The Sun.
London, England, 1841-07-22 00:00:00

yonmiNG SUN.

• JOHN CRITCHLEY PRINCE.
(From Chambers' Journal.)
Prince is a factory workman at Hyde, in Lancashire,
about thirty-three years of age, the father of a family,
and earning wages to the amount of about eighteen shil-
lings a-wee. From an early age he had a taste for
poetry, and has been himself a versifier. pursuing his
tuneful vocation amidst personal and domestic circum-
stances of the most unfavourable nature. The life of
this poor son of the Muses has included even more hard-
ship than generally belongs to the class of artisans with
which he is connected.
He was reared to his father's business of a reed-
maker for weavers, and married at the early age of
nineteen. Two or three years after, finding his in-
come miserably insufficient for his little family, he was
tempted to go in search of work to St. Quentin, in
Picardy, but reached that place only to find that the
then recent revolution of July, IS3O, had paralysed
everything. He then, with a very small remnant of
money, proceeded by way of Paris to Mulhausen on the
Upper Rhine, believing that he should there obtain good
employment ; but Mulhausen proved to be in the same
state with St. Quentin. He was here a penniless stranger,
amongst a people whose language he did not know, and
many of whom were in the same distress with himself.
Without the means to return, and in hopes of a revival
of trade, he lingered at the place for five months, often
suffering greatly from hunger, and indebted for any little
supplies he did obtain chiefly to the kindness of one
person. What follows will be allowed, we think, to be
a striking enough example of the hardships sometimes
endured by those who have to beg a brother man " for
leave to toil."
Finding that his hopes *ere fruitless, and the de-
sire of again seeing his wife and children becoming in-
supportable, lie at length determined to undertake the
task of walking home, through a stranger land, for many
hundred miles, without a guide, and without money.
Accordingly, in the middle of a severe winter (January,
1831), with an ill-furnished knapsack on his back, and
ten sous in his pocket, he set off from Mulhausen to re-
turn to Hyde, in Lancashire, with a heart as light as
the treasure in his exchequer.
For a few days he kept along the beautiful and
romantic banks of the Rhine, exploring its ruined
castles, and visiting every scene of legendary lore that
came in his path, exclaiming in the words of his
favourite poet, Goldsmith, " Creation's heir, the world,
the world is mine !" He journeyed through Strasburgh,
and admired its splendid cathedral ; through Nanci,
Verdun, Rheims, Luneville, Chalons,' and most of the
principal cities, sze., that lay near his route, till he
reached Calais once more ; obtained from the British
Consul a passage across the Channel, and again set his
foot on his native soil. During this toilsome journey,
he subsisted on the charity of the few English residents
whom he found on his way. He lay in four different
hospitals for the night, but not once in the open air, as
he did afterwards in his own country. The first night
after his arrival, he applied for food and shelter at a
workhouse in Kent, and was thrust into a miserable
garret, with the roof sloping to the floor, where he was
incarcerated along with twelve others—eight men and
four women, chiefly Irish—the lame, the halt, and
the blind. Some were in a high state of fever,
and were raving for drink, which was denied
to them ; for the door was loked, and those out-
side, like the bare walls within, were deaf to their
cries. 'Weary and wayworn, he lay down on the only
vacant place amid this . mass of misery—in a sleeping
chamber for the unfortunate child of woe, the hapless
vagrant in Christian England—at the back of an old
woman, who appeared to be in a dying state ; but he
could get no reit for the groans of the wretched around
him, and the crawling vermin which, quitting his com-
panions, crept up and down his limbs, exciting in him
the most horrid loathing. Joyfully did he indeed hail
the first beam of morning that broke through the cran-
nies of this chamber of famine and disease ; and when
the keeper came to let him out, his bed-fellow was dead
Released from this lazar-house, he proceeded on-
ward, penniless and shoeless, towards London, begging
in the daytime, and lying in the open fields at night.
When he readied London he had been the whole day
without food. To allay the dreadful, but to him then
familiar, cravings of hunger, he went to Rag Fair,
and, taking off his waistcoat, sold it for eightpence.
With the proceeds of this sale he bought a penny loaf
to mitigate his hunger, and four pennyworth of writing
paper, with which h entered a tavern, and, calling for a
pint of porter, proceeded to the writing of as much of his
own poetry as his paper would contain, and this amid the
riot and noise of a number of coal-heavers and others.
As soon as he had done his task, he went round to a
number of booksellers, hoping to sell his manuscript for
a shilling or two ; but the hope was, alas, vain ! To
these mercantile men the appearances and manners of
the famishing bard were against him—he could not suc-
ceed in finding taste for his poetry, or sympathy for his
sufferings.
He stayed in London during two days, wandering by
day, foodless, through its magnificent and wealth-fraught
streets, and pacing about, or lying on the cold stones in
gateways, or on the bare steps of the affluent, by night.
In depair, on the third day, he left the metropolis of the
land of his birth, where he was a greater stranger, and
less cared for, than in a foreign land, and wended
his way homeward, first applying for relief to the
overseer of " merry Islington," where, urged by the
stings of famine, he was importunate when denied as-
sistance, and was, therefore, for his temerity, thrust into
the street to starve. A youthful and unabused constitu-
tion, however, saved him from what might have followed
to a less healthful frame and a less buoyant heart.
At length, by untiring perseverance, he reached Hyde,
having slept by the way in barns, vagrant offices, under
hay-stacks, and in miserable lodging-houses with ballad-
singers, match-sellers, and mendicants, fully realising
the adage of Shakspeare, that " misery makes a man ac-
quainted with strange bed-fellows." On his route
from London he ground corn at Birmingham, sung
ballads at Leicester, lay under the trees in Sherwood
Forest, near Nottingham, lodged in a vagrant office at
Derby, made his bivouac at Bakewell, in Derbyshire, in a
" lock-up ;" and, finally, reached Hyde, but found, alas,
that it contained for him a home no longer.
Whilst poverty had thus brought suffering upon him,
when in quest of better means to provide for his family,
it had also brought woe and privation upon his wife and
babes. Unable to provide for her children by her
labour, she had been compelled to apply for parish aid,
and was in consequence removed to the poorhouse of
Wigan. After a night's rest, Prince hurried off to that
town, and brought them back to Manchester, where he
took a garret, without food and clothes, without bed and
furniture, or an article of use of any description. On a
bundle of straw did this wretched family of man, and
wife, and three children, lie for several months.
Ultimately he settled in the factory at Hyde, whiere
he still remains. During all his hardships he has
never ceased, at leisure hours, to indulge his taste
for poetry. He is described as a modest and re-
tiring man, of correct habits ; and to this cause pro-
' bably, as much as to the real merits of his composi-
tions, we are to attribute the subscrition which has
enabled him to give a collection of his verses to the
public. His volume having by accident come into our
hands, we find it to contain much smooth and elegant
poetry, marked generally by good feeling and a love for
the beauties of nature ; and we fully accord with his
Editor, who says—" Nor would a stranger to the man
infer that his polished lines were the
,outpourings of a,
self-educated artisan, who had given them birth amid
scenes of the most dire distress, or under the prostl'ating
influence of fatigue, surrounded by the anti poetical
smells of oil and steam, and the rumbling clatter of
wheels and machinery in a cotton mill." The following
is a specimen of this poor man's poetical effusions :
I'm a very strange wight, with a very strange name,
Unaided by fortune, unfavour'd by fame ;
I am homely in person and awkward in speech,
Yet am willing to learn, though unable to teach..
Sometimes 1 am sunny, and buoyant, and g2:4
As the breezes and bowers in the bright
Sometimes,And heavy,
and
de
gDlooecmemyb.earn,dl
radial of May
o
But feelings like these are engender'd in life,
'r
peevish rasped
oa un gdhr ug h
By poverty, toil, disappointment, and strife;
But away with reflection, and care, and the rest on't,
I live for to-day, and I'll just make the best on't.
I've a passion for woman, and music, and joyance,
And from children I pin more delight than annoyance :
As for woman herself, in the season of need,
Without her this world were a desert indeed _
In my evenings of leisure I fly to my books,
With their quiet, unchanging, intelligent looks
Whene'er I am with thous, sweet visions come o'er me,
And as to my choice,
uwbv I read all before me ;
page, and laughter from this
So between one I have lea-min/4'o"u that
Be It wisdom or wit, it can ne er come amiss—
and
O'er ai& t'other, 1 manage to sweep
deal of surface—but never go deep.

LONDON ELECTRICAL SOCIETY.
Div])Ay, JULY 20.—The papers read at this meeting
were
ce,lst. On the Perforation of Non-Conducting Sub-
tan by the mechanical action of the electric fluid,
o
by Andrew Crosse, Esq., Mem. Elec.. Soc. 2d. The Ef-
fects of Vegetable Points on Free Electricity, and the
position they thus occupy in the economy of vegetation,
romes as by
Pollock, Esq Heat, and their Con-
Mem
by Mr. Pine, of Maidstone. 3d. An Account of Expe-
riments undertaken to Investigate the Nature and
dcuboatinngeg of
Power,Colourb y
of BT
Elec. Soc. 4th. On the Method of Restoring
to Weakened Magnets their Primitive Strength,
by Muncke (translation). sth. Results of Ex-
periments made with a Groves' Battery, by Professor
De la Rive (translation). 6th. Monthly Register, for June
1841, of the Electrical State of the Atmosphere, in re-
lation to its Metereological Phenomena, by W. H.
Weekes, Esq. It would be fruitless to attempt giving,
within our limits, an abstract of all these interesting
communications ; let it suffice to mention the general
features, and to direct our readers to the proceedings of
the Society for further information.
The first paper teaches the possibility of drilling even
diamonds by the agency of electricity. The second
describes the little noticed, but extraordinary, functions
of the leaves of plants. The third is a bold, but pos-
sible attempt to generalise the imponderable agents of
nature. The fourth contains a very sensible mode of
preserving and restoring magnetic power, and is well
worthy the notice of those who possess magnetic' ma-
chines. The fifth contains further confirmation of cer-
tain experiments on the electric flow ; and some inte-
resting theoretical observations on its rotation with a
with the extensive ap-
S:tncl% ich.
paratus erected over the town of •
magnet. The sixth is the Monthly Register, the elec-
trical data of which are obtained

CFlyears
see ago
as
the ~
mwas
R 1
consideredc A . i ' h ibr by
tya
almost the extreme boundary of the hardiest enterprise.
But now the " far west " is at a much greater distance on
GeneseeA NGE
try
the one side, than the oldest east on the other. What
CHANGES
IN
A"
was then a tedious, uncomfortable, six weeks' journey,
is now performed with ease and comfort in three days ;
and when they get railroads and steam-carriages, it can
be effected in less than one. The time may come when
the Yankee shall breakfast at New York, dine at Buffalo,
sup at Detroit, and get to Green Bay early enough for
parade the next morning.