Page:Eminent English liberals in and out of Parliament.djvu/124

 Emerson, and Carlyle; of Shakespeare, Tennyson, Longfellow, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Burns; of Burke, Grattan, and Curran; of Macaulay, Gibbon, and Hume; of Scott, Thackeray, Dickens, and George Eliot; of Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Bastiat, Fawcett, Thornton, and other illustrious intellects. Latin and French he hammered out as best he could from the pages of "Cassell's Popular Educator," while Euclid and shorthand received no inconsiderable share of his attention. And whatever he read he mastered, and assimilated with a rare appreciation of all that he found true and beautiful.

Then came the application of all this acquirement,—a true and beneficent application. He did not wrap his talents in a napkin, but devoted them ungrudgingly to the elevation of his fellow- workmen. He lectured on temperance, trades -unionism, arbitration, co-operation, education, the advantages of mechanics' institutes, politics, and gradually became a clear, judicious, and convincing public speaker. He was a Sunday-school teacher, a day-school secretary, and an organizer of temperance societies. He came to read men, as he had read books, with intelligence and sympathy; and the miners on their part were quick and generous to discern that they had found in their fellow-workman a true friend and able counsellor.

In 1860 the Burts left Seaton Delaval, and settled at Choppington, now a portion of the parliamentary borough of Morpeth; and here it was that the great administrative talents of the honorable member first displayed themselves. He speedily became the delegate of the Choppington men, and ultimately, in 18G5, general secretary of the Northumbrian Miners' Mutual Confident Association.