Bygones Worth Remembering, Vol. 1 (of 2)

If the preface of a book be a plea to the reader, its force must lie in the aims of the author. In the following pages his main aim has been to be of service to somebody. That i...

It was a saying of Dryden that "Anything, though ever so little, which a man speaks of himself, in my opinion, is still too much." This depends upon what a writer says. No man i...

These pages being autobiographic in their nature, something must be said under this head. I was born April 13, 1817, which readers complained I omitted to state in a former work...

My first public discussion in London was with Mr. Passmore Edwards--personally, the handsomest adversary I ever met. A mass of wavy black hair and pleasant expression made him p...

Surely environment is the sister of heredity? Mr. Gladstone once said to me that "The longer he lived the more he thought of heredity." Next to heredity is environment--the moul...

More than acquaintanceship, I had affectionate regard for George Henry Lewes and George Eliot. Lewes included me in the public list of writers and contributors to the _Leader_--...

When Birmingham was a town it had a national reputation for Liberalism. At present I prefer to call myself a "townsman" rather than a "citizen." The old pride of owning to being...

It is not easy to determine which of many historic incidents of interest should take precedence. The 10th of April, known as the day of Chartist Terror--still spoken of in hyste...

The Chartists have made as much noise in the world as they knew how--yet to the generation of to-day they are ambiguous. They have had no historian. Carlyle went to look at them...

Besides Church Chartists and Positivist Chartists, there were Tory Chartists, of whom I add an account, and a list of those among them who were paid in the days of their hired a...

The enfranchisement of the working class, for which Place worked so unceasingly, could not come--in the ordinary course of things English--until the middle class had succeeded i...

References are continually made in the Press to certain events recorded in this chapter founded upon statements made by myself, but lacking details and without the official subs...

Without noticing unexpected qualities now and then, and remembering them, many are needlessly discouraged in purposes of improvement. The two Bramwells, the judge and his brothe...

There never was a "Manchester School," though a volume has been published upon it. It never had professor nor special tenets. Manchester stands for Free Trade and nothing more....

There is a romance in the title of this chapter, should some one arise to write it It was Lord Brougham who first spoke of Harriet Martineau as the "deaf girl of Norwich," which...

If the reader is curious to know what really were the opinions of these two distinguished offenders (H. Martineau and H. G. Atkinson), I recite them. In the book Dr. Martineau r...

In one of the last conversations I had the pleasure to hold with Mr. Gladstone, I referred to the "three Newmans" and their divergent careers. He said he never knew there were "...

Giuseppe Mazzini, whom Englishmen know as Joseph Mazzini, was born in Genoa, June 22, 1805, and died in Pisa, March 10, 1872. He spent the greater part of forty years of his mar...

There have been many conspirators, but Mazzini appears to have been the greatest of them all. In one sense, every leader of a forlorn hope is a conspirator. Prevision, calculati...

Dining one day (June 29, 1896) at Mr. Herbert Spencer's, thirty years after Garibaldi left England, Professor Masson, who was a guest of Mr. Spencer, told me that Garibaldi said...

General de Lacy Evans is no longer with us, or he might give us an instructive account of the uncertainty and difficulty of discipline in a patriotic legion which volunteers its...

One reason for commencing with the remark that John Stuart Mill was born on May 20, 1806, at No. 13, Rodney Street, Islington, London, is to notify the coincidence that Gladston...

Mill was so entirely serious in his pursuit of truth, and entirely convinced of the advantages of its publicity, that he readily risked conventional consequences on that account...

Mr. Gladstone's career will be the wonder of other generations, as it has been the astonishment of this. Mr. Morley's monumental "Life" of him will long be remembered as the gre...