Let me, in this chapter, give the first place to Samuel Plimsoll, a man who, if he made money, spent it nobly, and deserved the peerage far more than many who have been elected to that honour—at any rate, from the time the Earl of Beaconsfield became Premier¹.  He was down very low in the social scale, and it is thus he writes of his noble poverty and of his companions in misfortune, in that appeal on behalf of our seamen², which stirred up the community as with the voice of a trumpet³, and actually forced parliament to legislate⁴.  “I don’t wish,” he writes, “to disparage⁵ the rich; but I think it may reasonably be doubted whether these qualities are so fully⁶ developed in them” (he had been writing of the honesty, of the strong aversion to idleness, of the generosity⁷ to one another in Men who are not supposed to be mercenary often make a great deal of money.  Most of our artists rose from very humble⁸ beginnings.  Turner was the son of a hair-dresser.  Wilkie was desperately⁹ poor; so was Barry; and William Etty, that great colourist, was the son of a baker¹⁰ in York—was bound apprentice¹¹, wholly against his will, to a printer in Hull¹²; but he released himself from the

分享到：