m Carey's case
even better than that of George Fox:--"Sitting in his stall, working on
tanned hides, amid pincers, paste-horns, rosin, swine-bristles, and a
nameless flood of rubbish, this youth had nevertheless a Living Spirit
belonging to him; also an antique Inspired Volume, through which, as
through a window, it could look upwards and discern its celestial
Home." That "shoe-shop, had men known it, was a holier place than any
Vatican or Loretto-shrine...Stitch away, every prick of that little
instrument is pricking into the heart of slavery." Thirty-six years
after Fox had begun to wear his leathern doublet he directed all
Friends everywhere that had Indians or blacks to preach the Gospel to
them.

But it would be too long to tell the list of workers in what has been
called the gentle craft, whom the cobbler's stall, with its peculiar
opportunities for rhythmic meditation, hard thinking, and oft harder
debating, has prepared for the honours of literature and scholarship,
of philanthropy and reform. To mention only Carey's contemporaries,
the career of these men ran parallel at home with his abroad--Thomas
Shillitoe, who stood before magistrates, bishops, and such sovereigns
as George III. and IV. and the Czar Alexander I. in the interests of
social reform; and John Pounds, the picture of whom as the founder of
ragged schools led Thomas Guthrie, when he stumbled on it in an inn in
Anstruther, to do the same Christlike work in Scotland. Coleridge, who
when at Christ's Hospital was ambitious to be a shoemaker's apprentice,
was right when he declared that shoemakers had given to the world a
larger number of eminent men than any other handicraft. Whittier's own
early experience in Massachusetts fitted him to be the poet-laureate of
the craft which for some years he adorned. His Songs of Labour,
published in 1850, contain the best English lines on shoemakers since
Shakspere put into the mouth of King Henry V. the address on the eve of
Agincourt, which begins: "This day is called the feast of Crispin."
But Whittier, Quaker, philanthropist, and countryman of Judson though
he was, might have found a place for Carey when he sang so well of
others:--

"Thy songs, Hans Sachs, are living yet,
In strong and hearty German;
And Bloomfield's lay and Gifford's wit
And patriot fame of Sherman;

"Still from his book, a mystic seer,
The soul of Behmen teaches,
And England's priestcraft shakes to hear
O