eminent for genius, men staggered on in deep moral darkness, till it pleased God to kindle, in unexpected quarters, lights which began to dissipate the gloom.

We do not now dwell upon the work begun by Whitfield and Wesley, or upon that change in the mind of the people to which they contributed so great an impulse, a change which visibly affected both the pulpit and the press, and made itself felt in new sentiments and opinions spread through the country. But before this period arrived, the influence of the low tone of morals and religion had materially affected our national condition.

The great business of the nation, that of making the laws, was in the hands of those who regarded it as an instrument to aggrandize themselves and their dependents. Politicians were too much engrossed with this pursuit, to think of the miseries of their countrymen. True it is, and the circumstance was providential, that the period was not one of great suffering to the nation. Had a tithe of the difficulties which now press upon us, fallen upon England in the course of the last century, the government, destitute as it was of moral power, would have been blown to pieces. But these were days of progress: our commerce, husbandry, and manufactures were advancing; and in a progressive community there is little general suffering or dis

content.

Vicious habits, the offences which they generated,

and the method in which the law dealt with those offences, were the most obvious causes of the suffering which existed. The habit of drinking prevailed to an enormous degree, and the result, as is always the case, was the extension of crime. The amount of gin-drinking in the time of George II. was stich as to attract the attention even of his careless Parliament, which passed an Act to repress it. These were days indeed in which crime was visited with a severity which may be called ferocious. Terror was supposed to be the one specific, and the gallows were resorted to on all occasions. But the punishments which preceded the sentence were worse, often, than the sentence itself. The gallows punished once, and the suffering was over. In the gaol, men lay for years, and rotted by inches. They were fearful places,-the gaols, then in England. The evidence submitted to a Parliamentary Committee in 1728, gives us an array of horrors which we imagined had been confined to the prisons of the Inquisition. In the underground dens in which men were immured, the gaolers were suffered, without interference, to deal with them as they would-to plunder, starve, maltreat, and torture them; as bad men would, into whose hands was committed absolute power. The prisoners were left without food; they were immured, in the severest weather, without fire; they were driven into the open court and forced to sleep there; they were beaten, huge weights were fastened to their limbs,

manacles were thrust on them which wounded the flesh, the sores were left to fester and spread; in this state of suffering they were plunged underground, and chained to the damp walls, with foul sewers running through their caverns; and, as a new torment, the living victim was shut up in the same hole with the putrifying dead.

To this we may add the moral pollution; the selling of spirits in the gaol; the promiscuous intercourse and contamination of age and sex; the garnish, the gambling, the fees; the dismal rooms without chimney, without furniture, with earthen floors reeking with pestilence; the accumulation of filth without sewerage; the dungeons where felons were chained on mouldering straw, unable to raise themselves, dying by inches on the floor; the cells in which men were packed, with no ventilation but a hole over the door, through which the poisoned air of the close passages might enter if it could; where, in sickness and fever, men were kept till death, alone merciful, relieved them. These are some of the facts, and but a few, which marked the state of our gaols while Swift and Addison, Pope and Bolingbroke, were writing; while the wits were meeting in their coffee-houses, courtiers trifled in St. James's, and Walpole and Pulteney contended for power in the House of Commons. But neither poetry nor politics, neither wits nor statesmen, grappled with this evil, known as it was to them by the Report of their Par

liamentary Committees. The feelings of the House were roused indeed to such indignation, as to direct the officers of the gaols reported on to be arrested and prosecuted; but, these feelings satisfied, matters fell into their old train, offenders returned to their offences, and the gaols continued to be dens of infamy and suffering. We see in this instance, as in so many others, that it is not by the mandate of the great, but by the mission of the good, that inveterate wrongs are redressed, and deep-seated evils cured. For the longneglected work, a missionary was now to be prepared.

CHAPTER II.

THE MISSIONARY.

THE great Missionary of English benevolence was born about the year 1725, in the neighbourhood of London. His father was a merchant, who made his money in his business, and invested part of it in the purchase of a farm in the village of Cardington in Bedfordshire. JOHN HOWARD was sickly in infancy, ailing in youth, and infirm throughout life. It was only by strict regimen that his health was maintained. His early training was religious and his sweetness of temper, and the purity of his life, soon gave evidence of the principle which was implanted within. His education was imperfect. He was trained in a Dissenting school (his father being a Dissenter), and he appears to have owed little to that training. As soon as possible he was apprenticed to a wholesale grocer, in whose counting-house he learned habits of business, that were afterwards valuable. But on his father's death he discontinued the desk, and removed, where his health and tastes led