THERE are few periods of English parliamentary life to which lovers of their country can look back with more pride than to the latter part of the eighteenth century. The great questions which then fell to be discussed-the American War, the Impeachment of Warren Hastings, the French Revolution and its results were dealt with by men of power equal to the occasion. Never, perhaps, has such a galaxy of great speakers shone in the House of Commons. Then flourished Burke, with his splendid imagination and gorgeous rhetoric; Fox, with his noble generosity of nature, his ardent love of freedom, and his power of keen, rapid, decisive argument; Pitt, with his dignified composure, his calm' self-confidence, and his majestic eloquence; and Sheridan, shifty, indeed, and utterly wanting in moral weight, but sarcastic, clever, and brilliant. In addition to these great stars, a number of lesser luminaries adorned the parliamentary firmament, many of whom, in an age less favoured by fortune, would have been proudly followed as leader. Among them, were the cool and judicious Dundas, the generous and high-souled Windham, the straightforward and manly Grenville, the brilliant and accomplished Canning. In this secondary group, the name which stands at the head of this chapter occupied no mean position. But it is not as a polished speaker or as an eloquent debater that men love to dwell upon the memory of Wilberforce; it was not for these qualities that on

his death it could with truth be said of him that, 'For departed kings there are appointed honours, and the wealthy have their gorgeous obsequies; it was his noble portion to clothe a people with spontaneous mourning, and to go down to the grave amid the benedictions of the poor.' It is as the leader of the crusade against the iniquitous Slave Trade, as the gentle and kindly philanthropist, that he occupies his lofty pedestal in the gallery of fame; as the man who contentedly gave up the pursuit of place and power, and devoted his time, his talents, and his wealth, in order that a monstrous injustice should be swept away. It often saddens one to find between the leader of a great reform and the reform itself, a wide discrepancy: the work seems so great and massive and noble; the man seems so weak and little and contemptible. There is no such discrepancy in the case of Wilberforce. Apart altogether from the great part he played in Slave-Trade Abolition, his life is well worth studying, as that of a man of pure, fresh, generous, unsullied nature, who always endeavoured to apply his gifts to the highest uses, and who was without a taint of malice, or envy, or uncharitableness.

William Wilberforce was born at Hull on the 24th August, 1759-the year which witnessed the birth of his illustrious friend, William Pitt. He was the third child of his parents, but their only son. He came of an ancient and wealthy family, to which the township of Wilberfoss, eight miles from York, had given a name. His grandfather, who altered the spelling into Wilberforce, was the head of a Baltic house in Hull, of which his father, later on, became a partner. Wilberforce was a child of feeble frame, small stature, and troubled with a weakness in his eyes which more or less tormented him throughout life. His stature continued extremely small, and in his late years, by continual contortion, he had, though naturally well-shaped, brought himself nearly into the form of the letter Z.* So sickly

*For this fact we are indebted to an article in the Quarterly Review, vol. lxii., which, from the frequent use of italics, the affectation of private and special information, the badness of its style, and its carping and