Part 57

How do you make that out?"

"I will tell you by my own experience," replied Drew. "When I began business I was a great politician. For the first year I had too much to think about to indulge my propensity for politics; but, getting a little ahead in the world, I began to dip into these matters again, and entered into newspaper argument as if my livelihood depended on it; my shop was filled with loungers, who came to canvass public measures. This encroached on my time, and I found it necessary sometimes to work till midnight to make up for the hours I lost. One night, after my shutters were closed, and I was busily employed, some little urchin who was passing put his mouth to the keyhole of the door, and with a shrill pipe called out, 'Shoemaker! Shoemaker! Work by night and run about by day!' Had a pistol been fired off at my ear I could not have been more confounded. From that time I turned over a new leaf. I ceased to venture on the restless sea of politics, or trouble myself about matters which did not concern me. The bliss of ignorance on political topics I often experienced in after life--the folly of being wise my early history shows."

His sister kept house for him. One market-day a country-woman entered his shop, and having completed her purchases, remarked that she thought he would be more comfortable if he had a wife. Drew assented, but said, "I don't know any one who would have me." "Oh! that's easily settled," said the woman, and left. Next market-day she returned, bringing her buxom, apple-cheeked daughter with her. "There, Mr. Drew," said she; "I brought this maid, who will make 'ee a good wife."

Samuel demurred; he neither knew the family nor the qualities and character of the wench.

"Lor' bless 'ee!" said the woman, when he made these objections, "take her. The trial of the pudding is in the eating."

He declined the proposal, however; but this incident turned his mind to matrimony, and on April 17th, 1791, when in his twenty-seventh year, he married Honor Halls, and by her had five sons and three daughters. His wife's immediate fortune was £10, a sum of great importance at that time to him. Three years after it was increased by a legacy of £50.

Having made a certain amount of success with his Essay on the Immortality of the Soul, Drew next undertook one on The Identity and Resurrection of the Human Body, and this was published in 1809.

Into a controversy he was engaged in with Mr. Polwhele in 1800 on Methodism we need not enter, but it made no breach of friendly feeling between Mr. Polwhele and him, and it was at the request of the former that Drew wrote the little account of his life that appeared in Polwhele's Literary Characters, 1803.

Having experienced his own great difficulties in acquiring the principles of the English grammar, in 1804 he gave a course of lectures on that subject. These lectures, which occupied about two hours, were delivered on four evenings of the week, two being allotted to each sex separately. A year completed the course of instruction, and for this each pupil paid thirty shillings. He was able to illustrate his lectures very happily with anecdote and from his own experience, so as to render the barren study of grammar interesting and entertaining. Though never able to write first-class English, and often clumsy in diction, yet he was studiously correct in grammar, if often awkward in construction of a sentence.

In the year 1805 he gave up his cobbling business and devoted himself entirely to his pen. Seeing his value as a polemic writer in favour of the fundamental doctrines of Christianity, several of the clergy of Cornwall were anxious that he should join the Church; but his early association with Dissent, and his ignorance of Catholic doctrine, induced him to remain where he was in the Methodist Connection.

He next wrote an Essay on the Being and Attributes of the Deity, and a reply to Thomas Prout, On the Divinity of Christ and the Eternal Sonship. All this was very well in its way at the time, but is now so much waste paper, used only for covering jampots.

In 1814 Samuel Drew undertook his most voluminous work, the History of Cornwall, one which he was wholly unqualified to undertake, as he had no familiarity with the MS. material on which that history should be based; and it was a mere compilation from already printed matter.

In 1819 Samuel Drew removed to Liverpool, where he acted as local preacher in the Methodist meeting-houses. To this period belongs the epigram written on him by Dr. Clarke:--

Long was the man, and long was his hair, And long was the coat which this long man did wear.

He became editor of the Imperial Magazine, and after a short while in Liverpool, migrated to London.

In 1828 he lost his wife. "When my wife died," he was wont to say, "my earthly sun set for ever."

In 1833 he returned to Cornwall, and died at Helston on March 29th, at the age of sixty-eight.

Slender in form, with a head remarkably small for the length of his limbs, his stature exceeded the common height. He had a searching and intelligent eye, was somewhat uncouth in his movements, but was full of energy of mind and body. He sometimes wrote verses, which only a very partial biographer would call poetry. But what he prided himself on being was not a poet, but a metaphysician.

The story goes that S. Augustine was walking one day by the seashore, musing on the attributes of God and on the demonstration of the Divine nature, when he saw a child digging a hole in the sand, and then with a fan-shell ladling the sea-water into the hole it had made.

S. Augustine paused and asked, "My child, what are you about?"

"I am going to empty the sea into this hole," replied the child.

Then S. Augustine entered into himself and thought: "Can a man with the limited capacity of his brain embrace the infinity of the Divine nature and perfections? Is it not like emptying the sea into a tiny hole to try to effect this?"

Drew's life labours were just doing this. There was a certain amount of intellectual ingenuity in his arguments, but that was all. Not a leaf that he wrote is of any permanent value, but that it was of value at the time when he wrote I should be the last to deny.

There is abundant material for a life of Samuel Drew. Not only may it be found in the life by his son mentioned at the head of this article, and in his own biographical memoir given by R. Polwhele, but his son J. H. Drew also published a second memoir, under the title Samuel Drew, M. A., the Self-Taught Cornishman; A Life Lesson, published in 1861; also in Lives of the Illustrious, by J. P. Edwards, 1852; and Mr. Smiles has devoted some pages to him in Self-Help, 1866. The portrait of Samuel Drew is given as frontispiece to the first volume of The Imperial Magazine, 1819, and also to the Life by his son.

FOOTNOTE:

Samuel Drew says at the age of five, but this was a slip of his pen or a mistake of the printer; his mother died in 1774.

THE SIEGE OF SKEWIS

Skewis is a small, not very interesting farmhouse in itself, on the high road from Camborne to Helston, near the station of Nancegollan. Although at a distance of five miles from Tregonning Hill, that height crowned by a stone camp, and with two camps on its slopes, seems to dominate it. The country around is bleak and treeless except in dips, and where are the grounds of Clowance. To the north is the camp of Tregeare, where was once seated an ancient family of the same name, which died out in the reign of William of Orange with Richard Tregeare, sheriff of Cornwall. Skewis had been for some time the patrimony of a succession of yeoman proprietors of the name of Rogers.