counsel and not to waste his own or his host’s time.
Every cabman and costermonger in London knew him by sight and would take off his cap to him if he saw him in the streets, and the poor in the East End knew his tall figure and distinguished countenance better than did the men in the club windows in the West.
The beautiful monument to his memory in Regent Circus records that he was “an example to his order,” and yet better than this stately panegyric is the happy accident, if it be one, that the poor flower girls of London have pitched their camp upon the steps, and have successfully defied all the efforts of Mr. Bumble to remove them.
CHAPTER II: MISS FRANCES POWER COBBE
Miss Frances Power Cobbe was the original organiser and founder in December, 1875, of the National Anti-Vivisection Society which until 1898 bore the Title of the Victoria Street Society for the protection of animals from vivisection.
Many years before, in 1863, there lived at Florence a man who trafficked in torture named Schiff; “among the inferior professors of medical knowledge,” says Dr. Johnson, “is a race of wretches, whose lives are only varied by varieties of cruelty,” and such an one was this miscreant.
Miss Cobbe was then resident at Florence and was the correspondent of the Daily News, and in that paper she denounced the tortures inflicted on animals by this dreadful man, which so affected her generous
heart that for the rest of her life her chief preoccupation became the desire to put an end to such abominations.
In 1874 Miss Cobbe drew up a memorial to the Council of the Royal Society for the prevention of cruelty to animals urging upon them “the immediate adoption of such measures as may approve themselves to their judgment as most suitable to promote the end in view, namely, the restriction of vivisection.” And with indefatigable zeal she collected the signatures to it of a very large number of the most distinguished men in England; among them were such names as those of Thomas Carlyle, Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, John Morley, John Bright, Leslie Stephen, W. Lecky, B. Jowett, John Ruskin, Dean Stanley, and Canon Liddon.
In view of the fierce advocacy of vivisection to which the present Lord Knutsford has committed himself it is interesting to record that his father Sir Henry Holland’s name appears among the signatories of this memorial.