Samuel Smiles：Self-Help, Excerpt 157

It would be beside our purpose to enter upon any criticism of “The Forge” as an engraving; its merits having been already fully recognised by the art journals. The execution of the work occupied Sharples’s leisure evening hours during a period of five years; and it was only when he took the plate to the printer that he for the first time saw an engraved plate produced by any other man. To this unvarnished picture of industry and genius, we add one other trait, and it is a domestic one. “I have been married seven years,” says he, “and during that time my greatest pleasure, after I have finished my daily labour at the foundry, has been to resume my pencil or graver, frequently until a late hour of the evening, my wife meanwhile sitting by my side and reading to me from some interesting book,”—a simple but beautiful testimony to the thorough common sense as well as the genuine right-heartedness of this most interesting and deserving workman.

Source： https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/935
Locator：Excerpt 157 · Verified：2026-10-19 · Verification：Short excerpt

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