> 
. 
q 
{ 
4 
: 
29 
school at “ Vale,” in the Burnley Valley. After his marriage he 
started the business of a boot, shoe, and leather dealer, in the 
neighbouring town of Todmorden, and to this he shortly after 
added the trade of a tobacconist, which he carried on at Burnley. 
He died in February, 1878; indeed, within the period of eight 
months, father, mother, and child were gathered in one common 
grave under the greensward of the little Baptist Chapel at Vale, 
a sudden and tragical ending to a career at one time not wanting 
in promise. 
The essayist proceeded to remark, ‘ Personally I was 
attached to Standing, for despite a somewhat uncouth exterior, 
and manners that might be called ‘‘ provincial,” he was a person 
of the tenderest sensibility and the most delicate heart, who had 
read the poets carefully and thoughtfully, and with one of the 
greatest of the moderns had heard ‘The still, sad music of 
humanity.” In him the kernal of the nut was as sweet as the 
husk was rough. With Nature, who “ever whispers consoling 
secrets to attentive ears,” Standing walked as with a mistress 
whom he loved. To all her changing aspects his eyes were open, 
and often in journeying, a solitary traveller, over the dusky 
moors that stretch for miles and miles around his home, he had 
felt ‘‘The silence that is in the starry sky, the sleep that is 
among the lonely hills.” 
Among Standing’s friends here were Dr. Spencer T. Hall, the 
late Mr. Wilkinson, Mr. Henry Nutter, and others. 
Mr. Stansfield thus closed his paper : ‘‘ Had Standing survived, 
I believe that with his undoubted originality, his keen insight 
into character, and his overflowing humour, he might have made 
a name in literature. As it is, and brief as must—trom the very 
nature of the case—be the fame of writers in any dialect what- 
soever (Save in rare instances of supreme genius), I venture to 
think that one or two, at least, of these sketches of Standing’s 
will live yet for some years, and this by the vivid and ‘fast’ 
colours in which he has painted a condition of things phenomenal 
amid so much general enlightenment, but which is surely 
passing, and will in the course of another generation have totally 
passed away.” 
