■^(y N? ■,v '^/ja^AiNn-awv^ < -n .0^ '0- - 'O —n L. ■,% ,OFCM!FO/?^>^ , ^\u•IJ^'lVERv^ >^' T;^. ^^.nF-CAiiFn/?^>^ ,5.0FC -5 — n .V^' 1 ^^ i .Vv^llRf AWFIJMIVERy/^^ KlOSANf.Flf.r^ ^/.5JJ]AINil-3V\V^ "'^^ %ojn VJJO^" Li- »- ■ 1 > 5 .^ ' *" 'r? '$<■ '^' ' ^ ~ iAiNd-iw'^'^ '^-^^iHVMHii-w'^ "^AHvaaii-^ ^\\\n\no^. yt < 33 >- < DC ^^insAvr,F!/^r;^ CJ5 C3 %jnV3J0'^ ^ ^^m\ vO/: ^OFCALIF0% c^ ^WFUNIVERV/) r?» 'Jr ^lOSANGFlfj> > r r « ! I r- /^ ^ 6. <: ■ '-' /\'J > ' ■- U M J ' ■ '- "^^ ^- 9 - v^lOSANCElfx^ ^UNIVER% .vj^lOSW -< _^) ■3: ^■^i 5^ -~^ ^^ME■UNI\: 9/:^ ^xMLIBR rt —J I 11 r-n >- ~" O -^ — ' i"" — ^ 5 -a: ; T^ z= -c: ^OF-CALIF0/?4^ i lilni = 3 n s >■ r < n ^-^ 3 „-,.,, ,,,.,. X A\\r !' I" ,vinv-\ >* .^. > Z] ^1- '^*" f < r-n 5 < 5 L1_J ,--j %> > -v ..:^" '^^mk\ '/ ^"r ,^\\E■UNIVER% o^lOSA ^ **^ \^ c'^ r^Tv -^ ■J^ z r-) T! LANCASHIRE WORTHIES. 'Johti Heywood. t'lmu-r, Maitduster. LANCASHIRE WORTHIES. BY FRANCIS ESPINASSE. Srcanti Series. ' Hie manus, ob patriam pugnando vulnera passi, Quique sacerdotes ca-'ii, dum vita manebat, Quique pii vates, et Phosbo digna locuti, Inventas aut qui vitam excoluere per artes, Quique sui memores alios fecere merendo." j^neid, vi. 660-65. " Behold, a band Of whom some suffered for heir Fatherland ; With them are priests whose /ives were undefiled, And reverent bards on whom Apollo smiled. Inventors, too, of useful arts are here. And those whose worth has made their memory dear. LONDON: SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, & CO., Stationers' Hall Court. ^L\NCI1EST^:K: jorix heywood. iS77- • • • • * * » I , CONTENTS. I. SAMUEL CROMPTON II. THE FOUNDER OF THE PEEI, FAMILY III. THE FIRST SIR ROBERT PEEL . IV. THOMAS PERCIVAL . V. CAPTAIN JAMES KING VI. GEORGE ROMNEY . VIL HENRY CORT .... VIII. THE TOWNELEYS OK TOWNELEY IX. JOHN DALTON X. WILLIAM ROSCOE . XI. FELICIA HEMANS . Xn. JOHN DRINKWATER-BETHUNE XIII. THE TWO THOMAS WALKERS . XIV. MARIA JANE JEWSBURV . XV. HENRY LIVERSEEGE XVI. SIR JOHN BARROW . XVII. WILLIAM WHEWELL XVin. THOMAS DE QUINCEV XIX. SAMUEL BAMFORD . TAGE I 49 82 '73 195 211 224 238 261 274 286 296 306 323 340 35" 363 37S 462 NOTE ON THE CHEVALIER TOWNELEY AND HUDIBRAS 493 305189 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES. I. SAMUEL CROMPTON* npHE spinning-mule, invented by Samuel Crompton, has more than any single machine contributed to the progress and prosperity of the cotton manufacture, though the inventor himself profited little by the successful inge- nuity and labour which helped to enrich his county and his country. Indeed, of the three men — Hargreaves, Ark- wright, and Crompton — who may be grouped together as the originators of modern cotton-spinning, Arkwright alone accumulated wealth, and this because in business faculty he was greatly the superior of his two contemporaries. The operations of the founder of the factory system were, it is true, far more extensive than those of the inventors of the jenny and the mule. But if the sphere of Arkwright's * Gilbert J. French, The Life and Times of Sarmiel Crompton, Ltventor of the Spin7iing- Machine called The Mule, with an Appendix oj original documents, second edition (Manchester and London, 1 860). A Brief Memoir of Sa?mtcl Crompton, by John Kennedy, Esq., in Memoirs of tlie Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester, second series, vol. v. (London, 1831). Bennet Woodcroft, Brief Biographies of Inventors of Machines for the Manufacture of Textile Fabrics (London, 1863), § Crompton, &c., &c. A 2 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES. efforts and achievements had been much narrower than it was — if he had been simply, Hke Hargreaves or Crompton, the inventor of an isolated machine, he would assuredly have made out of it much more for himself than these two men made for themselves out of the jenny and the mule. By nature and by training Arkwright was as fitted as Crompton seems to have been unfitted for the battle of industrial life. Invention has been called the poetry of labour ; and certainly inventors or projectors are, as little as poets, all cast in the same mould. Stalwart, shrewd, and hearty Sir Walter Scott did not differ more from the melan- cholic and morbid Cowper than the burly, resolute, and not over - scrupulous Arkwright from the shrinking and sensitive Crompton, whose rather sad story now falls to be told. The only son of a small farmer at Firwood, near Bolton, Samuel Crompton was born there on the 3d of December 1753. His parents combined — as was then common — petty manufacturing with their petty agriculture. In the intervals of farm and dairy labour they carded, span, and wove, finding a market for their wares in Bolton, a town long previously famous for its fustians and other heavy fabrics. When Crompton was born, the population of Bolton was probably much less than the 5000 which it became twenty years later. The town was still called Bolton-in-the-Moors, from the marshy waste which sur- rounded it, and most of which, thanks partly to Crompton himself, is now covered with houses and mills. Writing: or publishing in 1795, Dr. Aikin says, that "in the memory of some persons now living, not more than one cow used to be killed weekly in Bolton ; or, if two, the unsold beef used to be sent to Bury market," 1 a fact which indicates the poverty as well as scantiness of the population. In ^ Coimtry Round Manchesta; p. 261. SAMUEL CROMPTON. 3 1773 Great and Little Bolton contained only 5,339 inhabi- tants ; a hundred years afterwards the population of the parliamentary burgh of Bolton was more than 93,000, an increase to which the success of Crompton's mule has largely contributed. In the production of its fustians and so forth, which at the time of Crompton's birth were the staple commodities of the place, Bolton was greatly de- pendent on the North of Ireland. Thence was brought the linen yarn for the warps, which, before Arkwright's rollers came into use, the cotton-spinning resources of the North of England could not supply of proper strength. Once a week there was a market for unbleached goods, the products of the town and neighbourhood. It was attended by buyers from Manchester and London; and the rural quota of the wares which they came in search of — " fustians, herring-bones, cross-overs, quiltings, dimities, and other goods — were carried to market by the small manufacturers (who were for the most part equally small farmers), in wallets balanced over one shoulder, while on the other arm was often hung a basket of fresh butter," ^ — a primitive conjunction of the products of the dairy and the loom. Crompton's progenitors had seemingly been better off than were his parents. His birthplace, Firwood farm, once belonged to the Crompton family, but was mortgaged by his grandfather, and sold by his father, who remained on it merely as a tenant. Crompton's parents were honest, hard-working, and strictly religious people. The construc- tiveness inherited by Samuel, and turned to account in the invention of the spinning-mule, was applied by his father for the benefit of the church (now All Saints, Little ^ French, p. 7. See in First Series, p. 373-Si the whole of Mr. French's interesting description of Bolton, its aspects and its trade, at the time of Crompton's birlh. 4 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES. Bolton), which he attended. The elder Crompton was fond of music, a taste also inherited by his son ; and when his day's work was over, he helped to erect the organ gallery, even beginning to build an organ, unfinished at his death. He died when Samuel was a boy of five, and there were also two daughters, of whom little more than that they existed is recorded. One removal of the Crompton family from Firwood farm to a cottage in the same town- ship had taken place soon after Samuel's birth, and just before the death of the father there was another to a portion of a neiglibouring and ancient mansion, known from its situation as Hall-in-the-Wood. The landlord of the Cromp- tons, the purchaser of Firwood, seems also to have been the ownerofHall-i'-th'-Wood(as it was called in the vernacular), which was otherwise untenanted. The couple, whom, as deserving people, he may have wished to assist, would look after it. They were probably falling rather than rising in the world, and perhaps the offer of a domicile at a lower rent led them cheerfully to exchange a little home of their own for the part-occupancy and custodianship of Hall-in- the-Wood. Since it became famous as the birthplace of the mule it has had many visitors, and one of them thus records what were its aspects, internal and external, nearly a century after the Crompton family first made it their home : — "An interesting specimen of the old rural mansion before Lanca- shire had become manufacturing— it is Elizabethan in style, small compared with modern mansions, but commodious and snug, and shows the advancing wealth of the owners of the successive additions which have from time to time been made to its accommodation : first, the roomy kitchen or hall, with sleeping apartments above, lit by latticed windows ; then the addition of a dining-hall and drawing-room, with their large oriel windows of stained glass. The situation is very fine, on a plateau once covered with timber, from which it derived its name. The little river Eagley, a tributary of the Irwell, runs deep in the valley beneath, the high land descending precipitously in some SAMUEL CROMPTON. 5 places almost to the banks of the stream. Even at this day, in spite of the long chimneys within sight, and the sky dimmed by smoke, the neighbourhood of Ilall-in-the-Wood exhibits one of the best specimens of South Lancashire scenery." ^ Here, with her Httle son and her two daughters, the widow Crompton abode after her husband's death, farming and manufacturing as before. Her dairy produced butter which was considered excellent, and the bees in the old-fashioned garden of the Hall supplied her with marketable honey. She was a superior woman, and of a superiority so appreci- ated, that, even in those days of the subjection of the sex, she was appointed overseer of the poor of her township. Dame Crompton seems to have been in one respect well qualified for the office. She was of a somewhat vigorous disposition, loving her son indeed, but all the more on that account not sparing the rod, and chastising him betimes. One fancies that this sort of training must have aggravated any- thing that was morbid in a naturally shy and sensitive boy. His mother sent him, however, to a good day-school in the neighbourhood, where he made fair progress in arith- metic, algebra, and geometry, taking kindly to such studies. Playmates or companions he seems to have had none. Of the sisters nothing is said, and besides mother and son, the only inmate of their section of the quaint mansion of whom mention is made was a lame old uncle on the father's side, so much of a cripple that he never left his one room, where he oscillated between his bed and his loom. Uncle Alexander was religious, like the rest of the family, but church-going was out of the question ; and thus it was that he contrived to compensate himself for the deprivation : — "On each succeeding Sunda)', when all the rest of the family had gone to morning service at All Saints, Uncle Alexander sat in his ^ Quarterly Review (for January i860), No. 213, § Cotton-Spinning Machitus and their Inventors (by Mr. Samuel Smiles), p. 66. 6 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES. solitary room listening for the first sound of the bells of Bolton parish church. Before they ceased ringing, he took off his ordinary working-day coat, and put on that which was reserved for Sundays. This done, he slowly read to himself the whole of the Morning Service and a sermon, concluding about the same time that the dismissal bells commenced ringing, when his Sunday-coat was carefully put aside, to be resumed again, however, when the bells took up their burthen for the evening service, which he read through with the same solemnity." ^ From early childhood, in all likelihood, Crompton was accustomed to help his hard-working mother in her humble manufacturing operations, and " probably his little legs became accustomed to the loom almost as soon as they were long enough to touch the treddles." School itself may not have released him from his home labours, and as he grew up, his mother kept him close to his work, in- sisting, like a wicked fairy tormenting a captive princess, that he should do a certain stint every day, at the risk, in case of neglect, of a terrible scolding, or worse. He was a boy of fourteen when Hargreaves, by 1767, as has been told elsewhere,^ so far perfected the spinning-jenny that a child could work with it eight spindles at once. Two years later the jenny was pretty generally used in Lancashire; and Crompton, cetat 16, "span on one of these machines with eight spindles the yarn which he afterwards wove into quilting, and thus was he occupied for the five following years." The spinning-jenny which Crompton used was perhaps a poor one, or there may have been inherent im- perfections in the machine itself. In any case, much of his time was passed painfully in " mending the ever-breaking ends of his miserable yarn," to get through the day's ap- pointed task and escape the maternal reproaches. It was a drudging, cheerless, lonesome life for the poor lad, and no wonder he grew up an unsocial and irritable young man. His one solace was derived from his inherited love of 1 French, p. 24. - First Series, p. 324. SAMUEL CROMPTON. 7 music. The son of the amateur organ-builder made him- self a fiddle, the first little achievement of the mechanical genius implanted in him, and destined to find before long a very different development : — "He soon scraped a very intimate acquaintance with his fiddle, which became to him truly a bosom friend, proving in after-life the solace of many a solitary hour, and a source of consolation after many a bitter disappointment. With this musical friend he, on winter nights, practised the homely tunes of the time by the dim light of his mother's kitchen fire or thrifty lamp ; and in many a summer twilight he wan- dered contemplatively among the green lanes or by the margin of the pleasant brook that swept round her romantic old residence."^ This construction of a fiddle that could be played on betokens considerable handiness in a youth who had no practical acquaintance with any but his own monotonous craft, and it perhaps aided in awakening his dormant mechanical powers. He had spun for five years on one of Hargreaves' spinning-jennies, when some dim conception of the mule floated into his brain, as day after day he felt more and more keenly the imperfections of the new machine — imperfections very palpable and very grievous, whatever its superiority to the old one-thread spinning- wheel, which it was rapidly displacing. Besides craving for a machine that would turn out yarn less brittle than that which was " ever breaking " as it came from the jenny, he was probably stimulated by the demand for a finer kind of yarn than any that could be then produced eff"ectively in England. In the muslin trade, the fabrics of India all but monopolised the market. The Act of 1721, which made penal the importation or use of Indian calicoes, plain or printed, did not prohibit muslins, and those of India defied English competition. English calicoes, for which Arkwright's rollers furnished the warp, and the spinning- * French, p. 23. 8 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES. jenny of Hargreaves the weft, were being produced in con- siderable quantities, when, we are told, " the manufacture of the still more delicate and beautiful muslin was attempted both in Lancashire and at Glasgow with weft spun by the jenny." But, it is added, " the attempt failed owing to the coarseness of the yarn. Even with Indian weft, muslins could not be made to compete with those of the East." ^ Nay, according to Crompton's latest biographer, in Bolton itself, for three years before he began to work at his machine, muslins had been woven, " but either from hand- spun material or from the fine yarn occasionally imported from the East Indies." The hand-spun yarn was trouble- some to produce ; the East Indian was costly ; so here would be stimulus given at his own door, as it were, to the young inventor. Crompton's mule was to enable the English spinner to produce a yarn out of which the most delicate muslin could be woven, not only to compete with, but to supersede, the airiest fabrics of the East. Five long years, from his twenty-second to his twenty- seventh, Crompton brooded over, experimented on, and worked at his nascent machine. In his moments of greatest hope, however, he did not dream of a patent and a fortune, but thought only of turning out for his own loom, and with greater ease, a finer and more valuable yarn than that which he and his fellow-craftsmen had painfully and laboriously educed from the jenny. The machine, if it proved effective, was to be kept a close secret, and thus the already solitary and uncompanionable young man probably became less disposed than ever for society. His tools were few and scanty — those used by his father in building the unfinished organ, and notably a clasp-knife of his own, which did him yeoman's service. Some others he bought with what money he could spare from his slender * Baines, Cotton Maftitfai-linr, p. 334. SAMUEL C ROMP TON. 9 earnings : partly to increase these, partly to gratify his taste for music, he fiddled in the orchestra of the Bolton Theatre during its period of intermittent opening, for the sum of eighteenpence a night. Of such poor tools as he possessed and acquired, moreover, he had to teach himself the use, since to ask for aid or instruction from the more skilful might have been to betray his secret. " It is known, however, that he frequently visited a small wayside smithy in the township, where, we are informed, he ' used to file his bits of things.' " Both to maintain due secrecy, and because his labour for his daily bread left him little leisure, he worked constantly at his machine during the night : — "Indeed, this it was which first called the attention of his family and neighbours to his proceedings. Strange and unaccountable sounds were heard in the old Hall at most untimely hours ; lights were seen in unusual places ; and a rumour became current that the place was haunted. Samuel, however, was soon discovered to be himself the embodied spirit (of invention), which had caused much fear and trouble to his family. Even when relieved from the alarm of a ghost, they yet found that they had among them a conjuror I for such was the term applied in contempt to inventors in those days, and indeed for a long time afterwards." ^ Something worse than the contempt and gibes of ignorant neighbours threatened the young inventor just as the long term of his patient experimenting approached a close. He had begun to work on his machine in 1774; five years more — the five years of his unremitting and solitary toil — bring us to 1779, the date of that uprising and outbreak of the Lancashire working classes against machinery, especially the spinning-jenny, which has been already described elsewhere. 2 The fury of the machine-breakers was scarcely anywhere more destructive than in the neighbourhood of Bolton. The rumours that Crompton was inventing more of the machinery on which the mob was wreaking its ^ French, p. 37-8. " First Series, \->. 423-7. y B lO LANCASHIRE WORTHIES. vengeance might easily have procured him a visit from the rioters ; and, as recorded in the following passage, they were once seen and heard, busy at their work of demolition, in the immediate neighbourhood of Hall-in-the-Wood : — " Crompton was well aware that his infant invention would be still more obnoxious to the rioters than Hargreaves' jenny, and appears to have taken careful measures for its protection or concealment should they have paid a domiciliary visit to the Hall-in-the-Wood. The ceiling of the room in which he worked is cut through, as well as a corresponding part of the clay-floor of the room above, the aperture being covered by replacing the part cut away. This opening was recently detected by two visitors, who were investigating the mysteries of the old mansion ; but they could not imagine any use for a secret trap-door until, on pointing it out to Mr. Bromiley, the present tenant, he recalled to his memory a conversation he had with Samuel Crompton during one of his latest visits to the Hall many years ago. Mr. Crompton informed Mr. Bromiley, that once, when he was at work on the mule, he heard the rioters shouting at the destruction of a building at ' Folds ' (an adjoining hamlet), where there was a carding- engine.^ Fearing that they would come to the Hall-in-the-Wood and destroy his mule, he took it to pieces and put it into a skip which he hoisted through the ceiling into the attic by the trap-door, which had, doubtless, been prepared in anticipation of such a visit, and now offers a curious evidence of the insecurity of manufacturing inventions in their early infancy. The various parts were concealed in a loft or garret near the clock, and there they remained hid for many weeks ere he dared to put them together again. But in the course of the same year the Hall-in-the-Wood wheel was completed, and the yarn spun upon it used for the manufacture of muslins of an extremely fine and delicate texture. " Yes, success had at last crowned the persistently and ^ This statement is curiously confirmed by a passage in Josiah Wedgewood's contemporary and epistolary chronicle of the doings of these rioters: — " By a letter from Bolton," he writes to a friend, "I learned that the mob entered that place on Tuesday, 5th October 1 779. . . . They next proceeded to Mr. Kay of The Folds and de- stroyed his machine and waterwheel, and then went to work with the lesser machines ' — spinning-jennies — "all above so many spindles." See First Series, p. 426. 2 French, p. 54-7. SAMUEL CROMPTON. I I perseveringly tentative labours, prosecuted in silence and secrecy, day after day, night after night, with the rudest tools, by the inexperienced, unassisted, the solitary and indigent young inventor, during five long years, spent in what Crompton afterwards described as " a continual endeavour to realise a more perfect principle of spinning. Though often baffled," he adds, " I as often renewed the attempt, and at length succeeded to my utmost desire, at the expense of every shilling I had in the world." ^ The result was the machine called at first, from its birthplace, the " Hall-in-the-Wood wheel," or sometimes, from the fine quality of the yarn spun on it, the " muslin wheel," but ulti- mately and now known as the " mule," from its combination of the principle of Arkwright's rollers with that of Har- greaves' spinning-jenny. After chronicling the origin, pro- gress, and results of these last two famous inventions, the historian of the cotton manufacture proceeds thus to describe the mule : — " During the period that has now passed under review, Hargreaves and Arkwright had established the cotton manufacture by their spinning machines ; but those machines were not adapted for the finer qualities of yarn. The water-frame spun twist for warps, but it could not be advantageously used for the finer qualities, as thread of great tenuity has not strength to bear the pull of the rollers when winding itself on the bobbins. This defect in the spinning machinery was remedied by the inventor of another machine, called the vmle, or the nude jennv, from its containing the principles of Arkwright's water-frame and Hargreaves' jenny. Like the former, it has a system of rollers, to reduce the roving ; and, like the latter, it has spindles without bobbins to give the twist, and the thread is stretched and spun at the same time by the spindles, after the rollers have ceased to give out the rove. The distinguishing feature of the mule is, that the spindles, instead of being stationary, as in both the other machines, are placed on a movable carriage, which is wheeled out to tlie distance of fifty-four or fifty-six inches from the roller-beam, in order to stretch and twist the thread, and wheeled in again to wind it on the spindles. In the jenny, the clasp, ' French, p. 37. 12 LANCASHIRE WORTH IRS. which held the rovings, was drawn back by the hand from the spindles; in the mule, on the contrary, the spindles recede from the clasp, or from the roller-beam which acts as a clasp. The rollers of the mule draw out the roving much less than those of the water- frame ; and they act like the clasp of the jenny, by stopping and holding fast the rove after a certain quantity has been given out, whilst the spindles continue to recede for a short distance farther ; so that the draught on the thread is in part made by the receding of the spindles. By this arrangement, comprising the advantages both of the rollers and the spindles, the thread is stretched more gently and equably, and a much finer quality of yarn can therefore be pro- duced." ^ Was the first rude conception of the rollers in the Hall- in-the-Wood machine borrowed from those of Arkwrisht ? is a question that naturally arises. In 1772, two years before Crompton began his experiments, Arkwright's rollers were hard at work in the Cromford mill, and turning out cotton yarn fit to be woven into hose. At first sight, it would therefore seem as if Crompton's rollers must have been suggested by Arkwright. But the weight of such evidence as there is, consisting partly of Crompton's own testimony, or reported testimony, tends decidedly the other way. On this point, his earliest biographer, who knew him personally and intimately, and who was himself a practical cotton-spinner, speaks thus explicitly : — "Mr. Crompton's first suggestion was to introduce a single pair of rollers, viz., a top and a bottom, which he expected would elongate the rove by pressure, like the process by which metals are drawn out, and which he observed in the wire-drawing for reeds used in the loom. In this he was disappointed, and afterwards adopted a second pair of rollers, the latter pair revolving at a slower speed than the former ; and thus producing a draught of one inch to three or four. These rollers were put in motion by means of a wooden shaft with different-sized pullies, which communicated with the roller by a band. This was certainly neither more nor less than a modification of Mr. Arkwright's roller-beam ; but he often stated to me, that -cohen he constructed his ^ Baines, Cotton Manufacture, p. 197-8. SAMUEL CROMPTON. 1 3 machine, he kntiu nothing of Mr. Arkwrighf s discoz'ery. Indeed, we may infer that he had not, otherwise he would not have gone thus rudely to work ; and, indeed, the small quantity of metals which he employed, proves that he could not have been acquainted with Mr. Arkwright's superior rollers and fixtures in iron, and their connection by clockwork. Even the rollers were made of wood, and covered with a piece of sheepskin, having an axis of iron with a little square end, on which the pullies were fixed. Mr. Crompton's rollers were supported upon wooden cheeks or stands. His tops were constructed much in the same way, with something like a mouse-trap string to keep the rollers in contact. His first machine contained only about twenty or thirty spindles. He finally put dents of brass-reed wire into his under rollers, and thus obtained a fluted roller. But the great and important invention of Crompton was his spindle-carriage, and the principle of the thread having no strain upon it until it was completed. The carriage w ith the spindles could, by the movement of the hand and knee, recede just as the rollers delivered out the elongated thread in a soft state, so that it would allow of a considerable stretch before the thread had to encounter the stress of winding on the spindle. This was the corner-stone of the merits of his invention." ^ Or, as in a much more recent sketch of Crompton, a living expert puts it : " In this machine was accomplished for the first time the action of the spinners left arm an'], 6s. 6d. ; but as it is known that several did not pay at all, and that he was at considerable expense of time and money in personally collecting the subscriptions of others, it may be assumed that the amount received did not exceed £(iO. The list is curiously interesting, as containing among the half-guinea subscribers the names of many Bolton firms now"— 1860— "of great wealth and emi- nence as mule-spinners, whose colossal fortunes may be said to have been based upon this singularly small investment. " No sooner was the mule given up to the public than the subscrip- tions entirely ceased. Crompton's hopes of reward and remuneration were blasted, and many of those who had previously given their names evaded or refused payment. Let us again use his own words in de- scribing this very shameful transaction : — ' At last I consented, in hope of a generous and liberal subscription. The consequence was, that from many subscribers, who would not pay the sums they had set opposite their names when I applied to them for it, I got nothing but abusive language, given me to drive me from them, which was easily done, for I never till then could think it possible that any man (in such situation of life and circumstances) could pretend one thing and act the direct oppo- site. I then found it was possible, having had proof positive.' "It thus appears that the money received for giving publicity to his wonderful invention merely sufficed to replace the machine he had given up ; and for his loss of time, study, and toil, he had not as reward or recompense a single shilling. But this pecuniary loss was less mortifying to his honourable and sensitive mind than the deceitful ingratitude he met with from too many of the persons he had so gene- SAMUEL CROMPTON. I9 rously trusted. A record exists with the names of some of the men who used him thus infamously, but we blot these names from our paper, and spare their descendants the mortification of learning that when Samuel Crompton respectfully asked their ancestors to pay their promised subscriptions, and put before them their own written agree- ment to do so, they denounced him as an impostor, and asked him how he dared to come on such an errand ! By this means many saved their miserable guinea (for that was the utmost extent of any subscription), but at what a fearful sacrifice of honesty and honour ! " ^ This was the return made to Crompton for his gift of the mule to the community which specially profited by it. The shabby and sordid treachery of his townsfolk sank deep into his soul, and hopeless resentment permanently clouded a disposition which was not by nature a cheerful or buoyant one. Crompton was himself an upright man, and his very integrity increased his exasperation at the meanness, faithlessness, and sometimes insolence, with which his benefaction was repaid. He became thenceforth suspicious and distrustful of all the world ; and, with a temper soured by disappointment, was prone to fancy himself insulted when not the slightest offence had been intended. Thus it came about that, not very long after his sur- render of the mule to the public, Crompton declined an overture, the acceptance of which might have effaced all or most of the disastrous consequences of his pre- cipitancy Among the subscribing firms entitled to inspect and copy the mechanism of the mule was that of Peel, Yates, & Co., of Bury, the chief or most energetic partner in which was Mr. (afterwards Sir) Robert Peel, son of the founder of the family, and father of the states- man. There is a story told of a visit of Mr. Peel to Hall- in-the-Wood for the purpose of seeing and studying the mechanism of the mule. He took with him, it is said, ^ French, p. 75. 20 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES. some of the mechanics in his employment. They in- spected the mule, and carried off in their heads the details of its construction and working. Mr. Peel could have meant no offence, but he mistook his man if, as is reported, he tendered Crompton, in rather too business-like a way, a payment of sixpence for each of these mechanics, presumably to compensate the inventor for the time lost during their inspection of his handiwork. Crompton, it is added, resented the offer as an insult, and never forgot or forgave it ; if so, greatly to his own disadvantage. He or his household received two more visits from Mr. Peel when he had removed (within five years from the date of the invention of the mule) to a farmhouse at Oldhams, some two miles north of Bolton, perhaps to escape the importunities of the visitors who, even after the mule was given to the public, continued to haunt the Hall-in-the-Wood. At Oldhams, nevertheless, he was still pestered by the curious, intent on inspecting the improvements which he was supposed to have made in the machine; and, to baffle them, "he contrived a secret fastening to the door in the upper story where he worked at the mule." It was from no mere curiosity of this kind that Mr. Peel paid the two visits to Oldhams, one of which, and the objects of both, are thus described by Crompton's biographer from information received : — "Mr. George Crompton " (Crompton's eldest son, born in 1781) "had a vivid recollection of two visits paid to Oldhams by the first Sir Robert Peel, then an eminent though untitled manufacturer. . . . On his first visit Crompton was absent, but Mr. Peel chatted with his wife, and gave young George half-a-guinea. Mrs. Crompton going into her dairy to bring her guest a bowl of milk, Mr. Peel took the opportunity to ask the boy where his father worked. George was pointing out the nail-head which, on being pressed, lifted the concealed latch of the door leading to the upper story, when his mother returned with the milk, and by a look warned him that he had committed an error." SAMUEL CROMPTON. 21 What follows is much more important than this anecdote, however characteristic and descriptive of the Crompton household: — "It is understood by his family, on the information of Mr. Crompton himself, that the objects of Mr. Peel's visits were, first, to induce him to accept a lucrative situation of trust in his establishment, and, after- wards, an offer of partnership. Both of these offers Mr. Crompton declined, partly, it is believed, from a somewhat morbid desire for independence that clung to him through life ; partly from a jealous suspicion of persons in superior social position, caused (as has already been said) by the cruel treatment he received when he surrendered his first mule ; but most of all from a feeling of personal dislike to the future baronet, which he entertained all his life, arising (as we have been informed) from some disagreement on the occasion of Mr. Peel's first inspection of the mule, " ^ produced by the aheady recorded tender of the sixpences. Things might have gone well with Crompton, or at least very much better than they did go, had he accepted Mr. Peel's offer. The man who refused it on such grounds as those just recorded was evidently little fitted to succeed in business. At Oldhams Crompton rented a few acres of land, and kept a cow or two, from the milk of one of which Mrs. Crompton brought Mr. Peel the jugful of the preceding anecdote. Another little glimpse of the interior of the humble household of the inventor of the mule is given in this reminiscence of his eldest son's : — "\Mien I was quite a child my father removed from Ilall-in-thc- Wood to Oldhams, and there a brother and a sister were born. I recol- lect that, soon after I was able to walk, I was employed in the cotton manufacture. My mother used to bat the cotton wool on a wire riddle. I It was then put into a deep brown mug with a strong ley of soap-suds, f My mother then tucked up my petticoats about my waist, and put me I, in the tub to tread upon the cotton at the bottom. When a second I riddleful was batted, I was lifted out, and it was placed in the mug, and ' ^ French, p. Si and note. 22 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES. I again trode it down. This process was continued until the mug became so full that I could no longer safely stand in it, when a chair was placed beside it, and I held on by the back. When the mug was quite full, the soap-suds were poured off, and each separate dollop of wool well squeezed to free it from moisture. They were then placed on the bread-rack under the beams of the kitchen-loft to dry. My mother and my grandmother curled the cotton wool by hand, taking one of the dollops at a time, on the simple hand-cards. When carded, they were put aside in separate parcels ready for spinning."^ Accustomed from his childhood to spin, Crompton pro- duced from his own machine, as may be supposed, better yarn than was turned out from it by any one else. It might be supposed, too, that he would have attempted to extend his operations by employing others to spin under him. He seems to have tried this plan, and meanwhile to have invented a new carding-machine ; but any hitch, great or small, in the conduct of an enterprise, threw the morbid and moody Crompton out of gear ; and after experimenting as an employer of labour, he sank again into dependence on his own and his wife's, with that of the children who were growing up about him. " I pushed on " (such is his own account of this section of his career), " intending to have a good share in the spinning line, yet I found there was an evil which I had not foreseen, and of much greater magnitude than giving up the machine, viz., that I must be always teaching green hands, employ none, or quit the country ; it being believed that if I taught them they knew their business well. So that for years I had no choice left but to give up spinning or quit my native land. I cut up my spinning-machines for other purposes." " On one occasion," says his biographer, " when much incensed by a repetition of this injustice, he seized his axe and broke his carding-machine to pieces, remarking: 'They shall not have this too.'" - But Crompton did neither "quit" his 1 French, p. 78. ^ lb., p. 91-2. SAMUEL CROMPTON. 23 "native land " nor entirely "give up spinning." Seemingly what he did do, when the paroxysm was over, was " to betake himself to his original occupation of weaving, or at least to spin only such yarn as he could employ in his own looms as a small manufacturer." In 1791 we find him leaving his "pretty and pleasant" abode at Oldhams (actually, it is said, to avoid being reappointed overseer of the poor !), and removing to Bolton, to occupy the house "now" — which means in i860 — " 17 King Street, with tlie attics over it and two adjoining houses for manufacturing purposes. During the six following years," adds his biographer, " his family was increased by the birth of four more sons — a circumstance which appears to have induced him to make fresh attempts to work his inventions with pro- fit, as we find that he filled the centre attic with preparatory machiner}^ and that the others had two new mules. In working them he was now assisted by his two eldest boys." At the end of the six years he lost his good, true, hard- working wife, and was left with eight children, some of them infants, others of them old enough, as has been seen, to assist him in his handicraft. After her death he joined — a step characteristic of his dreamy disposition — the Swedenborgians, wlio were then rather an increasing sect here and there in Lancashire, and he became a zealous member of its Bolton congregation, taking " entire charge of the psalmody in the church," and composing hymn- tunes for the choir. Crompton was a religious, and altogether, in his private life, a well-conditioned man, a good husband and a good father, frugal and industrious in his habits. His failures or non- successes were due not to any irregularities of conduct, but solely to want of business faculty, and his lot was cast in a stirring and pushing community at a time of great industrial expansion and excitement. He was never in debt, and indulged in 24 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES. speculation as little as in dissipation. The yarn he span was the finest, and the muslin he wove was the most delicate, in the market. But original defects of nature, which disappointment had aggravated, kept him behind in the race of life. " I found to my sorrow," he wrote once, " I was not calculated to contend with men of the world, neither did I know there was such a thing as pro- tection for me on earth ! I found I was as unfit for the task that was before me as a child of two years old to contend with a disciplined army." ^ To such a height did his shyness and sensitiveness grow, that "he has been known," says his biographer, "to return from Manchester without even attempting to transact business, because he observed himself to be pointed out to strangers as a remarkable man." If he did "attempt to transact busi- ness," he too often, as might be expected, shirked the bargaining and higgling of everyday trade. "When he attended the Manchester Exchange to sell his yarns or muslins, and any rough-and-ready manufacturer ventured to offer him a less price than he had asked, he would invariably wrap up his samples, put them into his pocket, and quietly walk away."^ Poor Crompton ! But well might he be " pointed out " in the streets of Manchester or in any other cotton-manufacturing town as a " remark- able man," for he had created a new and mighty industry. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the rude machine put together in secrecy and concealment, in fear, and almost in trembling, was producing a wide-spread and plenteous harvest of golden fruit. The mule turned out yams of most kinds, and, unlike Arkwright's rollers, which, to yield a profit, needed to be worked on a large scale and by extraneous motive power, the mule was a hand-machine, and whoever had ten fingers could spin with it. As it hap- ^ French, p. 95. " lb., p. 95 and note. SAMUEL CROMPTON. 2$ pened, moreover, a few years after the invention of the mule, all Arkwright's processes became public property, through the judicial decisions which cancelled his patents. This event gave a great impulse to the use of the mule, by making Arkwright's roving machinery generally available ; and at first the mule did not rove, it merely span. The mule had been given to all the world, and in course of time all the world of cotton-spinning seized upon it. In 1784, the year before Arkwright's patents were cancelled, there were at work in England 20,000 of Hargreaves' hand-jennies of eighty spindles each, against 550 of Cromp- ton's mules, of ninety spindles each. But as soon as Arkwright's patents were cancelled, the mule began rapidly to displace or to gain upon the jenny. As has been said or quoted elsewhere, " The dissolution of Arkwright's patent and the invention of the mule concurred to give the most extraordinary impetus to the cotton manufacture. Nothing like it has been known in any other great branch of indus- try. Capital and labour rushed to this manufacture in a torrent, attracted by the unequalled profits which it yielded."^ Readers of the First Series may remember Robert Owen starting in the cotton manufacture with no other stock in trade than three of Crompton's mules, the rovings for which he bought from " two young industrious Scotchmen of the names of M'Connell and Kennedy," ^ afterwards a famous firm. How mules, clieap and easy of construction, and workable everywhere, were set up through the length and breadth of industrial Lancashire, may be easily conceived. Of the effects of the general use of the mule on the weavers in a single district of Lancashire there is a graphic description by Radcliffe, the improver of the power-loom, when chronicling the history of the cotton manufacture in his own township of Meller, fourteen miles 1 First Series, p. 455. ' lb., p. 453. D 26 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES. from Manchester. The following sketch of his is a con- tinuation of that in which he delineated the half-agricultural, half-manufacturing, industry of the small Lancashire farmer in the days before Hargreaves, Arkwright, and Crompton : — "From the year 1770 to 1788, a complete change had gradually been effected in the spinning of yarns ; that of wool had disappeared alto- gether, and that of linen was also nearly gone ; cotton, cotton, cotton, was become the almost universal material for employment ; the hand- wheels were all thrown into lumber-rooms ; the yarn was all spun on common jennies ; the carding for all numbers up to 40 hanks in the pound was done on carding-engines ; but the finer numbers of 60 to 80 were still carded by hand, it being a general opinion at that time that machine-carding would never answer for fine numbers. In weaving, no great alteration had taken place during these eighteen years, save the introduction of the fly-shuttle, a change in the woollen looms to fustians and calico, and the linen nearly gone, except the few fabrics in which there was a mixture of cotton. To the best of my recollection, there was no increase of looms during this period, but rather a decrease. " They had decreased for the simple reason that, whatever the increased production of yarn through Hargreaves' in- vention of the spinning-jenny and Arkwright's successes with his rollers, the use of Kay's fly-shuttle enabled the weaver to do more than keep pace with it. But, on the introduction of the mule, all this was changed. Multitu- dinous indeed must have been the mules set to work, and enormous the increase in the quantitity of the yarn pro- duced through them, to lead to such a multiplication of hand-looms, and such an improvement in the position of the hand-loom weaver, as are described in the foUowins: passage : — "The next fifteen years, viz., from 1788 to 1803, I will call the golden age of this great trade. Water-twist," spun by Arkwright's rollers, "and common jenny-yarns," from Hargreaves' famous machine, "had been freely used in Bolton, &c., for some years prior to 1788 ; but it was the introduction of mide-yarns about this tune, along with the SAMUEL CROMPTON. 2/ other yarns, all assimilating together and producing every description of clothing, from the finest book-muslin, lace, stocking, &c., to the heaviest fustian, that gave such a preponderating wealth through the loom. "The families I have been speaking of, whether as cottagers or small farmers, had supported themselves by the different occupations I have mentioned in spinning and manufacturing, as their progenitors, from the earliest institution of society, had done before them. But the mule- twist now coming into vogue for the ii-arp as well as weft, added to the water-twist and common jenny-yams, with an increasing demand for every fabric the loom could produce, put all hands in request, of every age and description. The fabrics made from wool and linen vanished, while the old loom-shops being insufficient, every lumber-room, even old barns, carthouses and outbuildings of every description were re- paired, windows broken through the old blank walls, and all fitted up for loom-shops. This source of making room being at length exhausted, new weavers' cottages with loom-shops rose up in every direction ; all immediately filled ; and, when in full work, the weekly circulation of money, as the price of labour only, rose to five times the amount ever before experienced in this district, every family bringing home weekly 40, 60, 80, 100, or even 120 shillings per week ! It maybe easily con- ceived that this sudden increase of the circulating medium would, in a few years, not only show itself in affording all the necessaries and com- forts of life these families might require, but also be felt by those who, abstractedly speaking, might be considered disinterested spectators ; but in reality they were not so, for all felt it, and that in the most agreeable way too ; for this money in its peregrinations left something in the pockets of every stone-mason, carpenter, slater, plasterer, glazier, joiner, &c., as well as the corndealer, cheesemonger, butcher, and shopkeepers of every description. The farmers participated as much as any class by the prices they obtained for their corn, butter, eggs, fowls, with every other article the soil or farmyard could produce, all of which advanced at length to nearly three times the former price. Nor was the proportion of this wealth inconsiderable that found its way into the coffers of the Cheshire squires who had estates in this district, the rents of their farms being doubled, and in many instances trebled." ^ The rude machine of the Hall-in-the-Wood had done all this for the community in general, and for the hand-loom weaver in particular. Those were days when what has ^ William Radcliffe, Origin of Poiver-Loom Weaving, quoted by l>aines, Cotton Mamifactura; p. 338. 28 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES. become the trade of almost a pariah class of handicraftsmen could be described as " that of a gentleman." " The hand- loom weavers," according to the same authority, " brought home their work in top-boots and ruffled shirts, carried a cane, and in some instances took a coach." " Many weavers at that time," adds a commentator on this statement, " used to walk about the streets with a five-pound Bank of Eng- land note spread out under their hat-bands ; they would smoke none but long 'churchwarden' pipes, and objected to the intrusion of any other handicraftsmen into the parti- cular rooms in the public-houses which they frequented," ^ Several causes were soon at work to bring down the hand- loom weaver to a lower level ; among them was the invention of the power-loom by Edmund Cartwright, who took out his first patent in 1784, though years elapsed before it was perfected, and before the power-loom largely displaced the ancient and immemorial hand-loom. Moreover, while these causes were operating, the independent mule-spinner, working at home, and his or her own master or mistress, was being gradually brought inside the factory system, which, with his rollers and the organisation of labour needed to v/ork them, Arkwright had founded. In 1790, the manager of David Dale's New Lanark Mills for the first time drove mules by water-power, that of the rushing and falling Clyde. And a still more effective transformation of home into factory industry was made through the applica- tion of Watt's steam-engine to drive cotton machinery of all kinds — an application, too, locaUsing and concentrating in districts where coal and iron abounded the manufacture which otherwise might have been diffused, and might have flourished wherever there were streams capable of affording water-po\yer. Meanwhile, also, the machine of the Hall-in- the-Wood, in constant use by many hands, was being im- ^ French, p. 102. SAMUEL CROMPTON. 29 proved in various ways, and by various contrivances, towards its present form. One of the most noticeable results of all this expansion was, that some years before the nineteenth century opened, Crompton's mule had directly and indirectly led to the displacement of Indian muslins and light fabrics by those of British manufacture, Lanarkshire in this particular branch of industry already rivalling Lancashire. The year 1787 maybe fixed on as about the date of the latest renewal by British manufacturers — in this case cotton, not woollen manufacturers — of the old protest against the competition of East Indian products with those of " native industry." ^ Six years afterwards, in 1793, the tables were so completely turned, that we hear the East India Company, in a " Report of the Select Committee of the Court of Directors upon the subject of the cotton manufacture of this country," uttering the lament that " every shop offers British muslins for sale equal in appear- ance and of more elegant patterns than those of India, for one-fourth, or perhaps more than one-third, less in price." - Nay, at one time, so versatile was the mule, it seemed likely that Arkwright's rollers themselves would be laid aside to make way for it. The use of the power-loom, how- ever, which required for its operation a specially strong yarn, prevented the mule from displacing as a yarn-spinning machinethe rollers of Arkwright,^ as it undoubtedlydidatlast completely displace, in the cotton manufacture at least, the spinning-jenny of Hargreaves. To the spinning-jenny and the water-frame is to be mainly ascribed, no doubt, the ' Ure, Cotton ]\Ianufactitrc (London 1861), i. 296. ^ I'aines, Cotton Manufacture, p. 334. ^ lb., p. 308. Mr. Baines adds as another cause of the survival of Avkwriglit's water-frame, that "improvements which were made in the machine also enabled the manufacturers to sell the water-twist of low counts cheaper than mule-twist." 30 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES. increase in the import of cotton wool from less than four million pounds in 1764, to nearly eleven and a half millions in 1784. But it is to Crompton's mule that was chiefly due the still more striking increase in the same import between 1784 and the first year of the nineteenth century. In 1800 the import of cotton wool had risen to a quantity ratlier greater than fifty-six million pounds. It was in this same year of 1800 that, struck by the contrast between the little or nothing which he had gained for himself, and the much which he had achieved for his country and his county, some Manchester sympathisers — foremost among them Mr. Kennedy, Crompton's first biographer, and one of the earliest historians of the cotton manufacture,^ — bethought them of attempting to raise a ^ This is the Mr. Kennedy, one of the founders of the well-known firm of M'Connell & Kennedy, respecting whose Immble beginnings in the cotton trade, when they were able to make only the rovings which the young Robert Owen and others bought and span upon mules into thread, see First Series, p. 453, note. Late in life Mr. Kennedy printed for private circulation a volume of essays (including the "Brief Memoir of Crompton "), which the writer has not been able to procure or to consult. In the Library of the Patent Office, however, there is a MS. transcript, from the printed volume, of one of these pieces, entitled, "Brief Notice of my Early Recollections, in a Letter to my Cliildren," and from this interesting autobiographical fragment the following particulars are taken. John Kennedy was born in 1769, in the Stewartry of Kirkcudbright, on the slender paternal estate of Knockalling, some six miles from New Galloway. His father died when he was young, leaving him, with four brothers and two sisters, to be brought up by their mother, a superior Scotchwoman of the old type. When advanced in years, and living amid the stir of populous Manchester, he remembered the melancholy induced in his boyish mind by the silence of "the still valley and blue mountains " of his secluded and thinly-peopled Scottish home, where the arrival of a travel- ling pedlar made a sensation. From early years he was led to think of pushing his fortunes at a distance, as family after family of the few in his neighbourhood winged its flight to the West Indies and to England. One of the companions of his boyhood was Adam Murray, afterwards SAMUEL CROMPTOX. 31 public subscription for the benefit of the strugghng inven- tor. Unfortunately, the circumstances of the time were unfavourable to the success of the benevolent scheme. To war with France and the fiscal burdens imposed by it — burdens, however, which the productiveness of the mule and the new development bestowed by it on the cotton manufacture enabled the nation more easily to bear — were added depressed trade and high prices of food, bringing occasional riots in their train. The year in which the subscription for Crompton was set on foot was that of a renewed suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act, and of the establishment (in Spitalfields) of the first of English soup- kitchens. Comparatively few subscriptions could in these circumstances be procured. Among the few was one meriting remembrance. "When Mr. Arkwright, the son eminent as a Lancashire cotton-spinner, who migrated from their quiet glen to Chowbent, to be apprenticed to a machine-maker there, a fellow- countryman, Mr. Cannan, formerly of Kells, and among whose other apprentices was another young Scotchman, James M'Connell, after- wards Kennedy's partner. At the age of fifteen, the young Kennedy accordingly left Knockalling to join his friend as a fellow-apprentice in the Chowbent establishment, and great was his astonishment when at Dumfries he saw for the first time a few lighted lamps in the streets, and a waggon not only with four wheels, but with four horses. His apprenticeship successfully over, he started in business in Manchester with the two Sandfords and his friend James M'Connell as machine- makers and spinners, the firm being Sandford, M'Connell, & Kennedy, he taking charge of the machine department. It was at this time that Robert Owen bought their rovings. Their first shop was in Sl.ible Street, or Back Chetham Street, their capital not more than ;f 700, and the machines which they worked as well as made "were put up in any convenient garrets." After a few years the firm was dissolved, and a new one, M'Connell & Kennedy, formed, the operations of which were so primitive that their cards were turned by horse or by hand. Six or seven years later they built their first mill in Union Street, and rose in time to great manufacturing eminence and wealth. Mr. Kennedy died in 1855, in his eighty-sixth year, and, with faculties unimpaired, transacted business to the last. 32 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES. and successor of Sir Richard Arkvvright, was waited upon by Mr. Lee," Mr. Kennedy's active coadjutor in the good work, " he said that he would contribute cheerfully, candidly acknowledging the merit of the invention, — at the same time observing that ' Mr, Crompton had been his most bitter rival, as he had superseded the machine of his father's invention in all the finer numbers of yarn.' He contributed thirty guineas to the fund." ^ But liberality like this was rare, and those who had reaped profit from the mule were more backward with their money than was the second Richard Arkwright, who had suffered by its success. " So great, indeed, was the difficulty of collecting the sums subscribed, that the matter was of necessity prematurely abandoned. Between four and five hundred pounds was all that could be realised, and that was handed over to Crompton to increase his little manufacturing estab- lishment for spinning and weaving. As a consequence of his possession of this additional capital, he soon after- wards rented the top-story of a neighbouring factory, one of the oldest in Bolton, in which he had two mules — one of 360 spindles, the other of 220— with the necessary pre- paratory machinery. "Yht power \.o turn the machinery was rented with the premises. Here also he was assisted by the elder branches of his family; and it is our duty, though a melancholy one, to record that the system of seducing his servants from his employment was still persisted in, and that one, at least, of his sons was not able to withstand the specious and flattering inducements held out by wealthy opponents to leave his father's service and accept extra- vagant payment for a few weeks, during which he was expected to divulge his father's supposed secrets and his system of manipulating upon the machine." ^ The faith- lessness, stinginess, and insolence of fellow-manufacturers ' French, p. 112. '^ lb., p. 112-14. SAMUEL C ROMP TON. 33 enriched by his nmle had deeply wounded the sensitive and honourable Crompton. And now came the heaviest blow of all, the sordid treachery of his own son. As the years rolled on, Crompton became no richer, though his frugality and industry kept him from lapsing into anything like absolute poverty. Of his five sons, two were by way of helping him in his business, but they seem to have been young men of expensive habits, and Cromp- ton's acquaintance with care did not diminish in familiarity. He felt that the community owed him something, but the endeavours of his friends to make it sensible of its obliga- tions had not done much for him. Turning from Lanca- shire to London, in 1807 he made an abortive application to Sir Joseph Banks and the Society of Arts to aid him in procuring " from the Government or elsewhere," as he phrased it, " a proper recompense for his invention." Through some blundering, on all sides apparently, four years elapsed before Crompton discovered that nothing was to be expected either from Sir Joseph or from the Society. However, as it chanced, not long before this discovery, there happened something that encouraged him to make a more direct effort to obtain a national reward. In 1809, when he had wasted much of his substance in endeavours to manufacture by the power-loom, which he had invented years before, after the usual memorialising and petitioning, and the due process of investigation by a Committee of the House of Commons, the Reverend Edmund Cart- wright procured from Parliament a grant of ;^i 0,000 for his invention. Crompton's claims to a parliamentary grant were much stronger than Cartwright's ; for the mule was in general use, while the power-loom was as yet little valued or applied. Cartwright, however, had not only procured a patent for his loom, but an Act of Parliament (in iSoi) prolonged its operation on its expiry without profiting the E 34 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES. inventor, whereas poor Crompton had presented his inven- tion to his community and country. Stimulated, doubt- less, by Cartvvright's successful application to the Govern- ment and to Parliament, and perhaps urged forward by friends, Crompton resolved on what was for him rather a spirited enterprise. It was to visit the manufacturing districts of the United Kingdom and ascertain in person the results of the use of his invention, with the object of claiming from Government a national reward. He received considerable attention during his tour, and at Glasgow, where the mule had created a new and great Scottish industry, the muslin trade, arrangements were made to give him a public dinner. But any demonstration of this kind was too much for a man of his morbid shyness, and, to quote his own account of the matter, " rather than face up, I first hid myself, and then fairly bolted from the city.^ The following is an exposition of the statistical results of Crompton's tour of investigation, completed from the evi- dence given a year afterwards before a select Committee of the House of Commons, of which more anon : — "From the information obtained, he calculated that between four and five millions of mule spindles were then in actual use. But this estimate was afterwards found to be much too low. It referred to 360 factories only, and did not include any of the numerous mules used in the manufacture of woollen yarn. "There is some difficulty in fully appreciating the value of very ^ French, p. 150, where is the following note: " Another anecdote illustrative of Mr. Crompton's extreme modesty and shyness may be mentioned on the authority of his sons. Mr. Kennedy called upon him one day in King Street, accompanied by a foreign Count, who much desired to be introduced to him, but Crompton -cas laid down in bed, and coidd not see him. Mr. Kennedy went up-stairs, and said that if he did not get up and come down-stairs, his friend should visit him in his bed- room ; but Crompton could not be persuaded. He declared em- phatically that if the Count was brought up he would get under the bed." SAMUEL CROMPTON. 35 high numbers by persons unaccustomed to their use ; we therefore venture to suggest a familiar standard of measurement, to assist such of our readers as may be so placed, and assume that the Old Testament is made up of 2,728,100 letters. Now the number of mule-spindles which Mr. Crompton found to be in use in the latter part of the year 181 1 amounted to upwards of three-fourths more than the number of letters in the Bible, or to 4,600,000." It is added, in a note, "from a MS. document in Crompton's handwriting," that "at this time the number of spindles used upon Hargreaves' jenny machines was 155,880, upon Arkwright's water-frame 310,516;" to such an extent had the mule out-stripped both of the two great inventions which preceded it. To return: — "It was further found that about forty millions of pounds of cotton-wool was spun upon these mules annually ; that double the amount of wages was paid for spinning on the mule to that of all other machines for the purpose put together ; that about two-thirds of the entire amount of steam-power employed in cotton- spinning was then applied to turning Crompton's mule-spindles ; that at least lour-fifihs of the cotton-cloth bleached in the principal bleach- works in Lancashire was woven from yarn spun on mules ; that the value of buildings, power, and machinery engaged in spinning on Mr. Crompton's system was between three and four millions sterling ; that 70,000 persons were directly employed in spinning on mules ; 150,000 more in weaving the yarn thus spun ; and at the usual computation of two others dependent on each worker, the aggregate number of people depending on the mule for their living amounted to 660,000 people, without including the large addition of those who were engaged in working machinery, growing cotton, transporting it, dyeing, printing, embroidering, exporting and selling."^ Home again from his tour, Crompton laid his facts and figures before his kind Manchester friends, Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Lee. They at once gave him every encourage- ment and aid in preparing a case to be; laid before Govern- ment in support of a claim for a national reward, such as had been bestowed on the inventor of the power-loom, then a much less successful and productive machine than the mule had proved itself to be. A friendly Manchester solicitor tendered his gratuitous help in drawing up a memorial. Influential Lancashire gentlemen, men, and ^ French, p. 148 50. 36 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES. manufacturers, signed a certificate confirmatory of its statements, and, furnished with suitable letters of introduc- tion, Crompton proceeded to London in the February of 18 1 2. Spencer Percival, who had procured Cartwright his reward, was then Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer. He seems to have viewed Crompton's claim with favour, for, indeed, Chancellors of the Exchequer in that time of costly war knew the fiscal value of the cotton manufacture, and that to foster its development was a matter of grave national concernment. A petition of Crompton's to the House of Commons was referred to a select com- mittee, several of the members of which were Lancashire gentlemen or manufacturers. The Lord Stanley of the day, afterwards Earl of Derby, the grandfather of the present Earl, was its chairman, and both in public and in private showed himself a kind friend to Crompton. Crompton's old diflfidence and shyness prevented him from waiting personally on ministers and Members of Parliament, but he was not at all backward in urging his claims by letter. " Copies of a considerable portion of this corre- spondence have been preserved. The letters," we are told, " are invariably written in a style of respectful yet manly and straightforward independence, which we are compelled to admire, though at the same time it must be confessed that they might have been more useful had they been tempered with a little more worldly policy." Crompton still harboured the old grudge at the first Sir Robert Peel, and would not cultivate friendly relations with the man whose position, antecedents, and politics gave him great weight, especially in such a matter, with the IVIinistry. Sir Robert seems, nevertheless, to have exerted himself in behalf of the irritable inventor. He gave evidence before the committee, of which he was a member, in Crompton's favour, and so did the ISIr. Pilkington who had advised SAMUEL C ROMP TON. 37 the surrender of the mule to the public. Other manu- facturers testified strongly to the proved and incontestible value of the mule. The creator of the modern steam- engine, *' Mr. James Watt, of the House of Boulton, Watt, & Co., Birmingham," being called, and asked if he had " erected many steam-engines for turning machinery upon Mr. Crompton's principle," gave this brief but emphatic reply : " A considerable number ; I conceive about two- thirds of the power of steam-engine we have erected for spinning cotton has been applied to turning spindles upon Mr. Crompton's construction." One of the bits of evidence most likely to tell upon a Chancellor of the Exchequer and a House of Commons was the statement of Crompton's friend, Mr. Lee, " cotton-spinner of the house of Philips & Lee of Manchester," that the annual amount of duty paid merely upon the cotton imported to be spun by the mule was not less than ;^35o,ooo a year. The committee reported in Crompton's favour, without naming a sum, and the Prime Minister seems to have thought of proposing to give him ^^20,000, twice the amount of the grant bestowed on Cartwriglit. But, as poor Crompton's ill luck would have it (to say nothing of that of the victim him-elf), before the proposal was quite matured and made, came Bellingham's assassination of Percival : — "On the iilh day of May" 1812, "Mr. Crompton was in the lobby of the House of Commons in conversation with Sir Robert Peel and Mr. Blackbume," one of the members for Lancashire and a staunch friend of the inventor's, "upon the subject of his claim, which was about to be brought forward, when one of the gentlemen remarked, ' Here comes Mr. Percival.' The group was immediately joined by the Chancellor of the Exchequer," Percival, "who addressed them with the remark, ' You will be glad to know that we mean to propose twenty thousand pounds for Crompton ; do you think /hatw'iW be satisfactoiy ? " Mr. Crompton did not hear the reply, as, from motives of delicacy, he 3o5 I B9 38 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES. lett the party and walked down a short stair leading out of the lobby, but before he left it, he heard a great rush of people and exclamations that Mr. Percival had been shot, which was indeed the fact. The assassin, Bellingham, in an instant had deprived the country of a valuable Minister, and Crompton lost a friend and patron at the mo- ment of the most critical importance to his fortune." ^ Even so. And when, after some few weeks of "minis- terial crisis," a new Government was formed, the long-lived Liverpool administration, Vansittart succeeded Percival in the Chancellorship of the Exchequer. He, too, was not ^ French, p. i6i. The Commons were sitting in committee of the whole House, at the instance of Brougham, to hear evidence against the Orders in Coimcil. " For some days the examination of witnesses proceeded. On Monday the nth May, Brougham, as usual, moved the order of the day for going into committee. Babington took the chair; Robert Hamilton, a manufacturer 'of earthenware in Staf- fordshire, was summoned for examination; and Brougham, after com- plaining of Percival's absence, commenced to examine him. One of the members started off to Downing Street to summon the Minister ; Brougham went on with his questions ; finished his examination-in- chief ; and Stephen, the real originator of the Orders, commenced the cross-examination of the witness. In the meantime, the member who had gone to fetch Percival had met the Minister in Parliament Street, Percival characteristically darted forward to the House. The lobby was comparatively full ; a tall man in a tradesman's dress was standing by the door through which the Minister passed into it. He placed a pistol at Percival's breast and fired, Percival walked on one or two paces, faintly uttered, 'Oh! I am murdered,' and fell on the floor." — Spencer Walpole's Life of The Right Honoui-able Spencer Percival (Lond. 1874), ii. 295. The statement quoted in the text is scarcely con- sistent with this account of Percival's assassination. French, however, adds elsewhere (p. 176, note), "Mr. Percival when he was shot had a memorandum in his hand as follows : — ' Crompton, ^20,000 10,000 5.OCO' which was understood to signify, not less than ^^5000, but ^20,000 if possible." SAMUEL CROMPTON. 39 unfriendly to Cromptoii, but at that period of great national stress — England in arms almost alone against a world — some of his colleagues seem to have regarded the unfortunate inventor as a bore, and one of them so far mistook Cromp- ton's character and position as to drop the hasty, harsh, and calumnious remark, "Give the man ^100 a year; it will be as mucii as he can drink." The circumstances of the time were indeed singularly unfavourable to a liberal treat- ment of Crompton's claim. The war in the Peninsula called for new taxes and new loans, and the manufacturing distress produced by Napoleon's Berlin and Milan decrees, and the Orders in Council with which the English Govern- ment retaliated on them, culminated in machine-breaking and other riots in the manufacturing districts. The Ministers were more anxious to pass new penal enactments multi- plying capital punishments, with which to terrify these dis- turbers of the peace, than to weigh the value of Cromp- ton's invention ; and both rioting and active political dis- content were rife in and about the very Bolton from which he came.^ At last, on the 26th June 1S12, and of course ^ The severity of the law and its administration at tliis time, without additional penal enactments, may be estimated from the following con- temporary record : "Manchester, 13th June," 1S12. "About twelve o'clock on Saturday, the awful sentence of the law," death by hanging, "was put upon the eight persons condemned at the late special assize at Lancaster, viz., James Smith," and three others, "for burning, &c., Messrs Wroe & Duncough's weaving mill at West Houghton," in Bolton parish ; "John Howorth," and two others, "for breaking into the house of John Holland in this town, ajtd stealing bread and cheese,- and Hannah Smith for highway robbery by stealing potatoes at Bank Top in this town." — Annual Register for 181 2, Chronicle, p. 85. These riotous proceedings of the time, with which were mixed up simple thefts instigated by hunger, but equally punished by death, began with the frame-breaking Luddites in Nottingliamshire, and thence extended to other counties. To daunt the Nottinghamshire rioters, the Government introduced into Parliament the Framework Knitters' Bill, which made the destruction of the frames used in the 40 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES. by previous agreement with Vansittart, Lord Stanley, as chairman of the select committee on Crompton's claim, rose and moved that a grant of ^^5000 should be made to hosiery trade a capital offence. It was to oppose this bill that the young Lord Byron {atat 24) delivered his maiden speech in the House of Peers, on the 27th February 1812, just two days before he became famous by the publication of the first two cantos of Childe Harold. Byron spoke on the occasion not only as an English peer, but as a Nottinghamshire man. " During the short time," he said, " I recently passed in Nottinghamshire, not twelve hours elapsed without some fresh act of violence, and on the day I left the county, I was informed that forty frames had been broken the preceding evening, as usual without resistance and without detection." Wellington was then pursuing his victorious career in the Iberian peninsula ; he had stormed Ciudad Rodrigo on the 19th of Januaiy before Byron thus addressed his grave and reverend seniors of the Upper House : "All the cities you have taken, all the armies which have retreated before your leaders, are but petty subjects of self-congratulation if your land is divided against itself, and your dragoons and your executioners must be let loose against your fellow-citizens. You call these men a mob, desperate, dangerous, and ignorant, and seem to think that the only way to quiet the Bellua vml- toriim capititjn is to lop off a few of its superfluous heads. But even a mob may be better reduced to reason by a mixture of conciliation and firmness than by additional irritation and redoubled penalties. Are we aware of our obligation to a mob? It is the mob that labour in your fields and serve in your houses, that man your navj' and recruit your army, that have enabled you to defy all the world, and can also defy you when neglect and calamity have driven them to despair. You may call the people a mob, but do not forget that a mob often speaks the sentiments of the people." Here is the spirited peroration of this maiden speech of the author of Childe Harold ^nd Don Juan: "With all due deference to the noble Lords opposite, I think a little investiga- tion, some previous inquiry, would induce even them to change their purpose. That most favourite state measure, so marvellously effica- cious in many and recent instances," the treatment of the "Catholic claims" among them — " temporising— would not be without its advan- tages in this. When a proposal is made to emancipate or relieve, you hesitate, you deliberate for years, you temporise and tamper with the minds of men, but a death-bill must be passed off-hand, without a thought of the consequences. Sure I am, from what I have heard and f:om what I have seen, that to pass the bill under all the existing SAMUEL CROMPTON. 4 1 the inventor, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer having signified his approval, a resolution to that efifect was passed at once. To Crompton, after his costly tour in search of statistics, followed by a five months' sojourn in London, away from his business, to say nothing of the expense incurred by him in promoting the parliamentary inquiry, and in dancing attendance on the magnates of the Legisla- ture and the Ministry, the smallness of the grant was a terrible disappointment. This was enhanced by the taunts with which, when he returned home, he was, it seems, assailed by his sons. They had reckoned confidently on a much larger grant, and reproached him with having mis- managed a promising case. Crompton was now verging on sixty, and perhaps it would have been better for him to have accepted, in lieu of the grant, even so small a pension as ;2^ioo a year. With what remained of it, after all the inevitable deductions to circumstances, without inquiry, without deliberation, would only be to add injustice to irritation, and barbarity to neglect. The framers of such a bill must be content to inherit the honours of the Athenian law- giver, whose edicts were said to be written not in ink, but in blood. But suppose it passed, suppose one of those men, as I have seen them, meagre with famine, sullen with despair, careless of a life which your Lordships are about to value at the price of a stocking-frame, suppose this man surrounded by the children for whom he is unable to procure bread at the hazard of his existance, about to be torn for ever from a family which he lately supported in peaceful industry, and which it is not his fault that he can no longer so support, — suppose this man — and there are ten thousand such from whom you may select your victims — dragged into court to be tried for this new offence by this new law, still there arc two things wanted to convict and condemn him — twelve butchers for a jury and a Jeffries for a judge." ^ This burst received no response from the probably startled Ministerial Bench. The bill, which had been passed by the Commons, was passed by the Lords, and not long afterwards the capital punishment which it inflicted on frame-breakers was extended to the destroyers of machinery in general. ' rayliamentary History (Lond. 1812), xxi. 966. 42 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES. be made from it, he started in the bleaching trade, which was receiving a great extension from the more and more successful application of the seemingly useless elemental gas discovered in 1774 by Scheele, then an obscure Swedish apothecary, and named by him chlorine. Crompton's bleachworks were at Over Darwen. Fortune did not smile on the new enterprise ; and another into which he entered, by becoming a partner in a firm of cotton merchants and spinners, made him no richer than it found him. Some five years or so after the affair of the parliamentary grant, Crompton's sons, who had been associated with him in his bleaching and other undertakings, were either dead or dis- persed, and, almost alone in the world, he " carried on his small original business without assistance, spending much of his time in devising the mechanism proper for weaving new patterns in fancy muslins." Here again his lack of business faculty neutralised his industry and ingenuity. Neighbours and " pretended friends " pirated his patterns, and undersold him by manufacturing them in fabrics of inferior quality. Suppose a state of things in which there was no law of copyright, and a gifted but unpractical author published his own books in competition with " the trade," his position would be analogous to that of Crompton during much of his life ; and it is easy to see what would be the fate of a sensitive man of literary genius engaged in that trying struggle and unequal rivalry. As old age crept on him, Crompton grew poorer, and a widowed daughter, who became his housekeeper, made things worse for him instead of better. He had reached his seventy -second year when, in 1824, some Bolton friends — the kind Mr. Kennedy of Manchester once more co-operating — raised unknown to him a subscription, with the result of which they bought him an annuity of ^63. It is interesting to note, as a proof of the wide-spread use SAMUEL CROMPTON. 43 of the mule, that to this subscription Continental indus- trialists contributed. "The amount raised," we are told, *' was collected in small sums, from one to ten pounds ; some of which was contributed by the Swiss and French spinners, who acknowledged his " — Crompton's — " merits, and pitied his misfortunes." ^ A year or two afterwards, a bustling and warm-hearted resident in Crompton's town (probably a newspaper editor), a " Mr. J. Brown," who was then writing and printing what remains an unfinished history of Bolton, took up Crompton's claims once more, and promoted with considerable ardour a movement to procure the ill-fated inventor a second parliamentary grant. There were precedents that warranted the attempt. Dr. Jenner, who gave up to his country and to mankind his discovery of vaccination, had received, by way of recom. pense, two parliamentary grants, one, in 1802, of ;!£"i 0,000, and another, in 1807, of ^20,000. No fewer than three parliamentary grants had been lavished on the Scotchman, Macadam, for inventing the mode of manipulating roads which bears his nam^e ; and the third of them was voted about the time when Brown resuscitated Crompton's claims. The busy and bustling Brown began with the production of a pamphlet setting forth these claims, and then drew up a memorial, specially contrasting the reward given for the mule with the grant of double the amount to the inventor of the power-loom, whose rights, unlike Crompton's, were secured by patent, and whose inven- tion, even then, had been very much less productive than the mule. The document was numerously and influ- entially signed in Bolton. Crompton would not hear of applications for signatures elsewhere, or of a public meet- ing to be held in his own town, to support the prayer of the memorial. Brown proceeded to London early in 1826, ^ Kennedy, p. 324. 44 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES. circulated a long petition to Parliament on behalf of Crompton, and worked hard to procure from the Govern- ment of the day a favourable consideration of Crompton's case. By 1826 the Vansittart of 1S12 had become Lord Bexley, and was still a member of the Ministry as Chan- cellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, an office much inferior in importance to that of Chancellor of Exchequer, which he held at the time of the original grant to Crompton. "Lord Bexley" — it was thus Brown wrote to Crompton on the 22d of April 1826 — "was sincere in his desire to serve, and only failed from the want of power, without losing his own declining weight in the Cabinet." The petition does not seem to have been so much as presented to the House of Commons, and " Mr. Brown's suicide,"— how caused, or at what time occurring, is not mentioned — threw a cloud over the transaction which it would now be difficult to penetrate. In a few months more than twelve from the arrival of the unsuccessful and unfortunate Brown in London, and after but a brief enjoyment of his petty annuity, Crompton was beyond the reach of human rewards or ingratitude, and had shuffled off this mortal coil. " He died in his house in King Street, Great Bolton, on the 26th June 1827, aged seventy-four years, of no particular com- plaint, but by the gradual decay of nature, increased, if not hastened, by a life brimful of corrosive cares and mental sorrows. These cares and sorrows were greatly accumulated in his latter days, so that, unhappily, neither mind nor body could at all times bear up against them, and he became occasionally less abstemious in his habits than had been bis custom through his former life. To the last, however, he retained the esteem of his friends, and the regretful pity of all who knew him." ^ Some three years after Crompton's death, his friend and ^ French, p. 213. SAMUEL CROMFTON. 45 patron in life, Mr. Kennedy, read before the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society a "brief memoir" of the inventor. But nearly thirty years more elapsed before a local or general feeling of any depth or extent was created in Crompton's favour, and the minds of Lancashire men were led to ponder on the magnitude of his contribution to the staple industry of their county, and on the scantiness of the recognition and recompense which had been bestowed on it and on him. In the winter of 1858-59 two lectures on Crompton's life and work were delivered in the Bolton Mechanics' Institution by INIr, Gilbert James French, its president — a man of superior insight and attainments. The new generation which had come to maturity in Bolton since Crompton's death was much impressed by the narra- tive of the achievements and biography of their ill-fated townsman, and one of the results of this revival was the publication, in the succeeding autumn, of the first edition of Mr. French's " Life and Times of Crompton," the work to which the present memoir is so much indebted. Mr. French was not content with a merely literary tribute to the memory of the inventor of the mule. He exerted himself to raise a subscription for Crompton's then only surviving son, John, who was old and poor. The appeal received a warm response from the manufacturers and machine-makers of Bolton, and when a nephew of the old man's interfered and prevented the kind scheme from being carried out, the biographer of the father contributed generously to the support of the son. There was no one to interfere with Mr. French's next attempt to do honour to the inventor's memory, and he raised, easily and privately, a sum of ;i^20o, with which a plain monument was erected over Crompton's grave in the parisli churchyard. Mean- while, the Bolton community was becoming desirous of testifying, in some more public and conspicuous way, to 46 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES. its new sense of Crompton's services, and of effacing the reproach which his biography stamped upon their town. Ultimately, after several changes of place, the erection of a statue of Crompton in Bolton was determined on. A public meeting was held, and a subscription raised, which finally produced nearly ;^2ooo. The execution of the statue, cast in copper-bronze, with bas-reliefs of Hall-in-the-Wood and Crompton working at his machine, was intrusted to Calder Marshall, and the 24th of September 1862 saw it presented to the Bolton Town Council with much pomp and circumstance. Bolton and its whole population held gala on the occasion, with processions, decorations, and triumphal arches. Streams of visitors from the surround- ing districts poured in to keep Crompton's townsmen com- pany in doing public honour to the ill-fated inventor's memory. There were civic, military, and trade processions, oratory without doors and at banquets within, by local authorities and notables, and even a balloon ascent for the recreation of the vast holiday-making multitude, with illumi- nations and fireworks at night. Poor old John Crompton, cetat 72, was not quite forgotten in the celebration of his father's achievements. " He was accommodated with a chair at the side of the statue," ^ and a few weeks after- wards the then Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, sent him a gratuity of ^^50. The statue in Nelson Square remains one of the chief public monuments of Bolton, but more striking or significant than any art-memorial is the purely industrial structure thus described by his loving biographer : — "Near the Hall-in-the-Wood rises one of those octagonal columns so common in the manufacturing districts, which serve as visible ^ Bolton Chronicle of 27th September 1862, where is a copious account of the day's proceedings. SAMUEL CROMPTON. 47 S}TnboIs of the industry that surrounds them. The chimneys in and about Bolton are very numerous, and many of them are of great height, but all dwindle into pigmy dimensions compared with that near Crompton's former residence, which shoots up into the sky to a height of 366 feet (by far the loftiest structure in the district), and attracts to it every wandering eye in the surrounding countr)\ Unintentionally, it has become a conspicuous landmark, indicating with power and precision the site of his invention. Built for an entirely different pur- pose, the principal use of this tall and really graceful structure is in connection with numerous steam engines and furnaces in a huge factory, where some thousands of men and boys are employed in making mule-spinning machinery', not merely for the supply of the district or of the nation, but to be distributed through all the empires of Europe, and even to the outskirts of civilisation in Africa ; for, wherever the humanising effects of their industry have become known, Crompton's mules and their accessory engines are welcomed and cherished. Thus another unintentional tribute to the honour of their inventor is perpetuated by the weekly production of thousands of mule- spindles almost on the very spot of their invention, propelling with regularity, as from a mighty heart, the life-blood which circulates through and sustains this stupendous system of manufacture."^ Crompton's mule, improved into its present self-acting form, will probably keep his name alive while cotton- spinning endures. The mention ot Ciompton's name excites a feeling of compassion blended with regret that the industrialists of his county and the Government of his country did so little for the man who had done so much for them. By the splendour of its results, the national and individual wealth which it has created, the masses of population to which it has given employment, the mighty factories and hives of industry of many kinds which have grown out of that rude machine of the Hall-in- the-Wood, the mule has become far more conspicuous in the history of British industry and of the cotton manufac- ture, than the spinning-jenny of Hargreaves or the water- frame of Arkwright. Unlike Hargreaves or Arkwright, ^ French, p. 230. 48 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES. moreover, Crompton was never suspected of appropriating illicitly or unscrupulously the inventions of other men, and from first to last he was in all things an upright and honourable man. In this respect, as in his melancholy destiny, he resembles John Kay, the inventor of the fly- shuttle, the machine which first gave an impetus to our textile manufactures. The contrast between the struggle in which most of Crompton's life was passed and the successes and opulence developed by others from the machine of his invention, arouses the more pity and sympathy because the triumphs of the mule were achieved while he was yet alive. Other and greater men than Crompton have received wages much less proportionate to the value of their work. But for the most part, it was posterity that reaped where they had sown, and Crompton's was the unhappy case of one condemned to be satisfied with a few ears of corn from a mighty, far- spreading, and golden harvest, showing itself on ground which, unas- sisted and solitary, he had reclaimed from the wilderness. Faults of character and errors of conduct no doubt contri- buted to make his life what it was. But those faults and errors were of the unworldly and almost child-like kind, which, in a man of Crompton's pursuits and surroundings, excites surprise and sympathy rather than criticism and censure. Singular thing to have to say of a notable Lancashire man and Lancashire worker, — Samuel Cromp- ton seems to have failed in life chiefly from a want of — pushl II. THE FOUNDER OF THE PEEL FAMILY* THE one industrial family which has given England a Prime Minister can be traced back to the beginning of the fifteenth century. Belonging to the yeoman class, the ancestors of Peel the statesman were then settled as Peeles, or De Peles, in the Yorkshire district of Craven, and were at the same time " seised of lands " in the Lancashire Hundred of Blackburn. Two centuries later, Peeles were still to be found in or near Blackburn, some of them boasting of gentle blood and of a coat of arms. Whether by a mere coincidence, or from a continuance of an old connection between the Yorkshire and Lancashire Peels, is unknown, but certainly "about 1600 " a William Peele (as the name was then spelt), progenitor of the family which became historic, migrated to the neighbourhood of that Lancashire town from East Marton in Craven. There is * Sir Lawrence Peel, A Sketch of the Life and Character of Sir Robert /V^/ (London, 1S60). W.Cooke Taylor, Life and Times of Sir Robert Peel, 3 vols. (London, 1847). Edmund Potter, Calico- Printittg as an Art Manufacture {"London, 1852). Report of Select Committee of House of Commons on Trade, &'c. (1833), § Evidence of James Thomson (of Clitheroe). Ab>idgments of Specifications relating to Bleaching, Dyeing, and Printing Calico and other Fabrics. Published by the Commissioners of Patents (London, 1859). Statutes at Lar^^e. Journals of the House of Commons. Baines's Lancashire and History of the Cotton Manufacture, &c., &c. G 50 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES. no evidence of any consanguinity between this Yorkshire Peele and the pre-existing Lancashire Peeles in whose vicinity he settled. His unassuming descendants were content to derive their origin from the Peeles of Craven, from some of those "good yeomen Avhose limbs were made in England." The father of Sir Lawrence Peel, cousin and biographer of the statesman, was the brother of a baronet — the first Sir Robert ; but he is said by his son to have been " impatient of the addition of Esquire to his name, which custom had then made general. I have heard him when I was a boy," Sir Lawrence con- tinues, " more than once, something in the style of Jonathan Oldbuck, pish to himself over this superscription of his letters, half-play fully and half-peevishly muttering to himself, 'A pretty Esquire truly!' He would sometimes add, that he was a yeoman, and that his family before him were yeomen." When Sir Robert the statesman was shown a genealogical dissertation, the object of which was to establish, from the identity of surname, a connection be- tween the earlier and the later Lancashire Peels, he is reported to have made a characteristic remark " upon the inconclusiveness of this sort of reasoning," and to have declared that he " preferred to follow the traditions of his family." i William Peele's living descendant, the candid historio- grapher of the family, describing the farm near Blackburn where his progenitor settled at the beginning of the seven- teenth century, speaks thus of it, of him, and of his imme- diate successors. It was " in a melancholy site (whence the family may have drawn some of their hypochondriac humour), a low situation, which gave the farmhouse that they occupied the title of De Hole, or Hoyle House, for it was written both ways. Hoyle signifies hole. Low in 1 Sketch, p. 9-10. THE FOUNDER OF THE PEEL FAMILY. 51 situation as in origin, here for many years they resided." ^ Farmer WiUiam's grandson, Robert (a favourite name in the family), who literally " flourished " about the middle of the seventeenth century, not only added, after what was just becoming the fashion of his time and district, a domestic woollen manufacture to his slender agriculture, but printed the w^ooUen cloth spun and woven by him- self, or by others, by either or by both. " The cloth was stamped with patterns from wooden blocks, on which they were cut. Some of these blocks were seen by my " — Sir Lawrence Peel's — " father when a boy, lying neglected in a lumber-room in his grandfather's house ; " and this grandfather was a grandson of the first owner of the blocks. " He expressed his regret that they had not been preserved, and described them as curious from their very rudeness." ^ The farmer, woollen manufacturer, and woollen-printer of the Hoyle House throve by his industry and enterprise, and associated with the respectabilities of his neighbourhood. Of his two sons, one became curate of Blackburn; the elder, another Robert, was able to purchase, after his father's death, a small estate in the neighbourhood of Blackburn, then known as the Crosse, called subsequently Peel's Fold, and still possessed by the Peels that are. William, the son and heir of the purchaser of the Crosse, was kept down by ill health, and with him the fortunes of the family rather receded than advanced. Under William's son, again a Robert, and with him more particularly we have now to deal, the family fortunes took a fresh start, and went forward until his grandson, the famous Sir Robert, found himself Prime Minister of England. It was in the days ol this particular Robert of ours that the family surname became Peel instead of Peele. A thrifty and practical man, who loved to economise labour, even when writing 1 Sketch, p. 6-7. => lb., p. II. 52 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES. his signature, he dropped the final " e " from his surname, "for no better reason," says his grandson, "than the utiUtarian one which he assigned, that it was of no use, as it did not add to the sound." ^ Born in 1723, this first Robert of the Peels without the final ported the bill nor the fears of those who opposed it were ^ Cooke Taylor, i. 21-3. 144 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES. realised. The price of corn was not kept up to the wished- for standard, neither did the British manufacturer migrate with his capital and machinery to foreign lands. When the victory of Waterloo restored peace to Europe, Sir Robert Peel was a man of sixty-five. He had ceased to live in Lancashire, Drayton being his customary country residence, but he seems to have still superintended his wide-spread concerns. At any rate, he continued to take a lively interest in the state and prospects of manufacturing industry, as has been shown by his anti-corn-law speeches ; and a sudden and unexpected appeal now summoned him to renew his old legislative efforts on behalf of the chil- dren employed in it, — for the sake of humanity alone, not for his own sake or for that of his order in the least. The summons came this time primarily from Scotland, though not from a Scotchman, but from a Welshman — the Robert Owen who migrated from Lancashire to Lanarkshire, and, marrying the daughter of David Dale of Glasgow, became manager and part proprietor of the famous cotton-mills within earshot of the rushing and falling Clyde, where Richard Arkwright saw the germ of a Scottish Manchester. Though the application of steam to cotton-spinning, by substituting another motive power for that of water, falsified Arkwright's prediction. Dale's cotton-mills, which had been constructed on Arkwright's plans, and in which, indeed, Arkwright was for a short time a partner, throve -in the hands of the capable and experienced Robert Owen until he became a dreamer of dreams. He made the New Lanark Mills, as has been already said, one of the " indus- trial showplaces of Europe." ^ The internal arrangements of these mills were the best that could be contrived. The workers were provided with good houses, and stores ^ For a sketch of David Dale's biography, and of the early history of the New Lanark Mills, see First Series, pp. 449-54. THE FIRST SIR ROBERT PEEL. 1 45 were established to supply them cheaply with the best articles of food and clothing. Schools were built for the children, who were not allowed to work until they were ten, and whose labour was strictly limited to ten hours a day. The Scotch partners, Dale's successors — hard-headed and not very soft-hearted capitalists and men of business — dis- approved of Owen's ways and views, and seceded, but he managed to get at last other and more congenial in their place — philanthropic Englishmen, Quakers some of them, and, most notable of all of them, Jeremy Bentham, the sage himself. As Owen's arrangements for the health, comfort, and happiness of his workers perfected themselves, visitors from all parts of the kingdom, and even of the Continent, came to study the realised cotton-idyl of the New Lanark Mills, which, moreover, were successful finan- cially. If Owen had but gone on as he began, who knows what good influences his model mills might not have diffused, and what beneficent effects they might not have produced on the organisation of British industry elsewhere ? But soon, too soon, he was merging the practical in the speculative, running-a-muck against "Theology" among other venerable or venerated things. He printed " Essays on the Formation of Character " (to be manufactured, like cotton goods, by machiner}'), and the rank of some of the persons with whom these productions brought him into cor- respondence and connection made him restless and ambi- tious, not to speak of the vanity developed in him by the praises of admiring visitors. The left hand began to be too familiar with what the right hand was doing, and at last he fancied that his true mission was to regenerate the whole human race and to re-organise civilised society — on the pattern of his New Lanark Mills, but under conditions wholly different from those which made him there monarch of all he surveyed. One of the first steps taken by Owen T 146 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES. after the formation of his partnership (in 18 14) with the English philanthropists and philosopher, was, however, both legitimate and laudable ; though ultimately, alas ! it led him, or contributed to lead him, away and astray from home and its work. Before the war with revolutionary France broke out, cotton-wool had been imported duty free, but in the course of the costly contest, pressing ever more and more on the national finances, a heavy duty came to be levied on its import. The well-meaning Owen knew that a proposal to protest against the obnoxious impost would collect an eager throng of fellow-manufacturers, mute to any appeal of mere philanthropy. If, he seems to have thought, he could bring them together on this ground, he would have a chance of persuading them to listen to his denunciations of evils — such, for instance, as the premature and protracted employment of children — which he himself had abolished in his own mills, but which remained flagrant and pernicious in those of many other employers. But let Owen tell his own story : — " In 18 14 I had formed a new partnership with men pledged to assist my views for the reformation of society in my way in practice. I therefore commenced measures accordingly. My first step was to call a meeting of the manufacturers of Scotland in 1 81 5, to be held in the Tontine, Glasgow, to consider the necessity and policy of asking the Government, then under Lord Liverpool's administration, to remit the heavy duty then paid on the importation of cotton, and to consider measures to improve the condition of the young children and others employed in the various textile manufactures now so rapidly extending over the kingdom. The meeting was presided over by the Lord Provost of Glasgow, and was very numerously attended by the leading manufacturers of that town. I stated to the meeting my object in calling it, and first proposed that an application should be made to Government to remit the tax upon the raw material of the cotton manufacture. This was carried unanimously by acclamation," — for it came home to the pockets of the men of Glasgow. Very different was the reception given to Owen's next and philanthropic overture. "I then proposed a string of resolutions to give relief to the children and THE FIRST SIR ROBERT PEEL. 1 47 others employed in cotton, wool, flax, and silk mills. They contained the same conditions which I afterwards embodied in a bill which / induced the first Sir Robert Peel to propose for me to the House of Commons." Owen's egotism, when he wrote this, was fully developed. "The propositions were read by me to the meeting; but although all were enthusiastically in favour of asking for the remission of the tax, not one," — not even one among so many! — "would second my motion for the relief of those whom they employed. I then declined to proceed with them in the business of the meeting "—if they would not swallow the black draught, they should not have the barley-sugar, — " and it therefore came to nothing. But I told them I should take my own course in both measures, independently of them." " New Lanark was now becoming the most celebrated establishment of the kind at home or abroad, and was visited by strangers from all parts of the world, averaging yearly, from that period until I left it to go to the United States," — on a bootless errand, — "ten years later, not less than two thousand." The inference is that the manager of an establishment so well known and so visited could do something in the world without the aid of the men of Glasgow. "On returning from the Glasgow meeting to this establishment, T immediately sent to the Lord Provost of Glasgow, as chairman of the meeting, a copy of the address which I had read, and sent copies of it also to the Government, and to every member of both Houses of Parliament. I also had it published in the London and provincial press. "This address made me yet better known to the Government, and was afterwards a passport for me to all" (?) "the members of both Houses of Parliament, and it created a considerable sensaiion among the upper classes and the manufacturing interest over the kingdom. "As soon as I had made this address thus public, I proceeded to London to communicate with the Government, and to learn what it would do on both subjects. I was referred to Mr. Nicholas Vansittart, afterwards Lord Bexley," — then Chancellor of the Exchequer, — "re- specting the remission of the tax. I was well received by him, and in our conversation he asked me some questions, which I cannot now remember ; but my prompt, decided reply made him blush like a sensitive maiden on account of his previous want of knowledge on the subject," — for Vansittart was not "a second Pitt." "The tax was four- pence per pound, and he said he would remit the whole, except to the amount ol a small portion of a penny, which he said would be retained for some Government object or arrangement. " The tax, according to Baines, was more like 2d. per pound — l6s. ild. per icxj lbs. — which. 148 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES. according to the same authority, was reduced in the year of Owen's visit to Vansittart to about id. per pound — 8s. yd. per 100 lbs. "The Government was also favourable to my views for the relief of the children and others employed in the growing manufactures of the kingdom, if I could induce the members of both Houses to pass a bill for the purpose. This was a formidable task to attempt to effect, for by this time the manufacturing interest had become strong in the House of Commons, and yet stronger in its out-of-door influence with the members, whose election was much under its control. But I made up my mind to try what truth and perseverance could effect. "I waited personally on the leading members of both Houses, and explained to them my object, which was to give some relief to a most deserving, yet much oppressed part of our population. I was in general well received, and had much promise of support, especially from the leaders of the various sections into which parties were then divided. Lord Lascelles, member for Yorkshire, afterwards Earl of Harewood, and at that period the most influential " (?) "member of the House of Commons, offered me his full assistance, and requested me to use his name with mine in calling meetings of the members of both Houses to promote my proposed bill when introduced into Parliament. When by these means the leading members of both Houses had become interested, and were desirous the bill which I had prepared should be introduced, a final meeting was conjointly called by Lord Lascelles and myself of the members of both Houses who had taken with us the greatest interest at former meetings to forward the measure, now to consider, as I was not a member, who should be requested to take charge of the bill, and to introduce it into the House of Commons. The first Sir Robert Peel was now a member of the House of Commons, was an extensive manufacturer, and stood well with the Government and the House generally. But I had never applied to him or to any other manufacturer in the House, and it was not known to the meeting how he might view my proposals. The members present at the meeting (which with the previous one was held in the King's Arms Hotel, New Palace Yard, Westminster, and was numerously attended) suggested that if Sir Robert Peel would introduce the bill, he would be a very fit person to carry it through the House of Commons. The meeting wished to know whether I had any objections to Sir Robert Peel's taking charge of the bill, if he would undertake it. He had never been present at any of our meetings, and I did not know how as a manufacturer he was inclined to act, and I believed that so far he was altogether unacquainted with our proceedings. But I could have no objection to him if he was willing to accept the charge. The THE FIRST SIR ROBERT PEEL. 1 49 meeting asked me if I would endeavour to ascertain his views upon the subject, and I consented to do so. My calling upon him for this purpose was the first intimation that Sir Robert Peel had of these proceedings. "When I informed him of the support which I was offered from the leading members in both Houses, he very willingly accepted the offer, and agreed to attend the next meeting of the favouring members, that he might learn their wishes as to the best mode of proceeding. He did so ; and at that meeting all the arrangements were concluded for introducing the bill into the House of Commons with all the clauses as /had prepared them." ^ Thus, according to Owen's account, it was he, the philanthropist-manufacturer of the New Lanark Mills, who originated the second distinctly recorded attempt at factory legislation, and the bill introduced by Sir Robert Peel into the House of Commons in 18 15 was framed by him and by no one else. Owen's account is corroborated, though with some little modification, by Sir Robert Peel's statement to the House of Commons' committee of 181 6. He then sketched thus the history of the bill which he had introduced the year before. " A worthy man,'' lie said, " produced a plan to me, which I am not ashamed to own, and I conceived that the intention of that gentleman was so good, and his wishes so earnest, that I did not lend an unwilling ear to him." But though " far from adopting his plan of improvement to the extent he went, I still deemed an alteration necessary," in the present arrange- ments of the cotton manufacture, " and that gave birth to the bill of last year, which bill, in its progress, was attended by many honourable members of this House, and met with great approbation." Robert Owen, there cannot be the slightest doubt, was the "worthy man" here referred to by Sir Robert, who, at the same time, hints that the ardent Welshman went too far for him. To conciliate his fellow manufacturers. Peel lessened the stringency of the bill as ^ Robert Owen, Life by Himself, i, 1 13-16. 150 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES. framed by Owen ; and before all was done, it underwent, for the same reason, further and further modifications, until its first parent could scarcely recognise, and was almost disposed to disown, his offspring. "Had Sir Robert Peel," Owen grumbled some forty years after- wards, "been so inclined, he might have speedily carried this bill as it was through the House of Commons during the first session, in time for it to have passed triumphantly through the Lords. But it appeared afterwards that he was too much under the influence of his brother manufacturers ; and he allowed this bill, of so much importance to the country, the master manufacturers, and the working classes, to be dragged through the House of Commons for four sessions before it was passed, and when passed, it had been so mutilated in all its valuable clauses that it became valueless for the objects I had intended. "At the commencement of these proceedings I was an utter novice in the manner of conducting the business of the country in Parliament. But my intimate acquaintance with the proceedings for the four years during which this bill was under the consideration of both Houses, opened my eyes to the conduct of public men, and to the ignorant, vulgar self interest, regardless of means to accomplish their object, of trading and mercantile men even of high standing in the commercial world. No means were left unturned by these men to defeat the object of the bill in the first session of its introduction, and through four years in which, under one futile pretence and another, it was kept in the House of Commons." ^ Even so ; but Sir Robert Peel, who had been in the House of Commons for a quarter of a century, knew from the first the potency of the opposition, which forty years afterwards Owen fancied, or fancied that he fancied, might have been averted by an attempt to hurry the bill through Parliament in a single session. When, in 1802, thirteen years before. Peel proposed the Factory Apprentices Bill, what would otherwise have been the opposition of the manufacturers was silent and inert because the measure was introduced by him. But now he found arrayed against him the whole, or almost the whole, strength of the interest, the ^ Robert Owen, Life by Himself , i. 116. THE FIRST SIR ROBERT PEEL. I5I clamour of which, in its comparative infancy thirty years before, had daunted Pitt, and been eagerly taken, for party purposes, into alliance by Fox. The manufacturers of cotton alone were now a most powerful body, out of the House even more than in it ; and in opposition to further, or to stringent, factory legislation, were doubtless ranged all the other manufacturers of woollen, of flax, of silk, who, by adapting to their operations the machinery of the great inventors of the cotton industry, found their interests so far the same as those of the cotton manufacturers, and themselves threatened with the same restrictions. " Children at this time," says Owen with natural indignation, "were admitted into the cotton, wool, flax, and silk mills at six, and sometimes even at five years of age. The time of working, winter and summer, was unlimited by law, but usually it was fourteen hours per day, in some fifteen, and even, by the most inhuman and avaricious, sixteen hours ; and in many cases the mills were artificially heated to a high state most unfavourable to health." ^ Too true ! The Apprentices Act of 1802, which sought to abolish these evils, had become either obsolete or ineffective. When the workhouses first emptied their little inmates on the cotton districts, and parish apprentices were eagerly sought for by employers, many if not most of the mills lay away from towns, on the banks of streams available for water- power. But with the application of the steam-engine as a motor of machinery, water - power dwindled in value. Mills were built in towns, and population adjusting itself to the demand for juvenile labour, the employer was no longer left dependent on the workhouse, and gave up the apprenticeship system altogether. The mass of the children now employed, not being apprentices, were not subject to the provisions of Sir Robert Peel's Act of 1802, which had ^ Robert Owen, Life by Himself, i. 116. 152 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES. thus in most places become a dead letter. Even in districts where the apprenticeship system lingered, employers could carry out its provisions or not pretty much as they chose. There existed no officers or salaried inspectors whose business it was to watch for and to punish infractions of the law. Arkwright's son, Richard the second, was questioned on this point during his examination before the House of Commons' committee of 1816. " That Act," he said, speaking of Sir Robert Peel's measure of 1802, "has not been followed up with respect to the visiting of magis- trates these thirteen years " — that is, in fact, almost ever since it was passed. " I think," he added, " they visited my mills at Cromford twice." But even had inspection been effective, the Act was evaded by the employment of children who were not apprentices, and who were supplied in tolerably ample numbers by the growth of population in towns, stimulated as it was by the vast expansion of the cotton trade. Their labour was cheap, but the machinery of the cotton-mill became ever more and more costly and complicated with the progress of the manufacture ; and when Peel brought in his second bill, the employers fancied that they would be losers if the Legislature diminished the time during which the cheap labour of the children brought them a profit by its appHcation to the expensive machinery of the mills. Not only so ; the general use of the steam- engine in cotton-mills, the enlargement and elaboration of their machinery, the growth of fine spinning through the invention and development of Crompton's mule, brought adult labour more and more into play. The children who had once performed the principal part in the cotton manu- facture became in many operations the mere though indispensable adjuncts and assistants of the adult, who often directly employed his juvenile subordinate. Any measure, therefore, that restricted the hours of the labour THE FIRST SIR ROBERT PEEL, 1 53 of the children, inevitably though indirectly shortened those of the adult operative, to whom this human machinery was as necessary as the wood and iron of his mules, his spindles, and his carding-machines. " You are now," the manufac- turers of 1815 said to Sir Robert Peel, "no longer, as in I So 2, interfering merely with the labour of children — and it was an interference which we could avoid and evade — but you are virtually dictating to adults the hours during which they shall work, and are laying the axe at the root of our whole system of manufactures." What, actual and potential, was the strength of the Par- liamentary opposition to new factory legislation for the protection of children under these new circumstances, Sir Robert Peel knew better than Owen could know or than we can know. He received encouragement, no doubt, from philanthropic members on both sides of the House, and from individual members of the Administration, but the Government did not, as a Government, support him, and he found in 181 5 a state of feeling, in ParUament and out of it, very different from that of 1802. He was growing old too, and was himself a manufacturer, belonging to a class, the interests of which had just then been unfairly dealt with, he thought, by the passing of the Corn Bill ; and which, after this punishment for their sacrifices during the war, complained that now when peace had come, their industry was threatened with destructive or damaging legislation. Little wonder if the practical man, thus situated, did not share Owen's hope of getting the bill through Parliament in a single session, and if he endeavoured to disarm opposition by avoiding anything like precipitancy. It was on the 6th of June, 181 5 (twelve days before the Batde of Waterloo), that Peel introduced his second Factory Bill. Instead of attempting to hurry it through Parliament, as Owen urged, he proposed that it should be read a first time and then u 154 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES. printed, to be circulated during the recess through the country, "and receive the proper amendments." In his apparently brief speech when introducing the measure he did little more than explain its chief provisions, which were " that no children should be employed under the age of ten years, either as apprentices or otherwise, and the duration of their labour should be limited to twelve hours and a half per diem, including the time for education and meals, which would leave ten hours for laborious employment." In the bill printed " as amended " a week afterwards, the ten hours' limit, always contended for by Owen, was modified in some cases. No one under eighteen was to be employed more than ten and a half hours for any day, but it was only for those children receiving instruction that ten hours was to be the limit. During the first four years after admission to the mill, the child was to be instructed one half-hour every working-day in reading", writing, and arithmetic, either by " some discreet and proper person " to be provided by the mill-owner, or in some public school near at hand. The half- hour so spent was added to the meal time, and the child or young person receiving such instruction could be worked only ten hours a day, but in other cases work for ten and a half hours was permissible. No child was to be employed under ten years of age. The inspection of mills was en- trusted to the Clerk of the Peace or to a visitor or visitors appointed by the Justices, who might remunerate them, and a report was to be made once a year. The penalty for the infraction of these regulations was to be not more than £^\o or less than ;^5, one-half to be paid to the informer. Such were the main provisions of the bill of 1S15, and during the recess it was no doubt very extensively circu- lated among all whom it concerned. Great appears to have been the opposition to it from manufacturers, Eng- lish and Scotch, who had known nothing of legislative THE FIRST SIR ROBERT PEEL. I55 restrictions since the Act of 1S02, and its restrictions had long ceased to be effective. When Parliament again met, Sir Robert, it would seem, found the advice of friends and the clamour of foes urging him in one and the same direc- tion — to ask for a Parliamentary enquiry before proceeding further with the bill. Here is all that is reported of his speech on the occasion (April 3, 1816} — perhaps it was all that he said : — "Sir Robert Peel rose, in pursuance of a previous notice, to submit a motion to the House respecting the state of children employed in cotton manufactories. The object of his motion was altogether national, as it affected the health and morals of the rising generation, and went to determine whether the introduction of machinery into our manufac- tories was really a benefit. The principal business in our cotton manu- factories was now performed by machinery, and of course interrupted the division of work suitable to the respective ages, which formerly was practised in private houses. The consequence was that little children, of very tender age, were employed with grown persons at the machinery ; and those poor little creatures, torn from their beds, were compelled to work, even at the age of six years, from early morn to late at night, a period of perhaps fifteen or sixteen hours ! He allowed that many mas- ters had humanely turned their attention to the regulation of this prac- tice ; but too frequently the love of gain predominated, inducing them to employ all their hands to the greatest possible advantage. Some time ago he had introduced a bill into the House for regulating the work of apprentices, which was attended wilh the hapiiiest results, and their time was limited ; but children were still subjected to all the hard- ships to which carelessness or cupidity might expose them. The House was well aware of the many evils that resulted from the want of educa- tion in the lower classes. One object of the present bill was to enable manufacturing children to devote some of their time to the acquirement of a little useful simple knowledge, such as plain reading and writing. He hoped those children would experience the protection of the House, for if it were not extended to them, all our excellent machinery would be productive of injury. It might, perhaps, be said that free labour should not be subjected to any control ; Ijut surely it could not be inconsistent with our constitution to protect the interests of those helpless children. The honourable Baronet concluded with moving that a committee be appointed to take into consideration the state of the children emj^loycd 156 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES. in the different manufactories of the United Kingdom, and to report the same, together with their observations thereupon, to the House." There followed other speeches, from members manufac- turing and non-manufacturing, speeches which showed what a storm of opposition would have been raised had Sir Robert proposed to legislate without preliminary enquiry. For instance, a Mr. Curwen looked upon the bill " as an insult to parents," "Parents," said this honourable gentle- man, "must be best aware of the quantity of work their children were able to bear, and must undoubtedly feel most for their distress. Such a proceeding," as this pro- posal of legislative interference, " was a libel on the humanity of parents." However, even he " had no objec- tion to a committee," which was appointed and sat, taking evidence from the 25th of April to the 28th of June, 1816. All sorts and conditions of men, from the second Richard Arkwright, then on his way to become the wealthiest Com- moner in England, and from " Astley Cooper, Esq.," the great surgeon that was, and Sir Astley Cooper that was to be, down to humble operatives, were examined on the theory and practice of child labour in factories. The evidence, as usual in these cases, was emphatic on both sides, and as conflicting as it was emphatic. Manufacturers testified that their mills were salubrious, that the children in them were not over-worked, and that the juvenile mortality was slight. Medical men, practising in the manufacturing dis- tricts, had, on the other hand, from their own personal ex- perience, come to exactly the opposite conclusion. It was l)roved that in some cases children of five were employed in mills, and that sometimes children of other ages were worked fifteen hours a day. These, no doubt, were excep- tional cases, but there was nothing in the law to prevent the exception from becoming the rule, since it was admitted THE FIRST S/R ROBERT PEEL. 1 57 on all hands that the Parish Apprentices Act of 1802 had become a dead letter, and no appointment of visitors by the magistrates, which the Act enjoined, had been made anywhere in the Hundred of Salford. The second Richard Arkwright deposed that no children were admitted into the Cromford Mills under the age of ten, or until they had learned to read. The hours of attendance were tliirteen, from which was to be deducted one hour for dinner, and from fifteen to twenty-eight minutes for break- fast ; so that, in those earliest of cotton-mills, children of ten must have worked eleven and a half hours out of the twenty- four. It was this son, heir and successor of the founder of the factory system, one learns with pleasure from his own evidence, who invented the fan in the scutching-room, a simple and effective contrivance for ventilating it. But if the children in the mills of the second Richard Arkwright, who seems to have been a humane and careful employer, were worked eleven and a half hours at the lowest, how many more may not have been the number of hours during which they were worked here and there by greedy and callous em- ployers, restrained by no law ; to say nothing of what could be done, as Sir Robert Peel had discovered in his own mills, by unscrupulous overseers acting in flat transgression of the orders of humane employers? Owen and Peel were both of them examined, and Owen testified to the good effects produced in his own mills through the limitation, voluntarily imposed by himself, of children's labour to ten hours a day. Peel's evidence, and the long, the creditably- emphatic written statement which he handed in to the committee, have been already quoted from. Apart, it may be added, from evidence as to matters of fact, some of the manufacturers opposed to legislation laid great stress on fears often expressed since, and generally found chimerical ; but which may have made a greater than their due impres- 158 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES. sion then, when a long war was being followed by peace, and the competition of Continental manufacturers with those of England was beginning or reviving. Foreign countries, where no such restrictions existed, would, the committee were told, gain an advantage over us, and Eng- lish capital and workmen, already overweighted by taxa- tion, would seek refuge in those happy lands where the law did not prevent a cliild of five from doing what he liked with its own labour. Such vehement assertions have all sunk into silence now, but they may have seemed potent tlien, not only to manufacturers, but to the legislative country gentlemen, who in their fear of foreign competition, had enacted a Corn Law the year before. All this and a great deal more evidence was presented to the House in a Blue Book, but without any report or recommendations from the committee itself, perhaps because its members could come to no agreement on the points in dispute. During the following year, 181 7, nothing parliamentary appears to have been said or done in the matter of new fa(Si tory legislation. Sir Robert Peel seems to have been absent from the House of Commons, in all likelihood through illness or from ill health. A new campaign was opened, however, in the February of 1818, when Sir Robert intro- duced another Factory Regulation Bill, the provisions of which showed that he and the friends of the' cause thought it advisable to make considerable concessions to the enemy. The former bill embraced all factories, woollen, silk, or flax, as well as cotton ; the new bill lessened the area of opposition by restricting its scope, not merely to cotton factories, but to cotton-spinning mills alone. It was to be operative only in " cotton mills, manufactories, or buildings in which cotton-yarn is made." The age at which children might begin to work was lowered from ten to nine. The hours during which they might work were extended to eleven, — THE FIRST SIR ROBERT PEEL. 159 twelve and a half hours of attendance at the mill, with half an hour for breakfast and an hour for dinner. The pro- vision of the old bill prescribing instruction was dropped in the new one. That respecting the Justices and the appointment of Inspectors was retained, and the penalties for infraction were to be from £'io to ^20. After the usual fight, in which the old Sir Robert had this time the assistance of his son — who did not, however, in later years, remain very faithful to the cause thus espoused in his youth, — the bill was carried through the Commons on the 27th of April 1818, by a majority of 65, in a small house of 1 17 members. But the battle was not yet over. On the arrival of the bill in the Peers, where it was taken in hand by Lord Kenyon, it had to run the gauntlet of considerable opposition, at the head of which was a Scotch peer, the Earl of Lauderdale — Byron's " Lauderdale, shrill, Scotch, and acute." The Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool, spoke strongly in its behalf, declaring that " if all the medical staff of Manchester were brought to the bar of the House to prove that children worked more than fifteen hours a day without being thereby injured, he would not believe them." But the manufacturers had asked to be heard by counsel against the bill, and after this hearing. Lord Kenyon withdrew it until the ensuing session. In the February of 1819, the subject was brought again before the House of Peers, and on the motion of Lord Kenyon, a select committee was appointed to inquire into the question of the labour of children in factories. The evidence given in favour of restriction was even stronger than that received by the House of Commons' Committee of 18 16. A bill being now passed in the Peers, it was accepted by the Com- mons, and became during the same session the law of the land. This is the Act 59 George III., cap. 66; a brief enactment, and not containing those provisions of the former l60 LASCASHIRE WORTHIES. bills, whicli alone could have made it effective. Its scope was restricted to factories where cotton and cotton only was spun. No child younger than nine was to be employed, and no person under sixteen was to be actually worked in them more than ten and a half hours on any one day, the whole permitted number of hours of attendance being twelve, with an hour and a half for meals. Nothing was said concerning the instruction of the children ; and, above all, nothing of the appointment of visitors or inspectors. But penalties of from ;^io to ;^2o for infraction were retained, and a sanitary provision was added ; ordinary " ceilings and interior walls to be washed with quicklime and water twice a year." This was not much to have gained, after so many sessions of parliamentary campaigning and battling. The first Sir Robert Peel's Apprentices Bill of 1802, passed seventeen years before, regulated woollen and other as well as cotton- mills, but here it was only cotton-spinning mills that were brought, or retained, within the purview of the State's parental authority and supervision. The Act of 1802 directed that both secular and religious instruction should be furnished to the young people for whom it legislated. Here any and every provision of the kind was omitted. The Act of 1802, moreover, enjoined the appointment of inspectors or visitors, who were to report on the execution of its direc- tions, and though this injunction proved to be inoperative, it signified at least a desire on the part of the Legislature to enforce the fulfilment of its enactments. There was no provision of the kind in the Act of 18 19, and everything was left to " the informer," not a person likely to abound in the manufacturing districts of that, or of any time. The Act of 18 ig turned out, moreover, to have been so negli- gently drawn that its operation was grievously obstructed by a difficulty in the summoning and examination of witnesses, THE FIRST SIR ROBERT PEEL. l6l even when the " informer," professional or philanthropic, did choose to exert himself Hence the law was constantly evaded, and its execution had broken down, when Byron's friend, the then advanced Liberal member for Westminster, Sir John Cam Hobhouse, took up the grievance in the House of Commons. He was the author, six years afterwards, of the Act (6 George IV., cap. 23) amending that of 1819, and which for young persons under sixteen, made ten and a half hours the maximum period of daily labour permissible. This new Act contained satisfactory provisions for summon- ing witnesses, and for compelling them when summoned to give evidence; provisions, the absence of which, had rendered ineffective Sir Robert Peel's measure of 18 19. But the Act of 1825, too, was made of no avail by the ingenuity of the lawyers; and in 1829, Sir John Cam Hobhouse, still taking the lead, procured the passing of another, the 10 George IV., cap, 31, which deprived of validity technical objections, previ- ously and successfully taken when the name and designation of every partner in the firm prosecuted had not been stated in the summons. The last of Sir John Cam Hobhouse's well- meant legislative efforts of this kind, issued in the i & 2 William IV., cap. 39, another ten and a half hours' bill, and including, unlike most of its predecessors, weaving as well as spinning-mills. Yet whether they were weavmg or spinning- mills, it was those of the cotton manufacture alone that were legislated for by any of these enactments, with the ex- ception of Sir Robert Peel's Apprentices Bill of 1802, which did include woollen-mills, but that measure had long, as has been seen, become obsolete through the abandonment of the apprenticeship system and from other causes. With 1 83 1, and the last of Sir John Cam Hobhouse's Bills, regulat- ing juvenile employment in the cotton manufacture alone, the Reform Bill was approaching, and there had already come an awakening of public feeling in Yorkshire, a county X I02 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES. the seat of an extensive woollen manufacture, all the con- ditions and operations of which remained untouched, and unregulated by any law. Fiery Oastlers and vehement Sadlers were beginning to incite the men of Yorkshire, in the great centres of the woollen manufacture, to demand a ten hours' bill. Yorkshire, which had been left out of the scope and operation of all these recent short-time enact- ments, passed for the cotton trade alone, responded to the call, and the Lancashire operatives found themselves enlisting under the banner of a Ten Hours' Bill, unfurled by the leaders of the woollen operatives of Yorkshire. Noblemen and gentlemen, and influential sections of politi- cal parties, engaged actively in the new movement. With varying fortunes, under successive leaders, the agitation proceeded, until at last the victory was won ; and since then the manufacturers themselves have learned to be grateful for the Factory Acts, which, if stringent in their provisions and operations, at least impose the same equal restrictions upon all, and no longer allow the greedy and unscru- pulous a commercial advantage over their more humane or less grasping competitors. Effective factory legislation dates from 1833, and the 3 & 4 William IV,, cap. 103, which flowed from a Royal Commission of Inquiry, appointed as a result of the agitation in and out of parliament, begun by such men as the fiery Oastler and the vehement Sadler. That Act appointed paid inspectors, the one thing most needed, and from then till now, the principles embodied in Sir Robert Peel's first measure of 1802 have gone on slowly but steadily triumphing, until at the time of this present writing^ we seem to be on the verge of legislation which will prohibit the employment of any child of tender years in any kind of hard labour, and make the reception of some modicum of instruction a condition precedent to, 1 A.D. 1875. THE FIRST SIR ROBERT PEEL. 163 and an accompaniment of, the remunerative employment of any British child in town or country, in field and factory, in mine and workshop. An effective check will every- where be placed on the negligence of employers, and on the carelessness or greed of parents, and all this beneficent legislation traces its origin to the first Sir Robert Peel's modest measure of 1802. The year 18 19, which witnessed the aid given by the young Peel, then out of office and biding his time, to his old father in the discussion on the Factory Bill, was also that of their disagreement on the currency question. It was the first of the younger Peel's changes of opinion, the prelude, though a distant one, to others of more importance. Old Sir Robert loved inconvertible paper-money, not wisely but too well, and when just entering on official life, in war- time, moreover, the docile young Robert, as well as his obsti- nate old father, had opposed the resumption of cash-pay- ments proposed by the Whig, Francis Horner. But with the peace, with a temporary release from official trammels, and with the leisurely study of a question, the settlement of which one way or another did not affect "the Constitution," the younger Peel came round to Horner's view, which has since become that of almost all the world. He was made (for the Government kept its eye on him) Chairman of the Select Committee appointed in the February of 181 9 to inquire into the resumption of cash-payments, and on the 24th of May he was to propose a measure enjoining that resumption. Before his son began his statement, old Sir Robert rose to present a petition in favour of the existing system, and in the course of a speech supporting its prayer, he warned the House against the resolutions which the son was about to propose. " He really thought the resolutions were of a very extraordinary character. It was true that he should have to opi)Ose a very near and dear 1 64 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES. relation ; but while it was his own sentiment that he had a duty to perform, he respected those who did theirs, and who considered them to be paramount." Then followed the touching passage, already quoted,^ recording his early wish, when that near and dear relative was young, one day to present the child to his country, to follow in the path of " Mr. Pitt." "It was very natural," he added, "that such should be his wishes, although those who did their duty might be at once contented with their conduct. He was well satisfied that the head and heart of that relation were in the right place, and that though he had deviated a little from the path of propriety in this instance, he would soon be restored to it." The younger Peel, in his elaborate statement, thus referred to the mild paternal protest : — " Many other difiiculties," he said, "presented themselves to him in discussing this question ; among them was one which it pained him to observe, and that was the necessity he felt of opposing himself to an authority to which he had always bowed, and, he hoped, should always bow with defer- ence. But here he had a great public duty imposed on him, and from that duty he would not shrink, whatever might be his private feelings." Whereupon the old gentleman resigned himself to his fate, and cash-payments were resumed at the instance of his erring but still dearly-beloved son. The speech on the resumption of cash-payments seems to have been old Sir Robert's last in the House of Com- mons. He was verging on the seventies, and the little disagreement with his son perhaps contributed, as well as advancing years, to his withdrawal from the House of Commons. Long before he had relinquished to sons the management of the business, and at the general election in 1820 he retired from parhamentary into private life — one of his sons succeeding him as Member for Tam worth, which ^ Ante, p. 132. THE FIRST SIR ROBERT PEEL. 1 65 he had represented for thirty years. He spent the remain- ing decade of his Hfe in opulent privacy at Drayton Manor; and if there be truth in the description given of his tastes and intellectual habits by his contemporary biographer of 1803-4, his enjoyment of "retired leisure" vk^as not marred by en7iui. "After describing him as in person tall, manly, and well-proportioned," — "his eye," it is added, "when he speaks, lights up his countenance with peculiar animation;" "his address is affable, unem- barrassed, and very engaging," — this grandiose biographer proceeds thus : — " In conversation he is very attentive and communicative, relishing extremely sallies of wit in others, and is not unfrequently very happy himself in repartee. Although he has greatly improved his intellectual faculties by an extensive acquaintance with books, particularly on the subject of the history, commerce, and constitution of his native country, yet it is evident that his mind has derived its chief advantages from an attentive observation of men and manners, which probably has not a little contributed to give novelty and originality to his ideas. Being much conversant with the world, and having had transactions with cveiy class of society, he has acquired a very quick perception of human character, without imbibing the narrow prejudices and sus- picious circumspection usually attendant on such vai-ious intercourse. Colloquial discussions " — these are certainly most unexpected traits — "on the phenomena of nature constitute his chief delight ; and to an early habit of abstracting and generalising his ideas, he unites the curiosity of a naturalist and the eye of an acute observer." ^ It may be as well to add from the same sketch, pub- lished when he was a man of fifty-three or so, some more traits and anecdotes ; perhaps, as formerly liinted, com- municated by friends, and, whatever their origin, made the most of by the high-flown biographer, whose record requires to be considerably condensed : — "As the merit by which he acquired made him worthy of his fortune, so the use which he makes of it in communicating the means ^ rnhlic Characters of 1803-4, p. 35. 1 66 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES. of comfort to all around him endears him to a very extensive circle, &c. Although he has long ceased to regard the accumulation of wealth as productive of happiness, &c., &c., yet he has not lost the habit ot minute attention to his finances. His mansion is the residence of hospitality, but unencumbered with any ostentatious display of retinue. He never retires into the impenetrable recesses of his house, inacces- sible to the modest petitioner, &c., but his ear is at all times open to the suit of the meanest, &c., &c., &c." And now to go into detail : — "All public institutions of extensive utility find in Sir Robert Peel an active and powerful patron. Among others we distinguish the following : — Christ's Hospital, of which he is a governor ; the Literary Fund, of which he is Vice-President ; and the Society for bettering the Condition of the Poor, the fund of which he augmented in the year 1 80 1 by a donation of a thousand pounds. He has been lately chosen, in the most flattering manner. President of the House of Recovery in Manchester" — presumably what would now be called a "Convalescent Hospital"— "and he makes annual donations of large sums to the poor of Tamworth in Staffordshire, as well as to those of Bury in Lanca- shire" — the claims of the old home not being forgotten, though the new was a grander one. "Among innumerable acts of benevolence," &c., &c., here are a few : — "A rectory in his estate having become vacant, he solicited the Chancellor, with every prospect of success, to bestow it on the Rev. James Hargrcaves, M.A., a gentleman every way worthy, &c., &c. The seals, however, having been suddenly entrusted into the hands of commissioners, the desired appointment did not take place ; but to alleviate the mortification of disappointment. Sir Robert Peel pur- chased for, and presented to, his friend a living of equal value. " More striking is what follows : — "Three years have not elapsed since a house of the first consequence in the cotton trade, by imprudently extending its speculations beyond its capital, was, from some unforeseen circumstances, on the eve of bankruptcy. Informed of their pressing exigency, and convinced of the honour and integrity of the parties, Sir Robert Peel rescued them from their impending calamity by an immediate loan of ^^14,000. Reluctant favours are ungracious, &c., &c. This house had been long an obstinate rival to his own, and an opportunity now offered of witnessing its fall and of rising in its ruins. But Sir Robert Peel, THE FIRST SIR ROBERT PEEL. 1 67 rather than elevate himself by the misfortunes of others, generously extended the hand of friendship, and nobly supported his com- petitor." In conclusion : — "Very few (not four) years since, a family, consisting of two sons and three daughters, all whose property, which was very considerable, had been embarked in trade, was reduced, by adverse and unforeseen circumstances, to a complete wreck ; the daughters having entrusted their property, which was not less than ^^5000 each, to their brothers, participated in their misfortunes. Sir Robert Peel, with his character- istic liberality, respecting ' the Corinthian pillar of polished society even in the dust,' obtained an honourable and lucrative appointment for each of the sons, and presented ;^iooo to each of the daughters! These are plain unvarnished facts, which panegyric cannot embellish, nor malice attribute to unworthy motives."^ True, but none the less is it a relief to turn from this to a portraiture by a very different biographical artist, although, unfortunately, he does not, like the other, go into detail. Says Sir Lawrence Peel of his father's brother : — *' He was an ambitious man. He loved money, but he loved it principally as an instrument of power. He was the very reverse of a selfish man. He possessed a genial, generous nature ; he loved young people, and loved to see all about him happy. He was eager to diffuse happiness. He was at all times bountiful, and often munifi- cient in his gifts. As his possessions were great, it was his duty to give largely ; but still, even so viewed, his was a bountiful hand. He dealt with money as one who, if he knew its value, with how mucli toil and anxiety it had been won by him, felt also that God has impressed wealth with a trust, and that the trustee must pass his accounts. He gave much, and by preference he gave in secret. He gave also with delicacy of manner, and the nice feelings of a gentle- man. His was no narrow nor one-sided beneficence. He knew no distinction of politics or creed where a man needed help. He was grave in exterior, yet a humorous man, with a quiet relish of fun. He had small respect for a man of idle life, for any one in short who was not useful, and neither fashion nor rank, without good service of some sort, won any allegiance from him. He was a moral and religious Public Characters of 1803-4, p. 39-42. 1 68 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES. man. I am aware that some who attach a literal meaning to figurative expressions will doubt the religious mind of a millionaire. But when will men of religious earnestness learn the truth, that true religion has many sides and many coverings ? The temptations of riches are so truly and constantly insisted upon in Holy Writ, that we are apt to forget the scriptural instances of men rewarded with riches for their trust in God, &c., &c."^ Soon after receiving his baronetcy, Sir Robert had lost his wife, the first love of his youth — the faithful partner of his matiirer years. Chronicling her marriage some twenty years before, his biographer of 1803-4 discourses in this wise: — "Although his table has been already surrounded with olive-branches nearly as numerous as years have since elapsed, so profuse has nature been of her endowments, that, notwithstanding the amiable female has been the mother as well as the nurse of eleven very fine children, she yet ap- pears but the eldest sister of the family." Alas ! a year or so after this was written came the death of the graceful and beautiful lady, who when a child had sat upon the knee of her father's lodger, little anticipating the destiny in store for them. " It is said that London fashionable life — so unlike what she had been accustomed to at home — proved injurious to her health ; and old Mr. Yates used to say, ' If Robert hadn't made our Nelly a Lady, she might have been living yet ' " ^ — though, as the reader has seen, the bio- grapher of 1803-4 found nothing amiss, but the contrary, with the looks of the baronet's wife. Not long after her death, Sir Robert Peel married again (October 18, 1805), choosing in his old Bury circle a second wife, of whom little more is recorded than that she was " Miss Susanna Clarke, a sister of the rector of his parish at Bury, the late Rev. Sir William Henry Clarke, Bart. This lady died September 19, 1824, in her seventy-second year, leaving no issue." The year before Sir Robert retired into private hfe, his second son, 1 Sketch, p. 36. - Self- Help, p. 71. THE FIRST SIR ROBERT PEEL. 1 69 William Yates Peel, Byron's Harrow friend, had become the husband of an earl's (the Earl of Mountcashell's) sister. The )'ear afterwards, 1820, Robert, the nascent statesman, wedded the daughter of a general, and so the Bury calico- printer's children went on marrying into the aristocracy — one of them, Laurence, in 1822, even winning the hand of a sister of the Duke of Richmond of the day. "He," the first Sir Robert, "did not live to see his son Prime Minister, but he lived long enough for the gratification of a not im- moderate ambition. His son had gradually risen, had done his work well, and had advanced in the world's esteem, performing as the chief minister of the Crown in the House of Commons, in a time of unex- ampled bitterness, a painful task, with full command over himself, and with great ability. He had risen, but not yet had he risen to the height of his full stature — the greatest was yet behind. If he could have looked into the womb of time, the old man would have seen amongst his descendants new honours crowning that descent. I cannot call to mind any instance in any one prosperous family of an industrious career longer pursued. Three of his sons rose to be privy counsellors, of whom one was Prime Minister and declined a peerage, another was a Cabinet Minister, and a third Under-Secretary of State. In the next generation one grandson has been Under-Secretary of State, and another earned honour, rank, and an undying fame in the naval service of his country ; so that, counting from Sir William Peel to his great- grandfather," our Founder of the Peel Family, " there have been in this family four generations of hard-working men, each of whom had his appointed aim, worked hard to reach, and reached it." ^ Yes, returning to office as Home Secretary in 1S22, under his old patron, the Earl of Liverpool, and after the death of Canning, so prominent that the Government, formed and headed by the Duke in 1828, was called the Wellington- Peel Ministry, old Sir Robert's son and heir became in his father's lifetime, " Chief Minister of the Crown in the House of Commons." The year 1S29 saw the steadfast opponent of the Catholic claims astonish his father and his friends by proposing Catholic Emancipation, which must, one would » Sketch, p. 55. I/O LANCASHIRE WORTHIES. think, have been a greater blow to the old gentleman of seventy-nine than the change of opinion, ten years before, on the currency question. But no : — "I have read that the late Sir Robert Peel remained unforgiven by his father for his conduct on the Catholic question ! It was not, however, in his father's heart to doubt his son. The relation of father and son grew in a manner to be reversed — the father reverenced where he had at first only loved. He retained his own opinion on this solemn ques- tion, and he gave to his son the credit of purity and disinterestedness. Implacability was not in the father's nature, and he died at peace with all mankind. He had nothing to forgive in his son, and extended no forgiveness where there had been no offence. " It was in 1829 that Catholic Emancipation was consum- mated, and the previous year had witnessed an interesting event at Drayton Manor. In patriarchal fashion the old gentleman gathered round him on his seventy-eighth birth- day his children and grand-children, to the number of fifty, as if he had a presentiment that his latter end was ap- proaching, and he gave each of them a silver medal struck in honour of the grave occasion. The end was not for some two years more, the 3rd of May 1830. It was pre- ceded by a characteristic incident and remark, which "his nephew, Mr. Willock, who was present on the occasion," remembered and reported. " A few days before his death, the first Sir Robert Peel, feeling himself more than usually alert, invited three of his nephews to dine with him. At dinner he asked if the champagne was good, and being told that it was, he drank a glass of it. The wine raised his spirits, and he conversed with much animation about past times. After dinner they played at whist, and after a rubber or two, Mr. Willock, perceiving that his uncle's hand shook a little as he dealt the cards, offered to deal for him. ' No, no, Robert,' he said, ' if I cannot deal my own cards it is time to give up the game,' and with this characteristic speech he broke up the game. He survived but a few THE FIRST SIR ROBERT PEEL. I71 days." Though he had given much during his lifetime, settHng ^4^9000 a year on his eldest son when entering the House of Commons, the wealth which he left behind him was enormous. Says another of his biographers : — " We shall insert an abstract of the will of Sir Robert Peel, not to gratify idle curiosity, but to illustrate the great value of the cotton manufacture, and to show how great are the prizes to be gained by energy, enterprise, and intelligence in a free and commercial country. After entailing Drayton Park and the other large estates in Stafford- shire and Warwickshire, it proceeds to recite sums, to the amount of nearly a quarter of a million, previously advanced to or settled upon his several children (not including ^9000 per annum settled upon his eldest son), and then bequeathes above ;i{^6oo,ooo more, making the portions of his five younger sons ;^io6,ooo each, and those of his daughters ;^53,ooo each. He leaves to a chapel erected by him at Fazely, in Staffordshire, ;^ 1 000 (afterwards revoked, because he had endowed it with lands), and £,(iOOO to a school established by him in the said village ; to the Infirmary and Lunatic Asylum in Manchester, and the Lying-in-Hospital in Salford, ;^ioo each. "The will is dated July 27, 1S20. By a codicil, of February ir, 1S25, the portions of his younger sons were increased tO;^i35,ooo; and of the residue, which is said to have exceeded half-a-million, four- ninths are bequeathed to the present Baronet," — the second Sir Robert, the statesman, — " and one-ninth to each of his five younger sons. The personal property was sworn at what is technically called 'upper value,' which means that it exceeded ;/^900,ooo, and was the first instance of the scale of duties extending to such a sum. The probate- stamp was fifteen thousand pounds, and the legacy duties amounted to about ten thousand pounds more." ^ These are dazzling figures, but they have since been surpassed, and, in any case, they testify little or nothing to the genuine worth of the man of whose wealth they are representative. It is not as a millionnaire that the first Sir Robert Peel claims a prominent place among modern Lancashire Worthies. He was only one of many success- ful industrialists whose energy, skill, and luck evolved large fortunes out of the cotton manufacture suddenly ^ Cooke Taylor, i. 35. 1/2 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES. developed by Hargreaves, by Arkvvright, and by Crompton. Other wealthy Lancashire manufacturers of the first Sir Robert Peel's day and generation rose from small begin- nings to purchase landed estates, to found families, and to be members of parliament. But of none of them is there any such record as that which makes the first Sir Robert Peel estimable and admirable for his patriotism and bene- ficence. His loyalty to Pitt, his dedication of his eldest son to the service of his country, his protest against the Corn Bill, his factory legislation, raise him far above the vulgar crowd of pushing and successful money-makers. He combined, in a remarkable degree, warm-heartedness with long-headedness, and private with public munificence. Were it only that he, an opulent manufacturer, was the first to prepare and to carry a measure of any kind for the pro- tection of the young employed in factories, his memory would deserve to be held in honour. What he did to make a statesman of his eldest son has been seen ; and quite as much as the second Pitt, though in a different way, was the second Sir Robert Peel indebted for his success in public life to the proverbial fact that he " had a father before him." IV. THOMAS PERCIVAL* READERS of De Quincey's early autobiography may remember a mention there of Dr. Thomas Percival, the founder of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, now in the ninety-fifth year of its age. At the time to which he refers, the English Opium-eater was a little boy, living with his widowed mother at Greenheys, whence he had nothing, he says, but "a solitary road to traverse" all the way to " Princess Street, then the termination, on that side, of Manchester " ! Speaking of a story which made a deep impression on the juvenile minds of himself and his sister, De Quincey thus rambles on in his own peculiar and discursive fashion. " From what quarter the story comes originally was unknown to us at the time, and I have never met it since ; so that, possibly, it may be new to the reader. We found it in a book, written for the use of his own children by Dr. Percival, the physician who * The Works, Literary, Moral, and PJiilosophkal, of Thomas Percival, M.D. To which are prefixed Memoirs (by his Son) of his Life and Writings, and a Selection from his Literary Correspondence. A New Edition. 2 Vols. (London, 1S07). IJcnjaiiiin Franklin, Works, by Jared Sparks (Boston, 1840). Thomas De Quincey Autobiographie Sketches (Edinburgh, 1863). Ilalley's Lancashire, its Fnritanisni and A^onconformity, err., er=f. 174 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES. attended at Greenhay," which, according to De Quincey, was the name of his mother's mansion, built not long before as a country-house by his father, and from which, he avers, the Manchester suburb of Greenheys derived its name. " Dr. P.," continues De Quincey, diverging into episodical reminiscence, " was a literary man, of elegant tastes and philosophic habits. Some of his papers may be found in the Manchester Philosophic Transactions, and these I have heard mentioned with respect, though, for myself, I have no personal knowledge of them. Some presumption meantime arises in their favour, from the fact that he had been a favoured correspondent of the most eminent Frenchmen at that time who cultivated literature jointly with philosophy. Voltaire, Diderot, Maupertuis, Condorcet, and D'Alembert had all treated him with distinction ; and I have heard my mother say, that in days before I or my sister could have known him, he attempted vainly to interest her in these French luminaries by reading extracts from their frequent letters ; which, however, so far from reconciling her to the letters, or to the writers of the letters, had the unhappy effect of riveting the dislike (previously budding) to the doctor as their receiver, and the proneur of their authors. The tone of the letters — hollow, insincere, and full of courtly civilities to Dr. P. as a known friend of ' the tolerance ' (meaning, of course, of toleration) — certainly was not adapted to the English taste, and in this respect was specially offensive to my mother, as always assuming of the doctor, that by mere necessity, as being a philosopher, he must be an infidel. Dr. P. left that question, I believe, in medio, neither assent- ing nor denying \ and undoubtedly there was no particular call upon him to publish his Confession of Faith before one who, in the midst of her rigorous politeness, suffered it to be too transparent that she did not like him. It is always a pity to see anything lost and wasted, especially love ; and THOMAS PERCIVAL. 1 75 therefore it was no subject for lamentation that too probably the philosophic doctor did not enthusiastically like her. But if really so, that made no difference in his feelings towards my sister and myself. Us he did like ; and as one proof of his regard, he presented us jointly with such of his works as could be supposed interesting to two young literati, whose combined ages made no more at this period than a baker's dozen. These presentation copies amounted to two at the least, both octavos, and one of them, entitled The Father's — something or other; what was it? Assistatit perhaps."^ No, the book which Dr. Percival gave some ninety years ago to the little De Quinceys must have been his once well- known work, A Father's Instructions, partly original, partly selected. And in it, certainly, is the story (from RoUin) of " A Generous Return for an Injury," — " A Noble Revenge " (De Quincey calls it), — the English Opium-eater's imagi- native rendering of which, in old age, is rather curiously characteristic of his autobiographic ways, and will be worth further notice when we come to that Lancashire Worthy. But there is not in Percival's works and correspondence, or anywhere else, so far as one has been able to ascertain, the slightest trace of the " infidelity " imputed to him by De Quincey's mother, or of the epistolary communication which, according to De Quincey himself, he kept up with the leading French sceptics of his time, or of any sympathy with their heterodox speculations. Percival, it is true, was a Unitarian, but the distance between Unitarianism and " infidelity " was considerable in those days, even more than in these ; and, indeed, the tone of his writings is decidedly anti-sceptical. He was a man, too, of a very practical turn of mind ; and though, of course, an opponent of the Test and Corporation Acts, he took much greater interest in ' Autobiographic Sketches, p. 123-4. 176 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES. sanitary reform, and in what is now called " secondary education," and so forth, than in the revolt of the French Free-thinkers against continental priestcraft. The account of Dr. Percival, said to have been given by De Quincey's mother, was probably the more or less unconscious product of her son's imagination, dealing with some fragments of hazy reminiscence. In the present day, to designate this Lancashire worthy, as he was sometimes designated in his own, " the illustrious Percival," would be exaggera- tion. Yet his worth and his merit, his services to Man- chester, were by no means small, and he ought not to be remembered only by the indifferent likeness of him, as of a tedious and conceited free-thinking bore, preserved in De Quincey's autobiography. Thomas Percival was born at Warrington in 1740. He came of a Cheshire stock, and his ancestors long cultivated in that county what his son grandly calls " the patrimonial estate," though, on further definition, this turns out to have been nothing more than " a farm of moderate extent." His grandfather Peter (a younger son) was the first of the family to quit the Cheshire homestead, and he fixed his residence at Warrington, where he practised physic. Peter's eldest son, Thomas, followed his father's profession in his father's adopted town (he had been a pupil of Boerhaave), but a love of learned ease contracted the sphere of his professional exertions. The father of our Percival was a third son of Peter's, and seems in character to have resembled his brother the physician. " His native disposition was averse," we are told, " from the pursuit of fame and fortune, and he appears to have sought his happiness in the tranquil enjoy- ment of an easy and respectable station." It is one of the misfortunes of this grandiloquent school of biography that it rarely condescends to humble matters of fact. We want to know what Thomas Percival's father was, and we are THOMAS PERCIVAL. IJJ tendered the vague information : " At different periods he engaged in various branches of commerce, and transmitted to his posterity, in the example of upright and benevolent conduct, the fairest portion of his inheritance," from which it may be surmised that he left his children rather badly off. Thomas, the youngest and only surviving son, lost both father and mother before he was three, and his upbringing devolved on an elder sister, a superior and affectionate woman. She had him properly grounded, and then sent to the Free Grammar School of Warrington, where he distin- guished himself by his ability and industry. When he was ten an uncle died, leaving the clever little boy a small com- petency wherewith to obtain a liberal education, and to follow any profession for which he had a fancy. The fame of his physician-uncle was cherished in the family, and the studious nephew seems soon to have resolved to become a medical man. Percival was seventeen, and had learned all that could be learned in the Free Grammar School of his native town, just about the time of the establishment of the once celebrated Warrington Academy, still faintly remembered as having had Priestley and Gilbert Wakefield among its teachers. It was founded partly to give a solid ai^d useful education to the youth of the Northern Counties, but above all, to furnish candidates for the Dissenting ministry with the freer theological instruction thought needful at a time when English Presbyterianism was being gradually trans- formed into Unitarianism. Percival's family had ere this left the Church, and he is said to have been the first student enrolled by the Warrington Academy when it opened its doors in 1757. The teaching of the Academy was not of a kind to lead the inquiring youth of seventeen back to the Anglican Church. He had cherished a desire to complete his studies at the University of Oxford, but before he could z lya LANCASHIRE WORTHIES. enter it a theological subscription was necessary, Percival looked into the matter with diligence and earnestness, and found that he could not conscientiously sign the Thirty-nine Articles. When this conclusion was deliberately arrived at, he gave up his Oxford aspirations, and proceeded to the University of Edinburgh, there to study medicine. At Edinburgh he resided in the house of a sister of Robertson the historian, a Mrs. Syme (her daughter became the mother of Henry Brougham), who, in point of fact, did neither more nor less than take boarders. In her house and other- wise, he was thrown among the best literary and scientific society of the Scottish capital ; Robertson and David Hume were among his intimate acquaintances. His relations with Robertson survived his departure from the Modern Athens. Years afterwards it was from Robertson, as Principal of Edinburgh University, that the friendly intervention of Percival obtained their Doctor's degrees for Priestley, Aikin, Enfield (of The Speaker), and other tutors of the Warrington Academy. In the midst of his Edinburgh studies, Percival stole a year's hohday, which he spent in London and the scientific circles of the great metropolis. There and then he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society, through the influence of its Vice-President, Hugh, Lord Willoughby, of Parham, the representative of a peerage now extinct,^ a promoter (in fact he was its first president) of the Warrington Academy, who was not ashamed to remain a " Protestant Dissenter," as his fathers had been, though in the days, indeed, before English Presbyterianism began to develop into Arianism. After finally leaving Edinburgh, Percival made a tour on the Continent, and having completed his medical studies at ^Concerning what is alleged to have been his "supposititious" peerage (though he was Chairman of Committees of the House of Lords), see a note in Halley's Lancashire r»ritanis»i, ii. 397. THOMAS PERCIVAL. 1 79 Leyden, he took his degree there in 1765. Returning to Warrington, he married, and remained in his native town for a couple of years, contributing medical and scientific papers to the Philosophical Transadiojis, and to suitable periodicals. Learned in all the medical lore of his time, Percival now looked forward to establishing himself in London as a physician. He thought, however, that before taking this step it was desirable to acquire some preliminary experience and reputation. In 1767, accordingly, he went to Manchester, and he never left it. With such professional knowledge and skill, such culture and manners as his, Percival soon took the highest position among the physicians of Manchester, and abandoned his intention of settling in London. Beyond the limits of Lan- cashire, too, his name was made known to the profession and to the general scientific world by three volumes of Essays Medical afid Experimental (partly a reproduction of contributions to the Philosophical Transactions), the first of which was issued in 1767, the last in 1776. The year be- fore the issue of the final instalment of the Essays there appeared ("dedicated to the Countes." of Stamford") the first of three parts (the concluding one was not published until 1800) of A Father's Instructions, the book which De Quincey has referred to, and which testified to the fact that a young family was growing up about him. But it is less by his literature, medical or parental, than by the zeal with which he devoted himself to promoting in every way the improvement of the town of his adoption that Percival de- serves to be held in remembrance. Another man might have been content to enjoy professional success and social eminence, restricting his philanthropy to the relief of indi- vidual cases of disease and distress in humble life ; but Per- cival was fortunately animated by a rare and disinterested zeal for the welfare of the poor, and may claim to be re- l80 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES. garded as a founder of that admirable school of physicians of whom, in more recent days, the late Dr. Alison of Edin- burgh was a prominent type — men who, while reaping wealth by caring for the ailments of the rich, explore, with- out encouragement from Governments, central or local, the dark abysses where poverty welters in the company of disease, and who bring their personal and social influence, and their scientific knowledge, to bear on the improvement of the sanitary condition of the neglected poor. Without fee or reward, without hope of or wish for either, and long before the bare idea of the existence of such a functionary was dreamt of, Percival constituted himself Medical Officer of Health for Manchester. He settled there, moreover, just when the presence of a philanthropic and public spirited physician could be most useful, — in 1767, as already said, by which time Hargreaves had perfected his spinning-jenny; and thus on the eve of that expansion of the cotton manu- facture which has converted what was then a second-rate country town into one of the great cities of the empire. Seven years later Percival was able to note "the rapid growth of Manchester and Salford," the population of which had increased from some 20,000 in 1757 to some 27,000 in 1773, and in those quiet old days this was considered, and rightly considered, a wonderful phenomenon. Even with this trifling increase new sanitary needs had arisen, and Percival set to work to investigate the vital statistics of the place, and to compare them with those of the scantily-populated Manchester of the past, as of other towns and of non-manufacturing districts. In the very year, as it happened, of Percival's arrival in Manchester, appeared a work which directed public attention to the im- portance of vital statistics, and which founded on them as a sure basis the modern scientific system of life assur- ance. This was the "Treatise on Reversionary Payments" THOMAS PERCIVAL. l8l of Dr. Price, the dissenting minister, whose sympathy with the first French Revohition became one of the texts of Burke's "Reflections," and who aided Pitt to institute, witli the best intentions, what proved to be a futile sinking fund. Price's book was studied by Percival, and no doubt partly stimulated him to write his " Proposals for Establishing more Accurate and Comprehensive Bills of Mortality in Manchester." In this tractate he suggested that detailed lists of christenings, marriages, and burials, with a register of the causes of death, &c., &c., should be kept in every church and chapel \ and having been delivered at stated times to the clerk of each parish church, should be formed into one general table to be published periodically. Speci- men tables were appended, intelligible to the meanest capacity. Percival's modest " Proposals " may raise a smile in these days of general figuring, when, not to speak of Registrars-General and decennial censuses, of deputy-regis- trars spread all over the land, and of a universal and compul- sory system of registration of births and deaths, Manchester has a Statistical Society all to itself; but they were then as novel as they proved to be useful. His plan, we are told, " was approved by able judges, and was in great measure adopted by the superintending officers of the police of Man- chester," and by other towns both in Lancashire and Cheshire. It was about the time of the issue of these " Proposals" that Percival drew up his " Observations on the State of Population in Manchester and other adjacent places," which appeared in the Philosophical Transactions for 1774-5. He sent a copy to Benjamin Franklin, then {cetat. 67) Agent in England for the colonies, destined three years afterwards to become the United States of America. Franklin received the tractate in the September of 1773, in the December of which year " Boston harbour was black with unexpected tea," and the revolt of the American colonies was about to I 82 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES. begin. He passed its summer and early autumn at Lord De Spencer's seat of High Wycombe, philosophising, ex- perimenting, and even, strange occupation for that American sage, " abridging some parts of the Book of Common Prayer." There the congenial communication of his Manchester correspondent was promptly acknowledged in a note begin- ning, " Dear Sir, I have received here your favour of the 1 8th, enclosing your very valuable paper of the enumeration of Manchester. Such enquiries may be as useful as they are curious, and, if once made general, would greatly assist in the prudent government of a state." Then follow some remarks on the odd plan of census-taking adopted in China, and the penalty exacted there for false returns. " Perhaps," he adds, " such a regulation is scarcely practicable with us " — " us," he writes, since Franklin was still a British subject, " But," this is Percival's comment on the American sage's remark and remarks — " an enumeration of the people of England, similar to that lately executed at Manchester, could not be so difficult an undertaking as may at the first view be imagined. And if accurate and comprehensive Bills of Mortality were universally established, they would admirably coincide with the views of such enquiries, and give precision and certainty to the conclusions deduced from them." All of which, since Percival's time, has been and is being done. This "enumeration" of the Manchester of 1773 was made, one little doubts, at the instance of Percival himself; though in the " Observations," which are partly based on it, he does not claim to have originated it. These first " Obser- vations" of 1773 were followed by " Further Observations" of not much later date, and along with the facts given inci- dentally in the " Proposals," they constitute Percival's chief contributions to the vital statistics of the Manchester of his day and generation. They are valuable not only for their / THOMAS PERCIVAL. 1 83 facts, but for the judgment with which these are surveyed, and inferences drawn from them. Percival, indeed, not only led the way for the more accurate statistics of later days, but in his disquisitions he supplied a philosophy of statistics, without which the most accurate figures may mis- lead instead of instructing. Thus he pointed out that a low death-rate is not necessarily an indication of the general good health of the locality in which it occurs. For instance, he found by an interesting enquiry that the death- rate of the Manchester Quakers, an eminently temperate and well-conditioned body, was actually somewhat higher than that of the rest of the community, and he attributed the apparent anomaly to the circumstance that a constant influx of adult health and strength from the country districts into Manchester supplied the waste caused by town and manufacturing life, while the Quaker body was mainly recruited from its own births. With the increase of the ])opulation consequent on the development of the manu- facturing industry of Manchester and Salford, from some 20,000, as already stated, in 1757, to some 27,000 in 1773, the average annual mortality had fallen from i in 257 to I in 28'4. This decrease, however, of the death-rate was not altogether, Percival concluded, to be ascribed to an improvement in the health and sanitary condition of the inhabitants of the two towns, but mainlv to the influx from the rural districts.^ " Half of all that are born in this town," ^ Referring to the number of public-houses in ^^anchester, Percival cites the opinion of a still remembered ecclesiastical economist on the effect of this influx in the case of a great West of England mart and haven : — "The Rev. Dr. Tucker, the Dean of Gloucester, informs me that were it not for the daily arrival of recruits from Uie country, his parish (St. Stephen's in Bristol), and indeed Bristol in general, would be left in a century without an inhabitant, unless the people should betake themselves to better courses than that of drunkenness." — Ferci- val's JVoris, il. 355i note. 184 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES. — Manchester — Percival said in his " Proposals," " die under five years old." Nevertheless, the duration of life and the death-rate in Manchester, when Percival wrote, contrast favourably with those in London, Liverpool, and Edin- burgh, if unfavourably with those in agricultural countries abroad and counties at home. " In the Pays de Vaud," says Percival in the " Proposals," " the proportion of inhabi- tants who attain the age of 80 is i in 2i| ; in Brandenburg, I in 2 2^-; in Norwich, i in 27; in Manchester, i in 30 ; in London, i in 40 ; and in Edinburgh, i in 42." Again, if when Percival wrote the annual average mortality of Stoke Damarel in Devonshire was only i in 54, while in Manchester it was i in 28, it was higher in Liverpool, being T in 27, and in London, where it was i in 21. Moreover, though ascribing the decrease of the death-rate in expand- ing Manchester between 1757 and 1773 mainly to the influx from the rural districts, Percival admitted that with the development of its manufactures there had been a coinci- dent improvement in its general health. " However," he says in the Observations, "exclusive of this consideration" — the influx from the country — " there is good reason to believe that Manchester is more healthy now than formerly. The new streets are wide and spacious ; the poor have larger and more commodious dwellings, and the increase of trade affords them better clothing and diet than they before enjoyed. I may add, too, that the late improvements in medicine have been highly favourable to the preservation of life. The cool regimen in fevers and in the small-pox, the free admission of air, attention to cleanliness, and the general use of antiseptic remedies and diet, have certainly mitigated the mortality of some of the most dangerous and malignant distempers to which mankind are incident."^ In 1873, a hundred years after these lines were written, and 1 Works, ii. 323. THOMAS PERCIVAL. 185 with an increase of the population of Manchester and Sal- ford during the intervening century from some 27,000 to some 460,000, the death-rate of Manchester was i in 33 instead of i in 28 as in 1773. It may be hoped and believed that this decrease in the death-rate has been pro- duced, not merely by an influx of adults from elsewhere, but by causes akin to those to which Percival ascribed a part at least of the diminution of mortality in Manchester between 1756 and 1773. In 1768^ the year, as it chanced, after Percival's settle- ment in Manchester, and some time before the rise of the factory system, Arthur Young visited Manchester. It was an incidental visit paid during the course of his " Six Months' Tour in the Northern Counties " to investigate the state of their agriculture and agricultural population. Arthur turned aside to Manchester episodically, partly from a curiosity to see something of what was even then con- sidered a very rising and notable manufacturing town, partly that he might inspect the Duke of Bridgewater's much-talked-of canal operations at Worsley. Speaking of Manchester, Arthur says, " I enquired the effects of high or low prices of provisions, and found that in the former the manufacturers " — by whom he means what we should now call operatives — " were industrious, and their families easy and happy, but that in times of low prices the latter starved, for half of the time of the father was spent at the ale-house," — a statement which suggests another striking contrast be- tween the Manchester of then and of now. Five or six years later Percival noted that among the church and chapel goers of the country districts round Manchester, with the same climate and. the same manufactures, the death-rate was exactly one-half of that of Manchester itself, — a differ- ence which he attributed to the " luxury, irregularity, and intemperance of large towns." In the parish of Manchester 2 A 1 86 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES. of that day, he counted " 193 licensed houses for retailing spirituous and other liquors, and 64 in the other townships of the parish." In 1788, it appears that the population of Manchester and Salford was a mere 50,000. Eight years afterwards, however, when the inventions which made modern cotton-spinning what it is, when Hargreaves' spinning-jenny, Crompton's mule, and Arkwright's water- frame had fairly developed their productiveness, Manchester was, for those days, a great manufacturing town. The unregulated apprenticeship system was in full vigour of action, and Percival, who had long filled a principal posi- tion in the Manchester Infirmary, had ere this been sum- moned to report on the outbreak of fever among the apprentices at the first Sir Robert Peel's Radcliffe mill, — the event which, as has been already shown, primarily and ultimately produced the earliest of all factory bills, the Apprentices Act of 1802, a measure, it may be added, regarded by Percival as far from sufficiently stringent. In Manchester itself, with an expanding population, came overcrowding, while higher wages produced dissolute living among an uneducated population, which spent its earnings in ways not conducive to well-being and to health. The constant supply of labour from the country-districts concealed the ravages caused by avoidable disease, but at last contagious maladies broke out, which spared the rich as little as the poor, and then, indeed, the instinct of self- preservation roused the upper classes of Manchester from lethargy to exertion. Public meetings were held ; a local committee was appointed to institute enquiries, to suggest remedies, and to enforce them in conjunction with the authorities. This committee became in reality, as in name, a Board of Health, chiefly through the strenuous appeal made to it by Percival. In a document which is still extant, he called on the board and the authorities to THOMAS PERCIVAL. 1 8/ compel ventilation and cleanliness in the dwellings of the poor; to cleanse streets and remove nuisances ; to establish both special fever-wards and a house of recovery (our modern " convalescent hospital ") ; to have the cotton- factories inspected, and to procure returns of the condition, ages, hours of work, and so forth, of those employed in them, more particularly of the parish apprentices ; to limit the number and to regulate the internal economy of common lodging-houses ; to establish what he called " caravanseries" for the reception of those who came to Manchester, un- known and unrecommended, in quest of employment ; and last, not least, he insisted on the establishment of public baths. The most important of our modern sanitary, and some of the most important of our modern social, reforms were anticipated in the statement of the measures with which Percival energetically and not unsuccessfully urged the Manchester of 1796 to repress the diseases ravaging its population. Indeed, Percival may be regarded as one of the parents of factory legislation. In another document, also still extant, dated 25th January 1796 (six years before the first Sir Robert Peel introduced his Apprentices Bill), and addressed to the Manchester Committee, or Board of Health, then just formed, Percival drew up a series of resolutions on certain evils which had been developed by the growth of the factory system. These resolutions affirmed the disposition of children and others to catch and propa- gate contagious diseases, the injury to their health from long and close confinement, — especially the bad effects of the then general system of working through the night, — and the ignorance of every kind in which they were growing up. The last resolution went the length — a great one in those days — of recommending legislative interference with the con- ditions of factory labour. " From the excellent regulations," thus it ran, "which subsist in several cotton factories, it ap- 1 88 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES. pears that many of these evils may, in a considerable degree, be obviated ; and we are therefore warranted by experience, and are assured that we shall have the support of the liberal proprietors of these factories, in proposing an application for Parliamentary aid (if other methods appear not likely to effect the purpose), to establish a general system of laws for the wise, humane, and equal government of all such works." ^ Here, so far as one has been able to ascertain, is the first discoverable germ of modern factory legislation, and had Percival done nothing more than write those lines, his memory would deserve to be honoured in Lancashire and out of it. Be it noticed, moreover, that all these efforts and exertions of Percival seem to have sprung from a sense of duty, which warmed a man otherwise of serene, not to say cold, disposition, into something of a fervid energy. Percival's was not one of the ardent temperaments which impel many men, with time hanging heavy on their hands, to careers of public usefulness. Pie appears to have been a somewhat stately physician of the old school, who would have been perfectly happy practising his profession among the wealthier classes, experimenting, philosophising, and compiling and writing rather vapid books for young people. His public spirit seems really to have been developed out of a strong sense of duty. His son expresses a feeling of the kind when, referring to Percival's philanthropic schemes, the filial biographer says, in his own peculiar style : " His perseverance in accomplishing designs of this nature was prompted by a spirit of zeal and resolution which other occasions rarely excited, while the interest he continued to feel for their prosperity was more lively than a sentiment of benevolence usually betrays in the most sanguine cha- racter." 2 ^ History of the Factory Movement, p. 29. ^ Two names deserve mention as those of zealous fellow-wovkers 1 THOMAS PERCIVAL. I 89 For his efforts to forward the culture of Manchester, as well as to improve the physical and sanitary condition of its working population, a debt of gratitude is also due to Percival. He was in the habit of holding at his house weekly meetings for conversation on any topic which was not frivolous. These were attended by his own friends, in whom the principal inhabitants in the town were included, and by occasional strangers. Singular as it may seem, Manchester in those days had visitors, who came not only to inspect the manufacturing marvels of the place, but for purposes of classical study. One educational establishment with Pevcival in the estabhshment of the Manchester Board of Health. Dr. John Ferriar, who, like Percival, was one of the physi- cians of Manchester Infirmary, is otherwise remembered as the author of the "Illustrations of Sterne," a book full of the results of curious reading, and written to prove that the author of Tristram Shandy sedulously acted on Moliere's maxim, Je prends mon bien oil je le tivuvc. Dr. Ferriar was one of the founders of the Manchester Board of Health, — indeed, in his " Medical Histories," he claims to have been the first to recommend the establishment of an institution of the kind, and certainly he contributed greatly to its success, and laid down for its guidance, and for that of the Manchester police authorities, a useful code of sanitary reform and precaution. Another coadjutor of Percival meriting mention, was Thomas Butterworth Bayley, an affectionate memoir of whom he contributed to the Transactions of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society. This forgotten worthy was a country gentleman, of great public spirit and energy, who became chairman of the Lancashire Quarter Sessions. He zealously co-operated in the establishment of the Manchester Board of Health, and laboured for the improvement of the workhouses of the county. He also devoted much attention to the improvement of prisons and prison dis- cipline. After meeting with considerable opposition, he procured the erection, in 17S7, of what in those days was considered a "very com- modious and well- ventilated prison " for Manchester and Salford, the arrangements of which were praised by the philanthropic Howard. "By the unanimous vote of the magistrates" it was called after him the New ]!ayley, though careless or ignorant topographers spell it " New Baz'ley, " and thus, instead of commemorating the name of it." founder, it has been supposed to have been so designated in antithesis to the London Old Bailey. 190 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES. of the kind (that of the Rev. Ralph Harrison) was so famous that for its sake the first Marquis of Waterford, as he became (then, however, merely Earl of Tyrone), sent to Manchester his eldest son. Lord De La Poer, accompanied by a tutor, Charles De Polier, a cultivated Swiss, of whom there is an affectionate record from Percival's pen in an early volume of the Transactions of the Manchester Lite- rary and Philosophical Society. It was from the weekly meetings at Percival's house that this society took its rise. As the gatherings became larger and more interesting, the l)lace of meeting was removed to a tavern ; a few rules were drawn up; and at last, in 1781, the Literary and Philoso- phical Society of Manchester was formally instituted, with a local habitation of its own. Among the first of its mem- bers were Dr. Darwin, Priestley, Watson, Bishop of Llandaff, Josiah Wedgwood, and two famous foreigners, " Monsieur Lavoisier," the Newton of modern chemistry, and " Mr, Alexander Volta, professor of experimental philosophy at Como " (as he is styled in the original list), the inventor of the Voltaic pile. Percival was one of the first two joint- presidents, and on the death of his colleague he became sole president of the society, which, in the days of Joule and Angus Smith, worthily preserves the European reputa- tion which it gained in those of Dalton and of Henry, When the first publication of its memoirs was made, Per- cival wrote to Pitt, as Prime Minister, to ask leave to dedi- cate them to George HL, and in 1785 they appeared with a dedication, of which the opening words were, " To the King" — an exordium more impressive then than now. In his attempts to establish in Manchester two other institutions, Percival was not so successful, though at least one of them deserves grateful recognition, while the other contributed to the means of subsistence of a memorable and struggling cultivator of science. In 1785, Percival's THOMAS PERCIVAL. 191 alma mater as it were, the Warrington Academy, was clearly, and for various easily understood causes, on its last legs. In combination with " Protestant Dissenters " in Lancashire and elsewhere, Percival contrived to found an institution of the same kind in Manchester, which will always be remembered from the circumstance that during six years John Dalton was its "tutor in mathematics and natural philosophy." Like its Warrington predecessor, however, it did not permanently flourish. By 1802 it had fallen into a deep decline, for which change of air was pre- scribed, and it migrated to York. The second institution which Percival and his friends also managed to found in Manchester, but which enjoyed only a very brief existence, was a College of Arts and Sciences, intended for young men who, having finished their ordinary education, were about to "go into business." They were to attend lectures on mathematics, chemistry, the fine arts, and so forth, but above all on commerce and manufactures, their historj^, laws, and even ethics, at home and abroad. "After two winters, however, of unfavourable trial, the undertaking was found to decline, and was at length reluctantly abandoned." The voluntary principle proved to be insufiicient. The muni- ficence of an Owens was needed to establish a suitable Man- chester University. Percival's scheme, we are told, was " so approved by Dr. Franklin," that his friend, the American sage, is said " to have left a considerable sum of money for the establishment of a similar institution in America ; " but there is no trace of any such bequest in Franklin's published will. With the promotion of enterprises like these to fill up the intervals of his professional life, Percival's days flowed on equably, pleasantly, and profitably. The fame of his usefulness and abilities had been diffused far beyond the sphere in which they were immediately conspicuous. Many of the wise and distinguished in his own profession 192 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES. and out of it were among his correspondents : Lettsom and Heberden, Beattie and Parr ; Howard, the philanthropist, and Hannah More ; Robertson the historian, and Madame Necker ; Watson, Bishop of Llandafif, and Paley, to the last of whom Mrs. De Quincey's " infidel " referred his son when beset by the doubts which had prevented the father from going to Oxford ; but which did not prevent the younger Percival from becoming a clergyman of the Church of England.^ The chief drawback to his happiness in 1 In one of his letters to this son, Percival says in language which amply refutes the Opium Eater's insinuations : — "Your attachment to Butler's Analogy is very satisfactory to me. To no book am I undei so great obligations, for by the attentive perusal of it my full conviction of the truth of Christianity was restored." Percival's letter to Paley (dated Manchester, January 20, 1788), on his son's doubts or dubita- tions may be worth giving, as characteristic of the time, and exhibiting the position then occupied by that now slighted and neglected Arch- deacon of Carlisle. After apologies for troubling the great man, Percival proceeds: — "My eldest son, whom I intended for the profession of physic, by his residence at St. John's College, Cambridge, and connections in Cambridge, has had his views changed, and is now strongly inclined to go into the Church. But previous to his final decision he wishes to settle his mind on several important topics com- prehended in the articles of faith. The chapter on Religious Estab- lishments in your excellent system of Moral and Political Philosophy has had great weight with him, and he has this morning expressed to me an earnest desire to have the benefit of your personal instructions, on points so interesting to his future peace, prosperity, and usefulness. Is it possible for him to enjoy this singular privilege for the space of a few weeks ? I shall cordially acquiesce in any terms that you may pre- scribe, and with a grateful sense of obligation to you ' — which is rather delicately put. "I am a Dissenter," Percival adds, "but actuated by the same spirit of Catholicism which you possess. An establishment I approve, the Church of England in many respects I honour ; and should think it my duty to enter instantly into her communion, were the plan which you have proposed in your tenth chapter carried into execution." This is the chapter on Church Establishments, in which Paley recommends that the yoke and burden of tests and subscrip- tions should be made as easy and light as possible, and "adapted THOMAS PERCIVAL. 1 93 later years arose from defective eye-sight, caused, it is said, by his habit of constant reading in his carriage when driving about on his professional visits. The young men, however, who were admitted as pupils to be inmates of his house, and whose studies he directed, read to him and acted as his amanuenses — one of them, Dr. Henry, the father of the well-known chemist, with him in this way for five years, has left on record his keen sense of Per- cival's amiabiUty and kindness. Thomas Percival died at Manchester on the 30th of August 1804, in the sixty-fourth year of his age. A Latin epitaph by the mighty Dr. Parr is inscribed in the church at Warrington, his native place, where he was buried ; and over the president's chair in the hall of the Manchester Philosophical and Literary Society, a mural tablet was erected to his memory. A glowing panegyric on him was contributed a few weeks after his death to the pages of Sylvanus Urban, by Magee (already of the Atonement, but not yet Archbishop of Dublin), who had married a niece of Percival's, and knowing him well, admired him much. Percival is certainly a man who ought to figure prominently to the var)'ing sentiments and circumstances of the Church," (Src, ), vol. ii. (being vol. Ixxiii. of the Chetham Society's Publications). Mrs. Gordon's Christopher North; a Memoir of John Wilson, by his Daughter (Edinburgh, 1862). John Hill Burton, The Book- Himteri^(Xv!xh\xx^, 1862). Charles Knight's Passages of a Working Life during Half a Ceittury {London, 1864), &c. &c. \ Concerning Saier De Quincey (or Seher de Quinci), his Scotch mar- riage and possessions in Scotland, there are many controversial and other disquisitions in Notes and Queries, Fourth Series, vols, x., xi., and xii. THOMAS DE QUINCEY. "^"JCi dom of Winchester was revived by Edward II., and con- ferred on his ill-fated favourite, Hugh Le Despenser. The holder of this second earldom was not, however, in the least related to the holders of the first, and our De Quincey was altogether mistaken when he spoke of his alleged ancestors, " the Earls of Winchester," as " coming to grief," and of De Quinceys, purely imaginary " descendants from the guilty earl," whoever he may have been, projecting them- selves, as he phrases it, " by successive efforts, from the smoking ruins of the great feudal house ; stealthily through two generations creeping out of their lurking holes ; timidly, when the great shadows from the threatening throne had passed over, re-assuming the family name," and so forth. The De Quinceys, Earls of Winchester, did not " come to grief," and their peerage died out from natural causes. Whether collateral descendants or not of the De Quin- ceys, Earls of Winchester, temp. John and Henry III., the Opium Eater's modern progenitors were Quinceys without the De, and this aristocratic prefix was first resumed, or assumed, by himself. Thomas De Quincey's father, born about 1752, and who became a linen merchant in Man- chester, called himself plain Thomas Quincey. According to his son, he began life with a fortune of ;^6,ooo, and marrying a lady of station superior to his own, he em- barked in trade or commerce, not only because he was a man of active disposition, but that he might raise his in- come to a height commensurate with his wife's antecedents. As it happens, however, there is a record of him as engaged in trade before his marriage ; the record being neither more nor less than the newspaper-announcement of this impor- tant event in his biography. In November 17S0, when he was eight-and-twenty or so, a Manchester paper printed the following intimation : — " Wednesday last, was married, at St. George's, Queen Square, Mr. Thomas Quincey, linen 380 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES, merchant in this town, to Miss Penson, of North Street, London." ^ " My father," De Quincey writes in one of his autobiographic sketches, " was a merchant ; not in the sense of Scotland, where it means a retail dealer — one, for instance, who sells groceries in a cellar ; but in the English sense, a sense rigorously exclusive ; that is, he was a man engaged in foreign commerce, and no other ; therefore in wholesale commerce, and no other ; which last limitation of the idea is important, because it brings him within the benefit of Cicero's condescending distinction : " — Cicero, it is added in a note, once speaking " of trade as irredeem- ably base, if petty, but as not so absolutely felonious if wholesale." Unfortunately for this pretension of the Opium Eater's, there is the best evidence, the father's own to wit, that for three years after marriage he sold retail as well as wholesale. The following advertisement, sent to the Manchester newspaper, is " copied from his autograph : " — " Manchester, December 2, ^2,2^. Thomas Quincey, intend- ing very shortly to decline all retail trade, is now selling off on low Terms his Prints, Muslins, Table-Linens, Gauzes, Lutes, &c., of all sorts, with all his act Goods, of whatever kind, and Haberdashery Articles in general. N.B. — The Irish- Linen, Scotch, &c.. Trades in the Wholesale Line, he will continue as usual." ^ He was not a clever man, his son admits,* but he was an honest and even a scrupulous one. Occasionally, after his death, a stranger would say to the Opium Eater, " Sir, I knew your father ; he was the most upright man I ever met with in my life." He was in the West India trade, but only in its " honourable branches," the son is careful to add. He would have nothing to do with the trafific in negroes; and, indeed, after Clarkson's ^ R. W. Vrocter, A/emorMs 0/ Afanckesier S^reeis {Manchester, 1874), p. 261. ^ Admission- Register of Alanchester School, ii. 226. THOMAS DE QUINCE Y. 38 1 proclamation of a crusade against slavery, he " strictly abstained from the use of sugar," because a product of slave-labour, " in his own family." He possessed, too, some artistic and literary taste ; at least a small collection of paintings by old Italian masters was scattered about his house ; and his library, according to the same filial authority, included " the whole genuine literature both of England and Scotland for the preceding generation." The elder Quincey even wrote a book, a description of a tour in the Midland Counties, which is highly praised by his son, and the first form of which, after a long hunt in search of any form of it, does seem to have been at last discovered.^ ^ By Mr. James Crossley, of Manchester, wlio announced the dis- covery in the following communication to Notes and Qturies (November 20, 1875) •■— "De Quincev's Father: 'Tour in the Midland Counties IN lT]2.' — Who was the author of ' A Tour in the Midland Counties of England, performed in the Summer of 1772 (by T — Q — ),' which ap- peared in the Gentleman's Magazitie of 1774 (vol. xliv. p. 206, continued in four following numbers), and which, the editor tells us in a note, ' was the first production of the writer's pen?' I should at once have ascribed it, as the initials agree, to Thomas Quincey, the father of the Opium Eater, who published, his son tells us, a similar tour, but which, notwithstanding a long-continued quest by myself and others, has not yet turned up. As, however, he would only be nineteen when the tour was made, and twenty-one when it was printed in the Gentleman's Magazine, the doubt is whether the composition is exactly that which so young a person would be likely to have produced. The style would rather seem to indicate the writer to have been a man of mature years and experience. Still, this is not conclusive as an objection, as early acquaintance with the world and its business ripens the mind quite as much as advance of years. Thomas Quincey's success in mercantile pursuits — he died at the age of thirty-nine — and the codicils to his will, giving directions as to the carrying on and disposal of his business, are suflicient to show that he was by no means an ordinary person, and his son tells us that he had been a great traveller. The ' Tour in the Midland Counties' appears to have been made from London, to wliich the tourist returned on its conclusion. Thomas Quincey had not then 382 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES. It is not the production of a man of shining parts, but its writer evidently kept his eyes well about him, and occa- sionally philosophised on what he observed. The wife seems to have been not without character. Her father had "at one time held an office under the king," and was re- membered among his friends by " the magical versatility of his talents and his power of self-accommodation to all humours, tempers, and ages," characteristics inherited in some degree by his grandson, the Opium Eater. Of herself her son expressly records that she was "high-bred and polished," and that she " spoke and wrote English with settled in Manchester, and accordingly his name is not found in the Directories of 1772 and 1773. If the 'Tour' in the Gentletfian's Magazine was really written by him, the probability is that his son, though aware of the fact of his father having composed such a journal, did not know where it had appeared, otherwise it would be difficult to account for his having barely noticed the existence of a production in which he might have taken a just pride, and which would have afforded him a paternal peg which he might have hung many a digression and disquisition upon. ... I ought, perhaps, to mention that in the ' Tour ' the writer has a good deal to say in the description of Boston, in Lincolnshire, and I find in the will of Thomas Quincey that Henry Gee, of Boston, Merchant, was appointed one of his trustees, and that a legacy is given to ' his respected friend and kinsman John Oxenford,' who resided in that neighbourhood. "Jas. Crossley." Mr. Crossley's case is rather stronger than he seems to think it. The truth is that De Quincey did more than " barely notice the existence" of his father's little work, and, indeed, wrote of it and its scope with considerable exaggeration. But the passage in which this was done he pared down to next to nothing when he revised for the col- lective English (or Scotch) edition of his works his Autobiographic Sketches, which first appeared in Tait's Magazine. As will be occa- sionally noted hereafter, some interesting information, not to be found in the Autobiographic Sketches of the English editions, lies buried in the " Sketches of Life and Manners, from the Autobiography of an English Opium Eater," the first instalment of which was published in Tail for February 1834. THOMAS DE QUINCEY. 383 singular elegance," and in these respects the son resembled her also. Incidentally, it is discoverable that she was an affectionate and generous mother, and of strictly reli- gious principles, belonging to a school which was then being only revived in the Church of England, namely, the Evan- gehcal. With this devotional turn she combined a love of house-building, and the two tendencies combined to start her once on a rather strange tour in search of a site for a home : — " Taking with her," says De Quincey, " two servants and one of my sisters, my mother entered upon z.periplus, or systematic circumnaviga- tion of all England. . . . My mother's resolution was to see all England with her own eyes, and to judge for herself upon the qualifications of each county, each town (not being a bustling seat of commerce), and each village (having any advantages of scenery), for contributing the main elements towards a home that might justify her in building a house. The t^ualifications insisted on were these five — good medical advice somewhere in the neighbourhood, first-rate means of education, elegant (or what most people might think, aristocratic) society, agree- able scenery, and so far the difticulty was not insuperable in the way ot finding all four advantages concentrated. But my mother insisted on a fifth, which in those days insured the instant shipwreck of the entire scheme ; this was a Church of England parish clergyman, who was to be strictly orthodox, faithful to the Articles of our English Church, yet to these Articles as interpreted by Evangelical divinity. My mother's views were precisely those of her friend Mrs. Hannah More, of Wilber- force, of Henry Thornton, of Zachary Macaulay (father of the historian), and generally of those who were then known amongst sneerers as ' the Clapham Saints.' This one requisition it was on which the scheme foundered. And the fact merits recording as an exposition of the broad religious difference between the England of that day and of this. At present no difficulty would be found as to this fifth requisition. ' Evangelical ' clergj-men are now sown broad-cast ; at that period, there were not on an average above six or eight in each of the fifty-two counties " — a contrast worth noting. Such were the parents of Thomas De Quincey. He was their second son, and was born on the 5th of August 1785, at " The Farm," which he speaks of as " a pretty rustic 3S4 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES. dwelling, occupied by my father in the neighbourhood of Manchester." But six or seven years after his birth, the Quincey household migrated to Greenhay, as he spells it. Greenhay {Jiaie, hedge) had been built by his father in 1 79 1, under the controlling superintendence of his archi- tectural mother, and with its grounds and garden was then a solitary house, " a clear mile from the outskirts of Manchester," From this mansion of the Quinceys the Manchester suburb of Greenheys, according to the Opium Eater, derives its name. It was standing, " sadly shorn of its former beauties, in the year 1852, when it and its sur- rounding grounds, about three acres in extent, were razed, and became the site of hundreds of miserable dwellings, bounded by the modern Pigot Street on the one side, and Embden Street on the other." ^ The father's business was carried on in Market Street Lane, and in a warehouse of his own which was " absorbed in the improvement of Market Street under the Act of 182 1." 2 But the elder Quincey saw little or nothing of his family during what were his later and his second son's earlier years. He was then dying slowly of consumption, and he tried to escape the foe by taking refuge in southern lands and regions, in the West Indies, and on the coast of Devonshire. De Quincey's first remembrance of him was when, he himself being a child of about eight, his father returned to Greenhay to die. He languished for weeks upon a sofa, and from the " repose of manner" which already distinguished the little boy, his second son was a privileged visitor to him throughout his waking hours. " I was also present at his bedside " — the little boy, become a man of nearly fifty, remembered and wrote — " in the closing hour of his life, which exhaled quietly, amidst snatches of delirious conversation with some imaginary visitors. He ^ Admission- Register of Manchester Grammar School, ii. 226, ^ lb., p. 225. THOMAS DE QUINCEY. 385 died in the summer of 1793. leaving an unencumbered estate worth exactly ;/{^ 1,600 a year. Each of the boys was to have ;^i5o a year, and Tom's interests during his minority were to be cared for by four guardians. One of them, probably the most active of them, was the Rev. Samuel Hall, then apparently a curate in Salford, but afterwards the first incumbent of St. Peter's, Manchester. At the death of its head, the Quincey family con- sisted of the mother and six children, three girls and three boys, of whom Thomas was the second. Two daughters had died before their father. The death of the second of them happened when De Quincey was a boy of six, and, according to his own account, in a passage of his auto- biography, full of solemn and pathetic beauty, grief for this favourite and beloved sister, at her death a girl of nine, made a profound and lasting impression on his mind and heart. This was the clever sister to whom and to her precocious little brother Tom (their " combined ages," he says, " made no more at this period than a baker's dozen"). Dr. Percival, the medical attendant of the family, presented, as formerly mentioned,^ a copy of his " Father's Instructions." When the fact was recorded, the promise was made that it should be reverted to — and with sufficient reason, since thus it is possible to compare at least one small reality of De Quincey's childhood with the ideahzed representation of it given by him long afterwards in his autobiography. Goethe, in old age, writing memoirs of himself, frankly called them " Wahrheit und Dichtung," — Fact and Fancy, — for he knew that when memory seeks to recall from a long- vanished past, the incidents, the thoughts and feelings of early years, they become transfigured by the imagination. How much of fact and how much of fancy there is in De Quincey's autobiographic reminiscences it is 1 Ante, p. 175. 3c 386 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES. of course impossible to determine, but the contrast between the text of this one little story in Percival's compilation, and his poetic version of it in later years, is curious and in- structive. Here, from Percival's book, is the anecdote, of which De Quincey says in his autobiography that the impression made by it on himself and his sister was " deep and memorable." " My sister wept over it, and wept over the remembrance of it, and not long after carried its sweet aroma off with her to heaven ; while I, for rrfy part, have never forgotten it." Percival entitles it 'o^ "A GENEROUS RETURN FOR AN INJURY." " WTien the Great Conde commanded the Spanish army, and laid siege to one of the French towns in Flanders, a soldier being ill-treated by a general officer, and struck several times with a cane, for some dis- respectful words he had let fall, answered very coolly that he should soon make him repent of it. Fifteen days afterwards, the same general officer ordered the colonel of the trenches to find a bold and intrepid fellow to execute an important enterprise, for which he promised a reward of a hundred pistoles. The soldier we are speaking of, who passed for the bravest in the regiment, offered his services, and going with thirty of his comrades, whom he had the liberty to make choice of, he discharged a very hazardous commission with incredible courage and good-fortune. Upon his return, the general officer highly com- mended him, and gave him the hundred pistoles which he had promised. The soldier presently distributed them among his comrades, saying he did not serve for pay, and demanded only that if his late action seemed to deserve any recompense, he would make him an officer. ' And now, Sir,' adds he to the General, who did not know him, ' I am the soldier whom you abused so much fifteen days ago, and I then told you I would make you repent of it.' The General, in great admiration, and melting into tears, threw his arms around his neck, begged his pardon, and gave him a commission that very day." — Rollin?- Observe now^ how this bald little anecdote, as told by the late Monsieur Rollin, — once, but no longer, a classic of the English governess and her girl-pupils, — becomes expanded, transformed, and glorified in De Quincey's memory. ^ Percival's Works, i. 23. THOMAS DE QUINCEY. 387 " Here," he says, " is Dr. Percival's story " rendered into the " impassioned prose " of which De Quincey was so proud : — "A young officer (in what army, no matter) had so far forgotten himself, in a moment of irritation, as to strike a private soldier full of personal dignity (as sometimes happens in all ranks) and distinguished for his courage. The inexorable laws of military discipline forbade to the injured soldier any practical redress ; he could look for no retaliation by acts. Words only were at his command ; and in a tumult of indig- nation, as he turned away, the soldier said to his officer that he would 'make him repent it.' This, wearing the shape of a menace, naturally rekindled the officer's anger, and intercepted any disposition which might be rising within him towards a sentiment of remorse ; and thus the irritation between the two young men grew hotter than before. Some weeks after this, a partial action took place with the enemy. Suppose yourself a spectator, and looking down into a valley occupied by the two armies. They are facing each other, you see, in martial array. But it is no more than a skirmish which is going on ; in the course of which, however, an occasion suddenly arises for a desperate service. A redoubt, which has fallen into the enemy's hands, must be recaptured at any price, and under circumstances of all but hopeless difficulty. A strong party has volunteered for the service ; there is a ci-y for somebody to head them ; you see a soldier step out from the ranks to assume this dangerous leadership ; the party moves rapidly forward ; in a few minutes it is swallowed up from your eyes in clouds of smoke ; for one half-hour, from behind these clouds, you receive hieroglyphic reports of bloody strife ; fierce repeating signals, flashes from the guns, rolling musketry, and exulting hurrahs, advancing or receding, slackening or redoubling. At length all is over : the redoubt has been recovered ; that which was lost is found again ; the jewel which had been made captive is ransomed with blood. Crimsoned with glorious gore, the wreck of the conquering party is relieved, and at liberty to return. PVom the river you see it ascending. The plume- crested officer in command rushes forward, with his left hand raising his hat in homage to the blackened fragments of what was once a flag, whilst, with his right hand, he seizes that of the leader, though no more than a private from the ranks. That perplexes you not ; mystery you see none in that. For distinctions of order perish, ranks are con- founded, 'high and low,' are words without a meaning, and to wreck goes every notion or feeling that divides the noble from the noble, or the brave man from the brave. But wherefore is it that now, when suddenly they wheel into mutual recognition, suddenly they pause? 388 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES. This soldier, this officer — who are they ? O reader ! once before they had stood face to face. The soldier it is that was struck ; the officer it is that struck him. Once again they are meeting ; and the gaze of armies is upon them. If for a moment a doubt divides them, in a moment the doubt has perished. One glance exchanged between them publishes the forgiveness that is sealed for ever. As one who recovers a brother whom he had accounted dead, the officer sprang forward, threw his arms around the neck of the soldier and kissed him, as if he were some martyr glorified by that shadow of death from which he was returning; whilst, on his part, the soldier, stepping back and carrying his open hand through the beautiful motions of the military salute to a superior, makes this immortal answer — that answer which shut up for ever the memory of the indignity offered to him, even whilst for the last time alluding to it: 'Sir,' he said, 'I told you before that I would make you repent it.' " ^ An effective and striking bit of writing, in De Quincey's best narrative-style, but certainly this is noi " Dr. Percival's story." And the reader, or the writer, who studies De Quincey's autobiography to extract from it the truth about his life, whether outward or inward, must take into account the Opium Eater's habit of allowing fancy, as in the fore- going version of Rollin's anecdote, to magnify, transmute, and beautify fact. Yet some reminiscence of the fact was present in the autobiographer's mind. Probably he had not seen Percival's book since he was a child. He might easily have evolved a small romance without ever referring to Percival, and the reference proves in its own way that if his autobiography is not all fact, neither is it by any means all fancy. With no companions but younger sisters and brothers, the little De Quincey was growing up in that solitary and secluded mansion a shy, sensitive, and dreamy boy. Sud- denly he was made to feel the sway of a more vigorous will and temperament than his own, and was brought into rude contact with a fraction of the busy industrial world — so near 1 IVorA-s (Second Edinburgh edition of 1863-71), xiv. 125. THOMAS DE QUINCEV. 389 and yet so far — that lay beyond the pleasant grounds and gardens and green lanes of still Greenhay. With their father's death came the return home of little Tom's elder brother, some five or six years older than himself, and then, there- fore, about thirteen or fourteen. Master William Quincey, having been found at an earlier stage unmanageable at home, was sent to the Grammar School of Louth, in Lincoln- shire, from which he returned, full of boyish vigour of all kinds, to domineer over the inmates of the school-room and nursery at Greenhay. He was not a reading boy like his younger brother, who, to say nothing more of Dr. Percival's juvenile literature, had already fed upon a "vast nursery collection of books," — ■ among them a favourite '* Bible illustrated with many pictures " — and who had advanced so far in criticism as to challenge the preference given by Mrs. Barbauld to Sindbad and Aladdin over the other stories of the Arabian Nights. But the turbulent, mischief-loving, and despotic new-comer from the Lincolnshire school and its pugilistic encounters, was not without an odd intellec- tuality and imaginativeness of his own. He delivered lectures on Natural Philosophy in the nursery. He pro- pounded plans for walking, like the flies, on the ceiling, and was more successful in the manufacture of fire-balloons. He had opinions of his own on every subject, from the Thirty-nine Articles to necromancy, and frightened his brothers and sisters by the profundity of his knowledge of the world of ghosts. He wrote a tragedy called "Sultan Amurath," which he compelled them to perform, and in which the dramatis personae of each act were slaughtered off to make room for a new set in the next. By way of varying his amusements, he created an imaginary kingdom of which he was the ruler, and kindly permitted his younger brother to indulge a similar fancy. But the junior found that even in the realms of imagination he was domineered 390 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES. over by his imperious senior. His own kingdom was an island of Gombroon, the whereabouts of which he carefully concealed until he knew that of his brother's. When Will announced that the capital of his dominions was in the high latitude of 65 degrees north, Tom "smacked" his little island-kingdom 10 degrees south of the line, in the hope that his brother would not dream of fitting out a naval expedition against distant and insignificant Gombroon. But as soon as the whereabouts of Gombroon was fixed upon the map. Will discovered that though his metropolis was so far north, yet his sway extended southward some 80 or 90 degrees ! The acme of Tom's regal anxieties was reached when, after an accidental dip into the book in which that strange Scotchman, Lord Monboddo, asserted man to be a variety of the ape, and to have at one time possessed a tail, Will suddenly announced that Tom's Gombroonian subjects were still in the tail-wearing stage. There was no end to the ridicule and reproach which the elder brother heaped upon the younger for this backward condition of the Gombroonian development. Long after- wards De Quincey remembered and half-pathetically re- corded what he suffered on this account, and the cir- cumstantiality of the record goes to prove that the little boy of eight or nine, who could thus torment himself, must have been already morbidly sensitive. These were merely mental torments, but physical pains and penalties v/ere added by the enfa7it terrible of an elder brother to embitter poor Tom's existence. The two boys went daily from Greenhay to Salford, where lived their tutor, the Rev. Mr. Hall, of whom mention has been made as one of Tom's guardians. De Quincey's own account of the circumstances out of which this new trouble arose is worth giving for its topographical and in some degree for its THOMAS DE QUINCE Y. 391 social interest. He is describing Manchester as it was in 1792, or thereabouts : — "Greenhay, a country-house, newly built by my father, at that time was a clear mile from the outskirts of Manchester ; but in after years Manchester, throwing out the tentacula of its vast expansion, absolutely enveloped Greenhay ; and for anything I know the grounds and gardens which then insulated the house may have long disappeared. Being a modest mansion, which (including hot walls, ofifices, and gardener's house) had cost only six thousand pounds, I do not know how it should have risen to the distinction of giving name to a region of that great town — however, it has done so ; ^ and at this time, therefore, after changes so great, it will be difficult for the habitue of that region to understand how my brother and myself could have a solitary road to traverse between Greenhay and Princess Street, then the termination on that side of Manchester. But so it was, Oxford Street, like its namesake in London, was then called the Oxford Road ; and during the cur- rency of our acquaintance with it, arose the first three houses in its neighbourhood ; of which the third was built for the Rev. S. H." — Samuel Hall — "one of our guardians, for whom his friends had also built the Church of St. Peter's — not a bowshot from the house. At present, however, he resided in Salford, nearly two miles from Greenhay ; and to him we went over daily for the benefit of his classical instructions. One sole cotton- factory had then risen along the line of Oxford Street, and this was close to a bridge, which also was a new creation ; for pre- viously all passengers to Manchester went round by Garrat. This factory became to us the ojjicina gentium, from which swarmed forth those Goths and Vandals that continually threatened our steps ; and this bridge became the eternal arena of combat, we taking care to be on the right side of the bridge for retreat, i.e., on the town side, or the country side, accordingly as we were going out in the morning, or returning in the afternoon. Stones were the implements of warfare ; and by continual practise both parties became expert in throwing them. "The origin of the feud it is scarcely requisite to rehearse, since the 1 In one of those notes — of which De Quincey was so fond, — ex- panding, qualifying, or illustrating his text, he adds: "Greenheys with a slight variation in the spelling, is the name given to that district of which Greenhay formed the original nucleus. Probably it was the solitary situation of the house which (failing any other grounds of denomination) raised it to this privilege." 392 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES. particular accident which began it was not the tnie efficient cause of cur long warfare, but simply the casual occasion. The cause lay in our aristocratic dress. As children of an opulent family, where all pro- visions were liberal, and all appointments elegant, we were uniformly well dressed ; and in particular, we wore trousers (at that time unheard of, except among sailors), and we also wore Hessian boots— a crime that could not be forgiven in the Lancashire of that day, because it ex- pressed the double offence of being aristocratic and being outlandish. We were aristocrats, and it was vain to deny it ; could we deny our boots? whilst our antagonists, if not absolutely sattsculoties, were slovenly and forlorn in their dress, often unwashed, with hair totally neglected, and always covered with flakes of cotton. Jacobins they were not," — a remark worth noting, — "as regarded any sympathy with the Jacobinism that then desolated France ; for, on the contrary, they detested everything French, and answered with brotherly signals to the cry of 'Church and King,' or, 'King and Constitution.' But, for all that, as they were perfectly independent, getting very high wages, and these wages in a mode of industry that was then taking vast strides ahead, they contrived to reconcile this patriotic anti-Jacobinism with a personal Jacobinism of that sort which is native to the heart of man, who is by natural impulse (and not without a root of nobility, though also of base envy) impatient of inequality, and submits to it only through a sense of its necessity, or under a long experience of its benefits. "It was on an early day of our new tyrociniu??i, or perhaps in the very first, that, as we passed the bridge, a boy happening to issue from the factory sang over to us derisively ' Hulloa, Bucks ! ' In this the reader may fail to perceive any atrocious insult commensurate to the long war which followed. But the reader is wrong. The word 'dandies,' which was what the villain meant, had not then been born, so that he could not have called us by that name, unless through the spirit of prophecy. Buck was the nearest word at hand in his Man- chester vocabulary ; he gave all he could, and let us dream the rest. But in the next moment he discovered our boots, and he consummated his crime by saluting us as ' Boots ! Boots ! ' My brother made a dead stop, surveyed him with intense disdain, and bade him draw near that he might 'give his flesh to the fowls of the air.' The boy declined to accept this liberal invitation, and conveyed his answer by a most contemptuous and plebeian gesture, upon which my brother drove him in with a shower of stones." ^ This was the young De Quincey's introduction to Man- ^ Wo}-ks, xiv. 48. THOMAS DE QUINCEY. 393 Chester Industrialism and the factory system. The quiet, dreamy, sensitive little boy had no taste for encounters with the rude sons of the mill, but his impetuous and aggressive brother insisted on his active alliance, offensive and de- fensive, and daily he had to assist in a battle of which " stones, fragments of slate, and a reasonable proportion of brick-bats were the weapons." Thrice he was captured by the foe ; once he made his escape ; the second time he was dismissed with kicks and an insolent message to his brother, who reviled him for transmitting it ; a third time he was delivered into the custody of the girls of the factory, who connived at his flight. At last, one of the boys' guardians interfered. He happened to be a magistrate, and thus to possess some weight with the proprietors of the factory. But the juvenile mill-hands were so independent of em- ployers, and so careless of their displeasure, that the only means discoverable for putting an end to the warfare was an alteration of the hours at which the two young gentlemen came and went between Greenhay and Salford. Even this arrangement was proving ineffective for the preservation of the peace, when the elder of the brothers was summoned away to a distance. Among William Quincey's accomplishments was that of drawing. Some of his sketches were shown to De Lotherbourg, the academician, who pronounced them promising. With a fee of a thousand guineas, at least so says De Quincey, he was sent as a pupil to the artist, in whose house at Hammersmith he died of typhus at seventeen. The news of his death does not seem to have been received by his junior with any of the transcendent grief which De Quincey represents himself to have felt at the death of his elder sister, and a reference to "horrid pugilistic brothers" once occurs in his autobiography. The daily combats with factory lads may not have been agreeable to the sensitive boy, but a little, not too much, of what is called roughing it 3 D 394 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES. at a public school, would probably have done him good then and in after life. When he did go to a public school, it was not a whole- some ordeal to which he was exposed. He was placed at the Grammar School of Bath, to which town, cetat. 13, he migrated with his mother and her household. De Quincey had made progress under the Rev. Samuel Hall, though he speaks of the first incumbent of St. Peter's as a dull man, and remembered sadly when he wrote his autobiography, his weekly task of having to reproduce every Monday to the best of his ability the sermon which his clerical tutor preached on the Sunday. His aptitude for learning was great, and if it was only later that he became a good Grecian, his skill in Latin verse-making was already so con- siderable, that the master of the Bath school used to re- proach his bigger and biggest boys with being outdone by this little fellow, who, with his diminutive stature, looked even younger than he was. The seniors resented the comparison, and made poor De Quincey's school-life very uncomfortable to him. After a year or two he had to leave in consequence of an accident, which led the doctors to fear that his skull was fractured. During his illness his mother read to him Hoole's Tasso, and he first read for himself the Paradise Lost, of which great poem his profound admiration and knowledge are visible throughout his writings. When he was well again, some adult local admirers asked that he might be allowed to return to the school where he had dis- tinguished himself. " But," says De Quincey, " it illustrates my mother's moral austerity, that she was shocked at my hearing compliments to my own merits, and was altogether disturbed at what doubtless these gentlemen expected to see received with maternal pride. She decHned to let me continue at the Bath school; and I went to another, at Winkfield, in the county of Wilts, of which the chief THOMAS DE QUINCE Y. 395 recommendation lay in the religious character of the master." At Winkfield, under its religious master, De Quincey remained about a twelvemonth, and of his experiences there his autobiography contains no record. Then, in his fifteenth year, the schoolboy was suddenly admitted to glimpses of the great world, and brought into contact more or less close with people of rank and fashion. He received an invitation to accompany, on a visit to Ireland during the summer and autumn, a "young friend" of his own age, Lord Westport, the son of Lord Altamont, afterwards first Marquis of Sligo. Of the origin of the friendship between the son of the Manchester linen merchant and the young Irish nobleman, De Quincey simply says : " My acquaint- ance with Lord Westport was of some years' standing. My father, whose commercial interests led him often to Ireland, had many friends there. One of these was a country gentleman connected with the west, and at his house I first met Lord Westport." Lord Westport was at Eton, and in the spring of 1800 De Quincey went to join him there. The young nobleman's mother was a daughter of the great Admiral, Earl Howe, and was intimately known to the royal family, and Lord Westport at Eton was therefore favoured with the special notice of George III. at Windsor. During one of their walks in the grounds of Frogmore, the two boys were amusing themselves throwing pebbles almost when the King came upon them. After a little conversa- tion with Lord Westport, the good-natured monarch spoke to his companion, and was doubtless amused when, in reply to the question whether the Quinceys had settled in England on the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, the boy plunged into a genealogical account of his family, asserting with some eagerness that they were not French, but had come to England at the Conquest, and quoting 39^ LANCASHIRE WORTHIES. Robert of Gloucester in proof of their mediaeval eminence. In May, De Quincey saw for the first time, though but for a day (most of it given to St. Paul's), the mighty London which he was to revisit under very different circumstances. In June the two young friends were with Lord Altamont in Dublin. Ue Quincey's stay in the Irish capital was made at an interesting time, for those were the last days of the legislative independence of Ireland ; and with Lord Altamont for his host, he saw everybody and everything worth seeing. He was present in the Irish House of Lords on the death-day of the Irish Parliament, when the Union Bill received the Royal assent. The observant boy remarked with wonder at the time, and recorded long years afterwards, the curious fact that there was not the slightest sign of excitement in the crowd of legislators and privileged spectators when the fateful words le rot le veult tolled the knell of Ireland's separate legislation. " The man who presented his robes to Lord Altamont seemed to me," he says, " of all whom I saw on that day, the one who wore the face of deepest depression. But whether this indicated the loss of a lucrative situation, or was really disinterested sorrow, growing out of a patriotic trouble at the knowledge that he was now officiating for the last time, I could not guess." From Dublin, De Quincey accompanied Lord Westport and Lord Altamont to the family seat in county Mayo, and saw a good deal of the domestic life of the old Irish resident nobility, an experience novel and interesting. At Westport House he found himself near the centre of the second Irish insurrection of 1798, and only eleven miles from Castle- bar, to which town the French expeditionary force, sent under General Humbert to assist the rebels, had "ad- dressed their very earliest efforts." " Records there were on every side, and memorials even in our bed- THOMAS DE QUINCEY. 39/ rooms, of this French visit; for at one time they had occupied Westport House in some strength." The con- versation often turned on the doings of those eventful days, and the intelligent and inquisitive young gentleman learned all that was to be learned about them from people some of whom had witnessed the insurrection, while others of them had played a part in it. The events recorded in the chapters of his autobiography devoted to the two Irish insurrections of 1798 lie away from the story of De Quincey's life, but his chronicle of them combines vigour and picturesqueness with all that subtle analysis in the presentment of detail which characterises him as a nar- rator. From the west of Ireland, with its jovial gentry and smouldering ashes of insurrection, the young De Quincey passed as a guest to Laxton, a country-house in Northamp- tonshire. One of his sisters was there, visiting a certain Lady Carbery, a young and beautiful peeress, who was an intimate friend of his mother's, and who had known him- self when a child. In Ireland he had, of course, played a part subordinate to his young friend, Lord Westport. At Laxton he found himself somebody. When he arrived, Lord Carbery was absent, and Lady Carbery had for guests a Lord and Lady Massey. Lord Massey, an Irish peer, had been roused from a life of ennui and torpor by an attachment to the fair young Irishwoman whom he married, and whose fascinations of person, disposition, and manner, exercised after marriage the same spell on him as before it. But there were no males to keep him company and to amuse him in those two terrible post- prandial hours during which custom banished the ladies from the dining-room. De Quincey had no sooner entered the house than Lady Carbery, who was deeply attached to Lady Massey, took him into her confidence, and 39S LANCASHIRE WORTHIES. asked him to entertain, in the intellectual sense of the word, the young nobleman after dinner. The young gentleman cheerfully consented to do his best. His Irish visit had rubbed off some of his shyness, and sup- plied him with topics of conversation interesting to an Irish peer. " I could talk," he says, " upon innumerable subjects," and "with the aid of three or four glasses of wine" he made himself an agreeable companion. From amusing his fellow-guest De Quincey took to instructing his fair hostess. His mother had made Lady Carbery religious after her own fashion, and she and her young friend were soon engaged in theological discussion. One great advantage the boy had over the woman in these friendly debates. He knew the original language of the New Testament, and Lady Carbery willingly accepted his offer to teach it her. The needful books were ordered from Stamford, and under the guidance of her youthful tutor she became an adept in New Testament Greek. He was urging on her the pleasure which she would derive from reading Herodotus in the original, when Lord Car- bery appeared on the scene, and De Quincey left it. His guardians had decided that he should enter the Manchester Grammar School, and try for one of those exhibitions at Brasenose, which were open to pupils of three years' standing at Bishop Oldham's Foundation. Each exhi- bition yielded jQ^o a year, and this would have raised De Quincey's patrimonial income of ^£"150 to ;^2oo at Oxford. There is some justice in De Quincey's complaint that the proposed arrangement ought to have been tried when he was younger. He was now half-way between fifteen and sixteen, and he would remain a school-boy until he was half-way between eighteen and nineteen. After his free and quasi- virile life in Ireland and Northamptonshire, his soul sickened at the thought of the Manchester Grammar THOMAS DE QUINCEY. 399 School. To it, however, he was consigned, and after an examination, he was placed in the highest class. The head master, whose boarder he became, was not the man to reconcile him to his new lot. Mr. Lawson was a con- scientious, a too conscientious, teacher. He cut down the hours traditionally allowed for meals and recreation, and added them to school-time. De Quincey's health suffered ; — though his organisation was frail, yet in ordinary circum- stances and with plenty of exercise, he never knew illness — but at the Manchester Grammar School, according to his account, exercise was out of the question. As the months rolled on, the state both of his body and mind rendered the school insufferably repulsive. In some respects, on the other hand, there was much to make his new school- life pleasant. He had a room to himself; his mother presented him with an admission to a Manchester hbrary, on the literary stores of which he fastened with keen enjoy- ment; and he was fortunate in his school-fellows of his own age or standing. One of his chief friends among them — the "G." of his autobiography — was the amiable and excellent Gilbert, afterwards Bishop of Chichester. In his retrospect, moreover, of those days, and of the older or riper among his school-fellows, De Quincey lays stress on the rather striking as well as creditable fact, that the reproach to which the training given and the studies pur- sued at most other public schools were liable — that, namely, of a neglect of our own literature — could not be brought against the Manchester Grammar School. At this school, indeed, he says, speaking of himself and his companions : — " It happened that most of us sought for the ordinary subjects of our conversational discussions in literature, viz., in our own native literature. Here it was that I learned to feel a deep respect for my new school-fellows — deep it was then, and a larger experience has made it deeper. I have since known many literaiy men ; men whose 400 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES. profession was literature, and who sometimes had with some cnc special section or little nook of literature an acquaintance critically minute. But amongst such men I have found but three or four who had a knowledge which came as near to what I should consider a comprehensive knowledge, as really existed amongst these boys col- lectively. What one boy had not, another had ; and thus, by con- tinual intercourse, the fragmentary contributions of one being integrated by the fragmentary contributions of others, gradually the attainments of each separate individual became, in some degree, the collective attainments of the whole senior common room. It is true, undoubt- edly, that some parts of literature were inaccessible to boys at school — for instance, Froissart in the old translation by Lord Berners, now more than three centuries old ; and some parts were to the young essentially repulsive. But measuring the general qualifications by that standard which I have since found to prevail amongst professional litterateurs, I felt more respectfully towards the majority of my senior school-fellows than ever I had fancied it possible that I should find occasion to feel towards any boys whatever. My intercourse with those amongst them who had any conversational talents greatly stimu- lated my intellect. " ^ It is a pity that De Quincey, with his passion for discus- sive philosophising, did not broach a theory to account for this striking difference between the Manchester school and public schools elsewhere. However, it is creditable to him that, with all his classical scholarship, he ever upheld the greatness of our own rich and noble literature, and main- tained its superiority as a whole to that of Greece and Rome, It was while at the Manchester school that De Quincey first made the acquaintance of two, then new and young, English writers, who both personally and intellectually were destined to affect his career most powerfully. In 1798 had appeared, anonymously, the first edition of the "Lyrical Ballads," Wordsworth's (chiefly) and Coleridge's, a volume which opened with " The Ancient Mariner," and closed with the " Lines written a itw miles above Tintern Abbey." ^ Confessions of an Opium- Eater, in vol. i. of Works (edition of 1863), p. 57- THOMAS DB QUINCRY. 4OI The sale of the work was so inconsiderable, that when its publisher, Cottle, the Bristol bookseller, transferred his copyrights to the Longmans, the value of this one copyright was formally estimated as "nil"/ By degrees, however, the new poetic and philosophic music found an audience, fit, though few, and in 1801 a second edition was called for. A copy of it fell into the hands of the schoolboy De Quincey, and acted on his susceptive mind almost like a revelation. Deep was his disappointment when, at this time, reading it aloud, " with a beating heart," to Lady Car- bery, she scoffed at the Ancient Mariner as an " old quiz" ! For De Quincey was cheered during his stay at the Man- chester Grammar School with the occasional society of the fair peeress who had been his pupil at Laxton. A former governess and dear friend of Lady Carbery's, who had settled near her, and was afflicted with some painful disease, decided on going to Manchester for a time to profit by the professional advice of one of its denizens, Charles White, at this time the most eminent surgeon in the North of England. Lady Carbery and the Laxton household, Lord and Lady Massey included, migrated with her to Man- chester, — a town, according to De Quincey, little fitted then for the reception of aristocratic visitors. "Gloomy they " — the streets of Manchester — "were at that time, mud below, smoke above, for no torch of improvement had yet ex- plored the ancient habitations of the Lancashire capital. Elsewhere ^ ^ " Elsewhere " is in the "Confessions of an English Opium-Eater " (p. 45), where, speaking of the alumni of the Manchester Grammar School, De Quincey says : "I had lived familiarly with boys gathered from all quarters of the island at the Bath Grammar School, and for some time (when visiting Lord Altamont at Eton) with boys of the highest aristocratic pretensions. At Bath and at Eton, though not equally, there prevailed a tone of higher polish ; and in the air, speech, de- portment of the majority, could be traced at once a premature know- ledge of the world. They had indeed the advantage over my new 3e 402 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES. I have expressed the inexhaustible admiration which I cherish for the moral qualities, the unrivalled energy and perseverance, of that native Lancashire population, as yet not much alloyed with Celtic adulteration. My feelings towards them are the same as were eloquently and impres- sively avowed by the late eminent Dr. Cooke Taylor, after an official inquiry into their situation. But in those days the Manchester people realised the aspiration of the noble Scythian ; not the place it was that glorified them, but they that glorified the place. No great city (which technically it then was not, but simply a town or large village) could pre- sent so repulsive an exterior as the Manchester of that day. Lodgings of any sort could with difficulty be obtained, and at last only by breaking up the party. The poor suffering lady, with her two friends. Lady Carbery and my mother, hired one house. Lord and Lady Massey another, and two others were occupied by attendants, — all the servants, except one lady's maid, being every night separated by a quarter of a mile from their mistresses. " ^ Most welcome to De Quincey was the presence of the beautiful and friendly peeress, with her conversation " so friends in graceful self-possession ; but, on the other hand, the best of them suffered by comparison with these Manchester boys in the qualities of visible self-restraint and of self respect. At Eton high rank was distributed pretty liberally, but in the Manchester school the parents of many boys were artizans, or of that rank ; some even had sisters that were menial servants ; and those who stood higher by pretensions of birth and gentle blood, were at the most the sons of rural gentry or of clergymen. And I believe that, with the exception of three or four brothers, belonging to a clergyman's family at York, all were, like myself, natives of Lancashire, At that time my experience was too limited to warrant me in expressing any opinion, one way or other, upon the relative pretensions — moral and intellectual — of the several provinces in our island. But since then I have seen reason to agree with the late Dr, Cooke Taylor, in awarding the pre-eminence, as regards energy, power to face suffering, and other high qualities, to the natives of Lancashire, Even a century back they were distinguished for the culture of refined tastes. In musical skill and sensibility no part of Europe, with the exception of a few places in Germany, could pretend to rival them ; and, accordingly, even in Handel's days, but for the chorus-singers from Lancashire, his oratorios must have remained a treasure, if not absolutely sealed, at any rate most imperfectlj re- vealed." ^ Works, xiv, 429. THOMAS DE QUINCEY. 403 bold, SO novel, and so earnest," and every afternoon he was allowed to spend some hours in her drawing-room. But even her society did not cure his dispiritment and depres- sion, as one little incident testifies. During the stay of the Laxton party in Manchester occurred a Christmas, and according to old custom there was an oratorical display at the Grammar School on the breaking up for the holidays. As one of the three boys who composed the head class, De Quincey was called on to take part in the proceedings, and Lady Carbery, with a large party of friends, was among the auditors. According to his own account, he had to recite a copy of Latin verses on the recent capture of Malta, Melita Britannis subacta} His declamation was received with loud applause, but long afterwards he remembered how ** furious" was his "disgust," and how "frantic" was his " inner sense of shame at the childish exhibition." Morbid, indeed, must have been the state of mind of the clever boy of fifteen, when feelings like these quenched the natural glow of juvenile vanity. In after-years he came to the conclusion that much of his suffering might have been re- moved by the timely administration of a few doses of calomel. But the medical adviser, with whom his guardians allowed him to run up a bill, was an aged apothecary who dosed him with drastic medicines, and these merely aggra- vated his complaint. When Lady Carbery and the Laxton household left Manchester, De Quincey was reduced to despair. He opened negotiations with one of his guardians for a removal from school ; but the guardian thought, not unnaturally, that as the young gentleman had completed ^ Here, again, the fact of the declamation is confirmed by evidence, while, in regard to its theme, memory had played him false. "At the annual speech day in December iSoo, Thomas De Quincey took part, reciting a Latin exercise on this text, ' Dolor ipse disertum fecerat.' " — Admission- Register of Manchester Grammar School, ii. 225. 404 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES. one half of the term requisite for an exhibition, he had better stay out the other half, unless he had some more valid excuse for departure than a morbid mood of mind or a hability to bilious attacks. When this last hope of release from the bondage of school was destroyed, De Quincey resolved to " elope," as he phrases it, — in plain English, to run away. At first his unrest pointed in the direction of the Lakes, where was the abode of his idolised Words- worth. But on reflection he decided not to present him- self for the first time to the poet in the undignified character of a runaway and impecunious schoolboy. Ultimately he fixed on North Wales as his destination, partly because his way to it lay through Chester, where lived his mother, whom he was unwilling to alarm by disappearing into space, leaving not a trace behind. She had grown tired of Bath, and had migrated to Chester, and St. John's Priory, without the walls of the ancient city. Having bought the Priory, she had added to it, with her usual love for building, and was hving there with her younger children and a brother, a retired East Indian officer. Her son's decision taken, he wrote to Lady Carbery, asking for a loan of five guineas, and after a week he received a letter enclosing ten. A rather curious incident further helped to drive him Chester-wards. Through some mistake of the post-oflfice, he received a letter addressed " A Monsieur De Quincey, Chester." It contained a draft for forty guineas, and, as afterwards appeared, was intended for a French e7nigre at Chester, unknown to the postal authorities there, who accordingly forwarded it to a De Quincey whom they did know of. To return it to the Chester Post-office was an additional inducement to make for the city on the Dee, and early on a July morning of 1802, before the Lawson household was astir, the young gentleman bade a silent and secret farewell to the Man- chester Grammar School, and launched on a career of THOMAS DE QUINCE Y. 405 Strange vicissitude and adventure. " I set off on foot," he says, " carrying a small parcel with some articles of dress under my arm, a favourite English poet in one pocket, and an odd volume, containing about one-half of Canter's Euripides, in the other." Of course the news of her son's flight reached his mother some time before the truant could arrive at Chester on foot. On his arrival there, he managed to have the \vrongly- delivered letter, with its enclosure, handed over to the postal authorities, and he despatched a note to one of his sisters asking her to meet him in the ruins of the near Priory which gave its name to her home. Instead of the sister, who was off in a post-chaise to the Lake country in search of her vanished brother, the " bronzed Bengal uncle " kept the appointment, and Master Tom was soon in the presence of his anxious and austere mother. Fortunately for him, the uncle was a man not only of the world, but of "even morbid activity," who rather sympathised with his nephew's preference of locomotion among the Welsh mountains to school and school-books. At his in- stance the mother consented that the young gentleman should be allowed a guinea a week to make a pedestrian tour in Wales. The uncle pleaded for a larger allowance, but the mother refused, urging, " most reasonably," De Quincey admitted in his maturer years, that an increase " would be only a proclamation to his two younger brothers that rebellion bore a premium, and that mutiny was the ready road to ease and comfort." Behold the young De Quincey, then, just entering his eighteenth year, permitted to taste the sweets of perfect freedom amid the beautiful scenery of North Wales ! For a few weeks he lived in lodgings at Bangor, the Bishop of which, as it happened, was Master of Brazenose, the very Oxford college to which De Quincey might have gone had 406 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES. he remained at the Manchester Grammar School. His Bangor landlady had been in the Bishop's service, and in the course of condescending conversation with her, his lordship warned her to be careful to whom she let her lodgings, and hinted that her young lodger might be an adventurer. The good woman reported the conversation in a style too matter-of-fact for the taste of De Quincey, who left the house forthwith. In his autobiography he speculates extensively on the happy results that might have followed if he had written the good Bishop an expostula- tory letter in Greek, which must have attracted the prelate's attention to the writer and his story, and perhaps have pro- cured him his patronage then and there, and afterwards at Oxford. However, he did not write the Greek letter, and he quitted Bangor for Carnarvon and " Snowdonia," in which region, on his guinea a week, he led for some time a delightful and rambling life, thus, with the long-vanished and enviable tourist-aspects of the Principality during the first years of the century, pleasantly and characteristically described in the " Confessions " : — "There were already, even in these days of 1802, numerous inns, erected at reasonable distances from each other, for the accommodation of tourists, and no sort of disgrace attached in Wales, as too generally upon the great roads of England, to the pedestrian style of travelling. In- deed, the majority of those whom I met as fellow-tourists in the quiet little cottage-parlours of the Welsh posting-houses were pedestrian travellers. All the way from Shrewsbury, through Llangollen, Llanwrst, Conway, Bangor, then turning to the left at right angles through Carnarvon, and so on to Dolgelly (the chief town of Merionethshire), Tan-y-Bwlch, Harlech, Barmouth, and through the sweet solitudes of Cardiganshire, or turning back sharply towards the English border through the gorgeous wood scenery of Montgomeryshire — everywhere at intermitting distances of twelve to sixteen miles, I found the most comfortable inns. One fea- ture, indeed, of repose in all this chain of solitary resting-houses, viz., the fact that none of them rose above two stories in height, was due to the modest scale on which the travelling system of the Principality had moulded itself in correspondence to the call of England, which THOMAS DE QUINCE Y. 407 then (but be it remembered this then was in 1802, a year of peace) threw a very small proportion of her vast migratory population annually into this sequestered channel. No huge Babylonian centres of com- merce towered into the clouds on these sweet sylvan routes ; no hurri- canes of haste, or fever-stricken armies of horses and flying chariots, tormented the echoes in these mountain recesses. And it has often struck me that a world-wearied man, who sought for the peace of monasteries separated from their gloomy caj^tivity — peace and silence such as theirs, combined with the large liberty of Nature— could not do better than revolve amongst these modern inns in the five northern Welsh counties of Denbigh, Montgomery, Carnarvon, Merioneth, and Cardigan. Sleeping, for instance, and breakfasting at Carnarvon ; then by an easy nine-mile walk, going forwards to dinner at Bangor ; thence to Aber — nine miles — or to Llanberis ; and so on for ever, accomplishing seventy to ninety or one hundred miles in a week. This, upon actual experiment, and for week after week, I found the most delightful of lives. Here was the eternal motion of winds and rivers, or of the Wandering Jew liberated from the persecution which compelled him to move, and turned his breezy freedom into a killing captivity. Happier life I cannot imagine than this vagrancy, if the weather were but toler- able, through endless successions of changing beauty, and towards evening a courteous welcome in a pretty rustic home, that, having all the luxuries of a fine hotel (in particular some luxuries that are almost sacred to Alpine regions), was at the same time liberated from the in- evitable accompaniments of such hotels in great cities or at great travel- ling stations, viz. , the tumult and the uproar. "Life on this model was but too delightful ; and to myself especially, that am never thoroughly in health unless when having pedestrian exer- cise to the extent of fifteen miles at the most, and eight to ten miles at the least. Living thus, a man earned his daily enjoyment. But what did it cost ? About half-a-guinea a day, whilst my boyish allowance was not a third of this. The flagrant health — health boiling over in fiery rapture — which ran along side by side with exercise on this scale, whilst all the while from morning to night I was inhaling mountain air, soon passed into a hateful scourge " — presumably from the costly appe- tite thus produced. "Perquisites to servants and a bed would have absorbed the whole of my weekly guinea. My policy therefore was, if the autumnal air were warm enough, to save this expense of a btd and the chamber-maid by sleeping amongst ferns and furze upon a hill-side ; and perhaps with a cloak of sufficient weight as well as compass, or an Arab's burnoose, this would have been no great hardship. But then in the day-time what an oppressive burden to carry ! So perhaps it was as well that I had no cloak at all. I did, however, for some weeks 408 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES. try the plan of carrying a canvas tent, matnufactured by myself, and not larger than an ordinary umbrella, but to pitch this securely I found difficult, and on windy nights it became a troublesome companion. As winter drew near, this bivouacking system became too dangerous to attempt. Still one may bivouack decently, barring rain and wind, up to the end of October. And I counted, on the whole, that in a fort- night I spent nine nights abroad. " ^ Of congenial society De Quincey found no lack among the tourists who lingered in and about Snowdonia, and who were interested by the conversation of the polished, well- read, and reflective young gentleman. Indeed, during these rambles it was that De Quincey, brought into commune with all sorts of minds, developed and cultivated the singular col- loquial powers for which he afterwards became famous. One of his temporary companions, a " Mr. De Haren,"an accom- plished young German, who had held a commission in the British navy, even gave him some lessons in German, and excited his curiosity respecting such great Germans as Kant and Jean Paul Richter, whose names he then heard for the first time. From the same associate he derived the hum- bler knowledge that there was an inn ten or twelve miles south of Dolgelly where the charge for "a really elegant dinner " was only sixpence, and the youthful philosopher took care to test the accuracy of the information. De Quincey says that he " alternately sailed upon the high- priced and the low-priced tack." By living in cottages he could, on three weeks expenditure, save two guineas out of his three, and spend the third where society and conversa- tion were to be had. " In some families," he adds, '^ raised above dependence upon daily wages, when I performed any services in the way of letter-writing, I found it imprac- ticable at times to force any money at all upon them." But winter was approaching, when bivouacking would be imprac- ticable, and it would be difficult to eke out the weekly guinea * Confessions of an Opium- Eater, p. 130-2. THOMAS DE QUINCE Y. 409 SO as to cover the expenses at inns where society and conver- sation were to be found. What was to be done ? He was now accustomed to be his own master, and never seems to have thought of returning home. Suddenly the strange notion occurred to him that he would rush off to London and try to borrow ^200 on the security of his " expectations." In four years more he was to attain his majority, and his little patri- mony would be at his own disposal. He entered into elabo- rate calculations with himself — for however deficient in prac- tical, De Quincey was always a master of theoretical, finance — to prove that he could live comfortably in London lodgings for ;^5o a year. Two friendly Welsh lawyers started him for the metropoUs with a loan of twelve guineas. Reaching Shrewsbury on foot, he caught the Holyhead mail, and in eight and twenty hours the adventurous youth of seventeen was alone in the wilderness of the Great Babylon. At ten o'clock on the morning of his arrival, De Quincey presented himself to a London usurer. When in Wales, he had, with some forethought, communicated by letter his wants and his expectations to several worthies of this class, and the money-lender to whom he first applied had, he says, verified certain of his statements. But this particular money- lender did not grant personal interviews, and referred him to one of his jackals, a broken-down attorney, who called himself Mr. Brown, and occupied a ramshackle house, almost bare of furniture, in Greek Street, Soho. Mr. Brown professed to give loans on personal security, but his own, in the non-financial sense of the words, was limited, since he lived in frequent fear of arrest. Brown, however, was a well-educated man, and loved knowledge and literature. This formed a bond of personal union between him and his juvenile acquaintance, and as matters turned out, very fortunately for the foolish De Quincey. The remaining guineas of the twelve, with the aid of which the young 3 F 410 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES. gentleman exchanged Wales for London, disappeared in a few weeks. He might have been absolutely homeless, had not Brown given him gratuitous lodgings, without board, in the roomy and sparsely-tenanted mansion of Soho. Here he found for his chief companion a poor friendless girl of ten, who acted as a sort of servant to Mr. Brown during the day, and it was only during the day that this singular money-lender was visible, or invisible, in Greek Street. De Quincey's interviews with him and conversations on classical and other literary topics were chiefly at his breakfast, any occasionally remaining fragments of which meal were appropriated by the hungry and destitute youth. When the varied, but always disreputable business of his host's day began, the young gentleman took his walks abroad, only to return to sleep, on the floor, as it chanced, with a bundle of law-papers for a pillow, and the scantiest of dis- coverable bed-clothes. In his night-rambles, till it was time for him to take shelter in this strange home, De Quincey be- came familiar, innocently familiar, he says, with some of the class of "female peripatetics," as he styles them, whom he re- garded as " simply sisters in calamity." With one of them, a girl scarcely sixteen, whom he knew only as Ann, " for many weeks he had walked at night, up and down Oxford Street, or had rested with her on steps or under the shelter of porticoes," when there befell the incident which, so long as the " Confessions of an Opium- Eater " are read, will keep alive the dim, sad memory of this poor Magdalen. Hers was otherwise the usual story, but however sternly moral and unsentimental or anti-sentimental, what reader of that unique book can forget De Quincey's record of this episode in their nocturnal wanderings, or has not been touched by the apostrophe with which it closes ? — " One night, when we were pacing slowly along Oxford Street, and after a day when I had felt unusually ill and faint, I requested her to THOMAS DE QUINCE Y. 4T I turn off with me into Soho Square. Thither we went ; and we s.it down on the steps of a house, which to this hour I never pass without a' pang of grief, and an inner act of homage to the spirit of that un- happy girl, in memory of the noble act which she then performed. Suddenly, as we sat, I grew much worse. I had been leaning my head against her bosom, and all at once I sank from her arms, and fell backwards on the steps. From the sensations I then had, I felt an inner conviction of the liveliest kind, that, without some powerful and reviving stimulus, I should either have died on the spot, or should at least have sunk to a point of exhaustion from which all re-ascent under my friendless circumstances, would soon have become hopeless. Then it was in this crisis of my fate that my poor orphan-companion, who had herself met with little but injuries in this world, stretched out a saving hand to me. Uttering a cry of terror, but without a moment's delay, she ran off into Oxford Street, and in less time than could be imagined, returned to me with a glass of port wine and spices, that acted upon my empty stomach (which at that time would have rejected all solid food) with an instantaneous power of restoration ; and for this glass the generous girl, without a murmur, paid out of her own humble purse, at a time, be it remembered, when she had scarcely wherewithal to purchase the bare necessaries of life, and when she could have no reason to expect that I should ever be able to reimburse her. O youth- ful benefactress ! how often in succeeding years, standing in solitary places, and thinkingof thee with grief of heart and perfect love, how often have I wished that as in ancient times the curse of a father was believed to have a supernatural power, and to pursue its object with a fatal necessity of self-fulfilment, even so the benediction of a heart oppressed with gratitude might have a like prerogative ; might have power given it from above to chase, to haunt, to waylay, to pursue thee into the central darkness of a London brothel, or (if it were possible), even into the darkness of the grave, there to awaken thee with an authentic message of peace and forgiveness, and of final reconciliation ! " ^ What a descent from the society of Lady Carbery and Lord Westport to that of London Magdalens and bankrupt attorneys, — or even from the inns and cottages of Snowdonia and bivouacking in the soft, pure summer-air, to vagrancy and semi-starvation in the purlieus of Soho ! It was a change, too, worked by his own folly, and his wretchedness was continued by his own puerile obstinacy. He had but ^ Confessions of an Opium-Eater, p. 171. 412 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES. to write to his mother, or the bronzed Bengal uncle, and the prodigal would have been doubtless forgiven, or at least duly cared for. How he lived at all is a mystery, which he did not choose to clear up in the " Confessions ; " probably he contrived to borrow a little from old friends or acquaint- ances at a distance, who were not known to his family, or likely to communicate with it. When he came in after years to record this miserable episode of his career, De Quincey expressed his own wonder that he had never thought of trying to gain a livelihood, say, by becoming a corrector of Greek proofs, or otherwise turning his talents and accomplishments to account, and well might he wonder. Borrowing on his " expectations " was the only expedient that occurred to him ; and his last hope of success in this direction vanished soon after his misery reached its acme on the steps of that house in Soho Square. " A gentleman of his late Majesty's household," who had received hospitalities from the De Quincey family, met him, he says, in Albemarle Street, and challenged him on the strength of his family-likeness. De Quincey confessed who he was, and on receiving a pledge that he should not be betrayed to his guardians, gave his address in Greek Street. Next day came a bank-note for ten pounds. It so happened that at the same time a Jew usurer had satisfied himself as to the ''expectations" of Thomas De Quincey, second son of Thomas Quincey of Manchester. But was the present applicant really the Thomas De Quincey who he pretended to be ? De Quincey produced sundry letters in proof of his identity, among them several which, when in Wales, he had received from his young friend. Lord Altamont, as the whilom Lord Westport had now become. More to secure a business-connection with the heir to a peerage, than for the sake of the profit derivable from this particular transaction, the usurer offered to ad- THOMAS DE QUINCEY. 413 vance two or three hundred pounds on De Quincey's per- sonal security, provided Lord Altamont would guarantee repayment on their joint-coming of age. With what remained of the ten pounds after satisfying the preliminary demands of the Jew and the Jew's representive, his host, Mr. Brown, De Quincey improved his shabby personal appearance, gave a guinea to Ann, and took coach for Eton, where he supposed Lord Altamont to be. On reach- Eton he found that Lord Altamont had migrated to Jesus College, Cambridge. De Quincey then bethought him of another young acquaintance of his at Eton, Lord Desart, on whom he called. Lord Desart received him kindly, and asked him to breakfast. The meal seemed " magnificent," and was the first plenteous one that he had tasted for months. The young nobleman heard his story, and after a legitimate hesitation to be mixed up with money-lenders, very good- naturedly promised his signature, "under certain conditions." De Quincey returned to London, but the Jews scrupled to accept Lord Desart's " conditions." Ann, too, was lost to him. She had seen him part of the way to the mail on the evening of his departure for Eton, promising to look for him on the fifth night after their parting, and every night after- wards until they did meet, at the corner of a street agreed on. De Quincey kept his appointment, but no Ann appeared then or any more. Every enquiry he made for her, — and he made many, — was altogether fruitless : — "To this hour I have never heard a syllable about her. This, among such troubles as most men meet with in this life, has been my heaviest affliction. If she lived, doubtless we must have been some- times in search of each other, at the very same moment, through the mighty labyrinths of London ; perhaps even within a few feet of each other— a barrier no wider, in a London street, often amounting in the end to a separation for eternity ! During some years I hoped that she dtd live ; and I suppose that, in the literal and unrhetorical use of the word myriad, I must, in my different visits to London, have loohed into many myriads of female faces, in the hope of meeting Ann. I 4H LANCASHIRE WORTHIES. should know her again amongst a thousand, and if seen but for a moment. Handsome she was not ; but she had a sweet expression of countenance, and a peculiarly graceful carriage of the head. I sought her, I have said, in hope. So it was for years ; but now I should fear to see her ; and her cough, which grieved me when I parted with her, is now my consolation. Now I wish to see her no longer, but think of her, more gladly, as one long since laid in the grave— in the grave, I would hope, of a Magdalen ; taken away before injuries and cruelty had blotted out and transfigured her ingenuous nature, or the brutalities of ruffians had completed the ruin they had begun. " ^ Hopeless as well as penniless, De Quincey, though he owns it not, gave in. His own account of what happened is brief, and vague as it is brief. " Suddenly at this crisis," he says, "an opening was made, almost by accident, for reconciliation with my guardians. I quitted London in haste, and returned to the Priory ! " It was the summer of 1802 that De Quincey spent rambling in Wales, and the winter of 1802-3 vagabond- ising in London. By the April of 1803 he had returned to the Priory. How his mother and the bronzed Bengal uncle received the prodigal he does not say. But he hints that he was looked on — he a young man of nearly eighteen — as " a child in disgrace." This was not a position which he cared to accept, and being at a disputatious age, with a great deal more of book-knowledge than either of them, he held his own rather too vigorously on all sorts of con- troverted topics against both his mother and uncle. One day, after about nine months of home, he took to criticising De Foe's " Memoirs of a Cavalier," and the criticism had a singular result. " My uncle, who had an old craze in behalf of the book, opposed me with asperity; and in the course of what he said, under some movement of ill- temper, he asked me, in a way which I felt to be taunting, * How I could consent to waste my time as I did.'" This is the account given in the Autobiographic Sketches ; but ^ Confessions of an Ophim- Eater, p. 187. THOMAS DE QUINCEY. 415 in its first published form^ the uncle is represented as saying that he would be ashamed to be tied to his mother's apron string, " Without any answering warmth, I explained that my guardians, having quarrelled with me, would not grant for ray use anything beyond my school-allowance of ;^ioo per annum. 'But was it not possible that even this sum might, by economy, be made to meet the neces- sities of the case?' I replied, 'that from what I had heard, very probably it was.' 'Would I undertake an Oxford life upon such terms?' 'Most gladly,' I said. Upon that opening, he spoke to my mother; and the result was, that within seven days from the above con- versation I found myself entering that time-honoured University." In the original report ^ of his colloquy with his mother, she is heard telling him that his guardians would continue at the University his school-allowance of jQioo a year. "She did not," she explained, "increase it out of her own purse, because his sisters were a heavy expense to her. However, he was free to pass in her house his vacations and any other time he pleased; and if he thought that a ;^ioo a year would suffice for him at Oxford, he was welcome to it." Among De Quincey's contributions to the Edinburgh magazine are several papers entitled " Oxford," which have not been reprinted (indeed, they were scarcely worth reprinting) in either of the EngUsh (or Scotch) editions of his collected works. They are written in De Quincey's most rambling and least instructive manner, and throw very little light on his university life and studies. But they do record a few incidents and anecdotes, which are the better worth reproducing that he has left this important section of his biography so dark. He arrived at Oxford late in the December of 1803, and the day after he sum- 1 Tail's Magazine for January 1835. • lb. 4I<5 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES. raoned *' a conclave of friends," among them no doubt old school-fellows of the Manchester days, to discuss the question which college he should join. At last he fixed on Christ Church, and even had an interview with its Dean (Cyril Jackson) on the subject of his intentions. When it came to the point, however, it turned out that "the expenses of an Oxford Inn, with almost daily entertainments to young friends, had run away with the bulk of the fifty guineas brought with him to Oxford for preliminary expenses," and he had not enough left to provide what he calls the caution-money required at Christ Church. He was fain, therefore, to enter himself at Worcester, a college which charged in that way much less than Christ Church did. In spite of his elaborate calculations on paper to demon- strate that he could live on p^^ioo a year at the University — he had once satisfied himself, it will be remembered, that he could live in London on ;^5o a year — De Quincey was soon, and literally, out at elbows. He was not dis- sipated or extravagant, but throughout life he was the worst of economists, and always, if left to himself, care- less in his dress, infinitely preferring books to clothes when he had spare cash to spend on either. At last the shabbiness of his habiliments became so conspicuous, that an "ofliicial person" of his college sent him "a message of courteous remonstrance," by which he resolved to profit. He kept his resolution so badly, however, that one day he went to dine in hall without a waistcoat, a deficiency which he tried to conceal by buttoning up his coat to the neck, and pulling his academic gown closely round him ! The absence of the waistcoat was none the less discovered, and poor De Quincey was doomed to hear an ironical dialogue proceed between two of his neighbours, one of whom gravely asked the other if he had seen the last Gazette, as it was understood that it contained an inter- THOMAS DR QUINCEY. 41/ diet on waistcoats. The reply was in the afifirmative, and added the expression of a hope that there would be a similar interdict on breeches, as they were still more difficult to pay for ! It was not always, moreover, by economies of this odd kind that De Quincey, at Oxford? endeavoured to have some money in hand for books or other expenditure, which he preferred to the payment of a tailor's bill. In the " Confessions of an Opium Eater " he admits that eighteen months after entering at Worcester he negotiated with one of his old Jew friends in London a loan of ;^25o, receiving about ^^150, and paying only seventeen and a half per cent, per annum on the whole sum ! Of his studies at the University he says next to nothing, though he complains bitterly of the almost total ignorance and neglect of English literature, in his time, at Oxford, His first and last conversation with his tutor was held when he was reading Parmenides on his own account. "What have you been lately reading?" asked the tutor. " Paley," said the undergraduate, not caring to confess to Parmenides. " Paley," was the rejoinder — " an excellent author ; but be on your guard as to his style — he is very vicious there." In default of autobiographic reminiscences of De Quia- cey's Oxford career, there may be quoted an interesting sketch of it, in a paper on his life and writings, which appeared in the Quarterly Rroicw for July 1S61. The reviewer was "indebted for the following particulars to the kindness of Dr. Cotton, Provost of Worcester Col- lege:"- " Of his Oxford life he has left us few memorials. He appears to have resided there from 1803 to 1808 ; that is, from his eighteenth year to his twenty-third. But of his own obligations to that University he says not one syllable. Whether he read or whether he idled we are left to conjecture. And this is the more singular, because the two favourite 3g 41 8 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES. pursuits of De Quincey are also the studies most prized in the Uni- versity of Oxford, namely, elegant scholarship and metaphysics. The modern examination-system was also introduced during these years, and we should have been glad to hear what De Quincey thought of the Reform, and what he heard said about it among older men than himself. But his Oxford life is an unwritten chapter of the Auto- biography," except to the extent previously mentioned. "It is curious, indeed, that it should be so; his career at Oxford having been, according to the testimony of contemporaries," as repro- duced by the College dignitary aforesaid, "highly characteristic of the man, and one which nobody who took the public into his confidence so freely as De Quincey did need have shrunk from describing. He was admitted a member of Worcester College, and matriculated on the 17th of December 1S03, and his name remained upon the College books for seven years, being removed from them on the 15th December 1 810. During the period of his residence, he was generally known as a quiet and studious man. He did not frequent wine parties, though he did not abstain from wine ; and he devoted himself principally to the society of a German named Schwartzburg, who is said to have taught him Hebrew. He was remarkable, even in those days, for his rare conversational powers, and for his extraordinary stock of informa- tion upon every subject that was started. There were men, it would appear, among his contemporaries who were capable of appreciating him, and they all agreed that De Quincey was a man of singular genius as well as the most varied talents. His knowledge of Latin and Greek was not confined to those few standard authors with which even good scholars are or were accustomed to content themselves. He was master of the ancient literature ; of all of it, at least, which belongs to what is called pure literature. It appears that he brought this knowledge up to Oxford with him, and that his university studies were directed almost wholly to the ancient philosophy, varied by occasional excursions into German literature and metaphysics, which he loved to compare with those of Greece and Rome. His knowledge of all these subjects is said to have been really sound, and there can be no doubt that he was capable of reproducing it in the most brilliant and imposing forms. It was predicted, accordingly, by all who knew him, that he would pass a memorable examination ; and so indeed he did, though the issue was a somewhat different one from what his admirers had anticipated. The class list had lately been instituted ; and there seems no reason to doubt that, had De Quincey's mind been rather more regularly trained, he would have taken a first-class as easily as other men take a common degree. But his reading had THOMAS DR QUINCEY. 419 never been conducted upon that system which the Oxford examina- tions — essentially, and very properly, intended for men of average abilities — render almost incumbent upon every candidate for the highest honours. De Quincey seems to have felt that he was deficient in that perfect mastery of the minuter details of logic, ethics, and rhetoric, which the practice of the schools demanded. With the leading principles of the Aristotelian system he was evidently quite intimate. But he apparently distrusted his own fitness to undergo a searching oral examination in these subjects, for which a minute acquaintance with scientific terminology, and with the finest dis- tinctions they involve, is thought to be essential. The event was unfortunate, though so agreeable to De Quincey's character that it might have been foreseen by his associates, as by one of them it really was. The important moment arrived, and De Quincey went through the first day's examination, which was conducted upon paper, and at that time consisted almost exclusively of scholarship, history, and whatever might be comprehended under the title of classical liteiature. On the evening of that day, Mr. Goodenough, of Christ- church, who was one of the examiners, went down to a gentleman then resident at Worcester College, and well acquainted with De Quincey, and said to him, ' You have sent us to-day the cleverest man I ever met with; if his vivd voce examination to-morrow corres- ponds with what he has done in writing, he will carry everything before him.' To this his friend made answer that he feared De Quincey's vivd voce would be comparatively imperfect, even if he presented him- self for examination, which he rather doubted. The event justified his answer. That night De Quincey packed up his things and walked away from Oxford, never, as far as we can ascertain, to return to it. Whether this distrust of himself was well founded, or whether it arose from the depression by which his indulgence in opium was invariably followed, we cannot tell. So early even as his Oxford days, De Quincey, we are told, was incapable of steady application without large doses of opium. He had taken a large dose on the morning of his paper work, and the reaction that followed in the evening would, of course, aggravate his apprehensions of the morrow. Be that as it may, he fairly took to his heels, and so lost the chance, which, with every drawback, must have been an extremely good one, of figuring in the same class list with Sir Robert Peel, who passed his exami- nation in Michaelmas 1808 ; which was, no doubt, the era of De Quincey's singular catastrophe.** Yes, already, only twenty-three, De Quincey had acquired 420 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES. the fatal taste, if not as yet the fatal habit ; and thus, at the outset of his career, it helped whatever was defective in his character to destroy his university prospects. Had he taken his degree and not fallen a victim to opium, he would doubtless have gained a college-fellowship; and, with his unambitious disposition and love of reading and reflection, he would, as the fellow of a college, have been one of the happiest of men. But, on the other hand, it is also true he might have been content to study, medi- tate, and talk all the days of his life ; and, without external stimulus to exertion, he might not have enriched the literature of his country with sixteen volumes of ingenious and interesting prose. De Quincey introduced himself to opium the very year after his admission to Worcester College, and when he was only eighteen. The following is his own account of this cardinal event in his biography. From an early age he had been accustomed to wash his head in cold water at least once a day. Being suddenly seized with toothache, when in bed, and during one of his frequent flying undergraduate-visits from Oxford to London, he fancied that the attack might be due to a casual intermission of the practice. He jumped out of bed, plunged his head into a basin of cold water, and with wetted hair went to sleep. Next morning he awoke with "excruciating rheumatic pains" in head and face, which tormented him for weeks almost without cessation. While the attack was still plaguing him, he met accidentally a college acquaintance, who recommended him to try opium for relief, and De Quincey's fate was sealed. He bought and took some laudanum, " and in an hour, O heavens ! what a revulsion ! what a resurrection, from its lowest depths, of the inner spirit ! What an apocalypse of the world within me ! That my pains had vanished, was now a trifle in my eyes ; this negative effect was swallowed up in the immen- THOMAS DE QU/NCEY. 42 I sity of those positive effects which had opened before me, in the abyss of divine enjoyment thus suddenly revealed. Here was a panacea, a pa^/Aa/co^ vri'^rniki, for all human woes; here was the secret of happiness, about which philosophers had disputed for so many ages, at once discovered ; happi- ness might now be bought for a penny, and carried in the waistcoat pocket ; portable ecstasies might be had corked up in a pint bottle ; and peace of mind could be sent down by the mail." ^ These were the pleasures of opium-taking, and to De Quincey they seemed celestial. Its pains and agonies, its infernal punishments, were to come. But this introduction to opium, though the most memor- able, was not the only important episode of his college life. The year before that in which he quitted Oxford, he made the acquaintance of Coleridge, his admiration of whom and of Wordsworth had increased with time, and was not in the least diminished by his wide range of academic and other study at the university. In 1806 the young gentleman had attained his majority, and seems to have come into what of his patrimony survived the preliminary borrowings at Oxford from London Jews. Money for locomotion was in his pos- session, and in the Long Vacation of 1807 he visited the Bristol Hot Wells; perhaps because his mother, who certainly did settle for some time in that neighbourhood, had already migrated thither from Chester. At Bristol the young en- thusiast heard with inexpressible joy that the great Coleridge was within forty miles of him, at the little town of Nether Stowey, among the Quantock Hills, — the guest of a Mr. Poole. " In that same hour " the eager hero-worshipper was on his way to Nether Stowey and his hero. When he arrived Coleridge was absent, but Mr. Poole received De Quincey kindly and hospitably, and started him on horse- back to Bridgewater, whither the erratic and devious genius ' Confessions of an Opium-Eatcr, p. 195. 42 2 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES. had been tracked As soon as he saw his idol, he knew that Coleridge was before him. "I had received directions for finding out the house where Coleridge was visiting ; and in riding down a main street of Bridgewater, I noticed a gate-way corresponding to the description given me. Under this was standing and gazing about him a man, whom I will describe. In height he might seem to be about five feet eight (he was in reality about an iach and a half taller, but his figure was of an order which adorns the height) ; his person was broad and full, and tended even to cor- pulence ; his complexion was fair, though not what painters technically style fair, because it was associated with black hair ; his eyes were large and soft in their expression ; and it was from the peculiar appearance of haze or dreaminess which mixed with their light, that I recognised my object. This was Coleridge. I examined him stead- fastly for a minute or more ; and it struck me that he saw neither my- self nor any other object in the street. He was in a deep reverie ; for I had dismounted, made two or three trifling arrangements at an inn- door, and advanced close to him, before he had apparently become conscious of my presence. The sound of my voice, announcing my own name, first awoke him : he started, and for a moment seemed at a loss to understand my purpose or his own situation ; for he repeated rapidly a number of words whicli had no relation to either of us. There was no mauvaise honte in his manner, but simple perplexity, and an apparent difficulty in recovering his position amongst day-light realities. The little scene over, he received me with a kindness of manner so marked that it might be called gracious. The hospital^le family with whom he was domesticated was distinguished for their amiable manners and enlightened understandings : they were descend- ants from Chubb, the philosophic writer, and bore the same name. For Coleridge they all testified deep affection and esteem — sentiments in which the whole town of Bridgewater seemed to share ; for, in the evening, when the heat of the day had declined, I walked out with him, and rarely, perhaps never, have I seen a person so much inter- rupted in one hour's space as Coleridge, on this occasion, by the courteous attentions of young and old. All the people of station and weight in the place, and apparently all the ladies, were abroad to enjoy the lovely summer evening ; and not a party passed without some mark of smiling recognition ; and the majority stopping to make personal inquiries about his health, and to express their anxiety that he should make a lengthened stay among them. Certain I am, from the lively esteem expressed towards Coleridge at this time by the people of Bridgewater, that a very large subscription might, in that town, have THOMAS DE QUINCEY. 423 been raised to support him amongst them, in the character of a lecturer, or philosophical professor."^ Facts very creditable to the Bridgewater of 1808, since, though Coleridge had his ardent admirers, the young De Quincey among them, the British reading public was then for the most part indifferent to him and his verse. The philosopher was five and thirty, and the disciple two and twenty, at the time of this their first interview. The two were soon in the drawing-room of the house in which Coleridge was staying, and De Quincey received an invitation, which he gladly accepted, to remain to dinner. " That point being settled, Coleridge, like some great river, the Orellana or the St. Lawrence, that, having been checked and fretted by rocks or thwarting islands, suddenly recovers its volume of waters, and its mighty music, swept at once, as if returning to his natural business, into a continuous strain of eloquent dissertation, certainly the most novel, the most finely illustrated, and traversing the most spacious fields of thought, by transitions the most just and logical, that it was possible to conceive." For " about three hours " he continued to talk, " and in the course of this perfor- mance he had delivered many most striking aphorisms, embalming more weight of truth, and separately more deserv- ing to be themselves embalmed than would easily be found in a month's course of select reading." Once only the conversation was briefly interrupted by the entrance of Mrs. Coleridge, in whose face De Quincey discerned only " some prettiness of rather a common-place character," while in her husband's manner to her he detected a marital indifference, founded, he afterwards discovered, on nothing worse than the " want of sympathy " with which men of genius are apt to reproach their wives. At dinner " Coleridge talked," but "with effort," before a numerous company invited to hear ^ Works, ii. 51. 424 LANCASHIRE WORTHIES. him talk, and seemed to his vigilant young admirer "stru inter, Maiiduster. 3 Palin, W. Henry, Esq., Town Hall, Manchester. Peakse, Percival, Warrington. Ross, Roger Rowson, Esq., 12 Cecil Street, Greenheys. RiGBY, S., Esq., Bmche Hall, Warrington. Rylands, J. P., Esq., F.S.A., Highfields, Thelwall. Rylands, W. H., Esq., Highfields, ThelwalL Sewell, Rev. E., M.A., Ilkley Cottage, Ilkley. Shackleton, W., Esq., Vale Manse, Todmorden. Thomas, Mrs., Wilderpool, Warrington. Waugh, Edwin, Esq., 27 Sagar Street, Manchester. Williams, Jacob, Esq., 4 Chorlton Buildings, Cooper Street, City. Whatmough, J. Riley, Esq., Chapel Allerton, Leeds. Woods, Henry, Esq., J. P., Gillibrand Hall, Chorley. Young, Henry, Esq., Bagot Street, Wavertree, Liverpool. Young, Miss, Wavertree, Liverpool. LIST OF BOOKSELLERS WHO HAVE SUBSCRIBED TO THE LARGE PAPER IMPRESSION OF THE SECOND SERIES OF LANCASHIRE WORTHIES. Abbott, Thomas, Bolton. Barlow, W. S., Bury. Bentley, John, Todmorden. BuRGHOPE & Strange, Messrs., Burnley. Clegg & Lee, Messrs., Oldham. Day, T, J., Market Street, Manchester. Deane, G., Greengate, Salford. Dooley, H., Stockport. Hardman, J., Tyklesley. Harrison, J., Staley Bridge. Haworth, Henry, Poolstock, Wigan. Hill & Son, J., Bury. Kenyon, W., Newton Heath. Pearse, Percival, Sankey Street, Warrington. Smith & Son, Messrs., Brown Street, Manchester. Winterburn, G., Bolton. Young, H., Liverpool. LIST OP SUBSCEIBERS TO THE LARGE PAPER IMPRESSION OF THE SECOND SERIES OF LANCASHIRE WORTHIES, Arnold, Henry, Esq., Blackley. AsHWORTH, Adam, Esq., Brookshaw Terrace, Bury. BoTSFORD, J. W., Esq., Manchester. BouLTON, Isaac Watt, Esq., Stamford House, AsIitou-undcr-Lyiie. Brooks, Thomas, Esq , Barkby Hall, Leicester. Cooling, Edwin, Junior, Esq., 42 St. Mar/s Gate, Derby. Crane, Newton, Esq., United States' Consul, Manchester. Dale, Thomas, Esq., J. P., F.G.H.S., Bank House, Eomiley, Cheshire. Draper, T., Esq., Lymm. Ellershaw, John, Esq., Kirkstall, near Leeds. Fairclough, Richard, Esq., Woolston. FiLDES, James, Esq., 44 Spring Gardens, Manchester. Garnett, William, Esq., Queenmore Park, Lancaster. Gillespie, Thomas J., Esq., Park House, Ne\Yt()u-Ie-Willo\vs, Green ALL, Captain G., Greenall. 2 Gkeenall, Sir Gilbert, Bart., Walton Hall, Warrington. Greenall, Thomas, Esq., Warrington. Greenhalgh, J. DoDsoN, Gladstone Cottage, Haulgh, Bolton. Grundy, Alfred, Esq., Whitefielcl, near Manchester. Hadfield, Henry, Furness Vale, Derbyshire. Hodgson, F. Esq., St. Helens'. Holt, David, Feen Hill Gate, Rumworth, Bolton. Hornby, Major, Dalton Hall, Burton. Ho WORTH, James, Esq., Waterfoot, Manchester. HoYLE, James, Esq., Lemanshill House, Tottington. HoYLE, Isaac, Esq., The How, Sedgeley Park, Prestwich. Jenkins, Thomas H., Esq., Holly House, Higher Broiighton. Johnson, C. K, Esq., Abbey Grove, Eccles. Jones, H. W., Esq., The Old Bank, Chester. Kenyon, William, 47 Church Street, Newton Heath, Kershaw, John, Esq., Manufacturer, Ptumworth, Bolton. KiRKPATRiCK, E., Esq., 12 York Street, Manchester. Lancaster, John, Esq., J. P., Bilton Grange, Rugby, Leyland, John, Esq., The Grange, Hindley, near Wigan. Lord, Edward, Esq., Adamroyd, Todmorden. Macmartin, James, Esq., Yew Tree Cottage, Cheadle Heath, Manchester. M ARSON, James, Esq., Prospect Hill, Hill ClifFe, Warrington. Morgan & Co., Messrs. W., Scotland Road, Liverpool. Moore, ^Mrs., 2 Darling Place, Higher Broughton, Neevers, Richard, Esq., Woningworth, Fulwood Park, Preston. Owen, Willum, Esq., F.R.S., B.A., Warrington. SUPPLEMENTARY LIST OF SUBSCRIBERS TO THE LARGE PAPER IMPRESSION OF "LANCASHIRE WORTHIES," SECOND SERIES. The Right Honourable the EARL OF DERBY, Kiiowsley. P. B. ALLEY, Esq., Cross Street, ]\raiicliester. A. E. DAVIES, Esq., F.L.S., Overton, Frodsliain. Mr. ROBERT ROBERTS, 150 Oldfield Road, Salfor.l. G. Y. VERNON, Es(|., F.R.A.S., Old Trafiord, .Muiichesler. S. WARBURTON, Esq., TuiiuyluU, Crump.sall. RICHARD WOOD, Es(i., John Street Mills, Ikywood. fe-^ \? (/ ^ '^ n B = ^ w^^ 32: =1 ^ ' -^.i/ol o <^ CO .^v 6 .^,OFCALIF0% ^<5Aaviian-^^'^ r-i >;lOS-AKr-'^ -< aWEUNIVER% -n (_■ ■- -S: ^WEUNIVERV//, CI •< § c. -< V RYQc, ^vM-UBRARYQ^ :iVER5 =: ■z. ■^ < OCT 00 ;3^ ^ ^^ 40 "T" 1 = 1 -r» O lL 117 6: 3r :p: .^0 l-iJi ^^Aavaaii-^v > ■J 5MEUKIVERy/A vvlOSANC ...in'^Aijf .\W[UNIVER% ^ O u_ -< , r ^ ^fc. . 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