Nameless, unknown!
Of all distinction stript and bare,
In nakedness conceal’d,
Oh! who shall thee declare?
Nameless, unknown!
Yet fit companion thou for me,
Who hear no human voice
No human visage see.
From me, from thee,
The glories of the world are gone;
Nor yet have either lost
What we could call our own.
What we are now,
The great, the wise, the fair, the brave,
Shall all hereafter be,
All Hermits—in the grave.”
CURIOUS ANECDOTES OF BIRMINGHAM MANUFACTURERS AND MANUFACTURES.
Birmingham, says the late Mr. William Hutton, (the historian of this large and populous town,) Birmingham began with the productions of the anvil, and probably will end with them. The sons of the hammer were once her chief inhabitants; but that great crowd of artists is now lost in a greater. Genius seems to increase with multitude. Part of the riches, extension, and improvement of Birmingham, are owing to the late John Taylor, Esq. who possessed the singular power of perceiving things as they really were. The spring and consequence of action were open to his view. He rose from minute beginnings to shine in the commercial, as Shakspeare did in the poetical, and Newton in the philosophical, hemisphere.
To this uncommon genius we owe the gilt button, the japanned and gilt snuff-boxes, with the numerous race of enamels. From the same fountain issued the painted snuff-box, at which one servant earned three pounds ten shillings per week, by painting them at a farthing each. In his shops were weekly manufactured, buttons to the amount of 800l., exclusive of other valuable productions. One of the present nobility, of distinguished taste, examining the works with the master, purchased some of the articles, among others, a toy of eighty guineas value; and while paying for them, observed with a smile, “he plainly saw he could not reside in Birmingham for less than two hundred pounds a day.” Mr. Taylor died in 1775, at the age of sixty-four, after acquiring a fortune of 200,000l.
The active powers of genius, the instigation of profit, and the affinity of one calling to another, often induce the artist to change his occupation. There is nothing more common among us; even the divine and the lawyer are prone to this change. Thus the church throws her dead weight into the scale of commerce, and the law gives up the cause of contention: but there is nothing more disgraceful, except thieving, in other places. “I am told,” says an elderly gentleman, as he amused himself in a pitiful bookseller’s shop in a wretched market town, “that you are a stocking-maker by trade!” The humble bookseller, half confused, and wholly ashamed, could not deny the charge. “Ah,” cried the senior, whose features were modelled between the sneer and the smile, “there is neither honour nor profit in changing the trade you were bred to. Do not attempt to sell books, but stay at home, and pursue your own business.” The dejected bookseller, scarcely one step higher than a “walking stationer,” lived to acquire a large fortune. Had he followed the senior’s advice, he might, like a common foot soldier, have starved upon eight-pence a day. This humble and dejected bookseller was Mr. Hutton himself. He says, toy trades first made their appearance in Birmingham in the beginning of Charles the Second’s reign, in an endless variety, attended with all their beauties and their graces. When he wrote, he ranked, as first in preeminence, the