UNIVERSITY OF LONDON—ETON COLLEGE—UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF DUNDEE—SCOTTISH UNIVERSITIES COMMISSION—ROYAL COMMISSION OF THE 1851 EXHIBITION—CARNEGIE TRUST: SCOTTISH UNIVERSITIES—SCIENCE AND ART DEPARTMENT: SCIENCE MUSEUMS—LISTER INSTITUTE OF PREVENTIVE MEDICINE 161 CHAPTER XII DIGNITIES AND HONOURS—THE _DEUTSCHE REVUE_—GERMANY AND ENGLAND—WORLD SUPREMACY OR WAR 175 CHAPTER XIII HOME LIFE—LADY ROSCOE—WOODCOTE LODGE—PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS—DEATH 190 INDEX 204 THE RIGHT HONOURABLE SIR HENRY ENFIELD ROSCOE CHAPTER I WILLIAM ROSCOE—HENRY ROSCOE The subject of this memoir had no particular pride of ancestry. _Stemmata quid faciunt?_ Although with no convictions on the subject, he was willing to believe that his line stretched at least as far back as Adam and Eve, and he doubted whether any man could with certainty claim—_pace_ Darwin—a more ancient lineage.[1] As he has told us in his Autobiography, his family was one of the many that could not trace its origin for more than three or four generations back. All he knew was that he came of a North-country stock, members of which—village Hampdens and mute inglorious Miltons—had been settled in the County Palatine and in the vicinity of Liverpool for many years. He had a distinguished grandfather, a man of mark and public weight in his native town, and who bears an honoured name in our literature. Of him it is related that when a certain Garter Principal King-at-Arms desired to trace his pedigree (which had hitherto baffled his researches), he replied that he was a good patriarch, and the proper person to begin a family, as he had a quiverful of sons. “Accordingly the whole descent is registered, and the Roscoes may now go on _in sæcula sæculorum_. Amen.” Mr. William Roscoe—Grandfather Roscoe as he was called in the family circle—was justly claimed by his grandson to be the first man of distinction that Liverpool had produced. Although more than one hundred and fifty years have passed since his birth his name still remains one of the most prominent in its history. His story is one of the Romances of Literature.