Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 5.djvu/288

 I'Jt WORKMEN AND HEROES JOHN HOWARD* BY HARRIET G. WALKER (1726-1790) JOHN HOWARD was born in Hackney, Middlesex County, England, Sep- tember 2, 1 726. The only existing rec- ord of this fact is the inscription upon his monument in St. Paul's Cathedral, London. His parentage came through a somewhat obscure family, his father being sometimes mentioned as an up- holsterer and sometimes as a merchant of moderate means. Of his mother we know only her name Chomley and that she died when her second child, and only son, was an infant. The father was a strict, sturdy, honest, severe Puritan, the marks of whose character ever re- mained on the character of the son. The motherless boy seems to have passed unnoticed through the weary days of a sickly childhood, and the usual martyrdom of the " dullest boy in the school," under first one tutor and then an- other, to his sixteenth year, when he left school and books, as he afterward testi- fies, " not thoroughly knowing any one thing." How much does any boy or girl thoroughly know of any one thing at sixteen ? Surely not enough to war- rant his removal from school. But not so reasoned the father of John Howard, for we find him at this age apprenticing his only son to Alderman Newham, a wholesale grocer on Watling Street, London. That this was not a change made from pecuniary necessity is evidenced by the liberal provision made for the boy. We are told that his father paid .700 for his fee of apprenticeship, and provided him a separate suite of apartments, a ser- vant, and a pair of saddle-horses ! The inference is that young John's progress in school was not such as to warrant his continuance at his books. His letters and manuscripts still in existence reveal a lamentable deficiency in orthography and the handling of the king's English. Some of Howard's biographers attempt to attribute his methodical business- like habits in later life to the experience gained while in the service of this whole- sale grocer. But when we consider that his stay was far less than one year, we
 * Copyright. 1804. by Selmar Hess.