2 THE LIFE OF PHILIP HENRY GOSSE. 



a bundle of five brushes, and some leaves of ivory, for he 

 was a perambulating miniature-painter. 



This was Mr. Thomas Gosse, father of the subject and 

 grandfather of the writer of the present memoir. Born in 

 1765, he had been the eleventh of the twelve children of 

 William Gosse, a wealthy cloth manufacturer of Ringwood, 

 in Hampshire. The family had been leading citizens of 

 that town, and had always been engaged in the same 

 industry since the reign of Charles II., legend attributing 

 to the race a French origin, and an advent into England 

 at the Restoration. The name appears to have no direct 

 or recent relation with Goss, a frequent name in the west 

 of England ; but to mark kinship with the southern French 

 family, from which Etienne Gosse, the author of Le 

 Medisant, sprang at the close of the eighteenth century. 

 Mr. William Gosse had been not a little of a local magnate, 

 and had served, by virtue of some Welsh estates, as High 

 Sheriff of Radnorshire. But the earliest introduction of 

 machinery had struck heavily at the woollen manufacture, 

 and he died in 1784, at the age of seventy, an impoverished 

 though not a ruined man. 



Of the divided remnant of the father's fortune, Thomas 

 Gosse had, by 1807, long spent the last penny of his 

 trifling share. He had been trained, at his own passionate 

 request, to be an artist, had worked at the schools of the 

 Royal Academy under Sir Joshua Reynolds, and for 

 twenty years had lived precariously as a mezzotint en- 

 graver, first under Anker Smith, A.R.A., then under 

 William Ward, A.R.A., and at length independently. 

 But he had no push in him, no ambition, and no energy. 

 He was of a solitary and retiring disposition, and incapable 

 of any business exertion. At last, in the summer of 

 1803, he had ceased to follow engraving. The fashion 

 for mezzotints was everywhere on the decline, and their 



