1 MEMOIR 



side, the masters stultified their cause by obstinate impolicy, and 

 the men disgraced their order by acts of outrage. ' On Wednes- 

 day last,' writes Fleeming, ' about three thousand banded round 

 Fairbairn's door at 6 o'clock : men, women, and children, factory 

 boys and girls, the lowest of the low in a very low place. Orders 

 came that no one was to leave the works ; but the men inside 

 (Knobsticks, as they are called) were precious hungry and 

 thought they would venture. Two of my companions and my- 

 self went out with the very first, and had the full benefit of every 

 possible groan and bad language,' But the police cleared a 

 lane through the crowd, the pupils were suffered to escape un- 

 hurt, and only the Knobsticks followed home and kicked with 

 clogs ; so that Fleeming enjoyed, as we may say, for nothing, 

 that fine thrill <of expectant valour with which he had sallied 

 forth into the mob, * I never before felt myself so decidedly 

 somebody, instead of nobody,' he wrote. 



Dr. Bell Outside as inside the works, he was ' pretty merry and well 



a nd Greek to do,' zealous in study, welcome to many friends, unwearied in 

 ture. loving- kindness to his mother. For some time he spent three 



nights a week with Dr. Bell, ' working away at certain geo- 

 metrical methods of getting the Greek architectural proportions : ' 

 a business after Fleeming's heart, for he was never so pleased 

 as when he could marry his two devotions, art and science. This 

 was besides, in all likelihood, the beginning of that love and 

 intimate appreciation of things Greek, from the least to the 

 greatest, from the Agamemnon (perhaps his favourite tragedy) 

 down to the details of Grecian tailoring, which he used to ex- 

 press in his familiar phrase : *' The Greeks were the boys.' Dr. 

 Bell the son of George Joseph, the nephew of Sir Charles, and 

 though he made less use of it than some, a sharer in the dis- 

 tinguished talents of his race had hit upon the singular fact 

 tfiat certain geometrical intersections gave the proportions of 

 the Doric order. Fleeming, under Dr. Bell's direction, applied 

 the same method to the other orders, and again found the pro- 

 portions accurately given. Numbers of diagrams were prepared ; 

 but the discovery was never given to the world, perhaps because 

 of the dissensions that arose between the authors. For Dr. Bell 



