But to return to Edward and his culture. In one of the earliest letters which the author addressed to him, he made inquiry as to the manner in which he had become acquainted with the scientific works which are so necessary for the study of Natural History. “You seem to wonder,” he said in his reply, “why I did not mention _books_ in my memoir. You may just as well wonder how I can string a few sentences together, or, indeed, how I can write at all. My books, I can tell you, were about as few, as my education was brief and homespun.
“I thought you knew—yes, I am sure you knew—that any one having the Mind and the Will, need not stick fast even in this world. True, he may not shine so greatly as if he were better polished and better educated; but he need not sink in the mire altogether.
“You may very likely wonder at what I have been able to do—being only a poor souter,[60]—with no one to help me, and but few to encourage me in my labours. Many others have wondered, like yourself. The only answer I can give to such wonderers is, that I had the WILL to do the little that I have accomplished.
“If what I have done by myself, unaided and alone and without the help of books, surpasses the credulity of some, what might I not have accomplished had I obtained the help from others which was so often promised me! But that time is past, and there is no use in saying anything more about it. If I suffered privations, I had only myself and my love of Nature to blame.”
He was sometimes told that it was his “pride” which prevented him from being assisted as he should have been. His answer was, that he did not know anything about pride. But if it consisted in not soliciting aid when in want, and in endeavouring to conceal his poverty even when in need of help,—in order that the world might not know of the misery which himself, his wife, and his family suffered,—then he did not hesitate to say that he and his wife were proud. They never refused a kindly gift, but they always refused public charity.
“Although,” he says in a recent letter, “I have not known the pangs of want for some time, thanks to my children, I could scarcely have failed to do so in the years that are past. It would have been beyond the common run of things, if I had not. What working-man, especially what journeyman shoemaker, could have brought up and educated a large family, without at times feeling privation and the pressure of poverty? There are other trades which have their dull seasons; but, unlike most other tradesmen, shoemakers are not, from their low pay, able to lay anything by, even when they have plenty of work. And, as a matter of course, this made the struggle, when it did come, all the worse to bear.