William Rathbone : a memoir / by Eleanor F. Rathbone.

  • Eleanor Rathbone
Date:
1905
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: William Rathbone : a memoir / by Eleanor F. Rathbone. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    of his large fortune on public objects (much of it in releasing poor and respectable debtors from jail), and is said to have been the author of the saying, “ Every mian should be his own executor.” In 1787, on the birth of William Rathbone’s eldest son, he being a delicate child who needed country air, his father bought Greenbank, then a farm-house, three miles from the edge of the town in which it is now almost engulfed. Here they continued to live during the greater part of the year, moving for the winter months into Liverpool/ William Rathbone was fond of hospitality, and had many friends among men like-minded with himself in matters of politics, or religion, or both. In Liverpool the party of Reform, or, as they called themselves, the Friends of Freedom, were then as always in a minority, and the consciousness of this drew them the closer together. Comparatively few as they were, there were several men among them, now almost forgotten, who had then a considerable renown beyond their native Liverpool, and who attracted thither visitors to whom the commercial greatness of the city was as nought. The unquestioned leader among them was Roscoe, the historian of Pope Leo the Tenth and of Lorenzo de Medici. Roscoe’s literary reputation has not worn well, but in its own day it was very great. His