Vast labours attest the enthusiasm which accompanied their progress.

Such men have sealed their works with their blood: they have silently borne the pangs of disease; they have barred themselves from the pursuits of fortune; they have torn themselves away from all they loved in life, patiently suffering these self-denials, to escape from interruptions and impediments to their studies.

Martyrs of literature and art, they behold in their solitude the halo of immortality over their studious heads--that fame which is "a life beyond life." VAN HELMONT, in his library and his laboratory, preferred their busy solitude to the honours and the invitations of Rodolphus II., there writing down what he daily experienced during thirty years; nor would the enthusiast yield up to the emperor one of those golden and visionary days! MILTON would not desist from proceeding with one of his works, although warned by the physician of the certain loss of his sight.

He declared he preferred his duty to his eyes, and doubtless his fame to his comfort.

ANTHONY WOOD, to preserve the lives of others, voluntarily resigned his own to cloistered studies; nor did the literary passion desert him in his last moments, when with his dying hands the hermit of literature still grasped his beloved papers, and his last mortal thoughts dwelt on his "Athenae Oxonienses." MORERI, the founder of our great biographical collections, conceived the design with such enthusiasm, and found such seduction in the labour, that he willingly withdrew from the popular celebrity he had acquired as a preacher, and the preferment which a minister of state, in whose house he resided, would have opened to his views.[A] After the first edition of his "Historical Dictionary," he had nothing so much at heart as its improvement.