University of Virginia Library

ROSCOE.

One of the first places to which a
stranger is taken in Liverpool is the
Athenæum. It is established on a liberal
and judicious plan; it contains 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 find it filled with grave-looking
personages, deeply absorbed in
the study of newspapers.

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 commanding,
but it was a little bowed by time—perhaps
by care. He had a noble Roman
style of countenance; 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 still beamed with the fire of
a poetic soul. There was something in
his whole appearance that indicated a being
of a different order from the bustling
race around him.

I inquired his name, and was informed
that it was Roscoe. I drew back with an
involuntary feeling of veneration. 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 communed even in
the solitudes of America. Accustomed,
as we are in our country, to know European
writers only by their works, we
cannot conceive of them, as of other men,
engrossed by trivial or sordid pursuits,
and jostling with the crowd of common
minds in the dusty paths of life. They
pass before our imaginations like superior
beings, radiant with the emanations of
their own genius, and surrounded by a
halo of literary glory.

To find, therefore, the elegant historian
of the Medici mingling among the
busy sons of traffic, at first 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
interesting to notice how some minds
seem almost to create themselves, springing
up under every disadvantage, and
working 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 dulness to maturity; and
to glory in the vigour and luxuriance of
her chance productions. 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 birth-place 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 connexions, or patronage;
self-prompted, self-sustained, and
almost self-taught, he has conquered
every obstacle, achieved his way to eminence,
and, having become one of t