Page:The Story of the House of Cassell (book).djvu/85

 in Kensal Green Cemetery. There were many signs of widespread sorrow for his death. His widow survived him twenty-two years; his daughter, "my beloved Sophia," died in 1912.

Sir Sidney Lee reminds us that Ariosto imagined that at the end of every man's thread of life there hangs a medal stamped with his name, and that as Death severs the thread with the fatal shears, Time seizes the medal and drops it into the river Lethe. A few, a very few, of the medals, as they fall, are caught by swans, who carry them off and deposit them in a Temple of Immortality. Ariosto's swans are biographers. By what motive, asks Sir Sidney Lee, are they compelled to rescue any medals of personality from the flood of forgetfulness into which they let most of them sink?

It is not pretended that John Cassell's life, apart from his work as publisher, gave him a claim to a place in the Temple. He raised himself from extreme poverty to moderate wealth, but many others have done that. The factory lad at the time of his early death at the age of forty-eight was the head of a firm with five hundred employees; but there was nothing rare in that—other men had amassed greater wealth and created bigger businesses. He was a Temperance Reformer; but there were many more notable advocates of Temperance Reform. He was sincerely religious; he was a devoted husband and father; he was a good employer and an exemplary citizen; he had high courage and fine principle; but happily he shared those characteristics with a multitude of men. Perhaps the swans of Ariosto would not have caught John Cassell's medal, even adorned with so handsome a record. But there is something to add to this. Cassell did much to raise the moral and intellectual level of the mass of the people long before State education was inaugurated; as was said at his death, "he founded an Empire of literature in the hearts and homes of the working man"; he was a pioneer of a system of self-culture which benefited millions of his fellow-citizens and delivered from obscurity many who