public attention; writing
and publishing, during _the same twenty-nine years_, a grammar of the
French and another of the English language, a work on the Economy of the
Cottage, a work on Forest Trees and Woodlands, a work on Gardening, an
account of America, a book of Sermons, a work on the Corn-plant, a
History of the Protestant Reformation; all books of great and continued
sale, and the _last_ unquestionably the book of greatest circulation in
the whole world, the Bible only excepted; having, during _these same
twenty-nine years_ of troubles and embarrassments without number,
introduced into England the manufacture of Straw-plat; also several
valuable trees; having introduced, during _the same twenty-nine years_,
the cultivation of the Corn-plant, so manifestly valuable as a source of
food; having, during the same period, always (whether in exile or not)
sustained a shop of some size, in London; having, during the whole of
the same period, never employed less, on an average, than ten persons,
in some capacity or other, exclusive of printers, bookbinders, and
others, connected with papers and books; and having, during these
twenty-nine years of troubles, embarrassments, prisons, fines, and
banishments, bred up a family of seven children to man's and woman's
state.

5. If such a man be not, after he has survived and accomplished all
this, qualified to give Advice to Young Men, no man is qualified for
that task. There may have been natural _genius_: but genius _alone_, not
all the genius in the world, could, without _something more_, have
conducted me through these perils. During these twenty-nine years, I
have had for deadly and ever-watchful foes, a government that has the
collecting and distributing of sixty millions of pounds in a year, and
also every soul who shares in that distribution. Until very lately, I
have had, for the far greater part of the time, the whole of the press
as my deadly enemy. Yet, at this moment, it will not be pretended, that
there is another man in the kingdom, who has so many cordial friends.
For as to the _friends_ of _ministers_ and the _great_, the friendship
is towards the _power_, the _influence_; it is, in fact, towards _those
taxes_, of which so many thousands are gaping to get at a share. And, if
we could, through so thick a veil, come at the naked fact, we should
find the subscription, now going on in Dublin for the purpose of
erecting a monument in that city, to commemorate the g