The Right Honourable Sir Henry Enfield Roscoe P.C., D.C.L., F.R.S. T. E. Thorpe

The subject of this memoir had no particular pride of ancestry. Stemmata quid faciunt? Although with no convictions on the subject, he was willing to believe that his line stretched at least as far back as Adam and Eve, and he doubted whether any man could with certainty claim—pace Darwin—a more ancient lineage.[1]

As he has told us in his Autobiography, his family was one of the many that could not trace its origin for more than three or four generations back. All he knew was that he came of a North-country stock, members of which—village Hampdens and mute inglorious Miltons—had been settled in the County Palatine and in the vicinity of Liverpool for many years. He had a distinguished grandfather, a man of mark and public weight in his native town, and who bears an honoured name in our literature. Of him it is related that when a certain Garter Principal King-at-Arms desired to trace his pedigree (which had hitherto baffled his researches), he replied that he was a good patriarch, and the proper person to begin a family, as he had a quiverful of sons. “Accordingly the whole descent is registered, and the Roscoes may now go on in sæcula sæculorum. Amen.”

Mr. William Roscoe—Grandfather Roscoe as he was called in the family circle—was justly claimed by his grandson to be the first man of distinction that Liverpool had produced. Although more than one hundred and fifty years have passed since his birth his name still remains one of the most prominent in its history. His story is one of the Romances of Literature.

Born in 1753, he was the son of a market gardener who kept a bowling-green, attached to a tavern, in what was then a rural district of Liverpool known as Mount Pleasant. He learned to read and write, and that was practically all the schooling he received, for at the age of twelve he was required to help his father in the cultivation of his garden, and to carry cabbages and potatoes on his head to market. But he had an insatiable appetite for knowledge, and such leisure as he could secure he gave to reading and study. His love of literature led him to take service in a bookseller’s shop, but finding that his duties were those of a drudge, leaving him little opportunity for gratifying his passion, he articled himself when fifteen years old to an attorney. He worked hard at his profession, but still found time to cultivate the Muses, and, with the assistance of a gifted friend of his own age who taught languages in a school, he read the Classics and began the study of the literature of Italy. He early tried his hand at poetry—imitations of Goldsmith and Shenstone, or translations from the Italian. When he was twenty-four he published a long poem—“Mount Pleasant”—a characteristically stilted eighteenth-century production of no great merit and now forgotten, but which on its appearance was praised by Sir Joshua Reynolds, less, perhaps, for its poetry than for its passionate protest against the iniquities of “that execrable sum of all villainies commonly called the African slave trade”—at that time one of the sources of the commercial prosperity of Liverpool. The courage of the struggling young lawyer in thus inveighing against this vicious traffic roused the anger of some of the wealthiest and most influential of his fellow-citizens. He followed up his attack by another poem on the “Wrongs of Africa,” and he had a fierce controversy with an apostate Roman Catholic priest who had published a sermon on the “Licitness of the Slave Trade” as proved from the Bible, for which he had been formally thanked by the Liverpool Corporation.

The coming of the French Revolution was received with enthusiasm by all eager lovers of civil and political liberty in England. Roscoe, who welcomed its advent with inspiriting songs and odes, championed its cause in pamphlets, one of them directed against Burke, who had bitterly attacked the Jacobins. The ardent young Liberal was now identified with the Whig party in Liverpool, and was in frequent communication with its Parliamentary chiefs.

But he was not at heart a politician, and had but little liking for the turmoil and violence of party strife. “Party,” he had declared with Pope, “is the madness of many for the gain of a few.” His strongest inclinations were intellectual, and as his means increased and he was able to procure books he became more and more drawn to the study of Italian literature and history. The story of the rise of the Medici family, and especially the character and achievements of one of its ablest members, Lorenzo, surnamed the Magnificent, strongly interested and eventually fascinated him. These studies bore fruit

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