brow, and was bright about them. They went a good deal into society, and their power to interest and please would lose nothing, I am persuaded, by the slight tinge of the Quaker element that they might carry with them. At home, all were zealously occupied in self-education. The younger boys, even, sympathised with their sisters, and the whole circle were full of energy in the pursuit of knowledge and the conquest of difficulties. They were alike hearty in their play and work, their amusements and their studies in the exercise of the accomplishments that adorn life, as in the acquisition of knowledge and the culture and discipline of their best faculties. Sketching and reading in the park, under the shadow of its old trees-' their custom, often, in an afternoon; their excursions on foottheir long days spent in the woods gathering wild flowers, which, though in sport they might decorate the bonnet, were intended in earnestness to instruct in botany; their long, dashing rides on horseback; their conversation on an evening in the old hall; their one day dining out with a lord, and their receiving on another the visit of a prince; their being equally at home with an artist in his studies, an author with his book, or an officer at a ball;—all these things to our raw, rude Devonshire lad, made Earlham Hall a scene of enchantment.-Captivated and delighted, however dazzled and entranced, as he unquestionably was, by what he saw in his fair associates, the great point to be observed is, that their mental exercises and intellectual pursuits, their intelligence and taste, their aspirations and aims after self-improvement, were the sources of the influence they exercised over him, and of the manly character of the sympathy they excited. Ho

became a new man. Intellectual tastes and energies were awakened. Studious habits were instantly formed. A course of classical reading commenced. A laudable ambition was enkindled and sustained, which superseded his fondness for the field and the gun. It was, intellectually, 'a renewing of the mind,'-'a being born again,'—a sudden transition from death to life, and from darkness to light,'-old things passed away, all things became new? From the moment that he was subjected to a highly gifted intellectual influence, his whole mental being underwent a change. He proceeded to Earlham a great, idle lad, of sporting propensities and desultory habits; he left it in purpose and pursuits a man. He lived longer in that month than he had seemed to do in previous years, or than he could ever do again in the same period, except, indeed, in experiencing another and a higher birth. 'I know no blessing,' he says, ' of a temporal nature, for which I ought to render so many thanks, as my connection with the Earlham family. It has given a colour to my life. Its influence was most positive and pregnant with good, at that critical period between school and manhood.""

From this happy family circle he selected the future partner of his life. Hannah Gurney became his wife at the early age of twenty-one; and though the prudence of the step at the time it was undertaken may well be questioned, he was most fortunate and most happy in the object of his choice, as well as in the pleasant relationships which sprung from it. "The known tendencies of Sir T. F. Buxton induced Mr. Wilberforce, when he invited him into Parliament, to anticipate from him appropriate aid; the friendship of such a man would give power and fixedness

to his previous purposes; while these again, associated with his proved ability for parliamentary business, determined the choice of the retiring veteran, and led him to devolve on the rising advocate the management and leadership of the great cause. Lushington, Macaulay, Brougham, Mackintosh, and other names of the living and the dead, might be mentioned as those of public individuals, who, with Buxton, mutually acted on and influenced each other. But the most powerful, the most constraining, the holiest and best of the external impulses that touched and moved Sir Fowell Buxton-that to which he yielded with constant delight and the source of whose potency lay in its pure and heavenly gentleness in conjunction with the stirrings of his human love-was what came upon him in his own domestic circle, and from the more gifted of his family connections. Of several of his 'sweet sisters,' he speaks in terms of high respect; but for Priscilla Gurney-one of the gay Earlham group, who, like Mrs. Fry, gave up the world, devoted herself to God, and became a female minister among the Friends-his love and admiration are almost boundless. He speaks of her intellect as of the first order of her eloquence as uncommon, almost unparalleled; of her character as the combination of illustrious virtues. She died in 1821. During her illness she repeatedly sent for Buxton, urging him to make the cause and condition of the slaves the first object of his life.' Her last act, or nearly her last, was an attempt to reiterate the solemn charge; she almost expired in the ineffectual effort ;-she could only indicate, in two or three feeble, broken words, what became the most sacred memory of the dead, and was cherished as her parting legacy by the living. It is dis

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tinctly stated, that it was one of the things to which he often referred, as preparing his mind for accepting the advocacy of the anti-slavery cause."

But all his sympathies were large, and his heart was open to the most winning and gentle influences of love. "Only think of the leader of a section of the House of Commons, -the man bending under the weight of public business, absorbed by interests the most momentous, and fighting with difficulties that demanded, and had, nights and days of anxiety and labour, think of him coming along the Strand from some parliamentary committee, stepping into a shop to purchase a picture, hiding it when he got home among the torn-up letters and envelopes in his basket, that when his little children should rummage amongst them, or turn them out, he might hear their exultation at discovering the treasure, and join in a joy that would ring like the news of a nursery California! He was lying one day very fatigued and tired on a sofa ; one of his sons was lying on another their eyes were alike just open, though each supposed the other to be asleep. Presently, the great, giantlike man—the man that swayed the senate, was looked up to by thousands as a leader, and who seemed born for authority and command-slowly and quietly rose up from his position-trod softly and stealthily across the roomplaced a chair-lifted the feet of the young sleeper, as they seemed to be hanging uneasily from the sofa-laid them gently on the chair, and then crept back again as carefully as he had gone, and lay down to his own repose! All had been seen, though he thought not so. It would never have been mentioned-it might not have been remembered by him-had it only been a thing known to the father. It was

the irresistible impulse, the gushing out of irrepressible affection. I dare say he turned away from the lad with a glow at his heart and a prayer upon his tongue; a prayer whose answer he had already, though unconsciously, secured; for the impression of that act on the heart of the son must have given such sacredness to the wishes of the father, as could not fail, I should think, to have done more for the youth's virtue than any mere preceptive teaching could have secured."

But there are nobler attributes of the great and good man than these, and to them our attention must now be directed. We have already referred to his intellectual birth; to the renewing of his mind under the genial influence of the happy domestic circle at Earlham Hall; but another and far different conversion was essential to the fit preparation of him for that course of virtue and holiness by which he was more distinguished and truly great, than by all his eloquence, influence, and power. Mr. Binney has remarked, in sympathetic consistency with Dr. Chalmers, "I admit the excellence and I admire the virtues of many a natural or unconverted man. Such an individual may be pure, truthful, upright, benevolent, beneficent-a model, indeed, for many of far higher pretensions. But the point is, that a man may be all this without thinking of God-without even believing in him ;his excellence, however great, may be altogether 'of the earth, earthy it may spring from sources which lie within the limits of mere social morality, and it may be confined therefore to the rewards which flow from it in the world to which it belongs. There is nothing severe or uncharitable in saying, that something far more than this is