test. A family of beautiful children sprung
up around him, and in his peculiar fondness for pets he always had dogs
about him that were scarcely less dear than his children. He mourned the
death of one after another of his favorites, until, when the last one
died, he said he would have no more,--the pang of parting with them was
too keen.

The influence of his books as they came along one after
another--"Yeast," "Alton Locke," "Hypatia," "Westward Ho," "Two Years
Ago"--was of a stimulating, even of an exciting, nature, particularly
that of the earlier ones. Like nearly all men of genius, when young he
was a radical, and upon the publication of his first books the
conservatives all took up arms against him. In review after review, all
learning, all sincerity, all merit was denied him. He bore up under a
storm of obloquy and misrepresentation. This simply because he had shown
some of the sufferings of the poor,--given some vivid pictures of life
in England as it was in those days, before the repeal of the Corn Laws
had mitigated a little the sufferings of the dependent masses; and had
expressed some human sympathy with all this fruitless pain, and a manly
indignation at some forms of atrocious wrong. But there was nothing in
his teaching of the people which should have given offence to the
veriest conservative. The main burden of it was that "workingmen must
emancipate themselves from the tyranny of their own vices before they
could be emancipated from the tyranny of bad social arrangements; that
they must cultivate the higher elements of a common humanity in
themselves before they could obtain their share in the heritage of
national civilization. He discouraged every approach to illegality or
violence, and during the riots of that exciting time worked as hard as
the Duke of Wellington to keep the peace." But the Philistines of that
day looked upon it as crime in a beneficed clergyman to enter into
friendly intercourse for any purpose whatever with revolutionists, as
they called the agitators, who were engaged in what seem to us now to
have been great reforms. They denounced him for a Chartist, a name which
he proudly owned, although he never went the lengths of the real leaders
in that movement; and owning, as his enemies did, all the powerful
papers and reviews, they systematically belittled his work and
prejudiced the minds of many people against him to his dying day.

This misinterpretation of his work and misinterpr