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Updated: July 9, 2025
As you looked at his severe, thoughtful face, surmounted by a shock of beautiful white hair, you instinctively respected him; and when you heard that he lived by cobbling shoes by day and playing a violin in the Theatre Royal orchestra by night, occasionally putting off his leather apron to give a music lesson in the front parlour of an afternoon, you respected him all the more.
Fired by the honourable desire to marry Fanny, with a proper regard for prudence, George set himself to work to learn cobbling in his spare moments; and so successfully did he cobble the worn shoes of his fellow-colliers after working hours, that before long he contrived to save a whole guinea out of his humble earnings.
Wherefore I may well say that such a threadbare minister is either an ill man or hath an ill patron, or both; and when such cooks and cobbling shifters shall be removed and weeded out of the ministry, I doubt not but our patrons will prove better men, and be reformed whether they will or not, or else the single-minded bishops shall see the living bestowed upon such as do deserve it.
These were men who were old, men who were middle-aged and some who were young, all of them more or less dust-grimed, weather-beaten, or ragged. Occasionally one was to be seen in heavy beery slumber under the hedgerow, or lying on the grass smoking lazily, or with painful thrift cobbling up a hole in a garment.
His college days were bitter and rebellious; days of hunger and thirst and ruined raiment. Some well-meaning person, moved to pity by the sight of Johnson's shabby shoes, patched and mended till they were past all wholesome cobbling, placed a new sound pair at Johnson's door in nameless benevolence. Johnson cast them from him with fury, too proud to be shod by another man's bounty.
Francis washing the feet of the leper; the young slave Patrick guiding his master through the bogs of Ireland, which he later rid of their dangers; the poet Hans Sachs cobbling shoes; Jeanne d'Arc dropping her spindle in startled wonder before the heavenly visitants, naturally all obtained such enthusiastic following from our cosmopolitan neighborhood that it was certain to give offense if any two were selected.
It stood desolately idle for some time, tumbling to pieces almost visibly, until, one day, two years ago, a burly, white-bearded tramp stopped in front of it, laid down his stick and bundle, and went to inquire at the neighbor's if the place were for rent, then moved in with his stick and bundle and sent away for the rest of his belongings, that is to say, an outfit for cobbling shoes.
"Well, cobbling is looking up now. In any case, you have pauperized him." "That's bad bad! Now, in Virginia we used to feed everybody who came along!" said the judge, shaking his head. "But I've learned wisdom in the cities. Every bit of bread given to a beggar degrades human nature and rots society to the core." "But suppose he is starving?" urged the captain.
It's like turning an old coat; going to bring the flesh on the other side now. I don't like this cobbling sort of business I don't like it at all; it's undignified; it's not my place. Let tinkers' brats do tinkerings; we are their betters.
Take for example the stories of the three cobbler lads Drew the historian, Cooper the reformer, and Carey the missionary, who, each in his own way, proved superior to poverty and all its attendant disadvantages, and rose, the one from his bench to a professorship in the London University, the other from a position equally lowly to a high place among the thinkers and writers of his day; and the third, leaving his lapstone to take up the pen of a translator, from cobbling boots in a back kitchen, went out to be the great master missionary of his age.
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