as opportunity offered, but in a grave spirit becoming his own character (for he was a clergyman in deacon's orders), as well as the importance of the question. The great dining-room soon began to show the result; and the landlord told him with a smile, that he was his best customer. Merchants crowded in from curiosity; Guinea captains and others, to draw him into conversation, in order to try his temper, an experiment in which they succeeded only so far as to lose their own. His gravity provoked them, and his accurate knowledge of facts, some of a highly criminal nature, in which they were implicated; for their cruelty to British sailors was of a piece with the unfeeling character of their trade.

These disputations had nearly come to a tragical conclusion. One stormy day, Clarkson was standing on the Pier-head, looking down, he says, upon the tossing of the boats beneath him, when he observed a number of his most violent opponents at the Talbot walking towards him, their arms knit together in a firm phalanx. He turned to walk away, supposing they would open to let him pass; they showed no disposition to do so, and it struck him instantly that they intended to push him into the river, and let it be supposed he was drowned by accident. The sense of danger nerved him with strength; he rushed at them, knocked one of them down, and walked away, followed by a storm of curses, which proclaimed, had there been any doubt about it, the villainous intentions of his assailants.

From Liverpool, Clarkson proceeded to Manchester. His fame had preceded him. He was well introduced and kindly received. He arrived on Saturday, and his new acquaintance insisted on it that he should preach the next day in one of the churches, where they secured a pulpit. The church was crowded, and he delivered a sermon, of which he gives an outline. It was probably the only sermon he ever preached; for he now considered himself as devoted to the anti-slavery cause. His discourse shows very considerable talent, and concludes with an eloquent and solemn appeal, showing that the horrible iniquities of the slave trade could not fail to bring a curse upon our land as well as upon the individuals engaged in it. Next he visited Birmingham, and Derby, and other inland towns, and at the end of five months returned to London. During his absence he had been so absorbed in his one pursuit that he had not once read a newspaper. He was astonished to find how the cause had prospered, chiefly under the energetic management of the Society of Friends. Cowper's "Negro's Lament" had just been published.

"Forced from home, and all its pleasures,

Afric's coast I left forlorn "—

was now a popular ballad, sung about the streets; and songless Quakers, in the enthusiasm of the hour, forgot their scruples, and joined with others in subscribing to pay the ballad-monger. Clarkson joined the Quakers, and continued through life a member of the Society of Friends.

Not the least interesting part of the work is the sketch he gives of the great debate upon Wilberforce's motion for the suppression of the Slave Trade. After a long speech, in which he relieved his labouring spirit by a really frightful exposure of the cruelties of the trade, he sat down, at the end of several hours, declaring, with his usual generosity and kindness of heart, that he had no personal animosities, and believed that his opponents were sincere and honorable men. In the debate

that followed, never perhaps was there such a display of deep feeling, and of the eloquence which enthusiasm in a great cause only could inspire. Pitt and Fox forgot their life-long animosities, and spoke and voted together. Burke followed after, and William Smith from Norwich, Lord Carysford, Henry Thornton, and other members, who rose far above themselves; and it must not be concealed that their opponents spoke upon the whole with temper, and adduced many plausible reasons why the trade, under some restrictions for the prevention of cruelty, should still be retained. Pitt spoke with considerable knowledge of the subject, and Clarkson was justly proud of having prepared him for the debate. He had furnished him with his facts, and placed his manuscripts in his hands. Pitt received them with kindness and candour, and acknowledged his obligation, as Clarkson tells us, with the dignity becoming a great mind. At length the motion was carried (with the addition, on the motion of Mr. Dundas, that the abolition should be gradual) by two hundred and thirty, while those who opposed abolition altogether were only eighty-five. The Bill was sent up to the Lords, and several times returned to the Commons, shorn at each return of some of its strength. At length it received the Royal assent. But the war of the French revolution was at hand; every other subject became insipid; every project of reform was set aside; the Bill slumbered through twenty years of weary expectation on the part of Clarkson and his associates; while the West Indian party hoped that it might never be revived.

There was a strange contrast between Wilberforce and Clarkson. Wilberforce shrunk from no details, however frightful; and frightful indeed, and hardly to be credited, if he had not been prepared with evidence which none dared to call in question, were some of those on which he dwelt in introducing the great motion. Yet he left the House cheerful, nay, gay as ever. Heber, introduced by a friend, called upon him

that night, and the interview banished the prejudice of years. He spoke of his opponents with so much kindness, and of his glorious majority with such triumph, that the sincerity and the kindness of his nature could be doubted no longer. If he entered a dining-room, he was the happiest of the party; if he came late, his entrance imparted a fresh zest to all the company. He was full of wit, full of anecdote, and he soon contrived to give a useful turn to the conversation. When he was worn out at the end of the Session, he returned from a month's vacation at the Lakes, blithe as a lark, and ready for fresh toils. But Clarkson had the unhappy talent of making all his public anxieties personal griefs. He still dwelt on the iniquities of the slave trade night and day. It is true he was overwhelmed with work; but besides this he was gloomy and distressed. The staircase reeled underneath his feet; he was afraid to be alone. If he attempted to write, he fainted; if he were drawn into conversation, streams of perspiration ran down his forehead. It is well that we of this generation should know at what cost the horrors of the middle passage, and the curse of slavery, were removed.

At length the short administration of Mr. Fox was formed, and the last and greatest measure of his administration was the Bill for the total Abolition of the Slave Trade. It was not carried until Pitt and Fox slept side by side in Westminster Abbey. To Fox's administration, however, the honour is justly due. New combatants had entered the field. Lord Granville introduced the Bill, and the Duke of Norfolk, and Watson, bishop of Llandaff, supported it; as did Lord Howick and others. In the House of Commons new friends had risen up, inferior in eloquence to none of their predecessors. There were Brougham and Canning, and Spencer Percival, and Wyndham, and Sir Samuel Romilly. The Bill was passed in triumph, and the venerable Roscoe was there, the member for Liverpool, both to witness, and by his own vote to contribute to the victory.

"Reader!" so writes Clarkson in the last sentence of these two volumes, "Thou art now acquainted with the history of this contest. Rejoice in the manner of its termination; and if thou feelest grateful for the event, retire within thy closet, and pour out thy thanksgivings to the Almighty for this His unspeakable act of mercy to thy oppressed fellow-creatures."

EDITOR.

MEMOIR OF THE LATE J. S. HARFORD, ESQ., OF BLAISE CASTLE.

BY THE REV. CANON HARFORD BATTERsby.

ON the 23rd of April last a solemn funeral train was to be seen wending its way from the well-known mansion of Blaise Castle, near Bristol, along the pleasant garden-walk-so often trod by its late owner, John Scaudrett Harford, on his way to the adjoining parish church-there to deposit his remains in the family vault below that ancient building.

The funeral, by his own express desire, was conducted in a simple and unostentatious manner, with no elaborate display of "the trappings and the suits of woe;" but many a countenance in the crowded church on that occasion betrayed the feeling of sorrow which there was within-sorrow at the loss which, not the family of Mr. Harford only, or the neighbourhood in which he lived, but the Church of God had sustained in his removal.

Mr. Harford was born at Bristol, on the 8th October, 1785. The ancient residence of the Harford family was at Bosbury, in Herefordshire; but the branch of it to which Mr. Harford belonged had been settled in Bristol for many generations.

Mr. Harford and his brothers were sent to the school of the Rev. Mr. Lloyd, of Peterley House, Bucks, which was then in high repute. After leaving school, he did not proceed to the University; but at a later period he kept several terms at Christ's College, Cambridge, of which Dr. Kaye, then bishop of Bristol, and afterwards of Lincoln, was the Master, his acquaintance with whom ripened into a friendship which continued through life.

In 1822 Mr. Harford received the honorary degree of D.C.L. at Oxford.

Mr. Harford's tastes early developed themselves in the direction of literature and the fine arts. The retirement in which his parents lived, from their frequent domestic sorrows, was very favourable to these pursuits; and to those of landscape gardening and landscape painting, in which he learned to take great delight.

Still higher aims, however, than those of a life devoted to such attainments, soon opened upon him, and gave a new movement to his soul, which, while it did not lead him to forego his

*Mr. Lloyd was an able teacher. Many of his scholars distinguished themselves greatly at the Universities. His eldest son, whose attainments at Vol. 56.-No. 343.

Eton were of a very uncommon order,
died prematurely.
His second son,
after taking a high degree at Oxford,
became bishop of that See.

3 R

former pleasures and pursuits, gave a different direction to them all, and kept him ever after from an overweening attachment to the things of this lower world.

In an interesting record of his own early life, he ascribes his first deep impressions of religion to the effect produced on his mind by the death of his eldest brother in the year 1804. Mr. Harford was then 19.

He says, "I think it was from this time that I began to think seriously on religion. I had fancied, in my ignorance, that any one could become religious, if he chose. I now read my Bible with greater light, and began to find what a warfare and combat it is to subdue the flesh in any degree to the spirit."

The death of a beloved sister, and of a second brother, tended further to deepen these impressions. In both these near relatives, the power of Divine grace had been remarkably shewn, and from these solemn scenes Mr. Harford went forth another man. The life of godliness was now begun in him: that life which is perennial-unfailing-and which finds its true perfection in the world to come.

Amongst the most eminent of his Christian friends, and one to whom, more than to any other, he was indebted for spiritual guidance and assistance at this critical period of his life, was the Rev. Richard Whalley, rector of Chelwood, whose memory he ever cherished with the greatest affection; as is testified by the graceful tribute which he paid to it in the Memoir, published by him in 1846, and the short sketch of his life inserted in his "Recollections of Wilberforce," 1864. Mr. Harford's parents were members of the Society of Friends; but his own. convictions led him to withdraw from that body, and afterwards to join the Church of England, of which he ever afterwards continued a sincere and attached member. He received baptism from the Rev. R. Whalley, in the church of Chelwood, in the year 1809.

In 1812, he married Louisa, eldest daughter of R. Hart Davis, Esq., M.P. for Bristol. In her he found a partner who fully sympathized both in his intellectual and also his more spiritual tastes, and it was not till after fifty-three years of the happiest wedded life that their union on earth was broken by his death.

They visited Ireland on their marriage; and in the June number of the "Christian Observer" for 1813 is to be found a very interesting account of the impressions made on Mr. Harford's mind by that tour, under the title of "A Letter upon the State of Ireland, addressed to a distinguished Statesman." That statesman was Mr. Wilberforce, at whose request the letter was both written and published.

The death of his father, in 1815, put Mr. Harford in pos