duty, I visit the most noxious cells, and while thus employed 'I fear no evil!' I never enter an hospital or prison before breakfast, and in an offensive room I seldom draw my breath deeply."

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Mark his intrepid championship of Truth, too, as well as of Mercy. He was dining at Vienna, with the English ambassador to the Austrian court, and one of the ambassador's party, a German, had been uttering some praises of the Emperor's abolition of torture. Howard declared it was only to establish a worse torture, and instanced an Austrian prison which, he said, was as bad as the black hole at Calcutta," and that prisoners were only taken from it, when they confessed what was laid to their charge. "Hush!" said the English ambassador (Sir Robert Murray Keith), "your words will be reported to his Majesty!' "What!" exclaimed Howard," shall my tongue be tied from speaking truth by any king or emperor in the world? I repeat what I asserted, and maintain its veracity." Profound silence ensued, and "every one present," says

Dr. Brown," admired the intrepid boldness of the man of humanity."

Another return to England, another survey of prisons here, and he sets out on his fourth

again, Holland and Germany. Another general and complete revisitation of prisons in England followed, and then a fifth continental pilgrimage of goodness, through Portugal, Spain, France, the Netherlands, and Holland. During his absence from England this time, his friends proposed to erect a monument to him; but he was gloriously great in humility as in truth, benevolence, and intrepidity. "Oh, why could not my friends," says he in writing to them, "who know how much I detest such parade, have stopped such a hasty measure?..... It deranges and confounds all my schemes. My exaltation is my fall-my misfortune."

He summed up the number of miles he had travelled for the reform of prisons, on his return to England, after his journey, and another re-examination of the prisons at home, and found that the total was 42,033. Glorious perseverance! But he is away again! having found a new object for the yearnings of his ever expanding heart. He conceived, from enquiries of his medical friends, that that most dreadful scourge of man's race, the plague, could be arrested in its destructive course. He

visits Holland, France, Italy, Malta, Zante, the Levant, Turkey, Venice, Austria, Germany, and returns also by Holland to England. The narrative glows with interest in this tour-but the young reader,—and how can he resist it, if he have a heart to love what is most deserving of love, must turn to one of the larger biographies of Howard for the circumstances. Alas! a stroke was prepared for him on his return. His son, his darling son, had become disobedient, progressed fearfully in vice, and his father found him a raving maniac !

Howard's only refuge from this poignant affliction was in the renewal of the great mission of his life. He again visited the prisons of Ireland and Scotland, and left England to renew his humane course abroad, but never to return. From Amsterdam this tour extended to Cherson, in Russian Tartary. Attending one afflicted with the plague there, he fell ill; and, in a few days breathed his last. He wished to be buried where he died, and without pomp, or monument: "Lay me quietly in the earth," said he," place a sun-dial over my grave; and let me be forgotten!" Who would not desire

at death, that he had forgone every evanescent pleasure a life of selfishness could bring, to live and die like John Howard?

Conclusion.

WORK, and the true nobility of being devoted to it, distinguished every exemplar recorded in our sketch; and no name of eminence or excellence can be selected in human annals, who has ever used the phrase, which can only console idiots, that "he is perfectly happy, for he has nothing to do, and nothing to think about!" "Nothing to do!" in a world whose elements are, as yet, but partially subdued by man, and whose happiness can be augmented so incalculably by the perfecting of his dominion over Nature. "Nothing to think about!" when language, and poetry, and art, and music, and science, and invention, afford ecstatic occupation for thought which could not be exhausted if a man's life were even extended on the earth

to a million of years. "Nothing to do, and nothing to think about," while millions are doing and thinking,-for a human creature to

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