hout being severe. In the spacious gardens, and the commodious houses
of an architecture already dating a century back, which surrounded the
Common, there was plenty of freedom, and good fellowship, and reasonable
enjoyment for young and old alike. Here again Thackeray has not
done justice to a society that united the mental culture, and the
intellectual activity, which are developed by the neighbourhood of a
great capital, with the wholesome quiet and the homely ways of country
life. Hobson and Brian Newcome are not fair specimens of the effect
of Clapham influences upon the second generation. There can have been
nothing vulgar, and little that was narrow, in a training which produced
Samuel Wilberforce, and Sir James Stephen, and Charles and Robert Grant,
and Lord Macaulay. The plan on which children were brought up in the
chosen home of the Low Church party, during its golden age, will
bear comparison with systems about which, in their day, the world was
supposed never to tire of hearing, although their ultimate results have
been small indeed.

It is easy to trace whence the great bishop and the great writer derived
their immense industry. Working came as naturally as walking to sons who
could not remember a time when their fathers idled. "Mr. Wilberforce and
Mr. Babington have never appeared downstairs lately, except to take a
hasty dinner, and for half an hour after we have supped. The slave-trade
now occupies them nine hours daily. Mr. Babington told me last night
that he had fourteen hundred folio pages to read, to detect the
contradictions, and to collect the answers which corroborate Mr.
Wilberforce's assertions in his speeches. These, with more than two
thousand pages to be abridged, must be done within a fortnight, and they
talk of sitting up one night in every week to accomplish it. The two
friends begin to look very ill, but they are in excellent spirits, and
at this moment I hear them laughing at some absurd questions in the
examination." Passages such as this are scattered broadcast through the
correspondence of Wilberforce and his friends. Fortitude, and diligence,
and self-control, and all that makes men good and great, cannot be
purchased from professional educators. Charity is not the only quality
which begins at home. It is throwing away money to spend a thousand a
year on the teaching of three boys, if they are to return from school
only to find the older members of their family intent on amusing
th