“Life! we have been long together
Through pleasant and through cloudy weather;
’T is hard to part when friends are dear,—
Perhaps ’t will cost a sigh, a tear;
Then steal away, give little warning,
Choose thine own time;
Say not ‘Good night,’ but in some brighter clime
Bid me ‘Good morning.’”
Also in Church Street, Stoke Newington, lived Isaac Disraeli, author of the “Curiosities of Literature” and the “Quarrels and Calamities of Authors.” This estimable and amiable writer died in 1848. His son, Lord Beaconsfield, born here in 1805, was educated in a private school in the neighborhood until he was articled to a lawyer. He belonged, therefore, essentially to a middle-class family; he was not wealthy by birth, but he was not poor; he had the advantage, or the reverse, of being a Jew by descent and a Christian by conviction. To the former fact he owed much of his intellectual powers, to the latter the possibility of rising to the highest distinction and responsibility that the state has to offer, because at the outset of his career even the beginning would have been impossible to one of the ancient Hebrew faith.
The philanthropist John Howard was also a native of Hackney. He belonged, like so many others of the place, to the Nonconformists. His father was an upholsterer in the City, and he himself was at first made apprentice to a wholesale grocer. He was, however, unfitted for that kind of work, and as soon as he could he bought himself out. This is not the place to enlarge upon the work accomplished by this extraordinary man. After being a prisoner of war in France he became wholly possessed with one resolution—to reform the management of prisons. How he traveled through Great Britain first and the continent afterward, how he published reports which revealed the plague spots called prisons all over Europe, is matter of common fame and history.