THOMAS DOWSE, whose devotion to generally deemed unfavorable to culture citedf during his lifetime to stimulate y form the habit of reading, and whose nan ciated with several literary institutions estate. benefactions, was born at Charlestown, Ma.. ber, 1772, and died in Cambridgeport, on th. 4. His father, Eleazer Dowse, was a leather with his family from Charlestown on June 1. one of those destroyed by the conflagrat short time passed at Holliston, he establish small town in Middlesex county, the origina. there resumed his occupation as a leather des Thomas was severely injured by a fall from a t.asp fever setting in before he had recovered from the f dent, a lameness resulted which continued, fear severe pain, through life. At the proper age 1h ms. with his father, at his trade on the farm; a taste for reading, which he indulged with by the age of eighteen, he had read all the i.Sherborn. All his little earnings were es of books. He had no education but what cott town school. He continued to live at home us father till he had attained his majorit passage in a coasting vesity k ch 1 Abridged from a Discourse, by Hon. Edward Everett, at the opening of the Dowse Institute in Cambridgeport, and before the Massachusetts Historical Society. ↑ See Note at the close of this Memoir. * Abridged from a Discourse, by Hon. Edward Everett, at the opening of the Dowse Institute in Cambridgeport, and before the Massachusetts Historical Society. ↑ See Note at the close of this Memoir. foreign countries. Another never presented itself. He immediately sought employment in the business in which he had been brought up, and entered the service of Mr. Wait, a leather dresser and wool puller at Roxbury, Mass., at $12 a month wages. His pay was afterwards raised to $25. He remained in this employ ten years. He once informed a friend that at the age of twenty-eight his highest income was $25 a month; that he had never paid $5 for conveyance from one place to another, never owned a pair of boots, and was then the possessor of several hundred volumes of good books well bound. In 1803, he set up in business at Cambridgeport, with the assistance of Mr. Wait, who advanced the capital and shared the profits. This partnership was dissolved at the end of the year; after which Mr. Dowse carried on the business of a leather dresser, wool puller, and glover, at first with a succession of partners, and afterwards alone, till he was far advanced in life. His business was successful, and the articles manufactured by him enjoyed the reputation of being the best of their kind in the market. In 1814, he erected a large and commodious dwelling-house and shop in Cambridgeport, and laid out two or three acres as a garden; and here he lived unmarried the rest of his days. From the earliest period he devoted a large part of his income to the purchase of books. The working hours of the day were devoted to his shop or business connected with it; but the early morning and the evening hours were employed in reading. He thus acquired an intelligent knowledge of the contents of his steadily increasing library. Having formed a taste, not only for good books but for handsome editions, in which the American press was then greatly deficient, he was accustomed to import them directly from London. About the year 1820, his agent in England sent him the prospectus of a lottery for the disposal of the sets of a costly collection of engravings of the most famous works of the old masters, and of the water-color copies made from the originals, for the purposes of this publication. Mr. Dowse bought three tickets in this lottery, and drew two prizes, one prize consisting of two sets of the engravings, colored and uncolored; the other prize being half of the water-color copies framed, fifty-two in number. He thus became possessed of a large collection of admirable copies of some of the most celebrated paintings in England. In the judgment of Mr. Washington Allston, it afforded ampler means for the study of art than were elsewhere to be found at that time in the United States. The paintings were advantageously arranged in rooms adjoining Mr. Dowse's library, and formed with it an attraction of steadily increasing interest to men of letters and taste resident in the neighborhood, and to strangers. Mr. Dowse's bodily infirmity unfitted him for much active intercourse with society, and his disposition naturally inclined him to retirement and solitary occupation. He abstained from public life in all its forms, and though a diligent reader, committed nothing to writing. He continued to work at his trade till after he was seventy years of age; but for the last ten years of his life, though his shop remained open in the lower story of his dwelling, the business was conducted by persons in his employ. Of the eminent men whom the country has produced, Franklin was one of the special objects of Mr. Dowse's admiration. Toward the close of his life he expressed this sentiment by the erection, at his own expense, of a substantial granite obelisk at Mount Auburn, by the side of his own tomb. With the exception of the statue of Franklin presented by Mr. Bingham to the public library at Philadelphia, and the urn in Franklin place, Boston, which is rather an ornamental than a commemorative work, the obelisk erected by Mr. Dowse is believed to have been the first monument dedicated to the memory of Franklin in the United States. Giving his hours of labor to his trade, and those of relaxation to his books, his pictures, and his garden, Mr. Dowse lived on to a serene, contented, unaspiring and venerable age; exhibiting a beautiful example of the triumph of a calm and resolute spirit over what are usually regarded as the most adverse outward circumstances. A supposed invincible necessity of our natures has, in our modern society, almost separated the mechanical from the intellectual pursuits. A life of manual labor and business cares has usually been found (less perhaps in our country than in most others) to be inconsistent with the cultivation of a taste for literature and art. It is generally taken for granted, that, for this purpose, means and leisure are required, not within the reach of those who live by the labor of the hands. Hence society, speaking in general terms, is divided into two classes-one engrossed with manual labor or business cares, and suffering for want of a due culture of the mental powers; the other employed in pursuits that task the intellect, without calling into play the wonderful faculties of our material frames. The result in too many cases gives us labor without refinement, and learning without physical development. Such was evidently not the design of our nature. Curiously, wondrously compounded of soul and body, it was meant to admit the harmonious and sympathetic development of the material and intellectual principle: rather let me say, its attainable highest excellence can exist only when such development takes place. It is quite evident, that, as far as that object is attainable, labor should be ennobled and adorned by the cultivation of intellectual tastes and the |