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 certain professing
Christians in those days) Sophia Alethea Hobson--a woman who,
considerably older than Mr. Newcome, had the advantage of surviving him
many years. Her mansion at Clapham was long the resort of the most