Bedfordshire; and on the 25th of April, 1758, he contracted a second marriage with Henrietta, daughter of Edward Leeds, Esq., king's serjeant, a master in Chancery, and member of parliament for Ryegate. "With this lady," says Dr. Aikin, "who possessed, in an eminent degree, all the mild and amiable virtues proper to her sex, he passed, as I have often heard him declare, the only years of true enjoyment which he had known in life." Soon after his marriage, he removed to Watcombe, in the New Forest, Hampshire; but finding the situation prejudicial to the health of his wife, he returned to Cardington, where he employed himself in forming and executing various schemes of benevolence for ameliorating the condition of his tenantry, and administering to the wants of the poor in his neighbourhood. He began by building a number of neat cottages on his estate, annexing to each a little land for a garden, and other conveniences; and his chief delight was in peopling them with industrious tenants, and in exercising over them the combined superintendence of master and father. In 1765, he had the misfortune to lose his wife in child-bed; and his care and affection for the son she had left him, served but little to allay the severe anguish which he always felt at her loss. Shortly after her death he paid a visit to Bath; and in the spring of 1767, made a tour on the continent, which he repeated in 1769, and returned to England in the autumn of the following year.

In 1773, being appointed high sheriff of the county of Bedford, he chose rather to risk the penalties of the test act, which he incurred as a dissenter by accepting this situation, than refuse an office in which he saw great opportunities of doing good. One of his duties being to visit the county prisons, he examined them in person; and no sooner discovered the enormities and grievances that prevailed, than he determined to attempt the remedy of them, and the introduction of a humane and equitable system. The first thing by which he was struck, was the injustice of the payment of fees on a prisoner's discharge, by which many were confined for months after they had been otherwise entitled

to their liberation. "In order to redress this hardship," says our philanthropist, in his prefatory remarks to his State of Prisons, "I applied to the justices of the county for a salary to the gaoler in lieu of fees. The bench were properly affected with the grievance, and willing to grant the relief desired; but they wanted a precedent for charging the county with the expense. I therefore rode into several neighbouring counties, in search of a precedent; but I soon learned that the same injustice was practised in them; and looking into the prisons, I beheld scenes of calamity which I grew daily more and more anxious to alleviate." In consequence of what he had beheld in this benevolent search, he went on and paid visits to most of the county gaols in England, and some deplorable objects coming under his view who had been brought from the Bridewells, he travelled again into the same counties for the purpose of also inspecting these places of confinement.

His exertions having attracted the attention of parliament, he was requested to lay the result of his inquiries before the house of commons, which he accordingly did in March, 1774, when he received a vote of thanks, and was encouraged to persevere in his researches. On his appearing before the members, one of them asked him at whose expense he travelled; a question which, it is said, the noble philanthropist did not answer without manifesting emotions of indignation. Not long afterwards, he had the satisfaction of seeing a bill passed" for the relief of prisoners who should be acquitted, respecting their fees," and another for preserving the health of prisoners, and preventing the gaol-distemper; which he caused to be printed in a different letter, and sent them to the keeper of every county gaol in England. In December, he, in conjunction with Mr. Whitbread, stood a contested election for Bedford, when corrupt influence prevented their return; but on a petition being presented against that of their adversaries, one of them was, in consequence, ejected from his seat: Mr. Whitbread was declared to have been duly elected, and Mr. Howard's minority was reduced to four.

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In 1775 and 1776, he visited the prisons of France, Flanders, Holland, Germany, and Switzerland; and on his return, those of Scotland and Ireland; in all of which he found the same need of reformation. Having now pleted his inspection of English gaols, he, in 1777, published an account of his labours, in a work entitled, The State of the Prisons in England and Wales, with Preliminary Observations, and an Account of some Foreign Prisons, quarto, and dedicated to the house of commons. Nothing could exceed the care and attention with which he got up this publication, which was printed at Warrington, under the superintendence of Dr. Aikin, having been previously written out in correct language by a friend, and then revised by Dr. Price. Although the printing of the work took place in winter, Mr. Howard rose every morning at three o'clock, for the purpose of collating every word and figure of his daily proof sheet with the original; and when it was finished, he insisted, says Dr. Aikin, in fixing the price so low that, had every copy been sold, he would still have presented the public with all the plates and great part of the printing. In this work, the only one of the kind that ever appeared, we are introduced to scenes of the most shocking misery, injustice, and depravity, into which Mr. Howard readily entered, as also into the most loathsome dungeons, where none who were not obliged, besides himself, would venture. Alluding to the inquiries of his friends as to the manner of his preservation from infection, he says, "I here answer, next to the free goodness and mercy of the author of my being, temperance and cleanliness are my preservatives. Trusting in Divine Providence, and believing myself in the way of my duty, I visit the most noxious cells, and fear no evil. I never enter an hospital or prison before breakfast; and in an offensive room I seldom draw my breath deeply."

In 1778, he inade a third journey to the continent, and, on his return, he renewed his survey of the British prisons, and made an examination of the public hospitals. The further information which he thus obtained, he published, in 1780, as an appendix to his former work; and, in the same year, he was

appointed one of the three supervisors under the act of parliament, which had been passed in the previous year, for the establishment of penitentiary houses on a plan of his own recommendation. This office, for which he had refused a salary, he accepted on condition of the appointment of Dr. Fothergill as one of his colleagues; but the doctor soon afterwards dying, and some differences having arisen between the other supervisor and Mr. Howard, he resigned it in January, 1781. Shunning repose as criminal, when further benefit to his fellow-creatures seemed possible to be effected, he again quitted England, and made a tour through Denmark, Sweden, Russia, and Poland. On his arrival at St. Petersburgh, the empress sent to invite him to court; but his sublime answer to the messenger was, "I come to visit the prisons of the captive, and not the courts or palaces of kings." From this tour he returned in about a year; and, in 1782, he made another complete survey of the prisons in England, and another journey into Scotland and Ireland. In 1783, he visited the prisons of Spain and Portugal; and, on his return, having again surveyed the prisons of this country, he published, in 1784, an appendix of the additional information he had obtained during the last three years, together with a complete edition of his State of the Prisons, with all the supplementary matter.

Our philanthropist now turned his attention to those countries most afflicted by the plague, and resolved to visit the principal lazarettos of Europe, with a view of obtaining information as to the means of preventing its contagion. His intent, therefore, as his biographer observes, was nothing less than to plunge into the midst of those dangers, which, by other men, are so anxiously avoided; to search out and confront the great foe of human life, for the sake of recognising his features, and discovering the most efficacious barriers against his assaults. In the prosecution of this scheme, he, towards the end of 1785, set out through France, to Smyrna and Constantinople, whence he returned to the former place, for the purpose, as he says, of going to Venice with a foul bill, that would necessarily subject him to the utmost rigour of the quarantine. In his voyage, he was

attacked by a Tunisian corsair, which was defeated after a smart skirmish, in which Mr. Howard pointed one of the cannons with considerable effect.

From Venice, where his health and spirits suffered considerably from his residence in the lazaretto, he proceeded to Vienna, where he had a private audience with the Emperor Joseph the Second, who treated him with great condescension, and promised to adopt many of his plans for the improvement of prison discipline. Whilst abroad, he received intelligence of his son's insanity, and of the intention of his friends to erect a statue in honour of him by public subscription. Although with different emotions, both these events distressed and harassed him in an extraordinary degree. In a letter written shortly afterwards, he breaks off with "But, oh! my son, my son!" and, in allusion to what he calls "the other very distressing affair, he writes, "Oh! why could not my friends, who know how much I detest such parade, have stopped such a hasty measure!-As a private man, with some peculiarities, I wished to retire into obscurity and silence. Indeed, my friend, I cannot bear the thought of being thus dragged out. It deranges and confounds all my schemes-my exaltation is my fall, my misfortune."

On his arrival, therefore, in England, in 1787, he refused to direct the disposal of the sum collected, (£1,500,) part of which was reclaimed by the subscribers, and the remainder left untouched until the time of his death. In this and the following year, he again visited Scotland and Ireland, where he inspected the Protestant Charter School, with a view to the reformation of the various abuses which, in a former visit, he had observed, and reported to a committee of the Irish house of commons. Whilst at Dublin, he was created L.L.D., and at Glasgow and Liverpool he was enrolled among their honorary members. On his return home, having again inspected the prisons in England, and the hulks on the Thames, he published an account of his last laborious investigations, in An Account of the Principal Lazarettos in Europe, with various Papers relative to the Plague; together with Further Observations on some Foreign Prisons

and Hospitals; with additional remarks on the present state of those in Great Britain and Ireland, with a great number of plates. At the conclusion of the work, having stated it to be his intention "again to quit his native country, for the purpose of revisiting Russia, Turkey, and some other countries, and extending his tour in the east," he set off from London, in the summer of 1789, and proceeded through Germany to Petersburgh and Moscow, and from thence to a Russian settlement called Cherson, on the river Dnieper. According to Mr. Palmer, the principal object of Mr. Howard's last travels, was to try the effect of James's powders in cases of malignant fever; which, having broken out at the place where he now was, he administered that medicine to several patients. In his attendance upon one of them, he himself caught the infection; and, although Prince Potemkin sent him his own physician, and everything was done to save him, he died on the 20th of January, 1790. He expired with perfect resignation, and was buried in the garden of the villa of M. Dauphiné, at his own request; observing, as he made it," that he should there be equally near to heaven, as if brought back to England."

His death, which was lamented not only as a national calamity, but as a loss to the whole civilized world, was announced in the London Gazette, an honour of an unprecedented nature. Several poets of eminence employed their talents in his praise; and, with the remainder of the subscription before alluded to, a monumental statue, executed by Bacon, was erected to his memory in St. Paul's. All his biographers have vied with each other in striving to do justice to his exalted character; but no posthumous eulogium on Mr. Howard is to be compared to that pronounced by Mr. Burke, previous to his election at Bristol, in 1780: "I cannot," said the orator, name this gentleman without remarking that his labours and writings have done much to open the eyes and hearts of mankind. He has 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; not to collect medals, or collate manuscripts; but to dive into the depths of dungeons; to plunge into the infection of hospitals; to survey the mansions of sorrow and pain; to take the gauge and dimension of misery, depression, and contempt; to remember the forgotten, to attend to the neglected, to visit the forsaken, and to compare and collate the distresses of all men in all countries. His plan is original, and it is as full of genius as it is of humanity."

In person, Mr. Howard was slightly beneath the middle size; with a long, sallow countenance, and an appearance somewhat mean and forbidding, at first sight. His manners will be better appreciated if we say that they denoted rather the Christian than the gentleman; though, even in the most worldly sense of the word, he was by no means deficient in the qualities of the latter. This was particularly exemplified in his conduct towards women, to whom he paid particular attention and respect; and it is related of him, that whilst on his passage from Holyhead to Dublin, when the packet was much crowded, he resigned his bed to a maid-servant, and slept upon the floor. He was averse to general society, but threw off his natural reserve in the select company of the few, whose sentiments were similar to his own, and conversed with great fluency and animation. As neither his youth nor his fortune had led him into dissipation, his disgust increased with his years at the conduct and language of the profligate, which he never wanted the moral courage to denounce, whenever either came under his observation. In private, he set an example of all the religious, moral, and domestic duties; which he regulated with the order of a system, inculcated with the solicitude of a parent, and enforced with the authority of a master. His charity had no bounds save those of prudence; and, lest he might incur the guilt of pecuniary accumulation, he left no part of his income unexpended; and refused to leave more than a small portion to his son, saying, that it was iniquitous to provide for one the luxuries, whilst so many remained without the necessaries, of life. In mentioning his son, we pass over in silence the charges that have been brought against Mr. Howard

of parental cruelty, as they have been indisputably proved to have had no foundation whatever. His ideas of education were certainly peculiar, and he was resolute in adopting them; but his firmness never degenerated into harshness, nor his peremptoriness into anger. A disposition to censure, rather than to praise, has also been attributed to him in the prosecution of his public plans; but, however this may be, as Mr. Aikin justly observes, "a Hercules, going about to destroy monsters, cannot be expected to use all the fair forms of life." In his mode of living he was abstemious, even to excess; and it is related of him, that when travelling, although he always ordered his supper with beer and wine, he would make his man attend and take it away, whilst he was preparing his bread and milk. Piety was one of the most decided features of our philanthropist's character; nor were his thoughts less than his actions imbued with the spirit of pure religion. He lived and died a moderate Calvinist, and some have asserted that he was a predestinarian; but the mature deliberation by which all his plans were preceded, sufficiently confutes this supposition. With respect to his mental capacities, Mr. Howard was not, in a high degree, possessed of extensive comprehension, nor of the faculty of generalizing; but was rather a man of detail, of laborious accuracy, and minute examination. "I am the plodder," he used to say, "who goes about to collect materials for men of genius to make use of." In politics he joined no party, but was strongly opposed to aristocratical influence, and gloried in the triumph of American independence.

To an indignation at whatever was unjust or oppressive, he joined great firmness in the maintenance of his own rights; in proof of which, the following anecdote is related :-Whilst travelling in the King of Prussia's dominions, his carriage was met by that of a courier in a part of the road where it was too narrow to admit of more than one vehicle passing. Mr. Howard asserting that the courier ought to have blown his horn, refused to turn back; and the former being equally obstinate, both remained in their respective equipages for a considerable time, till the

courier at length gave way, and suffered the philanthropist to drive on.

In addition to the works already mentioned, the subject of our memoir contributed a few papers to the Philosophical Transactions, besides publishing a translation of the Grand Duke of Tuscany's new code of criminal law; and, in 1791, appeared an Appendix, containing Observations concerning Foreign Prisons and Hospitals, collected by him in his last tour. In concluding our memoir of Howard, we cannot forbear to remark how inadequate has been the posthumous homage of the country that gave him birth, to one of the greatest, because one of the best, of men. In tracing the picture of the occurrences that have taken place since his death, he appears a holy and

pleasing relief to the startling lights and shadows cast over the canvass by those who, in the more prominent characters of warriors and statesmen, have succeeded in fixing the attention of posterity. But his name has acquired a lasting, if a noiseless, fame; and although amid the bubbles that now and then spring to the surface of the times, from the tumultuous subsidings of individual or popular glory, it may occasionally be obscured or overwhelmed, yet when myriads of these shall have risen and burst, and the mirror of the past has re-assumed its former transparency, the image of Howard will always re-appear in undiminished purity, and be again contemplated with the regard due to his immortal memory.

THIS celebrated navigator, the son of a labouring man at Marton, in the North Riding of Yorkshire, was born there on the 27th of October, 1728, and received his education at the expense of Mr. Skottow, to whom his father was bailiff. At the age of thirteen, he was apprenticed to a haberdasher, but owing to some disagreement with his master, his indentures were cancelled, and having an inclination to the sea, he bound himself for seven years to Messrs. Walker, of Whitby, who had several vessels in the coal trade. Having afterwards served for a few years as a common sailor, he was appointed mate of one of Messrs. Walker's ships, in which capacity he displayed great assiduity in acquiring a knowledge of practical navigation. Being in London in the spring of 1755, when the war broke out between France and England, he, for some time, concealed himself to avoid impressment; but at length entered voluntarily on board the Eagle, of sixty guns. His diligence in this vessel gained him the notice of the captain, and his promotion being forwarded by private interest, he was, on the 15th of May, 1759, appointed master of the Mercury, which sailed to America, to join the fleet engaged in the siege of Quebec.

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this occasion he was employed to take the soundings of the St. Lawrence, between Orleans and the north shore, as well as to survey the most dangerous parts of the river below Quebec, which important services he most successfully performed.

On the 22nd of September, he was appointed master of the Northumberland, stationed at Halifax, where he first read Euclid, and studied the science of astronomy. Having assisted at the re-capture of Newfoundland, with the Northumberland, he, in 1762, returned to England, at the end of the year, and married Miss Elizabeth Batts, at Barking, in Essex. Early in 1763, he went out with Captain Greaves, to Newfoundland, as surveyor of its coasts; and, in the following year, accompanied Sir Hugh Palliser to Labrador and Newfoundland, in the capacity of marine surveyor, a situation in which he continued till 1767. While thus employed, he transmitted to the Royal Society, an account of his Observation of an Eclipse of the Sun at Newfoundland, with the longitude of the place deduced from it, which was printed in the fiftyseventh volume of the Philosophical Transactions. In 1768, he was presented with a lieutenant's commission, and