Stories told to a child/Chapter 5
THE LIFE OF MR. JOHN SMITH.
THIS great and good man, every event of whose life is well worth preserving, was born in the parish of Cripplegate Within, at half-past ten on Friday, the 1st of April, 1780. He was the only child of his parents, who, perceiving from the first his uncommon sweetness of disposition, and acuteness of intellect, felt a natural pride in watching his progress through infancy.
At seven months he cut his first tooth; at fourteen months he could run alone, and such was his precocity, that, at two years and a half, he could speak his mother tongue sufficiently well to be able to ask for what he wanted.
He began to learn his letters as early as three years old, and soon mastered the whole alphabet, which he would repeat with beautiful precision upon the offer of an apple or a ginger-bread nut.
His father was a brazier, and had a very good business. Jack, as he was then called, was allowed the range of the shop, and possession of all the nails that he could find lying about; thus he soon learned to distinguish between tin tacks, ten-pennies, and brass heads, and having a small hammer of his own, used to amuse himself with knocking them by dozens into a door in the yard, which was soon so thickly studded with them, that you could not see the wood between.
He also had a tin saucepan, which was given him on his seventh birthday by his indulgent father, and in this he often made toffee and hard-bake for his own eating, and thus, while still a mere babe, his mind was turned to philosophical and scientific pursuits; for by means of his nails and hammer he learned the difference between wood and metal, and also the degree of force required to drive the one into the other, whilst with the aid of his saucepan he taught himself many a lesson in the science of eating, for that it is a science, Soyer has lately demonstrated to the philosophical world.
At seven years old, he being already able to read almost any English book that was placed before him, his father and mother consulted together and resolved to send him to a school at Clapham. There he made such progress as exceeded their most sanguine hopes, and from this school he wrote his first letter, which has been preserved, and runs as follows:
'Dear Father,—I like school a great deal better than I did at first. My jacket has got two great holes in it, so I am forced to wear my Sunday one. We always have roast beef and Yorkshire puddin' for dinner on Sunday, and the boys are very glad of all the nails and screws and nuts I brought with me, and if I might have some more when mother sends my cake and the three pots of jam, and the glue, and the cobbler's wax, and the cabbage-nets, and the packthread, and the fishing-hooks, and the knife, and the new fishing-rod that I asked for when she came to see me, we should all be very glad.
'We have dug a hole in the playground nearly fifteen feet deep, we mean to dig till we get to water, and on half-holidays we fish in the water on the common, where there is an island. The boys want to make a bridge to reach it, but we haven't got anything to make it of. We have not got any fish yet, only newts out of that water, but we saw a good large one on Saturday, and Cooper says he is determined he'll have him. Cooper can fish beautifully.
' Dear father, the thieves have stolen all the apples out of the garden, which is a great pity. I send my love to my mother.
' I remain, dear father, your dutiful son,
'John Smith.'
This interesting letter was read by his parents with tears of joy; indeed, from this time till their son was fifteen years old, he gave them neither trouble nor anxiety, excepting twice—namely, when he took the measles, and when he fought with another boy, and came home with a black eye.
At fifteen, he was apprenticed to his father, and during his apprenticeship his career was as brilliant as could have been desired. Of course he liked to be well dressed, which his mother felt to be the natural consequence of his good looks. He also liked now and then to spend an afternoon in the parks, looking about him, which his father was glad of; for with such powers of observation as he was endowed with it was highly desirable that he should not be without opportunity for exercising them.
At the age of eighteen he had done growing, and measured five feet eight in his shoes; hair brown, with a slight twist in it, scarcely amounting to a curl; complexion moderately fair, and eyes between gray and green. When his apprenticeship was over he paid his addresses to the second daughter of a bookseller in Cheapside, and married her after a three years' courtship. During the next eleven years, Mr. Smith was blessed with seven children—John, his eldest son; Mary, named after her grandmother; Fanny, Thomas, Elizabeth, James, and Sarah.
A few days after the birth of this last, his father died, leaving him the braziery business, and four thousand pounds in the funds. Mr. Smith was a kind son. His mother lived with him, and her old age was cheered by the sight of his honors, worth, and talents. About this time he took out a patent for a new kind of poker; and in the same year his fellow-citizens showed their sense of his deserts by making him an alderman of London.
Happy in the esteem of all, and in the possession of a good business, he lived very quietly till he reached the age of fifty, when his mother died, and was respectably buried by her son in the parish church of Cripplegate.
His eldest son being now able to take charge of the shop and business, Mr. Smith resolved to travel for a month or two. He accordingly went to Ramsgate, where he enjoyed much intellectual pleasure in the prospect of the glorious ocean, and the fine vessels which continually appeared in the offing.
He was a true patriot, and, as he wandered on the beach, in his buff slippers and straw hat, with an umbrella over his head to shield him from the sun, he might often have been heard to sing, with laudable pride, 'Rule Britannia! Britannia rules the waves!'
After sojourning for three weeks at Ramsgate he went northward; nor did he stop till he had reached that city so renowned for its beauty as often to be called the modern Athens—we mean Edinburgh. Mr. Smith wrote home frequently from thence to his family, and made many valuable remarks on the dialect and manners of the inhabitants; but it would appear that he did not altogether approve of what he saw, for in a letter to his son, after praising the goodness of the houses, and the excellence of the gas-fittings, and, indeed, of everything in the iron and brass departments, he observed that the poultry was tough and badly fed, and that the inhabitants had a most unwarrantably high opinion of their city, 'which I can tell you, is as dull compared to London,' he continued, 'as the British Museum is compared with the Pantheon in Oxford Street.' He also, in the same letter, made some new and valuable remarks on the lateness of the season in the North. In proof of the difference between London and Edinburgh he told his son that strawberries were then in full perfection in the latter city, though it was past the middle of August.
Some years after Mr. Smith's return he was elected churchwarden for the parish of Cripplegate, and performed the duties of that situation with great satisfaction to the inhabitants, heading the subscription to the starving Irish with a donation of £5. In the same year he gave £10 to the Middlesex Hospital.
'It was not till he reached his sixty-eighth year that Mr. Smith retired from the premises and the sphere he had so long adorned. He then gave up the business to his sons, and retired with his wife to a pleasant residence on Stamford Hill.
He retained his superior faculties to the last; for, at the time when there was so much stir about the Nineveh Marbles, he went, though very infirm, to see them, and, with his usual sound sense, remarked that they did not answer his expectations: as there was so much marble in the country, and also Derbyshire spar, he wondered that Government had not new articles manufactured, instead of sending abroad for old things which were cracked already.
At the age of seventy Mr. Smith died, universally respected, and was buried in the cemetery at Kensall Green.
'And is this all?' cries the indignant reader.
All? I am amazed at your asking such a question! I should have thought you had had enough of it! Yes, it is all; and to tell you a secret, which, of course, I would not proclaim to the world, I should not be in the least surprised if your biography, up to the present date, is not one bit better worth writing.
What have you done, I should like to know? and what are you, and what have you been, that is better worth recording than the sayings and doings recorded here? You think yourself superior? Well, you may be, certainly; and to reflect that you are, is a comfortable thing for yourself. And notwithstanding that I say this, I have a true regard for you, and am far from forgetting that though the events of your life may never be striking, or worth recording, the tenor of your life may be useful and happy, and the record may be written on high. In conclusion, however, I cannot forbear telling you that, whether you are destined to be great or little, the honor of writing your biography is not desired by your obedient servant the biographer of Mr. John Smith.