(...)"In the pursuit of knowledge, the blind have been very successful, and many of them have acquired the first literary honours, that their own, or foreign universities could confer. If they have not excelled, they have equalled many of their contemporaries, in the different branches of philosophy, but more particularly in the science of mathematics, many of them having been able to solve the most abstruse problems in algebra. In poetry, they have been equally distinguished. Two of the greatest men that ever courted the muses, laboured under the deprivation of sight— Homer, the venerable father of epic poetry, and Milton, the(...)".