Glimpses Of Our Ancestors In Sussex - online book

With Sketches Of Sussex Characters, Remarkable Incidents &c

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The Old Sussex Radical.                 117
in either—was law to Clio; and it was a shield extended over Brutus and Cassius against the tyranny of Caesar! So we never had occasion to kill him in the Capitol! He died in his bed, after the Reform Bill was passed; and to the last he wooed the Muses, in lines to Clelia, Cynthia, and Celia, and set down in terse prose his " Reflections " on men and things. These appeared from time to time in the columns of the Brighton Herald and must supply the place of that diary which few men could have kept better than he, and which would have been invaluable had he kept it, but which, unfortunately, he never did keep. Else what scenes might he not have described with the Hones, the Home Tookes, the Thelwalls, and even older Radicals than they, with whom he must have come in contact!
Clio lost a much-loved wife in early life, and, when I knew him, had, properly speaking, no home—only a room in London, to which he retreated, like an old lion to its den, when he was too infirm to travel. The world was his home. He loved to call himself, and to hear himself called, "a citizen of the world;" he belonged to no sect of religion, and his political and social sympathies took in the whole human race and made light of the distinctions of classes or of nations or of skins. He had few family ties; but he had a good many friends, who, in his latter days, when he was somewhat out at elbows with fortune, showed their friendship by pro­viding for those few wants or luxuries—snuff and tobacco were the chief of them—to which he was tributary. In his palmy days he was always travelling from country to country, or from county to county. It was one of his boasts that no Englishman could be in his company half-an-hour without betraying to him by some peculiarity of speech the county to which he belonged; and of the customs of all these counties he was a master. He was as much at home in Yorkshire or in Hampshire as he was in Sussex; and, at last, he was equally a curiosity in all! Adhering to the old garb and fashions of his youth and manhood, and to the old ways of thinking and speaking, he looked like a portrait cut from an
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