60 ATTAINABLE IDEALS. 



fiiir means or foul, gigantic fortunes. Edward 

 and Dick did not rise; in the ordinary vulgar 

 sense of the words, their lives could not be con- 

 sidered by any means successful ; the one remained 

 a mere cobbler, and the other continued to lire the 

 baker's oven to the end of their days. And 

 therein consist the true value and lesson of their 

 history. The}' never raised themselves, by mere 

 "getting on," above the position in which they 

 were born ; but they enjoyed in that position in- 

 tellectual j)leasures and cultivated fellowship 

 which are rarely reached by any even of those 

 far, far above them in the social scale. They cor- 

 responded on equal terms with learned men of 

 science in all parts of the kingdom, and they were 

 visited and appreciated by those whose apprecia- 

 tion they would have most valued as a tribute of 

 admiration. But — more than that — they passed 

 their own lives liappily and usefully in the ab- 

 sorbing and delightful pursuit of natural knowl- 

 edge ; they drank to the full of all that was 

 known and thought in their own time on the very 

 profoundest and most interesting of questions, and 

 they had the satisfaction of knowing that by their 

 own humble amateur-work they had contributed 

 materially to the solution of some among these 

 higher problems which more learned men than 

 themselves had in many cases long failed to grap- 

 ple with. Such lives as those are surely, iu the 



