held out to him some hope of cure, but assured him that it must be a work of time; and to occupy his mind during that interval, he proceeded to take a final inspection of the gaols of his own country. He devoted to this more than a year and a half, traversing England, Ireland and Scotland, and including poor-houses as well as prisons, in his investigation, labouring without intermission, and giving to the public, in the end of 1788, his last remarks on the prisons of England, and his great work on the Lazarettos of Europe. His son's disease meanwhile had strengthened instead of abating, and it became absolutely necessary to place him in an asylum.

"His removal from Cardington enabled Howard to revisit it once more. With a mournful tenderness the old man now re-trod the scenes of so much happiness and so much sorrow. The last terrible affliction had opened all his former wounds afresh; and in the closing scenes of his laborious life, he saw the clouds gathering darkly from every quarter of the horizon. This was his last leave-taking of his favourite home. He took a tender interest in going for the last time over the grounds which he had trodden in happier years: in standing in the silence of evening beside the grave of his wife in thinking over all those schemes which young and happy lovers build for themselves in the future. Standing one evening with his old gardener, in the grounds behind his house, he observed, in a tone tremulous with emo

:

tion, that, after many years of planning and altering, he had at length got every thing into the state which his wife would have best liked, and now he was about to leave it for ever!"

He

He did not, however, neglect his active duties. made provision in his will for the education of the villagers of Cardington; for the poor of that place, and of the village where he was married; and for a certain number of poor debtors and prisoners. He visited every cottage, gave a present to each family, and left with them the words of a father's counsel. He settled his steward in a farm; and made his wife's favourite maid, a present of the cherished miniature of her former mistress. To his country he bequeathed, in the work which he published, the result of his labours; and with the statement to his readers that he was again about to revisit the East, he added the entreaty, "that they would not impute this to rashness or enthusiasm, but to the serious and deliberate conviction that he was pursuing the path of duty." The motto prefixed to his work was, "O let the sorrowful sighing of the prisoners come before Thee." And on the back of the title-page he added the eloquent words of Cicero, "Nihil est tam regium, tam liberale, tamque munificum, quam opem ferre supplicibus, excitare afflictos, dare salutem, liberare periculis homines."*

His diary refers to the secret springs of his fearless *Brown's Life, p. 519.

energies; "Courage and humanity," he says, "are inseparable friends." "The truest pleasures arise from

extensive benevolence."

"Christ has made poverty and meanness, joined with holiness, to be a state of dignity."

"Ease, affluence, and honours, are temptations, which the world holds out:-on the other hand, fatigue, poverty, suffering, and danger, with an approving conscience; O God, my heart is fixed, trusting in Thee!"

CHAPTER VI.

THE CLOSE.

FROM his intimate friends, Howard did not disguise his conviction, when he entered upon this last journey, that he should see them again no more. In truth it was not the age which he had reached, now sixty-three, but the shocks and toils and sorrows of an arduous life, and last of all the wearing anguish of every-day suffering for his son, which had sapped the strength of a constitution always delicate. The wonder is that it had endured so much.

"You may probably," he said, "never see me again; but, be that as it may, it is not matter of serious concern to me whether I lay down my life in Turkey, in Egypt, in Asia Minor, or elsewhere; my whole endeavour is to fulfil, according to the ability of so weak an instrument, the will of that gracious Providence who. has condescended to raise in me a firm persuasion that I am employed in what is consonant to his Divine will. The way to Heaven from Grand Cairo is as near as from London."

Or as he says in the confidence of his journal,* "I am a stranger and pilgrim here: but I trust, through grace, going to a land peopled with my fathers and my kindred and the family of my youth. And I trust my spirit will mingle with those pious dead, and be for ever with the Lord."

On the 5th of July, 1789, he left England, and proceeded through Germany and Prussia into Russia. From Moscow he wrote to a friend telling him that his medical acquaintance gave him little hope of escaping the plague in Turkey, but that his spirits did not fail him. He was then engaged in inspecting the military hospitals of Russia, which were in a fearful state; and in endeavouring to obtain a mitigation of that cruel system by which recruits were swept from all parts of that enormous empire, hurried by forced marches over bad roads, ill clothed and fed, till thousands sickened and died.

In the course of this enquiry, Howard reached the town of Cherson. Cherson was then filled, for it was mid-winter, with the Imperial troops, who had just taken the fortress of Bender from the Turks, and were in winter quarters, spending their time in triumph and gaiety. There also was Prince Potemkin, the princely and profligate favourite of Catherine. There tidings reached Howard, which gave him sincere joy—not the fall of Bender, but the fall of the Bastille; the ruins *Brown's Life, p. 584.