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crown of pride ; woe unto the drunkards of Ephraim !’’ and then 
he sat down and not another word was said. I thought at the 
time they had a direct personal reference. There were schools, 
but they were out of my reach. There was the old Grammar 
School and the National School, and there were other schools, 
but the school where I learnt my ‘‘A B C” was in Rodney 
Street, and was kept by two poor women named Isabella Stott 
and Harriet Bamford. May their names be for ever venerable. 
They were good, pious, peaceful, gentle souls; very poor, eking 
out a scanty livelihood by teaching little children and selling 
needles and bobbins of thread. 
There were no books in that dark street, or next to none. My 
father was a reader, but he must have had to borrow what books 
he read. Besides the Bible, I only remember one or two, and 
one was ‘‘ Enfield’s Speaker.” My father was fond of reading 
aloud, and would read the fine passages of Pope, or Milton, or 
Gray, or Collins to any booby who would listen, seeming to 
think that what was beautiful to him must be the same to 
others. T. B. Spencer used to say he was the finest reader he 
ever heard. 
By the way, poor T. B. made his appearance in Blucher 
Street about 1834 or 85. Iremember seeing him for the first 
time standing by the stove in my father’s workshop, a thin, 
slight, poorly clad, poverty-stricken figure, but with an expres- 
sion of countenance very different to the old fogies of the back- 
shop or the village street. He was a hand-loom weaver, and 
worked at the old ‘‘dandy shop” in Keighley Green. He used 
to preach occasionally at Mount Pleasant Chapel, Hammerton 
Street, then Cow Lane, where as a boy I used to go on Sundays 
to hear him, and he impressed me by his intellectual look and 
his fine elocution more than by his theology. I think of him 
then as of one of those men described by Emerson, ‘‘a Damascus 
blade, laid up on the sheif in some village to rust and ruin.” 
As I have said, books were scarce, and it was perhaps as well, 
for I was never tired of hearing my father read Lycidas, Comus, 
Gray’s Elegy, Collins’ ‘‘ Ode to Evening,” passages from Pope’s 
«« Hssay on Man,” the ‘ Story of Lefevre,” and other things from 
the ‘“‘ Speaker.” How he got the taste for these things I could 
never understand. There are few people even in these ages of 
culture who feel the supreme charm of Collins’ ‘‘ Ode to 
Evening,’ and only those who have something of ‘the vision 
and the faculty divine ’’ will ever feel it. I can only account for 
it on Touchstone’s theory, ‘“‘ The gods had made him poetical.” 
But having made him poetical, why did they put him down in 
Blucher Street? ‘Oh, knowledge ill inhabited! worse than 
Jove in a thatched house!’ There were no newspapers, except 
now and then one a week or two old, no periodicals. There was 
