It is the penalty of old age to lose all our friends and acquaintances, but fortunately our hold on earth weakens as the end of life draws near. In an active life, we see much of the world and the men who help to make it better. Many ministers and missionaries came to my father’s house with wonderful accounts of the spread of the Gospel in foreign parts. At a later time I saw a knot of popular lecturers and agitators—such as George Thompson, the great anti-slavery lecturer, who, born in humble life, managed to get into Parliament, where he collapsed altogether. As an outdoor orator he was unsurpassed, and carried all before him. After a speech of his I heard Lord Brougham declare it was one of the most eloquent he had ever heard. He started a newspaper, which, however, did not make much way. Then there was Henry Vincent, another natural orator, whom the common people heard gladly, and who at one time was very near getting into Parliament as M.P. for Ipswich, then, as now, a go-ahead town, full of Dissenters and Radicals. He began life as a Chartist and printer, and, I believe, was concerned in the outbreak near Newport. Of the same class was a man of real genius and immense learning, considering the disadvantages of his lowly birth, Thomas Cooper, the Chartist, and author of that magnificent poem, “The Purgatory of Suicides,” written when he was in gaol for being connected with a Chartist outbreak. He had been a Methodist, he became a Freethinker, and, when I knew him, was under the influence of Strauss’s Life of Jesus, a book which George Eliot had translated, and which made a great sensation at the time of its appearance, though it is utterly forgotten now. Cooper and I were members of an obscure club, in one of the Fleet Street courts, where he used to declaim with great eloquence on the evil doings of the Tories and the wrongs of the poor, while at the same time he had a true appreciation of the utter worthlessness of some of the Chartist leaders. As he advanced in years he gave up his infidel opinions and became an earnest advocate of the faith he once laboured to destroy. The last time I saw him was at his house in Lincoln shortly before he died. He seemed sound in body, considering his years, but his mind was gone and he remembered no one. At the same time I saw a good deal of Richard Lovett—a noble character—who worked all his life for the mental and moral improvement of the working man, of whom he was such an illustrious example. Cooper and Vincent and Lovett did much between them to make the working man respected as he had never been before.