Page:The Story of the House of Cassell (book).djvu/90

 Thomas Dixon Galpin. Galpin had spent his early youth as a sea-rover. Had he not, while serving on a West Indiaman, fallen in love with Miss Pare, and had not Mr. Pare objected to his daughter marrying a sailor, Galpin would probably have died a seaman, and the history of Cassell's would have been differently written. The fresh colour of this tall, well-built, open-air man clung to him all through his life in the City. He became the business expert, the financial adviser. Petter assumed general control with a special eye on the editorial side of the work.

"Petter," wrote the late Bonavia Hunt, "was a man of excitable brain, indomitable will, and boundless energy. He possessed that rare combination of faculties, a grasp of high policy and a grip of the minutest detail. Except under the most trying circumstances he rarely lost command of himself, but when he did he was a living tornado. His storm, however, was not thunder and lightning, but a blizzard of sarcasm. The object of it emerged from his employer's presence seared and crumpled, and yet if he was anything of a man the ultimate effect of this discipline was to brace him to fresh efforts rather than to deter and discourage him. And if any member of the establishment, however humble his position, had any personal ailment or domestic trouble, no one could be kinder or more sympathetic than he who was known amongst us as 'the Great Man,' as well as by other and more sportive epithets.

"His personal appearance was not commanding or awe-inspiring from a merely physical standpoint; yet it was not without a certain dignity of bearing. In middle life his face was full and of a natural healthy colour; the brow was lined and well developed, and the shape of the crown indicated a good-sized brain. His speech was clear, and his diction rapid and voluminous, almost bewildering in its swift transitions from point to point; at times the listener would be inclined to recall Disraeli's gibe at Gladstone that he was 'intoxicated with the exuberance of his own verbosity'; but like the Great Man of the nineteenth century, our own Great Man seldom