In the year 1840 the thirty-seven were all alive; in 1850 their number had decreased by six; in 1856 and 1857 business was more lively, for the Crimea and the Mutiny carried off no less than nine.  There remained in 1870 but five of the original members, and at the date of my story, including the two Finsburys, but three.

By this time Masterman was in his seventy-third year; he had long complained of the effects of age, had long since retired from business, and now lived in absolute seclusion under the roof of his son Michael, the well-known solicitor.  Joseph, on the other hand, was still up and about, and still presented but a semi-venerable figure on the streets in which he loved to wander.  This was the more to be deplored because Masterman had led (even to the least particular) a model British life.  Industry, regularity, respectability, and a preference for the four per cents are understood to be the very foundations of a green old age.  All these Masterman had eminently displayed, and here he was, ab agendo, at seventy-three; while Joseph, barely two years younger, and in the most excellent preservation, had disgraced himself through life by idleness and eccentricity.  Embarked in the leather trade, he had early wearied of business, for which he was supposed to have small parts.  A taste for general information, not promptly checked, had soon begun to sap his manhood.  There is no passion more debilitating to the mind, unless, perhaps, it be that itch of public speaking which it not infrequently accompanies or begets.  The two were conjoined in the case of Joseph; the acute stage of this double malady, that in which the patient delivers gratuitous lectures, soon declared itself with severity, and not many years had passed over his head before he would have travelled thirty miles to address an infant school.  He was no student; his reading was confined to elementary textbooks and the daily papers; he did not even fly as high as cyclopedias; life, he would say, was his volume.  His lectures were not meant, he would declare, for college professors; they were addressed direct to ‘the great heart of the people’, and the heart of the people must certainly be sounder than its head, for his lucubrations were received with favour.  That entitled ’How to Live Cheerfully on Forty Pounds a Year’, created a sensation among the unemployed.  ‘Education:  Its Aims, Objects, Purposes, and Desirability’, gained him the respect of the shallow-minded.  As for his celebrated essay on ‘Life Insurance Regarded in its Relation to the Masses’, read before the Working Men’s Mutual Improvement Society, Isle of Dogs, it was received with a ‘literal ovation’ by an unintelligent audience of both sexes, and so marked was the effect that he was next year elected honorary president of the institution, an office of less than no emolument—­since the holder was expected to come down with a donation—­but one which highly satisfied his self-esteem.