THOMAS HOBSON

Summary

We confess ourselves rather puzzled to know in what manner to deal with the hero of the present chapter, under so many different forms is he represented by his biographers. The greater part of them represent him as uniting the professions of horsedealer and carrier in his own person, and at the same time exhibit him as a benefactor of our town in a way hereafter to be told. One chronicler hails him

“Thou friend to man, and the less friended beast.”

Another,

“A man not learned, yet a man of letters;”

while Milton endeavours to overthrow all these opinions by asserting him to be

“Made of sphere iron, never to decay.”

But as the last named authority elsewhere informs us that

“Death hath broke his girt

And here, alas, hath laid him in the dirt,”

we must reject his evidence as contradicting itself, and treat our hero as a man indeed, but of that species of which Proteus was the progenitor.

And, first, all dwellers in and visitors of Cambridge are well acquainted with a stream which runs by their side for a quarter of a mile as they come into the town on the London Road, and which, after accompanying them from the Bridge to the end of Downing Terrace, is there separated into two parts, one of which runs down both sides of Trumpington Street as far as Pembroke College, where it disappears like the Arethusa of old and is seen no more until sought for in its ortygia, the conduit in the Market Place: down both sides of Regent Street, until like its fellow it disappears opposite Christ's College and flows underground to the same conduit.