“2nd Clerk: I think he’s a —— fool (a long pause, then as an afterthought), but I think he did his best.”
In the evening of the day on which I overheard that excellent saying I was at a public dinner with no reporters present—not that their absence or presence ever worried me very much, for the Manchester reporters were all kind friends of mine, and stacked the wild oats of my after-dinner chatter into very
neat sheaves of morning print. The fact, however, enabled Dean Maclure to be expansive. In proposing my health, after many sarcastic and amusing allusions to my varied virtues, he expressed the hope—alas! not fulfilled—that, as he alone could do justice to the subject, he might live long enough to write my epitaph.
That was the cue for the story, and I shall never forget the Dean’s genial roar of laughter as I pictured him unveiling in his beloved cathedral a little white marble plaque, on which was cut in severe black letters:—
HE WAS
A —— FOOL,
BUT
HE DID HIS BEST.
I remind my readers of this story here at the beginning of things, because, looking forward to the round unvarnished tale I have to tell, I am very conscious that I shall convince them of the justice of the first part of the epitaph, and if I nothing extenuate and set down naught but what is strictly accurate, I am by no means sure that when the faculty is applied for in the Ecclesiastical Court to erect that little marble tribute to my memory someone will not enter an appearance with these recollections of mine exhibited to an affidavit, and move to strike out the last line of the epitaph as embarrassing and irrelevant.
The first foolish thing I did in connection with my twenty-five years sojourn in Manchester was to come there at all. I remember Henn Collins—then a leader on the circuit—telling me, with very clean-cut emphasis, what he thought of my folly only a week after I had settled down. It was the Peter Street verdict, without the adjective, and this was repeated to me by very many of the kind friends I made in the first few months after my arrival. Everyone asked me, “Why had I come to Manchester?” and for the life of me I could not give them a coherent and logical answer.