ive glooms our hearts found rest.

Such a step had long been in his mind. From Naples when on the threshold
of active life, he had written (February 6, 1832):--

I am becoming more and more anxious to realise a
competence speedily, every time I look to the future, and
reflect on the true objects of life, and the likeliest means
of procuring them. I am desirous to be able to realise
the projects I have formed before the age of feeling and
acting be past, and before the energy of youth has been
evaporated by long repression. Life and talents and
desires were not given me to be wasted in a situation
where the power of doing good is at best very limited,
and where that of acquiring the higher kinds of knowledge
and enjoying the best gifts of life is still more
confined.

The nearer prospect of the world of business and actual contact with it
made no change in the perpetual refrain.

I wonder [he writes, May 15, 1833] how long philosophy
or indecision will induce to continue the dog's life I am
leading here. I never open a book, but shun them as if
they were poison, rise at half-past five o'clock, go to bed
at ten, and toil like a galley slave all day, willy, nilly.
Man labours for the meat which perisheth, and the food
which satisfieth not.

The move to the Lakes, though it enriched his lite with many delicious
hours, and gave him leisure for thought and composition, yet seems to
have led directly to commercial difficulties. At first he spent
alternate weeks at Bury and at Wansfell, and for a little time he even
removed to Macclesfield. But business fell by insensible degrees into
the second place. Mr. Greg's temperament, moreover, was too sanguine in
practical affairs, as Cobden's was; and we might almost gather from his
writings that he had not that faculty of sustained attention to details
which is the pith and marrow of success in such a business as his. At
last the crash came in 1850. Three years before this the health of his
brother Samuel had broken down, and William Greg added the management of
his affairs to his own. The strain was too great, and a long struggle
ended in defeat. Both mills were closed, and the forty thousand pounds
of capital with which Mr. Greg had begun business were almost entirely
swept away. At the age of forty-one he was called upon to begin life
afresh. The elasticity of his mind proved equal to all the demands upon
it, and they were severe. The