The Early Life of Mark Rutherford | Page 5

that's what you are."
At one o'clock an immense dinner is provided at the Red Lion, and thither the debtors come, no matter what may be the state of their accounts, and drink my uncle's health. Such was Uncle Lovell. My father and mother often had supper with him and my aunt. After I was ten years old I was permitted to go. It was a solid, hot meal at nine o'clock. It was followed by pipes and brandy and water, never more than one glass; and when this was finished, at about half-past ten, there was the walk home across the silent bridge, with a glimpse downward of the dark river slowly flowing through the stone arches.
I now come to my father. My object is not to write his life. I have not sufficient materials, nor would it be worth recording at any length, but I should like to preserve the memory of a few facts which are significant of him, and may explain his influence upon me.
He was born in 1807, and was eight years old when his father died: his mother died seven years earlier. He had a cruel step-mother, who gave to her own child everything she had to give. He was educated at the Grammar School, but the teaching there, as I have said, was very poor. The step-mother used to send messages to the head master begging him soundly to thrash her step-son, for he was sure to deserve it, and school thrashing in those days was no joke. She also compelled my father to clean boots, knives and forks, and do other dirty work.
I do not know when he opened the shop in Bedford as a printer and bookseller, but it must have been about 1830. He dealt in old books, the works of the English divines of all parties, both in the Anglican Church and outside it. The clergy, who then read more than they read or can read now, were his principal customers. From the time when he began business as a young man in the town he had much to do with its affairs. He was a Whig in politics, and amongst the foremost at elections, specially at the election in 1832, when he and the Whig Committee were besieged in the Swan Inn by the mob. He soon became a trustee of the Bedford Charity, and did good service for the schools. In September 1843, the Rev. Edward Isaac Lockwood, rector of St. John's, in the town, and trustee of the schools, carried a motion at a board meeting declaring that all the masters under the Charity should be members of the Church of England. The Charity maintained one or two schools besides the Grammar School. The Act of Parliament, under which it was administered, provided that the masters and ushers of the Grammar School should be members of the Church of England, but said nothing about the creed of the masters of the other schools. The consternation in the town was great. It was evident that the next step would be to close the schools to Dissenters. Public meetings were held, and at the annual election of trustees, Mr. Lockwood was at the bottom of the poll. At the next meeting of the board, after the election, my father carried a resolution which rescinded Mr. Lockwood's. The rector's defeat was followed by a series of newspaper letters in his defence from the Rev. Edward Swann, mathematical master in the Grammar School. My father replied in a pamphlet, published in 1844.
There was one endowment for which he was remarkable, the purity of the English he spoke and wrote. He used to say he owed it to Cobbett, whose style he certainly admired, but this is but partly true. It was rather a natural consequence of the clearness of his own mind and of his desire to make himself wholly understood, both demanding the simplest and most forcible expression. If the truth is of serious importance to us we dare not obstruct it by phrase- making: we are compelled to be as direct as our inherited feebleness will permit. The cannon ball's path is near to a straight line in proportion to its velocity. "My boy," my father once said to me, "if you write anything you consider particularly fine, strike it out."
The Reply is an admirable specimen of the way in which a controversy should be conducted; without heat, the writer uniformly mindful of his object, which is not personal distinction, but the conviction of his neighbour, poor as well as rich, all the facts in order, every point answered, and not one evaded. At the opening of the first letter, a saying of Burkitt's is quoted with approval. "Painted glass is very beautiful, but plain glass is the most