ture moulded of
no common clay; and when he was gone, even accomplished men of the world
and scholars could not recall without emotion his bright and ardent
spirit, his forbearance, his humility.[3] The two brothers, says one who
knew them, were 'now both of them fresh from college: their interest was
alike keen in a great variety of subjects--poetry, philosophy, science,
politics, social questions. About these the two brothers were never
tired of talking together. They would pace up and down all the evening
under the stars, and late into the night, discussing things in heaven
and earth with a keen zest that seemed inexhaustible. Their appetite for
knowledge was insatiable, and their outlook over the rich life that was
opening before them was full of hope and promise.'

[Footnote 3: See the little volume entitled _A Layman's Legacy_;
published in 1877 (Macmillan and Co.), with a prefatory letter by the
late Dean of Westminster.]

The energetic and high-minded mother of the house died at the end of
1828, and the tenderness and skill of her youngest son in the sickroom
surpassed the devotion of women. In the following year he went to manage
one of his father's mills at Bury, where he went to reside. The Gregs
had always been distinguished for their efforts to humanise the
semi-barbarous population that the extraordinary development of the
cotton industry was then attracting to Lancashire. At Quarry Bank the
sedulous cultivation of their own minds had always been subordinate to
the constant and multifarious demands of their duties towards their
workpeople. One of the curious features of that not very distant time
was the Apprentice House. The employer procured children from the
workhouse and undertook the entire charge of them. The Gregs usually had
a hundred boys and girls between the ages of ten and twenty-one in their
apprentice house, and the care of them was one of the main occupations
of the family. They came from the refuse of the towns, yet the harmony
of wise and gentle rule for the young, along with dutifully adjusted
demand and compliance between the older hands and their employers, ended
in the transformation of the thin, starved, half-dazed creatures who
entered the gates of the factory into the best type of workpeople to be
found in the district. The genial side of the patriarchal system was
seen at its best. There is a touch of grace about the picture of the
pleasant house with its old beech-trees and its s