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the world in a variety of characters--errand-boy, brickmakers' boy,
potter, shipwright, sailor, sawyer, strolling player; and here he
finally settled down as painter, and, having achieved a trade, he turned
author, and wrote his life. That life--_The Autobiography of an
Artisan_--is one of the best written and most interesting books of its
class that we ever read. It is full of the difficulties of a poor man's
life, and of the resolute spirit that conquers them. It is, moreover,
full of a desire to enlighten, elevate, and in every way better the
condition of his fellow-men. Christopher Thompson is not satisfied to
have made his own way; he is anxious to pave the way for the whole
struggling population. He is a zealous politician, and advocate of the
Odd Fellow system, as calculated to link men together and give them
power, while it gives them a stimulus to social improvement. He has
labored to diffuse a love of reading, and to establish mechanics'
libraries in neglected and obscure places.

Behold the Thompson of Edwinstowe. Time, in eight-and-forty years, has
whitened his hair, though it has left the color of health on his cheek,
and the fire of intelligence in his eye. With a well-built frame and
figure, and a comely countenance, there is a buoyancy of step, an energy
of manner about him, that agree with what he has written of his life and
aspirations. Such are the men that England is now, ever and anon, in
every nook and corner of the island, producing. She produces them
because they are needed. They are the awakeners who are to stir up the
sluggish to what the time demands of them.

The two Thompsons of Sherwood are types of their ages. He of the
grave--lies solitary and apart from his race. He lived to earn
money--his thought was for himself--and there he sleeps, alone in his
glory--such as it is. He was no worse, nay, he was better than many of
his contemporaries. He had no lack of benevolence; but trade and the
spirit of his age, cold and unsympathetic, absorbed him. He was content
to lie alone in the desert, amid the heath "that knows not when good
cometh," and where the lonely raven perches on the blasted tree.

The living Thompson is, too, the man of his age: for it is an age of
awakening enterprise, of wider views, of stronger sympathies. He lives
and works, not for himself alone. His motto is Progress; and while the
forest whispers to him of the past, books and his own heart commune with
him of the fut