mason-father

Updated: May 29, 2025

General Wolfe took Quebec, and whilst he was taking it, recorded the fact that he would sooner have written Gray's 'Elegy'; and so Carlyle who panted for action, who hated eloquence, whose heroes were Cromwell and Wellington, Arkwright and the 'rugged Brindley, who beheld with pride and no ignoble envy the bridge at Auldgarth his mason-father had helped to build half a century before, and then exclaimed, 'A noble craft, that of a mason; a good building will last longer than most books than one book in a million'; who despised men of letters, and abhorred the 'reading public'; whose gospel was Silence and Action spent his life in talking and writing; and his legacy to the world is thirty-four volumes octavo.

Augustine Birrell - Obiter Dicta