re the birth of Christ. He pushed his way up through the lower
classes, up through the middle classes, up through the upper classes,
until he stood a master, self-poised upon the topmost round of political
and social power. Rebuffed, scorned, ridiculed, hissed down in the House
of Commons, he simply said, "The time will come when you shall hear me."
The time did come, and the boy with no chance but a determined will,
swayed the sceptre of England for a quarter of a century.

"I learned grammar when I was a private soldier on the pay of sixpence a
day," said William Cobbett. "The edge of my berth, or that of the
guard-bed, was my seat to study in; my knapsack was my bookcase; a bit
of board lying on my lap was my writing table, and the task did not
demand anything like a year of my life. I had no money to purchase
candles or oil; in winter it was rarely that I could get any evening
light but that of the fire, and only my turn, even of that. To buy a pen
or a sheet of paper I was compelled to forego some portion of my food,
though in a state of half starvation. I had no moment of time that I
could call my own, and I had to read and write amidst the talking,
laughing, singing, whistling, and bawling of at least half a score of
the most thoughtless of men, and that, too, in the hours of their
freedom from all control. Think not lightly of the _farthing_ I had to
give, now and then, for pen, ink, or paper. That farthing was, alas! a
great sum to me. I was as tall as I am now, and I had great health and
great exercise. The whole of the money not expended for us at market was
_twopence a week_ for each man. I remember, and well I may! that upon
one occasion I had, after all absolutely necessary expenses, on a
Friday, made shift to have a half-penny in reserve, which I had destined
for the purchase of a red herring in the morning, but when I pulled off
my clothes at night, so hungry then as to be hardly able to endure life,
I found that I had lost my half-penny. I buried my head under the
miserable sheet and rug, and cried like a child.

"If I, under such circumstances, could encounter and overcome this
task," he added, "is there, can there be in the world, a youth to find
any excuse for its non-performance?"

"I have talked with great men," Lincoln told his fellow-clerk and
friend, Greene, according to _McClure's Magazine_, "and I do not see how
they differ from others."

He made up his mind to put himself before the public