Page:Eminent English liberals in and out of Parliament.djvu/29

 first discoverable local habitation of the Brights is a place still called "Bright's Farm," near Lyneham, in Wiltshire. Here, in 1714, a certain Abraham Bright married Martha Jacobs, a handsome Jewess; and shortly afterwards the couple removed to Coventry, where Abraham begat William Bright, who begat Jacob, who begat Jacob junior, who, coming to Rochdale in 1796, was espoused to Martha Wood, the daughter of a respectable tradesman of Bolton-leMoors, and became in due course the father of John the Great, the subject of this sketch.

Mr. Bright's ancestry abounds in Abrahams and Jacobs, Marthas and Marys. He has a sort of vested interest in scriptural characters and scriptural knowledge, which comes as instinctively to him as fox-hunting to a squire of the county. He is a hereditary Nonconformist; nearly all his relatives, as is well known, being members of the Society of Friends. He may be said to have been born resisting church rates. His father, a most estimable man, could never be induced to pay them, and was, in consequence, as familiar with execution warrants as with the pages of his ledger. Not a bad example, assuredly, for a youthful people's tribune! Bright the elder had started life as a poor but honest weaver, working, as his right honorable son has told all the world, for six shillings a week! In 1809 he took an old mill named Greenbank. Some Manchester friends who had confidence in his intelligence and integrity supplied the capital; and, by the time that the ex-President of the Board of Trade had attained years of discretion, the family were in easy circumstances. The business has since been much developed; but the knowledge that Mr. Bright, from the first, possessed a sub-