he range of his
powers and the diversity of his interests, he made abiding contributions
to thought and knowledge, is to ignore the jealous conditions under
which such contributions come. To say so much as this is to make but a
small deduction from the total of a grand account.

I have not reproduced the full text of Letters in the proportion
customary in English biography. The existing mass of his letters is
enormous. But then an enormous proportion of them touch on affairs of
public business, on which they shed little new light. Even when he
writes in his kindest and most cordial vein to friends to whom he is
most warmly attached, it is usually a letter of business. He deals
freely and genially with the points in hand, and then without play of
gossip, salutation, or compliment, he passes on his way. He has in his
letters little of that spirit in which his talk often abounded, of
disengagement, pleasant colloquy, happy raillery, and all the other
undefined things that make the correspondence of so many men whose
business was literature, such delightful reading for the idler hour of
an industrious day. It is perhaps worth adding that the asterisks
denoting an omitted passage hide no piquant hit, no personality, no
indiscretion; the omission is in every case due to consideration of
space. Without these asterisks and, other omissions, nothing would have
been easier than to expand these three volumes into a hundred. I think
nothing relevant is lost. Nobody ever had fewer secrets, nobody ever
lived and wrought in fuller sunlight.

CHAPTER I

CHILDHOOD

(_1809-1821_)

I know not why commerce in England should not have its old
families, rejoicing to be connected with commerce from generation
to generation. It has been so in other countries; I trust it will
be so in this country.--GLADSTONE.

The dawn of the life of the great and famous man who is our subject in
these memoirs has been depicted with homely simplicity by his own hand.
With this fragment of a record it is perhaps best for me to begin our
journey. 'I was born,' he says, 'on December 29, 1809,' at 62 Rodney
Street, Liverpool. 'I was baptized, I believe, in the parish church of
St. Peter. My godmother was my elder sister Anne, then just seven years
old, who died a perfect saint in the beginning of the year 1829. In her
later years she lived in clo