John Brown was originally a poor lad in a cotton mill. His father and mother were—the Lord alone knows whom, for his known career began with his being found as an infant one winter’s night on a doorstep, wrapped in a flannel petticoat marked “J. B.” The foundling was taken to the workhouse and was fed, clothed, and educated at the public charge, finally being sent, as a lad, to the nearest cotton factory, where, by his ability and industry, he speedily rose to be a foreman. He married, early, one Mary Smith, who was captured and enslaved by his noble whiskers, and (being probably well versed in penny novelettes, in which the infants of the aristocracy are not uncommonly abandoned on doorsteps) secretly thought him of gentle blood. John Brown, like the Industrious Apprentice in the moral tales, continually rose higher, and became a cotton-spinner on his own account, and a wealthy man, with a magnificent villa at Higher Broughton, or some other place at that time still semi-rural. He knew nothing of Art, but, as it seemed to be the conventional thing for a man in his position to do, he bought pictures, chiefly, it must be confessed, on the basis of so much per square foot. He rose at six, was at the mill by eight o’clock; and had dinner at midday in town. He was home to tea, which he took with his “owd wumman” in the back-kitchen, leaving the magnificent dining-room for uncomfortable state occasions. He was in bed by nine o’clock. I do not know if any wealthy Manchester commercial men of the late ’sixties recognised themselves in this effort of the imagination; but at any rate it would not hold good nowadays. I do not perceive, at the present time, actually or imaginatively, any great cotton-spinner taking tea in the back-kitchen or retiring at 9 p.m., and, although the art patron idea vigorously survives, it is music that pre-eminently distinguishes Manchester in its higher recreations: Liverpool being really the greater art centre, devoted, above all things of culture, to the pleasing of the eye rather than of the ear. [Sidenote: _MATTER-OF-FACT_] To the typical Manchester man of that time, birth and gentility were nothing. He was, above all things, unsentimental and matter-of-fact, and provokingly literal. It was a Manchester man who, when a passage of poetry was read from Coleridge, declared that the reading, “The swallow was a-cold,” was incorrect, and should be “had a cold.” “Day is breaking” remarked some one to a cotton-spinner. “Let it break,” he replied, “it owes me nothing.”