I am sure some of the present Newcomes
would pay the Heralds' Office handsomely, living, as they do, amongst
the noblest of the land, and giving entertainments to none but the very
highest nobility and elite of the fashionable and diplomatic world, as
you may read any day in the newspapers. For though these Newcomes have
got a pedigree from the College, which is printed in Budge's Landed
Aristocracy of Great Britain, and which proves that the Newcome of
Cromwell's army, the Newcome who was among the last six who were hanged
by Queen Mary for Protestantism, were ancestors of this house; of which
a member distinguished himself at Bosworth Field; and the founder,
slain by King Harold's side at Hastings, had been surgeon-barber to King
Edward the Confessor; yet, between ourselves, I think that Sir Brian
Newcome, of Newcome, does not believe a word of the story, any more than
the rest of the world does, although a number of his children bear names
out of the Saxon Calendar.

Was Thomas Newcome a foundling--a workhouse child out of that village
which has now become a great manufacturing town, and which bears his
name? Such was the report set about at the last election, when Sir
Brian, in the Conservative interest contested the borough; and Mr. Yapp,
the out-and-out Liberal candidate, had a picture of the old workhouse
placarded over the town as the birthplace of the Newcomes; with placards
ironically exciting freemen to vote for Newcome and union--Newcome
and the parish interests, etc. Who cares for these local scandals? It
matters very little to those who have the good fortune to be invited
to Lady Ann Newcome's parties whether her beautiful daughters can trace
their pedigrees no higher than to the alderman their grandfather; or
whether, through the mythic ancestral barber-surgeon, they hang on to
the chin of Edward, Confessor and King.

Thomas Newcome, who had been a weaver in his native village, brought
the very best character for honesty, thrift, and ingenuity with him
to London, where he was taken into the house of Hobson Brothers,
cloth-factors; afterwards Hobson and Newcome. This fact may suffice to
indicate Thomas Newcome's story. Like Whittington and many other London
apprentices, he began poor and ended by marrying his master's daughter,
and becoming sheriff and alderman of the City of London.

But it was only en secondes noces that he espoused the wealthy, and
religious, and eminent (such was the word applied to