there and at Morlaix, whither I was carried next, during the two months I was at Carpaix upon parole I corresponded with the English prisoners at Brest, Morlaix, and Dinnan. At the last of these towns were several of our ship's crew and my servant. I had sufficient evidence of their being treated with such barbarity, that many hundreds had perished, and that thirty-six were buried in a hole at Dinnan in one day. When I came to England, still on parole, I made known to the Commissioners of Sick and Wounded Seamen the sundry particulars, which gained their attention and thanks. Remonstrance was made to the French court; our sailors had redress; and those who were in the three prisons mentioned above were brought home in the first cartel-ships. Perhaps what I suffered on this occasion increased my sympathy with the unhappy people whose case is the subject of this book." In Mr Howard's conduct, as here described by himself, we discern the real characteristic of active philanthropy. How few men are there who, like him, would have turned a personal misfortune to such good account; and who, while enduring sufferings themselves, would have occupied their thoughts with the means of putting an end, for all time coming, to the system which permitted such sufferings! Most men would have occupied the time of their imprisonment with sighs and lamentations; and once at liberty, they would have returned gleefully to the enjoyment of their homes, without troubling themselves about their less fortunate fellow-sufferers whom they had left behind, or at least without conceiving that their exertions could do anything for their benefit. But it is the characteristic of men like Howard, when once their attention is called to a wrong, not to rest until they have seen it rectified.

PRIVATE AND DOMESTIC CHARACTER-CONDUCT AS A

LANDLORD.

On his return to England, Mr Howard went to reside on the small estate of Cardington, near Bedford, which had been left him by his father, and which he had increased by the purchase of an additional farm. He appears to have resided here for the next two years, leading the life of a quiet country gentleman, superintending his farms, and earning the respect and good-will of all the people in the neighbourhood, by his attention to the comforts of his tenants, and his charities to the poor. It was during this period also, on the 13th of May 1756, that he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society; an honour which did not necessarily imply that he possessed reputation as a scientific man, or even as a man of brilliant abilities, but only that he was a gentleman of respectability, who, like many others of his class, took an interest in scientific pursuits. Howard's attainments in science do not seem to have ever been very great, and the only point of his character which connected him particularly with a scientific body, was his taste for meteorological observations.

On the 25th of April 1758 Mr Howard contracted a second marriage with Miss Henrietta Leeds, eldest daughter of Edward Leeds, Esq. of Croxton, Cambridgeshire. The lady whom he had selected as his partner in life is described as amiable, affectionate, pious, and in everyway worthy of such a husband. Her tastes were the same as his, and she cordially seconded all his charitable plans for the assistance and relief of those who depended upon his benevolence.

For seven years Mr Howard enjoyed uninterrupted happiness in the society of his wife. During this period he resided first at Cardington, next for about three years at Watcombe in Hampshire, and latterly at Cardington again. The even tenor of his existence during these years presents few incidents worth recording. Reading, gardening, and the improvement of his grounds, occupied most of his time. His meteorological observations were likewise diligently continued; and it is mentioned, as a proof of his perseverance in whatever he undertook, that on the setting in of a frost, he used to leave his bed at two o'clock every morning while it lasted, for the purpose of looking at a thermometer which he kept in his garden. His charities, as before, were profuse and systematic. His desire, and that of his wife, was to see all around them industrious and happy. To effect this, they used all the influence which their position as persons of property and wealth gave them over the villagers and cottagers in their neighbourhood. One of their modes of dispensing charity was to employ persons out of work in making articles of furniture or ornament; and in this way, it is said, Mrs Howard soon increased her stock of table-linen to a quantity greater than would ever be required by any household.

On the 31st of March 1765 Mrs Howard died in giving birth to a son, the first and only issue of their marriage. This event was a source of poignant affliction to her husband. On the tablet which he erected to her memory in Cardington church, he caused to be inscribed the following passage from the book of Proverbs:-"She opened her mouth with wisdom, and in her tongue was the law of kindness." Her miniature was ever after his constant companion by sea or land; and the day of her death was observed by him annually as a day of fasting, meditation, and prayer.

From the death of his wife in 1765 to the end of the year 1769, Mr Howard appears to have remained in England, and at Cardington as before, with the exception of a month or six weeks in the year 1767, which he devoted to a tour through Holland. His principal occupation during these four years was the education of his infant son. From the circumstance that this boy, when he arrived at the years of manhood, conducted himself in a profligate manner, and at last became insane, much attention has been drawn to Mr Howard's mode of educating him in his infancy; some insisting that his conduct as a parent was harsh

and injudicious, others going so far as to assert that this manwhom the world reveres as a philanthropist, and whose benevolent soul yearned for the whole human race-was in his domestic relations a narrow and unfeeling tyrant. This last assertionalthough, abstractly considered, there is nothing impossible or absurd in it, inasmuch as we may conceive such a thing as real philanthropy on the large scale conjoined with inattention to one's immediate duties as a husband or a father-appears to have absolutely no foundation whatever in Howard's case; and to have originated either in malice, or in that vulgar love of effect which delights in finding striking incongruities in the characters of great men. Nor does the other assertion-that Howard's mode of educating his infant son was harsh and injudicious— appear more worthy of credit. The truth seems to be, that Howard was a kind and benevolent man, of naturally strict and methodical habits, who entertained, upon principle, high ideas of the authority of the head of a family. A friend of his relates that he often heard him tell in company, as a piece of pleasantry, that before his marriage with his second wife he made an agreement with her, that in order to prevent all those little altercations about family matters which he had observed to be the principal causes of domestic discomfort, he should always decide. Mrs Howard, he said, had cheerfully agreed to this arrangement; and it was attended with the best effects. The same principle of the supremacy of the head of a family-a principle much less powerful in society now than it was a generation or two agoguided him in his behaviour to his son. "Regarding children," says Dr Aikin, as creatures possessed of strong passions and desires, without reason and experience to control them, he thought that nature seemed, as it were, to mark them out as the subjects of absolute authority, and that the first and fundamental principle to be inculcated upon them was implicit and unlimited obedience." The plan of education here described may to some appear austere and injudicious, while others will cordially approve of it, as that recommended by experience and common sense; but at all events, the charges of harshness and cruelty which some have endeavoured to found upon it are mere calumnies, refuted by the testimony of all who knew Mr Howard, and were witnesses to his affection for his son.

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Sensible of the loss which the boy had sustained by the death of his mother, Mr Howard placed him, in his fifth year, under the care of a lady in whom he had confidence, who kept a boarding-school at Cheshunt in Hertfordshire. This and other arrangements having been made, he went abroad on a fourth continental tour towards the end of 1769. Proceeding through the south of France, and spending a few weeks at Geneva, he visited most of the remarkable places in Italy, some of them for the second time; and returned home through Germany in the latter part of 1770, having been absent in all about twelve months.

When Howard had again settled at Cardington, he resumed his benevolent schemes of local improvement. It appears that the vicinity of Bedford, and Cardington especially, was inhabited by a very poor population, liable to frequent visitations of distress from the fluctuations of the only manufacture which yielded them employment-that of lace; as well as generally from the unhealthy and marshy nature of the soil, rendering ague prevalent. Mr Howard's first care with respect to those to whom he was attached as landlord, was to improve their dwellings. "At different times," says his biographer, Mr Brown," he pulled down all the cottages on his estate, and rebuilt them in a neat but simple style, paying particular attention to their preservation, as much as possible, from the dampness of the soil. Others which were not his property before, he purchased, and re-erected upon the same plan; adding to the number of the whole by building several new ones in different parts of the village. To each of these he allotted a piece of garden-ground, sufficient to supply the family of its occupier with potatoes and other vegetables; and generally ornamented them in front with a small fore-court, fenced off from the road by neat white palings, enclosing a bed or two of simple flowers, with here and there a shrub or an evergreen; thus imparting to these habitations of the poor, with their white fronts and thatched roofs, that air of neatness and comfort so strikingly characteristic of everything in which he engaged." "These comfortable habitations, which he let at a rent of twenty or thirty shillings a-year," says another biographer, Dr Aiken, "he peopled with the most industrious and sober tenants he could find; and over them he exercised the superintendence of master and father combined. He was careful to furnish them with employment, to assist them in sickness and distress, and to educate their children." In consequence of these exertions of Mr Howard, aided and seconded by those of his friend and relative, Samuel Whitbread, Esq., who possessed property in the same neighbourhood, "Cardington, which seemed at one time to contain the abodes of poverty and wretchedness, soon became one of the neatest villages in the kingdom-exhibiting all the pleasing appearances of competence and content, the natural rewards of industry and virtue." Industry and cleanliness were the two virtues which Mr Howard sought by all means to naturalise among the villagers of Cardington. It was his custom to visit the houses of his tenants now and then, conversing with them on the state of their affairs. During such visits he was particular in requesting them to keep their houses clean; and it was one of his standing advices that they should "swill the floors well with water." After talking with the children, he would tell them, at parting, to be "good boys and girls, and keep their faces and hands clean."

Among Mr Howard's other benefactions to the locality of Cardington, he established schools for the education of the boys

and girls of the neighbourhood in the rudiments of knowledge. Of these it was strictly required that they should regularly attend some place of worship on Sundays; whether the Established church, or any other, was indifferent, provided it was a church at all. His anxiety on this point also led him to convert one of his cottages into a preaching station, where the neighbouring clergymen of different persuasions, or occasionally a clergyman from a distance passing through the village, might officiate to such as chose to attend; and very rarely was the little congregation without at least one sermon a-week. Mr Howard, when at Cardington, was invariably present at these meetings. His regular place of worship was the Old Meeting-house at Bedford, of which the Rev. Mr Symonds was pastor from 1766 to 1772. In the latter year, however, when Mr Symonds declared his adherence to the theological tenets of the Baptists, Mr Howard seceded along with a considerable part of the congregation, and established a new meeting-house. The truth is, however, that, with all his piety, and indeed on account of the very strength and sincerity of it, the theological differences of sects occupied very little space in his attention, and did not in the least affect his schemes of philanthropy; and though a dissenter of a particular denomination himself, dissenters of all other denominations, as well as members of the Established church, were equally the objects of his respect and his benevolent solicitude.

The following recollections of Mr Howard's habits at this period, by the Rev. Mr Townsend, who resided with him at Cardington for a short period, in the interval between the secession from the Old Meeting-house and the erection of the new one, may be interesting. "He found him," he said, "not disposed to talk much; he sat but a short time at table, and was in motion during the whole day. He was very abstemious; lived chiefly on vegetables, ate little animal food, and drank no wine or spirits. He hated praise; and when Mr Townsend once mentioned to him his labours of benevolence"-not those general ones for which he is now so celebrated, but his exertions for the improvement of the condition of the people in his neighbourhood

"he spoke of them slightingly, as a whim of his, and immediately changed the subject." "He was at all times," adds his biographer, Mr Brown, "remarkably neat in his dress, but affected no singularity in it. Though he never thought it right to indulge in the luxuries of life, he did not despise its comforts. Wine or fermented liquors of any kind he himself never drank; but they were always provided, and that of the best quality, for his friends who chose to take them. He always maintained an intercourse of civility with some of the most considerable persons in the county, and was on visiting terms with the greater part of the country gentlemen around him, and with the most respectable inhabitants of the town of Bedford, churchmen and