their "particular calling as gentlemen."1 Yet wealth is far from being a sine quâ non for beneficence. Sarah Martin as well as Elizabeth Fry was a heroine in the same list as that graced by Howard's name.

Further, in an age when association for benevolent purposes is so widely developed and is so liable to abuse —when people lean so much on one another, looking for precedents, waiting for examples, tarrying on the borders of beneficence till more daring spirits beckon them on, the story of Howard's individuality and independence, shrinking from praise, comes as a corrective. Not that it ought to interfere with united action wisely conceived; but it ought to supersede feeble developments in the way of servile reliance, by inspiring a manly resolution, guided, not by the doings of others, but by a consciousness of individual power and obligation. In these times, when Christians are fond of having their good deeds reported and emblazoned, and when so many are extravagantly disposed to raise memorials of persons whom they admire, and not a few are equally glad to receive them, the tale of Howard's self-forgetfulness supplies a correction, checking base-born pride and bidding every worker look for his reward in the approval of conscience and "the praise of God."

"Lay me quietly in the earth," said Howard; "place a sundial on my grave, and let me be forgotten." That he cannot be ; but we are constrained to recognise his resemblance to One who "made Himself of no reputation."

1 See Barrow's Sermons.

CHAPTER XVI.

HOWARD'S MANTLE.

A GOOD man's influence does not die with him.

In Howard's case the fact is conspicuous. Could we collect all instances in which his memory has consciously touched ministers of mercy in this world of sorrow, still more, if we could trace all streams of moral power which, flowing from him, have unconsciously reached multitudes of workers,-the record of these manifold and mysterious impulses would make a marvellous history.

A few examples may justly close the present volume. As early as 1772, a clergyman at Bedford Chapel set on foot subscriptions for the relief of small debtors who were confined in prisons with the vilest criminals. A Society was instituted for its permanent promotion, "James Neild, a jeweller in St. James Street who amassed a large fortune and became High Sheriff of Buckinghamshire, was a zealous supporter, and filled for some years with great success the office of Treasurer. He won the title of a second Howard, and distinguished himself amongst those who were anxious to raise a monument in honour of Howard the first."

Mr. Neild in 1800 published, "An Account of Persons Confined for Debt in the various Prisons of England and Wales, together with their Provisionary Allowance during Confinement." He states himself

that during a period of twenty-eight years he visited most of the prisons in England, endeavouring everywhere to separate the debtor and vagrant from the abandoned felon. He tells sad stories illustrating the wretched effect of "the laws betwixt debtor and creditor," which he with other wise men anxiously desired to reform. The law of bankruptcy was then on the carpet, as it has been so recently in our time. Ten shillings in the pound would be offered to a creditor and not accepted, and then the money would be spent on the fees, the lodging, and the maintenance of the debtor, during perhaps a long incarceration. If, after arresting and putting a man in gaol for what he owed, a creditor forgave the debt, liberation did by no means take place as a matter of consequence. "No," says the gaoler, "my demand for prison fees and lodgings amounts to so-and-so, and I will detain him till these are paid." Thus a gaoler acted as judge, jury, and executioner; and this abominable system Mr. Neild strove to overturn. Window duty was imposed on prisons, and therefore, for economy's sake, light and air were excluded from the captive's cell. Hence disease was engendered, gaol fevers raged, and this painstaking person, in his beneficent labours, caught the pestilence, from which he did not recover for twelve months. As he contemplated the Association with which his journeys were connected, he exclaimed with pardonable excitement, "This little rivulet shall one day swell into a wide and copious stream that shall diffuse plenty and prosperity on every side of it; it shall abound like Euphrates and like Jordan in the time of harvest!" He volunteered, in connection with Sir John Mild

may, in 1802, to examine and report on the management of convicts in Portsmouth harbour. His persistent endeavours after reform put gaolers on the alert, inspiring a salutary fear of being visited; and so he helped to keep these dismal domains in a state of preparation for the eyes of gaol critics like himself; and at the same time magistrates were stirred up to make themselves better acquainted than they had been with the inside of a county prison. Mr. Neild's name, coupled with that of Howard, received honourable mention from judges on the bench; and better still, gaols at Aylesbury, at Gloucester, at Dorchester, at Chelmsford, and even at Edinburgh, were improved, as the result of his influence.

He seems to have been somewhat eccentric. One day he wrote stating that he had been surprised by receiving a bank note for £1,000 in a blank note addressed to James Neild, Esq., Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. He presented it to the Committee of his pet Society, saying it must have been intended for them, he being their Treasurer. Lord Romney was of a different opinion; but the Treasurer insisted upon the money being thrown into the Society's exchequer. The bank note could not be traced, being of three years' earlier date; and Mr. Nichols informs us, Happening at that time to be an acting commissioner at a public Board of which Mr. Neild was a regular attending member, I saw both the letter and the bank note, and had no doubt of its being a pious fraud of the worthy Treasurer; in other words, that the thousand pounds was a gift from himself." 1

1 Nichols' Literary History, vol. ii., p. 696.

Mr. Neild died in 1814. A year after, the following incident occurred. A gentleman named Venning was attracted by a Society formed at that period under the presidency of the Duke of Gloucester, and having succeeded in reforming some juvenile offenders at a time when that was judged hardly possible, he resolved to devote his remaining life to the enterprise. Proceeding to St. Petersburg with mercantile views, he found so much room for the exertions of a philanthropist, that he totally surrendered his original pursuits, and gave himself over to the work of ameliorating the national prisons. No personal dangers, and no consideration of ease or wealth, restrained him. He plunged into the receptacles of disease and crime, and by a skilful organization of noblemen of great influence, he was enabled, in a marvellously short time, to correct flagrant abuses. So deep and general was the impression produced by his disinterested consecration, that when he died of a fever contracted in gaol, shortly after completing the thirtyninth year of his age, Prince Galitzin, in proposing the monument to his memory which now stands in the Smolenskoi Cemetery, said: "While Russia has to show near one frontier the ashes of his contryman who produced the first traces of amelioration in the condition of prisoners and of the sick and suffering, let her show here the monument of a second Howard, a worthy follower and emulator of the good deeds of the first." Mr. John Venning, his relative, sympathized with him. I had the privilege of knowing this gentleman when I was young, and of visiting him

Knill's Life of Walter Venning.