houses still standing in the district, the long, low windows in the upper storeys betokening that they were formerly occupied by weavers. It was last lived in by Martha Priestley (Mrs Crouch), but on the death of her husband in 1786 was abandoned by the family, and, falling into decay, was pulled down about fifty years ago.

The Priestleys were a simple, sober, honest, Godfearing folk, staunch Calvinists, and deeply religious. Jonas Priestley was a manufacturer of "home-spun❞—a weaver and cloth dresser-two trades now distinct but then practised in common-who took his week's work on ass-back, on roads little better than bridle-paths, to the Sunday market in Leeds. He was of a class characteristic of the district.

These hand-loom weavers, who lived in the hill country lying to the west of Leeds, were generally men of small capitals; they often annexed a small farm to their business, or possessed a field or two on which to support horse and cow, and were for the most part blessed with the comforts without the superfluities of life. During five or six days of the week they dwelt in their own little village, among trees and fields, taking no thought of the outside world and contenting themselves with the homely gossip of their farmstead or hamlet. On market day they came into the town in shoals, clad in their quaint corduroy breeches, broadbrimmed hats, and brass-buttoned coats of antique cut, bringing their produce on pack-horses, to await the visits of the merchants-the commercial aristocracy of Leeds, then a town of some 16,000 or 17,000 inhabitants who were the agents through which the outer world received its supply of Yorkshire woollen

1

HANDLOOM WEAVERS

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goods. They were a shrewd, careful race, somewhat stolid and slow of speech and not given to great mental briskness or activity, keenly appreciative of the blessings of liberty and usually in sympathy with the political party to whom the cause of liberty was for the moment entrusted; sober, godly souls for the most part; regular in their attendance at public worship, and upon the

BIRTHPLACE OF PRIESTLEY.

I

And what a world it was in which they thus serenely dwelt apart.

"It was," writes Madame Belloc, "the time of Louis the Fifteenth in France and of George the Second in England, and the nephews and nieces of Charlotte Princess Palatine were still living, and her letters, whose name is legion, yet lay stored in the cabinets of her correspondents, full of inexpressible details

1 T. Wemyss Reid, Memoir of John Deskin Heaton, p. 7 et seq.

6

discussed in most expressive language. It was the time when Jeanie Deans walked from Scotland to beg her sister's life of Queen Caroline, and met Madge Wildfire in the way. It was the time when the polite world was composed of men, women and Herveys'; when Squire Pendarves was found dead in his bed in Greek Street, Soho, leaving his young widow to be courted by John Wesley and wedded by Dr Delany; when statesmen bribed, and young blades drank, and Sir Harbottle carried off Harriet Byron, whose shrieks brought Sir Charles Grandison to the rescue, sword in hand. It was the period when the Jacobite Rebellion flamed up and expired; when the ! Young Pretender marched to Derby and the heads of the decapitated lords were exposed on Temple Bar; tragedies, agonies, highway robberies, Dick Turpin, Jack Sheppard, smugglers, the press-gang; Frederick Prince of Wales quarrelling in Leicester Square; Queen Caroline on her death-bed telling her weeping little George, 'que l'un n'empêche pas l'autre'; Horace Walpole making the grand tour; Dean Swift dying in agonised misery. Merciful Heavens! What an England, of which we possess the daily diary! We can see Hogarth at his easel, and Sir Joshua taking his first stiff portraits, and Garrick going on pilgrimage to Stratford, and the young king courting Hannah Lightfoot and marrying his little bride from Mecklenburg. Without too much verifying of dates it is certain that all this was happening before Dr Priestley was thirty years of age, and that of none of it is there the faintest mention in the account he has drawn up of his own childhood, youth and young manhood, though he was himself destined to be one of the principal illustrations of the Georgian era. anything which appears to the contrary, he and his friends might have dwelt in some far-distant planet whose inhabitants were wholly given up to study and to prayer."

For

Priestley says of his father that he had a strong sense of religion, praying with his family morning and evening, and carefully teaching his children and servants the Assembly's Catechism, which was all the system of which he had any knowledge.

"In the latter part of his life he became very fond of Mr

LIFE AT FIELDHEAD

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Whitfield's writings and other works of a similar kind, having been brought up in the principles of Calvinism, and adopting them, but without ever giving much attention to matters of speculation, and entertaining no bigoted aversion to those who differed from him on the subject."

We may well imagine that Jonas, with his "strong sense of religion," was one of that earnest band of “several hundreds of plain people" who listened, spellbound, to the eloquence of John Wesley on that memorable day of May 1742, on which, on Birstall Hill, began the great Yorkshire "Revival."

Of his wife, "a woman of exemplary piety," the mother of the future philosopher, little has been recorded beyond the fragmentary notice in her son's autobiography. He says of her :

"It is but little that I can recollect of my mother. I remember, however, that she was careful to teach me the Assembly's Catechism, and to give me the best instructions the little time that I was at home. Once in particular, when I was playing with a pin, she asked me where I got it; and on telling her that I found it at my uncle's, who lived very near to my father, and where I had been playing with my cousins, she made me carry it back again; no doubt to impress my mind, as it could not fail to do, with a clear idea of the distinction of property and of the importance of attending to it. She died in the hard winter of 1739,' not long after being delivered of my youngest brother; and having dreamed a little before her death that she was in a delightful place, which she particularly described and imagined to be heaven, the last words which she spake, as my aunt informed me, were, 'Let me go to that fine place.'

During some considerable portion of his mother's

I The "Great Frost," as it was called, which, beginning on December 26, 1739, continued with the greatest intensity till February 17, 1740. Above London Bridge the Thames was completely frozen over, and numerous booths were erected on it for selling liquor, etc., to the multitudes who daily flocked there.

short period of married life, Joseph Priestley, together with his brother Timothy, was committed to the care of his grandfather Swift, with whom he remained with little interruption until his mother's death. From this we may infer that the domestic circumstances of his parents were far from easy, or that the accommodation at Fieldhead was unequal to the support of the clothdresser's rapidly-increasing family.

Timothy, who, after following his father's business as a cloth-dresser for a time, became an Independent minister, and died in London, has left us reminiscences of his brother's boyhood. He seems to have been particularly impressed with his ability to repeat the Assembly's Catechism without missing a word," and by being made to kneel down with him while he prayed. "This was not at bed-time, which he never neglected, but in the course of the day."

On the death of his mother, the eldest boy, then barely six

years old, was taken home and sent to school in the neighbourhood. Luckily for him, his Aunt Sarah, Mrs Keighley," a truly pious and excellent woman, who knew no other use of wealth, or of talents of any kind, than to do good, and who never spared herself for this purpose," being childless, offered, in 1742, to relieve her brother Jonas of all care for his eldest son by taking entire charge of him. "From this time," says her nephew, “she was truly a parent to me, till her death in 1764.”

John Keighley was a man of considerable property, and at his death, which occurred when Priestley was about twelve years of age, the widow was left with the greater part of his fortune for life, and much of it at her disposal after her death.

By Mrs Keighley's direction he was sent, he tells us,