Rabelais was a physician, and a successful
practitioner; Schiller was a surgeon; Cervantes, Lope de Vega,
Calderon, Camoens, Descartes, Maupertius, La Rochefoucauld,
Lacepede, Lamark, were soldiers in the early part of their
respective lives.
In our own country, many men now known by their writings, earned
their living by their trade. Lillo spent the greater part of his
life as a working jeweller in the Poultry; occupying the intervals
of his leisure in the production of dramatic works, some of them
of acknowledged power and merit. Izaak Walton was a linendraper
in Fleet Street, reading much in his leisure hours, and storing
his mind with facts for future use in his capacity of biographer.
De Foe was by turns horse-factor, brick and tile maker,
shopkeeper, author, and political agent.
Samuel Richardson successfully combined literature, with business;
writing his novels in his back-shop in Salisbury Court, Fleet
Street, and selling them over the counter in his front-shop.
William Hutton, of Birmingham, also successfully combined the
occupations of bookselling and authorship. He says, in his
Autobiography, that a man may live half a century and not be
acquainted with his own character. He did not know that he was an
antiquary until the world informed him of it, from having read his
'History of Birmingham,' and then, he said, he could see it
himself.
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