Anglican Church and outside it. The clergy, who then read more than
they read or can read now, were his principal customers. From the
time when he began business as a young man in the town he had much
to do with its affairs. He was a Whig in politics, and amongst the
foremost at elections, specially at the election in 1832, when he
and the Whig Committee were besieged in the Swan Inn by the mob. He
soon became a trustee of the Bedford Charity, and did good service
for the schools. In September 1843, the Rev. Edward Isaac Lockwood,
rector of St. John's, in the town, and trustee of the schools,
carried a motion at a board meeting declaring that all the masters
under the Charity should be members of the Church of England. The
Charity maintained one or two schools besides the Grammar School.
The Act of Parliament, under which it was administered, provided
that the masters and ushers of the Grammar School should be members
of the Church of England, but said nothing about the creed of the
masters of the other schools. The consternation in the town was
great. It was evident that the next step would be to close the
schools to Dissenters. Public meetings were held, and at the annual
election of trustees, Mr. Lockwood was at the bottom of the poll.
At the next meeting of the board, after the election, my father
carried a resolution which rescinded Mr. Lockwood's. The rector's
defeat was followed by a series of newspaper letters in his defence
from the Rev. Edward Swann, mathematical master in the Grammar
School. My father replied in a pamphlet, published in 1844.

There was one endowment for which he was remarkable, the purity of
the English he spoke and wrote. He used to say he owed it to
Cobbett, whose style he certainly admired, but this is but partly
true. It was rather a natural consequence of the clearness of his
own mind and of his desire to make himself wholly understood, both