And wherefore was it ABSÁL in that Isle, And what the turning of SALÁMÁN's Heart What is THE FIRE ?-Ascetic Discipline, She fill'd, and blotted out his Mortal Love. In Intellectual Light is Royal blest, And mounts THE THRONE, and wears THE CROWN, and Reigns, Lord of the Empire of Humanity. This is the Meaning of this Mystery, Which to know wholly ponder in thy Heart THE TRUTH GOD ONLY KNOWS. MEMOIR OF BERNARD BARTON (From a Letter of Bernard Barton) "THY cordial approval of my brother John's hearty wish to bring us back to the simple habits of the olden time induces me to ask thee if I mentioned in either of my late letters the curious old papers he stumbled on in hunting through the repositories of our late excellent spinster sister? I quite forget whether I did or not; so I will not at a venture repeat all the items. But he found an inventory of the goods and chattels of our great-grandfather, John Barton of Ive-Gill, a little hamlet about five or seven miles from Carlisle ; by which it seems our progenitor was one of those truly patriarchal personages, a Cumbrian statesmanliving on his own little estate, and drawing from it all things needful for himself and his family. I will be bound for it my good brother was more gratified at finding his earliest traceable ancestor such an one than if he had found him in the college of heralds with gules purpure and argent emblazoned as his bearings. The total amount of his stock, independent of house, land, and any money he might have, seems by the valuation to have been £61 6s., and the copy of his admission to his little estate gives the fine as £5, so that I suppose its annual value was then estimated at £2 15s. This was about a century back. Yet this man was the chief means of building the little chapel in the dale, still standing. (He was a Churchman.) I doubt not he was a fine simple-hearted noble-minded yeoman, in his day, and I am very proud of him. Why did his son, my grandfather, after whom I was named, ever leave that pleasant dale, and go and set up a manufactory in Carlisle ; inventing a piece of machinery 1 for which he had a medal from the Royal Society ?-so says Pennant. Methinks he had better have abode in the old grey stone, slate-covered homestead on the banks of that pretty brooklet the Ive! but I bear his name, so I will not quarrel with his memory." "I Thus far Bernard Barton traces the history of his family. And it appears that, as his grandfather's mechanical genius drew him away from the pastoral life at Ive-Gill, so his father, who was of a literary turn, reconciled himself with difficulty to the manufactory he inherited at Carlisle. always," he wrote, "perused a Locke, an Addison, or a Pope, with delight,' and ever sat down to my ledger with a sort of disgust ; and he at one time determined to quit a business in which he had been "neither successfully nor agreeably engaged," and become a minister of some sect of religion-it will then be time," he says, "to determine of what sect when I am enabled to judge of their respective merits. But this I will freely confess to you, that if there be any one of them, the tenets of which are more favourable to rational religion than the one in which I have been brought up, I shall be so far from thinking it a crime, that I cannot but consider it my duty to embrace it." This' however, was written when he was very young. He never gave up business, but changed one business for another, and shifted the scene of its transaction. His religious inquiries led to a more decided result. He very soon left the Church of England, and became a member of the Society of Friends. About the same time he married a Quaker lady, Mary Done, of a Cheshire family, She bore him several children ; but only three lived to maturity: two daughters, of whom 1 The manufactory was one of calico-printing. The " piece of machinery" "is thus described by Pennant: "Saw at Mr. Bernard Barton's a pleasing sight of twelve little girls spinning at once at a horizontal wheel, which set twelve bobbins in motion; yet so contrived, that should any accident happen to one, the motion of that might be stopped without any impediment to the others." 2 See an amusing account of his portrait, with his favourite books about him, painted about this time, Letter I of this Collection. the elder, Maria, distinguished herself, afterward, as the author of many useful children's books under her married name, Hack; and one son, Bernard, the poet, who was born on January 31, 1784. Shortly before Bernard's birth, however, John Barton had removed to London, where he engaged in something of the same business he had quitted at Carlisle, but where he probably found society and interests more suited to his taste. I do not know whether he ever acted as minister in his Society; but his name appears on one record of their most valuable endeavours. The Quakers had from the very time of George Fox distinguished themselves by their opposition to slavery: a like feeling had gradually been growing up in other quarters of England; and in 1787 a mixed committee of twelve persons was appointed to promote the Abolition of the Slave-trade; Wilberforce engaging to second them with all his influence in Parliament. Among these twelve stands the name of John Barton, in honourable companionship with that of Thomas Clarkson. "I lost my mother," again writes B. B., "when I was only a few days old; and my father married again in my infancy so wisely and so happily, that I knew not but his second wife was my own mother, till I learned it years after at a boarding school." The name of this amiable step-mother was Elizabeth Horne; a Quaker also; daughter of a merchant, who, with his house in London and villa at Tottenham was an object of B. B.'s earliest regard and latest recollection. "Some of my first recollections," he wrote fifty years after, "are, looking out of his parlour windows at Bankside on the busy Thames, with its everchanging scene, and the dome of St. Paul's rising out of the smoke on the other side of the river. But my most delightful recollections of boyhood are connected with the fine old country-house in a green lane diverging from the high road which runs through Tottenham. I would give seven years of life as it now is, for a week of that which I then led. It was a large old house, with an iron palisade and a pair of iron gates in front, and a huge stone eagle on each pier. Leading up to the steps by which you went up to the hall door was a wide gravel walk, bordered in summer-time by huge tubs, in which were orange and lemon trees, and in the centre of the grass-plot stood a tub yet larger, holding an enormous aloe. The hall itself to my fancy then lofty and wide as a cathedral would seem now, was a famous place for battledore and shuttlecock; and behind was a garden, equal to that of old Alcinous himself. My favourite walk was one of turf by a long strait pond, bordered with lime trees. But the whole demesne was the fairy ground of my childhood; and its presiding genius was grandpapa. He must have been a handsome man in his youth, for I remember him at nearly eighty, a very fine-looking one, even in the decay of mind and body. In the morning a velvet cap; by dinner, a flaxen wig; and features always expressive of benignity and placid cheerfulness. When he walked out into the garden, his cocked hat and amber-headed cane completed his costume. To the recollection of this delightful personage I am, I think, indebted for many soothing and pleasing associations with old age." John Barton did not live to see the only child—a son— that was born to him by this second marriage. He had some time before quitted London, and taken partnership in a malting business at Hereford, where he died, in the prime of life. After his death his widow returned to Tottenham, and there with her son and step-children continued for some time to reside. In due time Bernard was sent to a much-esteemed Quaker school at Ipswich: returning always to spend his holidays at Tottenham. When fourteen years old, he was apprenticed to Mr. Samuel Jesup, a shopkeeper at Halstead in Essex. "There I stood," he writes, "for eight years behind the counter of the corner shop at the top of Halstead Hill, kept to this day" (November 9, 1828) " by my old master, and still worthy uncle, S. Jesup." In 1806 he went to Woodbridge; and a year after married Lucy Jesup, the niece of his former master, and entered into partnership with her brother as coal and corn merchant. But she died a year after marriage, in giving birth to the only child, who now survives them both; and he, perhaps |