John Thomas

“ Then Thomas kneeled down and said, "My Lord and my God." Jesus said, "Thomas, because you have seen Me you believe; blessed are they who have not seen, and yet have believed."
[92]
Our Lord stayed forty days on earth, and often came and talked to His disciples; once He came to five hundred all in one place. But some of the apostles went back to their boats. There were together Peter, James and John, Thomas, Nathanael, and two other disciples. They went out to fish; but all night they did not catch one, and when day broke Jesus stood on the shore. ”

“ We whose names are subscribed, having seen specimens of drawings by John Thomas Smith, are of opinion that he is qualified for the office of drawing-master in the school of Christ’s Hospital.
I not only think him qualified as an artist, but greatly to be respected as a man. ”

“ Sixty-seven years later, the man who had entered thus hurriedly into the world left it with almost equal unexpectedness in his house, No. 22 University Street, after holding for seventeen years the post of Keeper of the Prints at the British Museum.
As a writer John Thomas Smith takes no high rank; but he is a delightful gossip, full of his two subjects: London and Art. We know him when he exclaims to a visitor in the Print Room, “What I tell you is the fact, and sit down, and I’ll tell ye the whole story.” Smith’s narrative manner is always that: “Sit down, and I’ll tell ye the whole story.” ”

“ He is yet said to be an affable, friendly man, and cheerful; 'tis then a pity he should be in alliance with hell, and an agent in the kingdom of darkness.
I will only give one instance of his knowledge of things at a distance, and of secret things. Henry John Thomas, of the parish of Aberystruth, a relation of mine, an honest man, went with the water of a young woman whom he courted, and was sick, to the said Charles Hugh, who, as soon as he saw Henry John, pleasantly told him, "Ho! ”

“ Not the real Thomas, who could not possibly be an object in another man’s thoughts. John’s real object being an ideal Thomas, he cannot, if sincere, and if fully conscious of what he means by Thomas, fail to agree in his statements with his own ideal. In short, on this our original supposition, John and Thomas are independent entities, each of which cannot possibly enter in real person into the thoughts of the other. Each may be somehow represented in the other’s thoughts by a phantom, and only this phantom can be intended by the other when he judges about the first. ”

“ Only one of the three Johns is taxed; only one can be weighed on a platform-balance; but the other two are just as important in the conversation. Let us suppose the real John to be old, dull, and ill-looking. But as the Higher Powers have not conferred on men the gift of seeing themselves in the true light, John very possibly conceives himself to be youthful, witty, and fascinating, and talks from the point of view of this ideal. Thomas, again, believes him to be an artful rogue, we will say ”

“ Within twenty years of his death, no less than ten different biographies of S. Thomas were composed by writers of the most diverse characters—his old comrade John of Salisbury, three of his own confidential clerks, a Benedictine abbot of Peterborough, an Augustinian prior of Oxford, a monk of Canterbury who was probably an Irishman by blood, a French poet who had seen the primate in his chancellor-days, a Cambridge clerk who had joined him on the eve of his martyrdom. But meanwhile a new school of English history was springing up in the court instead of the cloister. ”

“ In any case, the young Thomas must have {184} been very familiar with riverside Putney; he often helped to load his father's barges with wool, to be taken down to the ships awaiting them below London Bridge, and he attended a day-school close to his home. At the age of fourteen he was apprenticed to his uncle John Williams, who was then overseer of Wimbledon Manor and lived in a homestead at Mortlake, on the site of which is a house still named after him. ”

“ John, on learning the decision of the council, returned to his family.
Thomas (except when intoxicated, which was not frequent,) was a kind and tender child, willing to assist me in my labor, and to remove every obstacle to my comfort. His natural abilities were said to be of a superior cast, and he soared above the trifling subjects of revenge, which are common amongst Indians, as being far beneath his attention. In his childish and boyish days, his natural turn was to practise in the art of war, though he despised the cruelties that the warriors inflicted upon their subjugated enemies. ”

“ But still Thomas persevered that, whensoever the time came that Jesus should depart from the flesh, then all the brightness of joy would depart from the disciples for ever.
Then John answered and said that Thomas had well spoken, only that the Lord would provide against so great an evil; and he added, "Let us not suppose that the gates of death can separate us from the love of the Lord, neither let our imagination assure us that the grave is a strong place against the hand of the Almighty. ”

“ He was translated to Salisbury in November 1761, died there on 19 July 1766, and was buried in the cathedral, where a tablet erroneously gives his age as eighty-five instead of seventy-five. His library was sold in 1767. He left one daughter, married to John Taylor, chancellor of Salisbury. Of his four wives, the first was a niece of Bishop Sherlock. The famous wedding-ring ' posy,' 'If I survive I'll make them five,' is attributed to him.
Thomas seems to have been a worthy man, though weak in the disposal of patronage. ”

“ There is a vivid sense of style in Mr Thomas’s work, and sometimes a search for beauty in subjects which to the common eye may suggest the ugly. But Mr Thomas must be recognized as an artist of great power and originality and to the last degree conscientious. Sculptural subtleties he loves, and he works in a low key, quiet and unobtrusive, and severe though he is, he is a poet in sentiment with extreme refinement of taste. His reliefs are fine in rhythm, and by their accentuated definition, allied with delicacy, extremely telling. ”

“ No, no; we believe thou art at the right hand of the Majesty in the heavens, now reigning over mankind; that we are thy ministers and ambassadors on earth; and that in enriching us, the world is giving its substance and doing homage to thee; and that when we die, we shall come to thee, and kingdoms rule beyond the skies! Our churches are thy kingdom here, and it is our deep and pious conviction, that the more they confide in us, and the less they trouble themselves about the millennium, the better it will be for them, and for the peace of the denominations to which they belong. ”

“ INTRODUCTION Sir Thomas More, son of Sir John More, a justice of the King's Bench, was born in 1478, in Milk Street, in the city of London. After his earlier education at St. Anthony's School, in Threadneedle Street, he was placed, as a boy, in the household of Cardinal John Morton, Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Chancellor. It was not unusual for persons of wealth or influence and sons of good families to be so established together in a relation of patron and client. The youth wore his patron's livery, and added to his state. ”

“ The dark vapours and thick clouds of the sky, curling in dense and lowering masses, suddenly hiss forth the forked lightning, and the heaven is rent by the deafening roar of the voice of God. Hail, and fire mingled with hail, pour down upon them, and they are destroyed from the face of the land. ”

“ The only one printed, that in the ‘Cambrian Quarterly Magazine’ (v. 96–7) , is predictive, Thomas having a great reputation as a prophet. It was perhaps his prophecies which won him the title of ‘Twm gelwydd teg,’ i.e. Tom the plausible liar.
[All that is known of Thomas comes from two notices from ‘the book of Mr. Lewis of Penlline’ and ‘the book of John Bradford’ (d. 1780) , printed in the Iolo MSS. pp. 200–3. The accounts in Malkin's South Wales (1807) and vol. v. (1833) of the Cambrian Quarterly Magazine are probably drawn from these or similar sources.] ”

“ After attending the grammar school at Beverley, and reading privately along with his elder brother Robert (1808–1863) , Thomas was entered as a pensioner at St. John's College, Cambridge, in October 1833. ”

“ Holmes points out that when John and Thomas are talking, there are really six persons present—the real John, the person John thinks himself to be, the person Thomas thinks him to be, the real Thomas, the person Thomas thinks himself to be, and the person John thinks him to be. ”

“ The impulses of the flesh would lead them to crush the tyrants who have drenched the earth with their blood, and to bruise their heads like serpents, but their Captain has said, "Vengeance is mine, I will repay." ”

“ He is not a wolf, nor a dog, rending and devouring the flock, and investing himself with its wool; but one who would be the servant of the least, that he may be exalted to an unfading crown of glory, when the good shepherd shall appear to give life to all his sheep for evermore. ”

“ Such glory, or brightness, so beautifully represented by Ezekiel and John, will clothe the saints, as well as the Lord Jesus, when they shall appear in the kingdom of God: as it is written "They that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament; and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars for ever and ever." ”

“ If they had not, they would be in a worse case than sinners, for it is bad not to know the truth; but it is worse to know it, and not to walk in the light of it. If they had no advocate with the Father, few of them indeed, fewer than the few that will be chosen, would be saved. ”

“ Like our contemporaries, professing to believe the past, but denying that its scenes will ever be repeated, he remembers the overthrow of the former Gogue, as the Autocrat of Russia now remembers that of Sennacherib in the days of Hezekiah, but believes not in the repetition of so terrible a destruction. He will know, doubtless -- and who after that the knowledge of the Lord shall have covered the earth for a thousand years will not know? ”

“ Before the Throne of Christ on the right hand, the Just, in humiliation and in exultation, rise through the air, with their Children and Families; some of whom are bowing before the Book of Life, which is opened by two Angels on clouds: many groups arise with exultation; among them is a figure crowned with stars, and the moon beneath her feet, with six infants around her, she represents the Christian Church. ”

“ No one could be more blessed with the friendship of men of worth than Flaxman. Those highly esteemed characters William Hayley, Thomas Hope, and Samuel Rogers, were among his dear and inseparable friends ”

“ Combing the wig in the theatre and the drawing-room was a habit, like twirling the moustache. Dryden pictures the wits rising as one man in the pit of the theatre and beginning to comb their wigs while they stared at a new masked beauty. “It became the mark of a young man of ton to be seen combing his periwig in the Mall, or at the theatre” (Fairholt: Costume in England) . Hats were not worn on perukes that cost forty or fifty pounds. In Wycherley’s Love in a Wood (1672) we read: “A lodging is as unnecessary a thing to a widow that has a coach, as a hat to a man that has a good peruke.” ”

“ That they will all then be the sons of God, a community of glorious, honourable, incorruptible, and living beings; who will constitute the abode of the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb, the glory of whose presence will evolve a brilliancy surpassing the splendour of the sun. ”

“ Such historians are often found in life, mighty recollectors before the Lord, who [xii] talk books which no one can inspire them to write. And it is well that when Smith did write he took small pains to be fine or literary. Writing as a man, and not as the scribes, he produced in his Nollekens and his Times one of the most entertaining harum-scarum biographies ever seen, and in his Book for a Rainy Day, or Recollections of the Events of the Years 1766-1833, a budget of memories which has perhaps been less read and more quoted than any book of its kind. ”

“ But, alas! how fondly do we deceive ourselves! what was his chagrin, when, instead of hearing the name of Flaxman, that of Engleheart was pronounced as the successful candidate!
This timely lesson, he declared, so effectually operated upon his conceit, that he was determined ever after to talk less of his own talents, and to endeavour to do justice to those of others, who were also aspiring to the pinnacle of fame.—Sir Joshua Reynolds meeting Flaxman soon after he had received the hand of Miss Denman, in 1782, said to him, "So, Flaxman, you are married; there's no going to Italy now." ”

“ The Doctor comes like the wily serpent, whispers, in the ears of his brethren with specious arguments until he poisons their minds, and thinking that what he has written will not be taken notice of, boldly pushes the matter, until those whose minds cannot be corrupted, turn away in sorrow and grief that a great man has fallen in Israel! ”

“ Nollekens had been kind to him as a boy, and had remained his friend through life. He was a widower, childless, and enormously rich. No artist had known better how to make art profitable. His purchases of antiques in Rome had been most prudent; so, also, his investments. As a sculptor of portrait busts he stood alone, and in his long working life [xxi] he had “chopped out” the heads of many hundreds of wealthy and illustrious persons. ”