and the world, secmed every day to be more completely entangling it.

But as we advance in the memoir, and find the great objects which Mr. Wilberforce set before him,-when we see him steadily pursuing them, when we find him neither too much elated by prospects of success, nor pressed quite down, though often much oppressed, by difficulties and opposition, we ask how it would have been possible to set before the present or the future generation, the picture of his labours, if the name, the power, the rank, and the obstinacy of some of his opponents had not been given? It was the song of the syrens that made it so difficult for Ulysses to pass the Circean isle; and it was the Symplegades, with their dreadful latratus, that presented so terrific an avenue to the Trojan refugees. If Mr. Wilberforce stopped his ears against the charms of pleasure, and steeled his heart and nerved his arm for encounter with opposing power in all its varied shapes, it were impossible to estimate his resolution and his magnanimity unless we were acquainted with the enticements he had to fly from, or the foes he had to resist and subdue. It was easy for a

quiet party at Sir Charles Middleton's breakfast-table to fix on Wilberforce as the man to plead the cause of the unhappy African in parliament; and it is pleasant to think of those noble-minded men, and those high-born ladies, who did not forget, amid the elegances of life, the cause and the wrongs of the slave. But it is one thing to plan, a different, and quite another thing to execute. When we read of late and stormy debates, lengthened and numerous consultations, pamphlets to be written, committees to be attended, slanders to be endured, and even life to be jeopardied, then, and then only, we become acquainted with the greatness of final success, by having had afforded to us a survey of the long struggle that led to it.

Although Mr. Wilberforce will and must always be known as the great contriver and, ultimately, successful advocate of the abolition of the slave-trade, it was not until the publication of his memoirs that we were aware how great the effect of his eloquence had been, both in the great Yorkshire contest, and in the House of Commons as the supporter of the minister. "Mr. Pitt will not succeed, notwithstanding the aid of his eloquent friend, Mr. Wilberforce," is the confession of an opposition paper to his great powers of speaking, the force of which is at once acknowledged. Boswell's account of him in the castle-yard can never be forgotten. "I saw what seemed a mere shrimp mount upon the table, but, as I listened, he grew and grew until the shrimp became a whale." (P. 26.) "Danby tells me,' writes Pepper Arden, "that you spoke like an angel."

But all his great gifts he brought as an offering to God's altar. He laid them down there in humble self-abasement, and in adoring gratitude.

We have not space to follow him in his wanderings to Nice and home again, and then to Nice again, and again home, or to dwell on his conversations with Dean Milner, and the change of thought and

of life to which they led. What is chiefly remarkable, is the great judgment with which so earnest-minded a man acted under his altered views of life, and the great steadiness of purpose with which, notwithstanding his self-upbraidings, we must insist that he adhered to his resolutions. It is remarkable, too, and it is a clue to his consistency, in how thoroughly business-like a manner he reviewed constantly his own peculiar position in society, and the duties it entailed on him. It is the neglect of such thoughtfulness and prayerful review, such inspection of external and surrounding circumstances, and such introspection of motives, that leaves so many men of naturally noble endowments, without objects to pursue, and therefore without great ends attained. The whole of pages 98 and 99 will illustrate what we have said. We can only refer the reader to them, requesting him not to omit the commencement, where he describes himself as "at early morning accustomed to rove out (on Winander Mere) alone, and to find an oratory under one of the woody islands. in the middle of the lake. In this passage, the whole of which is most important, we find this great and good man not only looking at his own position, and gathering or pressing, so to speak, on himself the duties it imposed, but calmly estimating the dangers with which he was surrounded, and in God's strength preparing to meet them.

"Let me constantly view myself, in all my various relations, as one who professes to be a Christian, as a member of parliament, as gifted by nature and fortune, as a son, brother, pater-familias, friend, with influence and powerful connexions.

"1. To be, for ensuing week, moderate at table.

"2. Hours as early as can contrive. Redeeming the time."

The same wholesome and wise system he pursued during his whole life, until we find him, towards the close of it, thus recording his feelings he had lost a daughter; the funeral procession had left the house; the day was chill, and he was unable to accompany the body to the grave; and he accordingly retires "into his little room at the top of the stairs," and first pours forth his soul in prayer, "blessing God for his astonishing goodness to me, and lamenting my utter unworthiness." "Every one," he writes, "knows, or may know, his own sins; the criminality of which varies according to his opportunities of improvement, obligations, and motives to obedience, advantages and means of grace, favours and loving-kindnesses, pardons and mercies. It is the exceeding goodness of God to me, and the almost unequalled advantages I have enjoyed, which so fill me with humiliation and shame." He then reviews the leading circumstances of his life, his mercies, his advantages, his escapes; both what he had been delivered from, and what he had been never tried with; and concludes with a solemn re-devotion of himself to God.

There is one other point to which we would direct the reader's attention, having been much struck with it ourselves; we mean his conscientious abstinence from worldly business on the Sunday. Mr. Wilberforce did not take a Judaical view of the day of rest-he looked on it as a day of holy and happy privilege. "This is the

day which the Lord hath made; let us rejoice and be glad in it." Accordingly we find, in the midst of the most trying matters, personal or public, how he separated himself from care, and both sought for the fortifying power of that strength, and gave himself up to the enjoyment of that peace, which sabbatic calm so beautifully typifies in the last case, and secures in the first. He never forgot, and we would specially remind our readers that masters should take the same care to remember, that his servants should not be deprived of their rest, while he was himself indulging in what might otherwise be innocent enjoyment. The Sunday was never to him a day of any banqueting, but that of holy festivity, considerate of his neighbour and the stranger within his gates.

But we must pause. We have travelled with renewed interest through the scenes of this "tale of sixty years' since ;"—we have looked again at the young man in the house of his mother at Hull, or surrounded by the ardent followers of Whitefield at his aunt's ;—we have seen him enter life, and appear on one of its highest stages in public;we have heard again the thunder of the plaudits with which he was greeted as he turned the corner of the street at York, and dashed on in the carriage of the premier to the scene of his struggle and his victory; we have followed him in his week-day labours for the good of man, and strayed through the fields and heard his bell-like voice warbling, like a bird of music, God's praises in the woods, when Sunday shone upon him ;-we have talked with his friends, and seen them, one by one, drop off and die;-we have seen the wise Lord Camden, "the pompous Thurlow, and the elegant Caermarthen," the tender-minded Elliot, and Pitt, "ioolos pus," and Windham, and Burke, and Fox, and Perceval, and Porteus, and Milner, go to the long home of man; while he, so weakly in frame, and so worn in spirit, was supported to the enjoyment of a green old age, which did not terminate until more than fifteen "lustra" had been completed; and we cannot but recommend our readers, after a careful review of the whole, to peruse again for themselves, and, especially if they are fathers, to put into the hands of their sons, this most delightful and instructive piece of biography.

We would observe, in conclusion, that whatever faults Mr. Wilberforce may have been charged with, (and his best friends will be the most ready to acknowledge that he had them,) they were mostly those which he derived from the age in which he lived; whilst his virtues were chiefly those which, by God's grace, were evolved by circumstances from his own happy nature. He has certainly shown how great talent may be best devoted to country and to mankind, by being supremely devoted to God. He lived for no party, but that for which the Master whom he served both lived and died. He carried out, in the truest sense, the great maxim, "Salus reipublicæ lex suprema;" for he found that safety and health of the constitution in the amelioration of the condition of the poor, and in the elevation of the morals of "the miserable great."

Let

That he enjoys a great reputation-as great, perhaps, if not greater, now that he is gone, than he did while he remained, is the necessary consequence of his never having sought his own praise at all. public men think well of this. Posterity will think the better of them for their never having concerned themselves about the estimate of posterity. Virtue is seen by her own light: it must be so, for virtue, in its true sense, is only the name for Him who is himself both light and life eternal. Had Wilberforce been one of those who "seek their own," we venture to say, that his ashes would never have reposed in Westminster Abbey, nor his hearse have been followed thither by the carriages of half the nobility, and the great commoners of England, amid the mournful suffrages of all the wise and the good.

The Abridgment seems well managed. Of the new volume, 160 pages include the subjects related in the first volume of the larger work, and they contain about half the matter. The second occupies 110 pages of the Abridgment; the third, 120; the fourth and fifth, 87 each.

The system pursued is much the same throughout. The private life and religious experience is given most at large, the letters, which form about a third part of the original work, almost entirely omitted; diaries of a political or general character much condensed; all foot-notes left out, and the whole of an appendix of 90 pages.

As a sample of the change, take the fourth chapter of the Abridgment. It includes chapters five and six of the original work. The omissions are, Letter to Lord Muncaster, Extract from Mr. Windham, Note about Mr. Clarkson, Letters from Lord Grenville and Sir W. Eden; from Mr. Pitt to Mr. Wyvill on slave-trade. All particulars are given of his first labours on slave-trade, except letters, two or three pages of journal respecting his residence at the Lakes, and return to Bath. Mr. Wilberforce's first election for Yorkshire is given pretty fully; it occupies seven pages of the Abridgment. We regret that the affectionate and concise statesmanlike notes from Pitt, which so frequently occur in the larger work, are omitted.

On the abolition question full particulars are given as to its origin in 1788, its annual struggles, and its final triumph, in 1807. The only observable omissions are letters, and the differences with Mr. Clarkson. The correspondence with Mr. Williams about the chapel at Highwood is but briefly alluded to.

The entire omission of a very extensive correspondence is the most striking feature in the Abridgment. Of about thirty-five letters in Vol. I. forty-eight in Vol. II. an hundred and four in Vol. III., sixty-seven in Vol. IV. and sixty-five in Vol. V. scarcely twenty are given entire. The account of Mr. Wilberforce's declining years is perhaps too much abridged. We are seldom weary of gazing on a setting sun.

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Arundines Cami; sice, Musarum Cantabrigiensium Lusus Canori. Collegit atque edidit HENRICUS DRURY, A. M. Editio altera. Parker, London: Deighton, Cambridge.

WE are glad, but not surprised, to see that Mr. Drury's book has reached a second edition. Latin verses are connected in the minds of most of us with pleasant recollections. Some retain a taste for them, whom no other form of poetry has ever interested; and many, whose classical studies ceased when they left school, are glad to find a ground where they can meet professed scholars on a level. Mr. Drury showed sound judgment in confining his collection to translations. Original Latin poems are, at best, imitations-sometimes of ancient modes of thought; more often of ancient phrases without any thought, strung together, like the Platonic colloquialisms in Lucian's AntiAtticista, with an equal disregard of the purposes to which they were originally applied, and of any present meaning in those who use them. Good translations from modern languages into Latin or Greck, are, in every sentence, exercises of comparative philology; and, to use still more obscure language, of comparative æsthetics; showing, at a glance, what it is that modern poets have, or have not, in common with Catullus, or Ovid, or Euripides. They are the more valuable, because, either from a want of richness in the thoughts of Latin poets, or from the comparative diffuseness of our languages, all considerable attempts at poetical versions of Latin writers have hitherto failed. The Pieces done into English by eminent hands, as translations by Dryden and his contemporaries were called in the jargon of the time, are, as their title imports, mere products of manual labour. The extraordinary similarity of genius between Pope and Horace, and the strong resemblance of the social circumstances of the times in which they lived, have produced an equivalent in English literature to the Satires and Epistles; but familiar and easy versification belongs to a low form of poetry, and imitative paraphrases have different merits from translations. From whatever reason the popularity of the work before us may arise, we are glad of any proof that Latin scholarship is still held in general esteem. If we are suspected of an arrière penséeof a professional partiality to Latin as the language of the Church in the West, we are not solicitous to deny it.

The second edition of the Arundines Cami is enriched by some valuable additions. In its outward form it is worthy of the elegance of its contents, smooth and thick in paper, clear in print, and regular in margin; and the English originals of the Latin versions are sufficiently agreeable and various to furnish