power, instead of producing good, often gave birth to mischiefs more
flagrant, and more fatal, than those which they were employed to
correct. He found, even in the prisons of his own humane and enlightened
country, an accumulation of the most hideous abuses: he found them not
nurseries of penitence and amendment, but schools of vice and impiety;
or dens of filth, famine, and disease: not the seats of just and
salutary correction and punishment, but the strong holds of cruelty and
extortion. The irons of the prisoner, which he only beheld, entered into
his soul, and awakened unextinguishable energy in a spirit, of which
companion and fortitude were the divine characteristicks. In the noble
emotions of pity for the oppressed, and of zeal for the honour and
interest of civilized society, he conceived perhaps the sublimest design
that ever occupied and exalted the mind of man, the design to search and
to purify the polluted stream of Penal Justice, not only throughout his
own country, but through the various nations of the world. How low, how
little, are the grandest enterprizes of Heroic Ambition, when compared
with this magnanimous pursuit! How frivolous and vain are the highest
aims of Fancy and Science, when contrasted with a purpose so
beneficently great! But, marvellous as the magnitude of HOWARD'S
enterprise appears, on the slightest view that magnitude becomes doubly
striking, when we contemplate at the same time the many circumstances
that might either allure or deter him from the prosecution of his idea.
Consider him as a private gentleman, possessed of ease and independence,
accustomed to employ and amuse his mind in retired study and
philosophical speculation; arrived at that period of life, when the
springs of activity and enterprize in the human frame have begun to
lose their force! consider that his health, even in youth, had appeared
unequal to common fatigue! his stature low! his deportment humble! his
voice almost effeminate! Such was the wonderful being, who relinquished
the retirement, the tranquillity, the comforts, that he loved and