His career was that of not a few intelligent working men of his time. He was a “peaceful” agitator at a period when even the arguments of the peaceful were met by Governments with the more stern, and in their own way unanswerable, arguments of force. To-day, when agitators spout violence, and advocate reform by explosive bomb, and are regarded with indifference by the authorities, they come at last to Cabinet rank in governments; but in Bamford’s day a mere assemblage was considered by the authorities a dangerous thing, and was generally dispersed. Bamford himself was arrested, with others, in 1817, on suspicion of high treason, and sent up by coach, in chains, to London, to be examined before the Privy Council. He escaped that time; but, two years later, was arrested in connection with the famous Reform meeting in St. Peter’s Field, Manchester, August 16th, 1819, which resulted in the tragedy of “Peterloo.” “This time,” he was assured, “you will certainly be hanged,” but the proceedings resulted in a year’s imprisonment at Lincoln, where he was regarded as an amiable poetic visionary, and greatly indulged and liked. As he grew older, his opinions mellowed, and by the time of the Chartist agitation he had to all intents and purposes ceased to be a Radical, and was decidedly Whiggish. The trend of events since then has so altered the outlook that Bamford would probably be now considered a Tory. In 1852 the Government offered him a post at Somerset House: a position he accepted for a while, and then resigned with disgust, as being a sheer waste of time. It was not an exalted post, the duties consisting of arranging and cataloguing a vast number of dusty and useless papers connected with forgotten inland revenue affairs: papers that only a Government department would save from the waste-paper dealer. Clearly Bamford was born before his age. Were it all to do now, he would be standing, the head of his Department, in the House of Commons. It is really—this coming into a world not yet ripe for you—a tragedy, if you do but consider it; but there are compensations. He might have been born a century earlier, when, for such as he, life would have ended in a veritable tragedy of flesh and blood. Happy, perhaps, after all, in being born into the midmost era, he died at last, in his eighty-fourth year, in 1872.