.

But his private life is peculiarly worthy the attention of the
citizens of our young and busy country, where literature and the
elegant arts must grow up side by side with the coarser plants of
daily necessity; and must depend for their culture, not on the
exclusive devotion of time and wealth; nor the quickening rays of
titled patronage; but on hours and seasons snatched from the
purest of worldly interests, by intelligent and public-spirited
individuals.

He has shown how much may be done for a place in hours of leisure
by one master-spirit, and how completely it can give its own
impress to surrounding objects. Like his own Lorenzo de' Medici,
on whom he seems to have fixed his eye, as on a pure model of
antiquity, he has interwoven the history of his life with the