Page:The Life and Correspondence of the Reverend John Clowes.djvu/9



The manuscript which formed the basis of the following Biography was written by my father-in-law, George Harrison, within a few years of Mr Clowes’s decease. He read portions of it to me in 1838, at the same time stating his wish that some one with more turn for biography than he had, would take the work in hand, and make a picture from his sketch.

His own Preface to the manuscript is as follows:—“Having repeatedly requested the friends of the late Mr Clowes to commit to writing all they could recollect of him, and finding one after another following him to an eternal world without having left any such recollections behind, I felt it the more incumbent upon me to set down what came under my own observation respecting this most interesting character during his latter years; as well as what I had gathered from himself and his personal acquaintances from an earlier period. Since I began to write, however, I have been favored with several valuable collections of letters, and notes of his conversations. I have also included the substance of the short Memoir already published, having heard it from Mr Clowes’s own mouth.”

More than forty years passed without any further progress being made towards a complete Life of this excellent man. Meanwhile the manuscript came into my possession, as well as