148 
BIUTISII PIIAllMACEUTICAL CONFERENCE. 
proach against those engaged in pharmacy that they seem to care exclusively 
for their own concerns. Surely under the benign influence of this association 
such a charge will vanish. 
Now, the love of business in our own case involves the love of study, and this 
is the strictly professional part of our character. Of that study which concerns 
our own immediate necessities, such as the laws of chemistry, the knowledge of 
plants, the range of Materia Medica, I say nothing, as the subject is so frequently 
brought before you that I have taken it for granted. I confess I have a strong 
leaning to that class of mind which goes beyond this, and loves literature and 
learning for their own sakes. Nothing in my own career has more brightened 
toil, and lessened the irksomeness of manual labour than the recollections of a 
classical education. I know I shall be charged with affectation—that I cannot 
help. 
M^hen I first entered business, never having been apprentice, I was at the 
mature age of twenty-one. I loathed it in every fibre of my existence. In 
those first dark commencing years, no words can express the solace to my mind 
of many a splendid passa^ge from old Roman prose and verse, and many a strophe 
and antistrophe from the Greek. The pleasure is as vivid now as it was fifteen 
years ago. You exceedingly practical men who will read this at your own fire¬ 
side and pronounce it rubbish, try it in your own experience. I am so far be¬ 
hind the age as to believe at the present moment that there is no finer poetry in 
existence than that contained in the four books of the Odes of Horace. You 
recollect where, in bidding farewell to Virgil, he addresses the shijD bound with 
the poet for Athens, as if it were a living thing, and implores it to bring back 
his friend in safety (Od. lib. i. 3. 5) :— 
“ Navis, quEe tlbi creditum 
Debes Virgilium, finibus Atticis 
Reddas iucolumem, pvecor: 
Et serves animse dimidium mese.” 
Or shall I remind you of the exquisite lines in praise of Augustus ? In an age 
gross in its tyranny over the poor, and fulsome in its laudations of the rich, 
Horace simply says that nature herself seemed to rejoice at the presence of the 
Emperor (Od. iv. 5. 5) :— 
“ Lucem redde tuae. Dux bone, patrise: 
Instar Veris enim vultus ubi tuns 
Adfulsit populo, gratior it dies 
Et soles melius nitent.” 
So, like the brook, we might go on for ever, but a shade passes this way—the 
figure of a man whose hair is iron-grey, in face and dress and general aspect 
not unlike the Nelson portrait, and he is ten years older than his age. That 
was my father—some amongst you knew him. He was brought up at Witton, 
where he had a wretched education, if that might be dignified with such a 
name which had to be all unlearnt. He got a place at Chester, which was as 
wretched as his schooling ; from thence by a bold flight he went to London, 
where his prospects culminated in a hole situated somewhere in the Barbican. 
None ever entered upon pharmacy or education under more repulsive circum¬ 
stances. But fortune grew tired of frowning, and placed him at once and for 
his life under the guardian v/ings of a classic phoenix, supposed to be the patron 
bird of the Hon. Robert Boyle, but which in truth was fashioned by a modern 
artist years after that distinguished philosopher was gathered to his tomb. He 
•was the type of the man ethical. He loved his business with an unaflected pas¬ 
sion—he deliberately preferred it to any other walk in life ; yet every successive 
year he loved books more and more. 
First, he was ashamed of his scanty stock of Latin, and held it a sort of dis- 
