highest places; nor have difficulties apparently the most
insuperable proved obstacles in their way. Those very
difficulties, in many instances, would ever seem to have been their
best helpers, by evoking their powers of labour and endurance, and
stimulating into life faculties which might otherwise have lain
dormant. The instances of obstacles thus surmounted, and of
triumphs thus achieved, are indeed so numerous, as almost to
justify the proverb that "with Will one can do anything." Take,
for instance, the remarkable fact, that from the barber's shop came
Jeremy Taylor, the most poetical of divines; Sir Richard Arkwright,
the inventor of the spinning-jenny and founder of the cotton
manufacture; Lord Tenterden, one of the most distinguished of Lord
Chief Justices; and Turner, the greatest among landscape painters.

No one knows to a certainty what Shakespeare was; but it is
unquestionable that he sprang from a humble rank. His father was a
butcher and grazier; and Shakespeare himself is supposed to have
been in early life a woolcomber; whilst others aver that he was an
usher in a school and afterwards a scrivener's clerk. He truly
seems to have been "not one, but all mankind's epitome." For such
is the accuracy of his sea phrases that a naval writer alleges that
he must have been a sailor; whilst a clergyman infers, from
internal evidence in his writings, that he was probably a parson's
clerk; and a distinguished judge of horse-flesh insists that he
must have been a horse-dealer. Shakespeare was certainly an actor,
and in the course of his life "played many parts," gathering his
wonderful stores of knowledge from a wide field of experience and
observation. In any event, he must have been a close student and a
hard worker; and to this day his writings continue to exercise a
powerful influence on the formation of English character.