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Autobiography of Henry Taylor, 1800-(1875).
Autobiography of Henry Taylor 1800 - 1875 Author:Henry Taylor General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1874 Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million book... more »s for free. Excerpt: 14 CHAPTER 1L Boyhood. Anno Dom. 1800-21. Anno JEt. 1-21. As I have said, it was whilst I was an infant in arms that my mother died. My father who had by that time removed to St. Helens Auckland in the same county, where he had taken another farm, pursued his farming operations on a large scale and with more or less activity for about 18 years (i. e. so long as times were prosperous), dividing his time between business and literature. I have said little of my father hitherto, and it is time that I should give some account of him. If I have any difficulty in doing so, it is the reverse of that which I have met with in the case of my mother. Her I never knew. Of him my knowledge is so inward and accustomed as hardly to lend itself to an objective view; for, of course, it crept upon me insensibly, growing with my growth; and the image of him was never at any one moment presented to me in its totality as something fresh and new: and there is the farther difficulty that were I to describe him in general terms I should seem to be simply reproducing the model virtuous man of a fiction, who is proverbially uninteresting ; I should describe him as good, just, generous, true, affectionate, pure-hearted: and when I attempt to individualise, I find nothing to say except that he was habitually, though not invariably, grave and reserved; that his abilities, though not pre-eminent in any single kind, were remarkable for the many kinds in which they excelled, and taken along with his unceasing industry, if he had had as much love of distinction as of knowledge, would probably have made him eminent in his day an...« less