EVERYTHING BY TURNS, AND NOTHING LONG.

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume VII, Issue 174, 23 July 1872, Page 4

EVERYTHING BY TURNS, AND NOTHING LONG.

The Saturday Revieio, in a sneering review of the •• Life of Thomas Cooper," the author of the poem "The Purgatory of Suicides," says : — Mr. Thomas Cooper has in turn been a shoemaker, a schoolmaster, a newspaper writer, editor, and proprietor, the manager of a choral society, a chartist lecturer, a chartist prisoner, copying clerk in a Government office, a poet, a oovelist, a two days' actor, a Methodist preacher, an Unitarian lecturer, a Baptist lecturer, and the writer of his own biography. There is scarcely any subject which he has not studied, and there is no subject on which he has not lectured — from Pythagoras to Beau Brummell. In less than nine years he delivered 3373 lectures, but now practises moderation by preaching only twice on a Sunday, and lecturing three or four times a week *###** For many years of his life Mr. Cooper lived on ten shillings a week, for which he had to labor hard and long at shoemaking, while all his leisure time he devoted to severe study. It is impossible for us to tell what degree of accuracy Mr. Cooper attained in his studies of Hebrew, Greek, Latin, French, German, and Italian, not to mention mathematics, divinity, and sceptical literature. His method of studying English was at all events thoroughly sound, for he set to work to commit to memory passages from the great masters. To use his own words, he had " become master of a vocabulary ol no mean order by committing Milton and Shakespeare to memory and repeating them bo often." We wish that not only preachers, but also novelists, could be made to go through a like training. It is refreshing to turn from that strangest of all tongues, the language of tbe so-cailed sensational novel, to Mr. Cooper's idiomatic English, even when' bis garrulity is at its flqod. We know scores of popular writers whose style would be greatly improved if every morning before they began to write they were forced to learn off by heart a page even of the " Life of Thomas Copper." -•