made prayer equally appropriate and necessary; - that drew him to it as by the force of a sympathy, and impelled him by considerations connected with success. Throughout life, as a part of his religion itself, in circumstances of sorrow and of joy, when 'his heart was lifted up in the ways of the Lord,' or his spirit broken and crushed by disasters, he prayed. The necessity to his soul of the hallowed exercise, seemed to increase as his day declined. He found it to be strength in weakness, light in darkness, life in death. Through it, though the outward man perished, the inward man was renewed day by day? Like his divine Lord, as he drew near his last sufferings and was entering into them, he again and again prayed. 'Being in an agony he prayed more fervently? He sometimes " rose in the night, and spent considerable time in this exercise; with earnest utterance, as he expressed it, 'praying hard.' Like Jacob wrestling with the angel at Peniel, till the day broke, and he passed onward having obtained the blessing.

'Prayer is the Christian's vital breath,

The Christian's native air;

His watchword at the gates of death:
He enters heaven by prayer.'

"Sir Fowell Buxton's spirit and habit of prayer arose very much from the child-like simplicity of his religion; and from his power strongly to realize the absent and the distant, and therefore the spiritual and invisible, which, as a natural attribute of his mind, became faith when inspired by piety. After he became fixed and happy in his persuasion of the enjoyment of the Divine favour through Christ, he never encouraged any perplexing doubts, or

suffered himself to be seduced into the region of theological difficulties."

In the most interesting and instructive address to young men, which Mr. Binney has based on the incidents that marked the career of this eminent philanthropist, he has contrasted it with that of other men, contemporaries of his own, who, with a corresponding social position, and equal means for doing good, have attracted public attention, and won notoriety, where they have failed to secure esteem. He has taken Sir Samuel Romilly, a highly gifted and noble man, whose son felt no less delight in recording the honourable career of his distinguished father, than the son of Sir. T. F. Buxton experienced in writing that on which our present sketch is founded. But with all his solid excellencies, Romilly was no man of prayer. This world was all he lived for, and his biography, though penned with all the affection and admiration of filial love and duty, serves to prove how much the less he was adapted for the highest duties of this life, by his neglect of those which belong to the life hereafter.

Again, Buxton is compared to a benevolent enthusiast still living, who, setting all religion aside, has aimed at reforming the world by Eutopian and visionary schemes, which have proved, like the house of the foolish builders, founded on the sand. Or again, he is contrasted with Beckford of Fonthill, the showy, voluptuous man of taste and extravagance, whose costly monument of magnificent folly is already in ruins; with Sheridan, the poor dissipated man of wit and genius,-each aiming at his own goal of selfish pleasure or unwise design. "How much better for Buxton, that he possessed the spirit of 'a sound mind!

How much wiser he, to spend his life in aiming at possibilities; and how happy for him at last, to feel that he had not lived and laboured in vain ?

"What a contrast is Buxton to others of his contemporaries! A Banker in Berners Street finds himself in difficulties, and commences a course of fraud and forgery to keep up the credit of the house. At all hazards he will retain his place in society, and have, at least, the outward seeming of a gentleman,―though he is pursuing, all the time, a life of deceit and falsehood, and appropriating the property of others as his own. As might be expected, personal habits are as irregular as the social are criminal. He lives, without knowing the blessedness of a home; a husband without the rites of the church,-a father without the sanctities of the relation. At length, early on a dark damp November morning, a continual low murmuring sound is heard increasing in the thoroughfares of the city. Before the dark abode of punishment and crime, men are busy erecting the apparatus of death. Yellow flashes from various torches flickering against it, render it dimly visible to the eye, while the hollow sounds of the workman's hammer fall like heavy strokes upon the heart. At length it is day; thousands upon thousands are discovered-the packed filth and refuse of the metropolis-waiting to see a gentleman hanged! There he is! Beautifully dressed; elegant in figure; his hair, slightly touched by time, moving in the wind; he has all the appearance of being born to move in cultivated society, and to find his equals there. But he is here. And now,-see, he is left by every individual having the aspect of one of his own class. He has brought himself to the level of the wretched dregs and

offscouring of all things, who seem to hold him as their associate, and to hail him as one identified with themselves! What a terrible price to have to pay for the past! There is nothing in the universe so expensive as sin. Moral courage, true power, principle, religion, would not only have kept the man from sinking into the criminal, but might have raised him high into usefulness and honour. The Banker might have equalled the Brewer, if, like him, he had purposed, and worked, and believed, and prayed.

What a contrast such a life as the one before us, to that of the man who lives for nothing but to grub on, get money, hoard, and leave it! And how such people sometimes leave it!-causing the world to wonder, first at the enormous amount of their wealth, and then at the folly or vanity the meanness or injustice-of its testamentary distribution. There was an old tradesman whom I knew by sight, and whom Buxton, I dare say, knew. He accumulated much. Every Sunday morning he used to ride out into the country, walk about a little on Clapham Common, and return to dinner. I used to meet him regularly. It was but a poor form of life his; nothing divine about it. He was a social, genial man, too, in his way—but had no idea but that of getting money; not much faith, I fear, in anything beyond that, and the 'great fact,' indeed, of the unseen, but not unfelt, reality-the stomach! He married his cook; died very rich; and left some thousands to his Company to make themselves comfortable!' What an idea of the end for which man was born! This man and Buxton seem like beings of a different species—yet were they alike; living at the same time; inhabiting the same

E

city; within the sound of the same gospel, and capable of the same divine life."

Such is the contrast which might be multiplied an hundred fold, proving the force of the beautiful maxim of sacred writ, "Godliness has the promise of this life, and also of that which is to come."

CHAPTER IV.

INTEGRITY.

"To thine own self be true,

And it must follow, as the night the day,

Thou canst not then be false to any man."

HAMLET.

In the example of an upright British trader, and English gentleman, which has occupied our attention in the two previous chapters, we have witnessed the exhibition of perseverance, integrity, sound principle, high-toned Christian philanthropy, and a generous and public spirited disinterestedness. Such great examples are only of rare occurrence, and require that peculiar combination of talent with high principle which only falls to the lot of a few. All, however, can emulate his honesty, integrity, and perseverance; nor are there wanting abundant examples of the manifestation of these by the lowly and poorly gifted, to whom they have proved a better fortune than all the wealth which the sons of fortune have inherited. Honesty