Stephen Duck.

STEPHEN DUCK was born about the beginning of the last century, and received originally no other education than what enabled him to read and write English, together with a slight knowledge of arithmetic. About his fourteenth year he was taken from school, and afterwards successively engaged in the several lowest employments of a country life, which lasted so long, that he had almost forgot all the arithmetic he had learned at school. However, he read sometimes, and thought oftener: he had a certain longing after knowledge; and even when he reflected within himself on his want of education, he began to be particularly uneasy that he should have forgot any portion of what he had learned, even at his little school. He thought of this so often, that, at last, he resolved to try his own strength; and, if possible, to recover his arithmetic again.

He was then about twenty-four years of age, was married, and in employ: he had little time to spare:

neither books, nor money to get any; but used to work more than other day-labourers, by which means he got some little matter added to his pay. This overplus was at his own disposal; and with this he bought first a book of vulgar arithmetic, then one of decimal, and a third of measuring land; of all which, by degrees, he made himself a tolerable master, in those hours he could steal from sleep, after the labours of the day. He had, it seems, one dear friend, who joined with him in this literary pursuit ; and with whom he used to talk and read when they could devote a little time for it. This friend had been in employment, at London, for two or three years; and had an inclination to books as well as Stephen Duck. He had purchased some, and brought them down into the country; and Stephen had always the use of his little library, which in time was increased to two or three dozen of books. 66 Perhaps," says his historian, Mr. Spence, "you would be willing to know what books their little library consisted of. I need not mention those of arithmetic again, nor his bible. Milton, the Spectators, and Seneca, were his first favourites; Telemachus, with another piece by the same hand, and Addison's Defence of Christianity,

his next. They had an English Dictionary, and a sort of English Grammar; an Ovid of long standing with them; a Bysshe's Art of Poetry, of later acquisition; Seneca's Morals; Josephus, in folio; and one volume of Shakspeare's Plays, formed the whole of their collection.-Besides these, Stephen had read three or four other plays; some of Epictetus, Waller, Dryden's Virgil, Prior, Hudibras, Tom Browne, and the London Spy."

With these helps Stephen became something of a poet, and partly a philosopher. He had from his infancy a cast towards poetry, as appeared from several little circumstances; but what gave him a higher taste for it, than he hitherto had, was Milton's Paradise Lost. This he read over twice or thrice with a dictionary, before he could understand the language of it thoroughly; and this, with a sort of English Grammar he had, is said to have been of the greatest use to him. It was his friend that helped him to the Spectators; which, as he himself owned, improved his understanding more than any thing. The pieces of poetry scattered in those papers assisted his natural bent that way; and made him willing to try whether he could not do something like them.