The Life and Times of the late JAMES EWING RITCHIE, As told by Himself . London: james clarke & co. , 13 & 14, fleet street . 1898....

In 1837 Lord Melbourne was Prime Minister—the handsomest, the most cultivated, the most courteous gentleman that ever figured in a Royal Court.  For his young mistress he had a loyal love, whilst she, young and inexperienced, naturally turned to him as her guide, philosopher and friend.  The Whigs were in office, but not in power.  The popular excitement that had carried the Reform Bill had died away, and the Ministry had rendered itself especially unpopular by a new Poor-Law Bill, a bold, a pra

Long, long before John Forster wrote to recommend everyone to write memoirs of himself it had become the fashion to do so.  “That celebrated orator,” writes Dr. Edmund Calamy, one of the most learned of our Nonconformist divines, “Caius Cornelius Tacitus, in the beginning of his account of the life of his father-in-law, Julius Agricola (who was the General of Domitian, the Emperor, here in Britain, and the first who made the Roman part of Britain a Præsidial province), excuses this practice from

In recalling old times let me begin with the weather, a matter of supreme importance in country life—the first thing of which an Englishman speaks, the last thing he thinks of as he retires to rest.  When I was a boy we had undoubtedly finer weather than we have now.  There was more sunshine and less rain.  In spring the air was balmy, and the flowers fair to look on.  When summer came what joy there was in the hayfield, and how sweet the smell of the new-mown hay!  As autumn advanced how pleasa

It was wonderful the utter stagnation of the village.  The chapel was the only centre of intellectual life; next to that was the alehouse, whither some of the conscript fathers repaired to get a sight of the county paper, to learn the state of the markets, and at times to drink more ale than was good for them.  About ten I had my first experience of death.  I had lost an aged grandmother, but I was young, and it made little impression on me, except the funeral sermon—preached by my father to an

In the good old city of Norwich.  I passed a year as an apprentice, in what was then known as London Lane.  It was a time of real growth to me mentally.  I had a bedroom to myself; in reality it was a closet.  I had access to a cheap library, where I was enabled to take my fill, and did a good deal of miscellaneous study.  I would have joined the Mechanics’ Institute, where they had debates, but the people with whom I lived were orthodox Dissenters, and were rather afraid of my embracing Unitari

What more natural than that a son should wish to follow in his father’s steps?  I had a minister for a father.  It was resolved that I should become one.  In Dissenting circles no one was supposed to enter the ministry until he had got what was denominated a call.  I persuaded myself that I had such a call, though I much doubt it now.  I tried to feel that I was fitted for this sacred post—I who knew nothing of my own heart, and was as ignorant of the world as a babe unborn.  I was sent to a Lon

In due time—that is when I was about sixteen years old—I made my way to London, a city as deadly, as dreary as can well be conceived, in spite of the wonderful Cathedral of St. Paul’s, as much a thing of beauty as it ever was, and the Monument, one of the first things the country cousin was taken to see, with the exception of Madame Tussaud’s, then in Baker Street.  In the streets where the shops were the houses were mean and low, of dirty red brick, of which the houses in the more aristocratic

I drifted into literature when I was a boy.  I always felt that I would like to be an author, and, arrived at man’s estate, it seemed to me easier to reach the public mind by the press than by the pulpit.  I could not exactly come down to the level of the pulpit probationer.  I found no sympathetic deacons, and I heard church members talk a good deal of nonsense for which I had no hearty respect.  Perhaps what is called the root of the matter was in me conspicuous by its absence.  I preached, bu

In 1849 I lived at Cardiff.  I had come there to edit The Principality , a paper started, I believe, by Mr. David Evans, a good sort of man, who had made a little money, which, I fear, he lost in his paper speculation.  His aim was to make the paper the mouthpiece for Welsh Nonconformity.  I must own, as I saw how Cardiff was growing to be a big place, my aim was to make the paper a good local organ.  But the Cardiff of that time was too Conservative and Churchified for such a paper to pay, and

One national movement in which I took a prominent part was the formation of freehold land societies, which commenced somewhere about 1850, and at which The Times , after its manner in those days, sneered, asking scornfully what was a freehold land society.  The apostle of the new movement, which was to teach the British working man how to save money and buy a bit of land on which to build a house and secure a vote, was Mr. James Taylor, born in Birmingham in 1814.  Like all other Birmingham boys

I doubt whether the cynical old poet who wrote “The Pleasures of Memory,” would have included in that category the recollections of the famous preachers whom he might have heard.  Yet possibly he might, as his earliest predilections, we were told, were for the pulpit, and all have, more or less, of the parsonic element in them.  The love to lecture, the desire to make their poor ignorant friends as sensible as themselves, the innate feeling that one is a light and guide in a wildering maze exist

As the season of the May Meetings draws near, one naturally thinks of Exeter Hall and its interesting associations.  When I first came to London it had not long been open, and it was a wonder to the young man from the country to see its capacious interior and its immense platform crowded in every part.  It had a much less gorgeous interior than now, but its capacities for stowing away a large audience still remains the same; and then, as now, it was available alike for Churchmen and Dissenters t

It is the penalty of old age to lose all our friends and acquaintances, but fortunately our hold on earth weakens as the end of life draws near.  In an active life, we see much of the world and the men who help to make it better.  Many ministers and missionaries came to my father’s house with wonderful accounts of the spread of the Gospel in foreign parts.  At a later time I saw a knot of popular lecturers and agitators—such as George Thompson, the great anti-slavery lecturer, who, born in humbl

By this time people have got sick of electioneering.  It is a great privilege to be an English elector—to feel that the eyes of the world are on you, and that, at any rate, your country expects you to do your duty.  But to the candidate an election contest is, at any rate, fraught with instruction.  Human nature is undoubtedly a curious combination, and a man who goes in for an election undoubtedly sees a good deal of human nature.  I was put up for a Parliamentary borough—I who shudder at the s

At length I am in the home of the free, where all men are equal, where O’Donovan Rossa may seek to blast the glories of a thousand years, where a Henry George may pave the way for an anarchy such as the world has never yet seen, where even Jem Blaine, as his admirers term him, passes for an honest man, and claims to have a firm grip on the Presidential chair. I am unfortunate on my landing.  I have the name of one of Cook’s hotels on my lips, and as I know Mr. John Cook makes better terms for hi

It is about time, I wrote one day in America, I set my face homeward.  When on the prairie I was beginning to speculate whether I should ever be fit to make an appearance in descent society again.  Now, it seems to me, the question to be asked is, Whether I have not soared so high in the world as to have lost all taste for the frugal simplicity of that home life, where, in the touching words of an American poet I met with this morning, it is to be trusted my Daughters are acting day by day, So a

“Was there much of a sensation there when you left B— this morning?” said the manager of a leading daily to me as I was comfortably seated in his pleasant room in the fine group of buildings known to all the world as the printing and publishing offices of The West Anglian Daily , where I had gone in search of a little cash, which, happily, I obtained. “None at all,” said I, in utter ignorance of what he was driving at.  “None at all; no one knew I was leaving,” and I smiled as if I had said some