Among the sons of attorneys we find Edmund Burke, Smeaton the
engineer, Scott and Wordsworth, and Lords Somers, Hardwick, and
Dunning. Sir William Blackstone was the posthumous son of a silk-
mercer. Lord Gifford's father was a grocer at Dover; Lord Denman's
a physician; judge Talfourd's a country brewer; and Lord Chief
Baron Pollock's a celebrated saddler at Charing Cross. Layard, the
discoverer of the monuments of Nineveh, was an articled clerk in a
London solicitor's office; and Sir William Armstrong, the inventor
of hydraulic machinery and of the Armstrong ordnance, was also
trained to the law and practised for some time as an attorney.
Milton was the son of a London scrivener, and Pope and Southey were
the sons of linendrapers. Professor Wilson was the son of a
Paisley manufacturer, and Lord Macaulay of an African merchant.
Keats was a druggist, and Sir Humphry Davy a country apothecary's
apprentice. Speaking of himself, Davy once said, "What I am I have
made myself: I say this without vanity, and in pure simplicity of
heart." Richard Owen, the Newton of Natural History, began life as
a midshipman, and did not enter upon the line of scientific
research in which he has since become so distinguished, until
comparatively late in life.
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