CHAP. IV. Active Liberality of Mr. Wakefield-" Reply to the Letter of Edmund Burke, Esq. to a noble Lord." 1794-1797. IN Mr. Wakefield's defence upon his trial, !, he thus describes the privacy of his own life: t "I am not now, nor ever was, a member of any one political society: no frequenter of te public meetings, no speaker at public dinners;›› nor ever attended a lecture or debate on poь litical subjects in a single instance, on any occa- 1/ sion whatever, in all my life: not that I presume to censure or disapprove these practices d in others, but because of their absolute inconsistency with my regular, studious, sober, pacific, and domesticated modes of living. I have never written a single political article in any review, magazine, or other periodical publication of any name, character, or description." Yet so far from censuring thsoe who sought e" Defence," p.54. 1 to improve the condition of their countrymen, by exertions little suited to his own taste and occupations, he highly respected them, and felt a lively interest in the sufferings which too many of them endured under the late rigorous administration. It is well remembered that during Mr. Pitt's "reign of terror," in 1794, the judicature of Scotland exiled, among the most abandoned of mankind, men of education, and, several of them, of distinguished talents, "the height of whose offending" appears to have been little more than a pursuit, perhaps too eager, of the same objects to which that minister affected to attach himself in his road to popularity and power. The opposite rewards of Mr. Pitt, and those who professed to follow up his early principles, are not unaptly expressed by Mr. Wakefield: and Ah! how unlike reformers! is your fate: This to New-Holland, to th' Exchequer that!"f upon all occasions he scrupled not to condemn those sentences as cruel and unjust. His high opinion of one of the victims to mi f Juv. Imit. "Committunt eadem diverso crimina fato; g nisterial vengeance on that occasion, he has recorded in a learned work, upon the mention of a criticism on a passage in the New Testament, by the Rev. T. F. Palmer, a gentleman of great literary accomplishments, which he had devoted to a disinterested examination of the Christian scriptures. He likewise exerted himself in promoting the subscription set on foot at the close of the State Trials in 1794, to defray the heavy law expences incurred by Mr. Hardy and his fellow-prisoners, though otherwise wholly unconnected with any of the parties. Nor could it be an attempt deserving censure to lighten the pecuniary burdens of those who had hazarded their lives in dispro disproving the accusations of enemies powerful by the influence of office, and rich in the possession of the national purse. And here it may not be improper to notice Mr. Wakefield's interference respecting some severities exercised in the memorable prison of Cold Bath Fields; severities which a jury have since officially presented, and as to which We understand with much concern that this gentleman, on his return to Europe, after encountering almost incredible hardships, died at the island of Guam, one of the Ladrones, June 2, 1801. For a very interesting account of Mr. Palmer see Month. Mag. Feb. 1804. Vol. xvii. 83-85. 1 a man must have a marvellous faith in the interested assertion of a jailor, should he still venture to doubt their existence. From his letters now before us, written in July and August 1797, it appears that he exerted himself though without success, in various applications, to procure for two booksellers, who were confined for having sold certain political pamphlets, some mitigation of their treatment, which with respect to their communication with their family and friends, he describes as "rigorous beyond any thing ever known towards any criminal in this country;" and after a personal examination of the facts, he says, of the prisoners there con neone of them, without bribing the -292200 19 ; keepers, have the privilege of seeing their nearest relatives, except at an awful distance, and through iron gates. He was too soon 9 h In his "Letter to Sir John Scott," he thus describes the condition of these persons, when he visited them in the Bridewell in Cold Bath Fields, “excluded from father and mother, brother and sister, wife and child, relative and friend, except by a remote view and restrained converse, of which I have partaken, through iron grates, with ruffians by your side, scowling ferocity and menace. This is a literal unexaggerated fact, on which I stake my character, for honour and vera"city with the public. After an ocular evidence of this treatment, and other efforts for redress, I wrote to 3.1 a "dignified clergyman in the church, and chief director of this still better acquainted with the government of a prison, when it may be truly said that he suffered nearly as much from reflexions on the misery around him, as from the grievous privations to which he was himself subjected. Mr. Wakefield's next publication was called forth on the following occasion: "A In the beginning of 1796 appeared Letter from the Right Honourable Edmund Burke to a Noble Lord, on the Attack made on him and his Pension in the House of Lords by the Duke of Bedford and the Earl of Lauderdale." Among other answers Mr. Wakefield wrote "A Reply to the Letter of Edmund Burke, Esq. to a Noble Lord." The first edition was sent to the press in a few hours after that 3 a todasi pamphlet came to his hands. As he had long chosen the studies connected with classic and scriptural criticism to be the leading occupations of his life, when he was occasionally drawn from such employments by what he esteemed an impulse of duty, his impatience to resume them would not allow him prison; concluding that a scholar and a Christian might be induced to commiserate the condition of these booksellers. But in vain." "Letter, &c." p. 31. |