test, but exhibit a large alloy of baser matter mingled with the purest ore of human excellence. From such an examination, however severe, the character of Howard will come forth bright and unimpaired. He passed through scenes of grandeur, and sojourned among the most glorious remains of ancient art, without suffering himself, for one instant, to be diverted from the main object of his quest; and that this neglect was not attributable to ignorance or insensibility, is sufficiently attested by the extract just given, which indisputably proves him to have had a decided and expensive partiality to dilettanti pursuits. When Burke said of him, that he had visited all Europe, not to survey the sumptuousness of palaces, or the stateliness of temples; not to make accurate measurements of the remains of ancient grandeur, nor to 'form a scale of the curiosity of modern art;' he might have added, that, in neglecting all this, Howard made a noble and high-principled sacrifice of taste to Christian benevolence; that he did not pass these things by, from any want of interest in the achievements of genius, but from a settled and unalterable conviction that he had a "great work" to perform, and that it was in his power to complete it only by a resolute exclusion of every other pursuit from his fancy and his feelings. And he was right in his estimate. Nothing less than a "single eye" to his object, would have enabled him to effect, as he did, a change in the public mind of Europe. Nothing less than a stern and unmingled devotedness of all his mental faculties, all his moral and physical energies, in all the varieties of their exercise, could have enabled him to accomplish the mighty task, the execution of which was the one business of his life. Nor will it abate from the magnanimity of his selfdenial, if we admit that he felt a pure and elevated satisfaction in the success of his endeavours. His first steps were upon ground untried and unsafe. He had, arrayed against him, two of the most appalling and unconquerable hostilities that can be opposed to human enterprise, the interests of individuals, and the prejudices of mankind. Yet, these he encountered and overcame by a steady, calm, and heroic perseverance, altogether unparalleled in the history of man. To this he had bent the whole force of his character; he had put violence upon his peculiar habits and preferences, that he might go completely through with his disgusting and danger. ous office; and if, in these offensive and hazardous investigations and exposures, he found gratification, or if at any time he might contemplate the reformations that he had wrought, with feelings of complacency, the former was no impeachment of his disinterestedness, nor did the latter impair his humility. His VOL. XXI. N.S. 2 I

letters and his uniform course of life, attest his utter regardlessness of self; and every document that is brought forward by Dr. Brown, in illustration of Howard's habitual state of mind, shews that he cherished the deepest prostration of spirit, in the contemplation of his own character, as an instrument in the hands of God.

Nor was it a restless spirit, that made Howard, first a wanderer, and accidentally the benefactor of mankind. He had an exquisite relish for the pleasures of home; and his letters exhibit sufficient evidence that, while yielding to the high claims of duty, he sighed for the repose and the pleasures of his own tranquil dwelling. The peculiar tastes which make home delightful, were his in a remarkable degree. He had all those habits of elegant decoration, minute inspection, and social kindness, which make our apartments commodious, our garden a source of daily occupation and pleasure, our fields the subject of many a pleasant scheme of economical and ornamental improvement, our neighbourhood a sphere of usefulness and gratification. The man whose house and grounds, and whose habits and feelings in connexion with them, are the subject of the following interesting description, must have been under the influence of most powerful motives when he determined to encounter, not only severe privations, but the daily contact of disease, loathsomeness, and degrading associations.

In the house (at Cardington) which was but small, he made some further alterations, to render it commodious for his future resi dence; and his taste, with the assistance of Mrs. Howard's, which was highly cultivated and correct, soon gave to it an air of neatness and elegant simplicity very different to the appearance it had formerly borne. The front he adorned with lattice-work, replacing by simple cottage-windows the old-fashioned casements that had given to the whole building a character as sombre as that of the churchyard into which they looked. To the back of the house he made some additions, by the erection of a new set of rooms, abutting somewhat beyond the site of those he had pulled down, upon the pleasure grounds, to which he made a handsome entrance from the house, near the end of the new buildings. The grounds themselves were formed entirely under his own direction, out of a field of about three acres, which had formerly been a kind of homestead to the farm. They are laid out with great taste, having a kitchen-garden in the centre, so completely hid from observation by the shrubs surrounding it, that you can have no idea of its existence until you arrive at some of those narrow openings, over-arched by spreading boughs, through which you enter it, without the intervention of any gate, or other artificial barrier, to break the charm of so pleasing and so harmless a deception. Between the shrubbery and the house there is a very

neat lawn, and the whole is surrounded by a broad gravel walk, sheltered from the heat of the sun by fine full-grown trees, or thickly planted evergreens. In one part of the grounds, this walk is skirted on each side by a row of very majestic firs, the plants or seeds of which are said to have been brought by Mr. Howard from abroad, on his return from some of his earlier travels. The still silence of this shady grove was his most favourite resort; and in its mossy path, he spent many a solitary hour in devising, and many a social one in communicating to his friends, when devised, those glorious schemes of benevolence, which will never cease to impart to every spot his footsteps are known to have traversed on so merciful an errand, a charm more powerful than, without the magic influence of some such genius of the place, can dwell in nature's loveliest or sublimest scenes. The trees are still standing where they were first planted by his hand, and the gardener who watered the nursling shoots is yet living, in his ninetieth year, to prune, though with a sparing hand,-unwilling to lop off any thing his master loved to cherish, the exuberance of their spreading boughs. One tree in particular seems to be the object of his especial care. It was planted, as he delights to tell you, by Mrs. Howard, on the original formation of the walk, and therefore always possessed a peculiar charm in her husband's eyes. Nor has the moss with which Mr. Howard delighted to see the paths of his pleasure-grounds and gardens completely overspread, entirely disappeared.

Nor

has any thing been altered there, beyond the change which nature herself has introduced by the ordinary process of vegetation, except it be in a root-house at the end of the pleasure grounds, now not exactly in the state in which Mr. Howard left it. This little rural re. treat is built entirely in the rustic style, without any of those curious intermixtures of Chinese, Grecian, or Tuscan architecture, which give to many buildings, intended for similar purposes, in our days, a sort of non-descript character often truly ridiculous. The materials of which it is formed, are the roots and trunks of trees; the roof, thatch-work, without ceiling or pannelling on the inside, to mar the rude simplicity of the exterior. The door and its portico are Gothic, with windows of the same description on each side, just admitting light enough into the hermitage within, to fit it for the purposes of study and retirement, for which it was intended, without destroying the sombre and recluse appearance of the whole. The furniture exactly corresponded with the room. In the centre are still the remains of a lamp formed out of a root, and originally furnished with glasses, some of which were broken the first time they were used, and have never been replaced. In one corner is a fireplace, hid from observation by a chimney-board, formed, like the rest of the interior of the building, of roots and rough-hewn pieces of green wood. The place of chairs is supplied, partly by some singular masses of peat, of a very curious description, in the precise state in which they were cut out of a moss at Ampthill, a market town in Bedfordshire, distant from Cardington about seven miles; and on another side of the room, by benches, fastened into

the wall, and covered with coarse matting. Opposite to these is a stone slab, serving the purposes of a table, and ornamented with a female figure in marble, seemingly a nun, in a reclining posture; a model in wood of one of the public buildings which Mr. Howard had seen in the course of his travels; and an hour-glass. Over these, in a recess in the wall, is a small book-case, with glass-doors, still enclosing a sufficient number of books to enable us to form a pretty accurate notion of what description of reading their former owner was most attached to, from the little library he had selected for the spot where he was wont to spend his more retired hours in study and meditation. Hervey, Flavel, Baxter, and the divines of that class, seem to have been his favourite authors. But besides a well chosen selection of writers of this cast, these shelves contained the poems of Milton, Thomson, Young, Watts; Lord Anson's Voyages; The Wonders of the Universe displayed; and most of the popular, with a few of the more abstruse philosophical treatises of the day; such, principally, as are calculated to exhibit and illustrate the wonders of creation and of providence, and, whilst they inform the inquiring mind in some of the minutest, as well as the grandest of her operations, to teach their pupils, as a lesson habitually to be derived from all her works,

"To look through Nature up to Nature's God."

Nor does the book, in which, after all, that and every other valuable lesson are taught, at once in the simplest and the sublimest language, fail to find a place in a retreat so admirably adapted to the serious contemplation of its sacred page. The identical Bible which was Mr. Howard's constant companion in all his travels, undertaken for the sole object of carrying into effect those principles of universal charity to the whole brotherhood of man, which the Bible, and the Bible alone inculcates, still occupies the spot where it was regularly placed, whenever its owner, for a few short days or weeks, had found a resting place from his labours, in the calm solitude of the shades he loved.'

Mr. Howard returned from his first continental journey, in a state of health which rendered a rigorous dietetic regimen' necessary in the opinion of his medical attendants. He resided at Stoke Newington, and the attentions which he received. from the mistress of the house in which he lodged, during a severe attack of disease, were so unremitted as to induce him, on recovery, to make her an offer of his hand. The extreme disparity of their ages, twenty-five and fifty-two, induced that highly respectable woman to remonstrate with him on the unsuitableness of such a union; but he persisted, and they were married in 1752. Their connexion was happy, though brief; Mrs. Howard only survived her marriage two or three years, and her husband sincerely lamented her death. With his characteristic generosity of disposition, he had transferred

the whole of the small property possessed by his wife, to her sister; and when, on her decease, he gave up house-keeping, he distributed the greater part of his furniture among the poor of the neighbourhood. An old gardener, who had previously experienced his liberality,

gratefully remembered to the day of his death, that, upon this occasion, he had for his dividend, as he was accustomed to call it, a bedstead and bedding complete, a table, half a dozen chairs, and a new scythe-besides receiving a guinea for a single day's work, probably in assisting in the removal of the portion of his furniture which Mr. Howard reserved for his own use.'

In the hope of obtaining relief from depressed feeling, Mr. Howard determined on quitting England for a time; and the first object to which his course was directed, was the capital of Portugal, then in ruins from the recent effects of the tremendous earthquake of 1755. The Lisbon packet in which he sailed, was, however, taken by a French privateer, and, under circumstances of great barbarity, he was thrown into prison at Brest. He was subsequently released conditionally; and, on his return to England, he exerted himself with promptitude, energy, and success, to procure redress for those of his countrymen who were still suffering under the horrors from which he had been liberated. It was to these circumstances that he ascribed the first impulse, which gradually absorbed the whole of his mental energies, though it was not until confirmed by subsequent events, that it became the settled purpose of his life. He now took up his residence at Cardington, where he occupied himself in superintending the improvement of his estate, in doing good, and in making those meteorological observations which procured for him, in 1756, his election as an F.R.S._ In April 1758, he married the daughter of Edward Leeds, Esq. serjeant at law. This pious, amiable, and accomplished woman possessed his entire confidence and affection; and her death, in March 1765, though it was alleviated by the hope of a Christian, fell heavily upon him. She expired a few days after having given birth to a son, who survived to become a source of the severest anxiety to his father, and to furnish calumny with a pretext for assailing the parental character of Howard,

Never, perhaps, was a man more sincerely attached to a woman, whose fortunes he had identified with his own, than Mr. Howard appears to have been to his second wife; and never, according to the account of those who enjoyed the happiness of her acquaintance, was such attachment fixed upon a more worthy object. To such an extreme, indeed, I might almost say, did he carry his veneration for her,