ry respectable sum.
Charles Childs, who died suddenly a few years since, and who never seemed
to me to have aged a day since I first knew him, was truly a chip of the
old block. He was much in London, as he printed quite as much as his
father for the leading London publishers. An enlightened patriot, he was
in very many cases successful in resisting the obstacles raised from time
to time by party spirit or Church bigotry. On more than one occasion he
conducted a number of his workmen through an illegally-closed path, and
opened it by the destruction of the fences, repeated appeals to the
persistent obstructions having proved unavailing. He was a man of
scholarly and literary attainments, a clever talker, well able to hold
his own, and during the Corn Law and Currency agitation he contributed
one or more articles on these subjects to the _Westminster Review_, then
edited by his friend, the late General Perronet Thompson, a very foremost
figure in Radical circles forty years ago, always trying to get into
Parliament--rarely succeeding in the attempt. 'How can he expect it,'
said Mr. Cobden to me one day, 'when, instead of going to the principal
people to support him, he finds out some small tradesman--some little
tailor or shoemaker--to introduce him?' Once upon a time the _Times_
furiously attacked Charles Childs. His reply, which was able and
convincing, was forwarded, but only procured admission in the shape of an
advertisement, for which Mr. Childs had to pay ten pounds. The corner of
East Anglia of which I write rarely produced two better men than the
Childs, father and son. They are gone, but the printing business still
survives, though no longer carried on under the well-known name. By
their noble integrity and public spirit they proved themselves worthy of
a craft to which light and literature and leading owe so much. It is to
such men that England is under lasting obligations, and one of the
indirect benefits of a State Church is that it gives them a grievance,
and a sense of wrong, which compels them to gird up their energies to act
the part of village Hampdens or guiltless Cromwells. All the manhood in
them is aroused and strengthened as they contend for what they deem right
and just, and against force and falsehood. Poets, we are told, by one
himself a poet,

'Are cradled into poetry by wrong;
They learn in suffering what they teach in song.'

Nonconformists have cause especially to rejoi