Thomas Newcomen

“ Little is known of his history, but he is supposed to be the son of one Robert Burns, who is mentioned in m'Ure's ‘History of Glasgow,’ and whose name appears in the ‘List of Linen and Woollen Drapers, commonly called English Merchants, since the year 1600.’ The manuscript of his ‘Memoirs’ is lost, but there is a transcript of them, which is evidently much mutilated, by George Crawford, historian of Renfrewshire. The ‘Memoirs’ are filled with detailed accounts of the incidents which befell the nobility of Scotland during the stormy period of which they treat. ”

“ When he finally joined the rebels he was received by Prince Charles with great marks of distinction and esteem, and was made by him a privy councillor, colonel of the guards, and subsequently general. ”

“ BOYD, WILLIAM, fourth Earl of Kilmarnock (1704–1746) , belonged to a family which derives its descent from Simon, third son of Alan, lord high chancellor of Scotland, and brother of Walter, the first high steward of Scotland. Simon's grandson Robert was awarded a grant of lands in Cunninghame by Alexander III, as a reward for his bravery at the battle of Largs, 1263. ”

“ His family were staunch supporters of the Lancastrian cause. His brother, William, was slain at the battle of Bosworth gallantly defending the standard of Henry VII. A contemporary manuscript speaks of Sir Thomas as having 'greatly favoured and followed the party of Henry, earl of Richmond.' He married Anne, daughter of John Fiennes, Lord Dacre, and widow of the Marquis of Berkeley. ”

“ He was appointed to the embassy charged with concluding peace with France in 1492, and again in 1500 he formed one of the suite which accompanied Henry VII to Calais to meet the Archduke Philip of Austria. In 1503, together with Nicholas West, subsequently bishop of Ely, he was entrusted with the important mission of concluding a treaty with the Emperor Maximilian at Antwerp. The principal object of this treaty was to induce Maximilian to withdraw his support from Edmund de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, and banish him and the other English rebels from his dominions. ”

“ John Pits, a contemporary of his, speaks of him as being 'most diligent in gathering fruit into the granary of Christ,' and the same writer, alluding to his literary acquirements, says that he was 'no less familiar with literature than learned in Greek and Hebrew.' Dodd, writing of him a century later, says 'he was in great esteem among his brethren, an assistant to the archpriest, a canon of the chapter, and vicar-general to Dr. ”

“ He was licensed by the presbytery of Stirling in 1791, was presented to the parish of Eskdalemuir by the Duke of Buccleuch in 1792, and fulfilled there the duties of minister for forty-three ears, ln 1797 he married Margaret Moffat, by whom he had three children. ”

“ As a writer he was dull, painstaking, laborious, inaccurate, and credulous to a degree rare even for the age in which he lived. Among his principal works are: 1. 'A New Manual of Old Catholic Meditations,' 1617. 2. 'The Judgment of the Apostles,' Douay, 1632, dedicated to Queen Marie, wife of Charles I. These two works are published under the initials 'R. B.' The letter elicited an indignant pamphlet from one 'P. H.,' entitled 'A Detection or Discovery of a Notable Fraud committed by R. B., a Seminarie Priest,' in which Broughton's manner of treating Nos. ”

“ Newman chose to lurk among the common mourners who murmured "Madame la Comtesse" as a particular tall slimness almost bowed beneath its ensigns of woe passed before them. He stood in the dusky little church while the service was going forward, but at the dismal tombside he turned away and walked down the hill. He went back to Poitiers and spent two days in which patience and revolt were confounded in a single ache. On the third day he sent Madame de Cintré a note to the effect that he would call on her in the afternoon, and in accordance with this he again took his way to Fleurières. ”

“ NEWMAN, THOMAS (1692–1758) , dissenting minister, son of Thomas Newman (1665–1742) , was born in 1692 in London. The father, a pious tradesman, born ‘in Cloth Fair near Smithfield, London, at the most malignant period of the plague in 1665,’ was apprenticed to a linendraper, and, being apprehensive that James II would deprive the protestants of their liberty and the scriptures, he transcribed the whole Bible into shorthand, sitting up two nights a week for six months to do it. ”

“ In America, Newman reflected, lads of twenty-five and thirty have old heads and young hearts, or at least young morals; here they have young heads and very aged hearts, morals the most grizzled and wrinkled.
“What I envy you is your liberty,” observed M. de Bellegarde, “your wide range, your freedom to come and go, your not having a lot of people, who take themselves awfully seriously, expecting something of you. I live,” he added with a sigh, “beneath the eyes of my admirable mother.”
“It is your own fault; what is to hinder your ranging?” said Newman. ”

“ Pious youths in Oxford were carried away by them, and began to flock around the standard of Newman. Newman himself became a party chief—encouraging, organising, persuading. His long black figure, swiftly passing through the streets, was pointed at with awe; crowds flocked to his sermons; his words were repeated from mouth to mouth; 'Credo in Newmannum' became a common catchword. Jokes were made about the Church of England, and practices, unknown for centuries, began to be revived. Young men fasted and did penance, recited the hours of the Roman Breviary, and confessed their sins to Dr. Pusey. ”

“ M'Kay's History of Kilmarnock, 1864; Doran's London in the Jacobite Times, 1871 ; Moore's Compleat Account of the Lives of the two Rebel Lords, 1746; Ford's Life of William Boyd, Earl of Kilmarnock, 1746; Foster's Account of the Behaviour of William Boyd, Earl of Kilmarnock, 1746; Observations and Eemarks on the two Accounts lately published by J. Ford and J. Foster, 1746; Gent. Mag. xvi.; Scots Mag. viii. ; Howell's State Trials, xviii. ”

“ Newman sat gazing at Tristram during this harangue with a lack-lustre eye; never yet had he seemed to himself to have outgrown so completely the phase of equal comradeship with Tom Tristram. Mrs. Tristram's glance at her husband had more of a spark; she turned to Newman with a slightly lurid smile. "You must at least do justice," she said, "to the felicity with which he repairs the indiscretions of a too zealous wife." ”

“ I had followed the course of his fame, and felt happy that I had once known him. Returning to my lodgings, during a sojourn in Washington, I was told I had had a visitor, a man well on in years, plain in attire, and rugged-faced. The card he left bore the name "Simon Newcomb." I sought him out at once, and have rarely felt more honoured than that my old friend, learning casually of my whereabouts, had felt the impulse to find me and renew our former intercourse. After a half-century the boy was still discernible in the aging man. ”

“ Newman took an interest in the wondrous French thrift and conceived a lively admiration for Parisian economies. His own economic genius was so entirely for operations on a larger scale, and, to move at his ease, he needed so imperatively the sense of great risks and great prizes, that he found diversion akin to the watching of ants in the spectacle of fortunes made by the aggregation of copper coins and in the minute subdivision of labour and profit. He questioned M. Nioche about his own manner of life and felt a friendly mixture of compassion and respect for the mystery of these humilities. ”

“ Her presence of mind, her perfect equilibrium, struck Newman as portentous, and he inclined to agree with Valentin that the young lady was very remarkable. "No, to tell the truth, I did n't come for you," he said, "and I did n't expect to find you. I was told," he added in a moment, "that you had left your good father."
"Quelle horreur!" she cried with the brightest of all her smiles. "Does one ever leave one's good father? You've the happy proof of the contrary."
"Yes, convincing proof," said Newman with his almost embarrassed eyes on M. Nioche. ”

“ And Newman paused a moment. "You've something on your mind and on your conscience, your mother and you—some thing in your life that you've kept as much as possible in the dark because it would n't look well in the light of day. You've a skeleton, as they say, in your closet." M. de Bellegarde continued to look at him hard, but it was a question if his eyes betrayed anything; the expression of his eyes was always so strange. Newman paused again and then went on. ”

“ Yes, I am seek.”
“Ask monsieur to sit down,” said Mademoiselle Nioche. “Garçon, bring a chair.”
“Will you do us the honor to seat?” said M. Nioche, timorously, and with a double foreignness of accent.
Newman said to himself that he had better see the thing out and he took a chair at the end of the table, with Mademoiselle Nioche on his left and her father on the other side. “You will take something, of course,” said Miss Noémie, who was sipping a glass of madeira. Newman said that he believed not, and then she turned to her papa with a smile. “What an honor, eh? he has come only for us.” ”

“ But the old lady, with the serenity of supreme power, let her son make her epigrams for her. She only smiled, almost sweetly, shaking her head and repeating, “But once, Mr. Newman; but once!”
Nothing that Newman had ever seen or heard gave him such a sense of marble hardness as this movement and the tone that accompanied it. “Could anything compel you?” he asked. “Do you know of anything that would force you?”
“This language, sir,” said the marquis, “addressed to people in bereavement and grief is beyond all qualification.” ”

“ Newman asked with interest about Mademoiselle Noémie, and M. Nioche at first, for answer, simply looked at him in lachrymose silence.
"Don't press me on that subject, sir. I sit and watch her, but I can do nothing."
"Do you mean she gives you serious cause—?"
"I don't know, sir, what I mean! I can't follow her. I don't understand her. She has something in her head; who can say what's in the head of a little person so independent, so dreadful—and so pleasing? She's too deep for her poor papa." ”

“ After all, you are a man, you are young and at liberty. Let me beseech you, then, to respect the innocence of Mademoiselle Nioche!”
Newman had wondered what was coming, and at this he broke into a laugh. He was on the point of declaring that his own innocence struck him as the more exposed, but he contented himself with promising to treat the young girl with nothing less than veneration. He found her waiting for him, seated upon the great divan in the Salon Carré. She was not in her working-day costume, but wore her bonnet and gloves and carried her parasol, in honor of the occasion. ”

“ Bread supposed, kept all the time, and no particular servant could enjoy all the sunshine diffused by the career of a universal master. She ventured nevertheless to express a modest hope that Newman meant to remain a while in Paris. He laid his hand on hers and shook it gently. "I mean to remain for ever."
He went after this to see Mrs. Tristram, to whom he had telegraphed and who expected him. She looked at him a moment and shook her head. "This won't do," she said; "you've come back too soon." ”

“ She led him about with her, introduced him to fifty people, and took extreme satisfaction in her conquest. Newman accepted every proposal, shook hands universally and promiscuously, and seemed equally unfamiliar with trepidation or with elation. Tom Tristram complained of his wife’s avidity, and declared that he could never have a clear five minutes with his friend. ”

“ Newman had an exasperating feeling that she would get the better of him still; he would not have believed it possible that he could so utterly fail to be touched by the sight of a woman (criminal or other) in so tight a place. Madame de Bellegarde gave a glance at her son which seemed tantamount to an injunction to be silent and leave her to her own devices. The marquis stood beside her, with his hands behind him, looking at Newman. ”

“ It is a pity, nevertheless, that Newman had not been a physiognomist, for a great many of the faces were irregularly agreeable, expressive, and suggestive. If the occasion had been different they would hardly have pleased him; he would have thought the women not pretty enough and the men too smirking; but he was now in a humor to receive none but agreeable impressions, and he looked no more narrowly than to perceive that everyone was brilliant, and to feel that the sun of their brilliancy was a part of his credit. “I will present you to some people,” said M. de Bellegarde after a while. ”

“ Noémie Nioche." But Mr. Newman, unlike his companion, read the name with perfect gravity; all French names to him were equally incommodes.
"And precisely—how it happens!—here's my father; he has come to escort me home," said Mademoiselle Noémie. "He speaks English beautifully. He 'll arrange with you." And she turned to welcome a little old gentleman who came shuffling up and peering over his glasses at Newman. ”

“ When Newman learned that his social position was to be taken into account, he professed himself utterly incompetent, and begged Tristram to relieve him of the care. “I didn’t know I had a social position,” he said, “and if I have, I haven’t the smallest idea what it is. Isn’t a social position knowing some two or three thousand people and inviting them to dinner? I know you and your wife and little old Mr. Nioche, who gave me French lessons last spring. Can I invite you to dinner to meet each other? ”