PER ARDUA AD ASTRA.

Auckland Star, Volume LXI, Issue 103, 3 May 1930, Page 8

PER ARDUA AD ASTRA.

The career of Joseph Wright,' professor of philology at Oxford, is a story that for difficulties overcome and successes achieved is. not unworthy to be set on record by . the Bide of other more famous ones (eays the "Christian Science Monitor"). .Sir Michael Sadler has revealed that Wright was born in a one-room cottage near Bradford, that he went to work at the age of six for a weekly wage of one-and-eixpence, and that, never having gone to school, he was unable to read until he taught himself .to do_so when he Avas sixteen. Four years later, in 1875, he opened a night school, obtaining eighteen pupils at twopence a week each, and studying himself until.2 a.m., though he began work every morning in the mill at seven o'clock. He saved enough money to enable hiiti to take courses at various German. universities, and accomplished the astonishing feat of learning Greek, Latin, Frenchj German, Sanskrit, Gothic, Old Bulgarian,-Lithuanian, Russian, Old Norse, Old and Middle High German, Anglo-Saxon and Old Icelandic. Thus Joseph Wright, who at sixteen had. taught himself to reacf English by means of the Bible and "The Pilgrim's Progress," was able at thirty-three to secure an appointment at Oxford, and later to become there professor of philology, a post he held until his retirement in 1925. Few careers have illustrated more vividly the triumph of character over circumstances. . Y '