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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    contemporaries freely compared him, as an historian, to Gibbon, and as a poet to whichever of the really great names of the day chanced to be most in fashion, r Whatever may be thought of their judgment, it was at least sincere, for Roscoe had in the beginning nothing but his talents and his personal qualities to commend him to Fame. His father was the owner of a small public-house, standing where the Adelphi Hotel now stands, and of a market-garden, which stretched up the slopes of Mount Pleasant. The boy’s early occupation was carrying his father’s vegetables on his head to market ; afterwards he became an attorney, and much later in life a banker. In addition to his work as an historian, poet, and politician, he was the first and greatest patron of the Fine Arts in Liverpool, and the city owes him many of its institutions. Another of the Friends of Freedom and of William Rathbone’s intimates was Dr. James Currie, the biographer of Burns, and the author of the once famous open letter to Mr. Pitt, signed Jasper Wilson, protesting against the French war of 1793. ‘Yet another was Edward Rush ton, formerly mate of a slaving-ship, afterwards one of the bitterest opponents of the trade, and a poet of some celebrity, who exercised his Muse chiefly in the cause of Abolition,