MACKEY, THE LEARNED SHOEMAKER OF NORWICH, AND TWO OTHER LEARNED SHOEMAKERS.
In this connection we may mention a curious instance of learning in lowly life, mentioned in one of a series of interesting articles in the Leisure Hour, already alluded to. The writer says: “In that most entertaining miscellany Notes and Queries (No. 215) we find an interesting account of a very poor Norwich shoemaker named Mackey, whose mind appears to have been a marvellous receptacle of varied learning. He died in Doughty’s Hospital, in Norwich, an asylum for aged persons there. The writer of the paper found him surrounded by the tools of his former trade and a variety of astronomical instruments and apparatus, and he instantly was ready for conversation upon the mysteries of astronomical and mythological lore, the “Asiatic Researches of Captain Wilford,” and the mythological speculations of Jacob Bryant and Maurice, quoting Latin and Greek to his auditor. He was called “the learned shoemaker.” His learning was probably greatly undigested and ungeneralized, but it was none the less another singular instance of the pursuit of knowledge under difficulties, as is shown by his published works on mythological astronomy and on “The Age of Mental Emancipation.” To this notice of Mackey the writer in the Leisure Hour adds an amusing story, which is too good to be omitted, of a brother of the gentle craft (a cobbler) who, in order to eclipse a rival who lived opposite to him, put over his door on his stall the well-known motto, “Mens conscia recti” (a mind conscious of rectitude). But his adversary, determined not to be outdone, showed himself also a cobbler in classics as well as in shoes, by placing over his door the astonishingly comprehensive defiance, “Men’s and Women’s conscia recti.”