----In the serviankind to be
A guardian god below; still to employ
The minds brave ardor in heroic aims,
Such as may raise us oer the grovelling herd,
And make us shine for ever--that is life.
THOMSON.
ONE of the ?rst places to which a stranger is taken in Liverpool is the Athenaeum. It is established on a liberal and judicious plan; it tains a good library, and spacious reading-room, and is the great literary resort of the place. Go there at what hour you may, you are sure to ?nd it ?lled with grave-looking personages, deeply absorbed iudy of neers.
As I was once visiting this haunt of the learned, my attention was attracted to a person just entering the room. He was advanced in life, tall, and of a form that might once have been anding, but it was a little bowed by time--perhaps by care.
He had a noble Roman style of tenance; a a head that would have pleased a painter; and though some slight furrows on his brow showed that wasting thought had been busy there, yet his eye beamed with the ?re of a poetic soul. There was something in his whole appearahat indicated a being of a different order from the bustling race round him.
I inquired his name, and was informed that it was ROSCOE. I drew back with an involuntary feeling of veion.
This, then, was an author of celebrity; this was one of those men whose voices have gone forth to the ends of the earth; with whose minds I have uned even in the solitudes of America.
Aced, as we are in our try, to know European writers only by their works, we ot ceive of them, as of other men, engrossed by trivial or sordid pursuits, and jostling with the crowd of inds in the dusty paths of life. They pass before our imaginations like superior beings, radiant with the emanations of their genius, and surrounded by a halo of literary glory.
To ?nd, therefore, the elegant historian of the Medici mingling among the busy sons of traf?c, at ?rst shocked my poetical ideas; but it is from the very circumstances and situation in which he has been placed, that Mr. Roscoe derives his highest claims to admiration. It is iing to notice how some minds seem almost to create themselves, springing up under every disadvantage, and w their solitary but irresistible way through a thousand obstacles. Nature seems to delight in disappointing the assiduities of art, with which it would rear legitimate dulo maturity; and to glory in the vigor and luxuriance of her ce produs. She scatters the seeds of genius to the winds, and though some may perish among the stony places of the world, and some be choked, by the thorns and brambles of early adversity, yet others will now and then strike root even in the clefts of the rock, struggle bravely up into sunshine, and spread over their sterile birthplace all the beauties of vegetation.
Such has been the case with Mr. Roscoe. Born in a place apparently ungenial to the growth of literary talent--in the very market-place of trade; without fortune, family es, or patronage; self-prompted, self-sustained, and almost self-taught, he has quered every obstacle, achieved his way to eminence, and, having bee one of the ors of the nation, has turhe whole force of his talents and in?ueo advand embellish his native town.
Indeed, it is this last trait in his character which has given him the greatest i in my eyes, and induced me particularly to point him out to my trymen. Emi as are his literary merits, he is but one am