tell which is actually given; and no man is pleased with perplexity." Of compliments, he also often said, "Two and two do not make four, and twenty and twenty fall far short of forty; deal not, then, in that deceitful arithmetic." Mr. Balmer, a friend of Hall's, to whom we are indebted for the conversational remarks which form so valuable a portion of Dr. Gregory's Memoir, says, "It was interesting and amusing to observe how Mr. Hall's exquisite sensibility to literary beauty, intermingled with, and qualified the operation of his principles and learning, both as a Christian and a Dissenter. Of this I recollect various instances; but shall give only one. While conversing respecting Archbishop Magee, his talents, sentiments, conduct, &c., I quoted, as a proof of his High.. Church principles, a remark from a charge then newly published: it was to this effect: That the Roman Catholics have a church without a religion; the Dissenters have a religion without a church; but the Establishment have both a church and a religion. Mr Hall was struck with the remark.—“ That, Sir," he exclaimed, " is a beautiful saying. I have not heard so fine an observation for a long time. It is admirable, Sir." "You admire it, I presume, for its point-not its truth? "I admire it, Sir, for its plausibility and cleverness. It is false, and yet it seems to contain a mass of truth. It is an excellent stone for a Churchman to pelt with."

On being asked if he had read the Life of Watson, Bishop of Landaff, then recently published; he said he regretted that he had-as it had lowered his estimate of the Bishop's character. Being asked why, he expressed his reluctance to enlarge upon the subject, but added, "Poor man, I pity him! He married public virtue in his early days, but seemed for ever afterwards to be quarrelling with his wife." Hall, himself, had made a marriage of the same kind; but his conjugal quarrels only produced a slight and temporary misunderstanding, scarcely an estrangement of a vowed affection, strengthened by many pledges.

Of a penurious person, a friend said, "Poor wretch! you might put his soul into a nut-shell." "Yes, Sir," replied Hall," and even then it would creep out at a maggot-hole."

On being asked if Dr. Kippis was not a clever man ; Hall said, “He might be a very clever man by nature, for aught I know; but he laid so many books upon his head that his brain could not move." Disgusted, on one occasion, by the egotism and conceit of a preacher, who, with a mixture of self-complacency and impudence, challenged his admiration of a sermon; Mr. Hall, who possesssed strong powers of satire, which he early learned to repress, was provoked to say, "Yes, there was one very fine passage in your discourse, Sir." "I am rejoiced to hear you say so, which was it?" Why Sir, it was the passage from the pulpit

into the vestry."

In confessing that he had been led into the folly of imitating Dr. Johnson, he said, "I aped Johnson, and I preached Johnson, and, I am afraid, with little more of evangelical sentiment than is to be found in his essays; but it was a youthful folly, and it was a very great folly. I might as well have attempted to dance a hornpipe in the cumbrous costume of Gog and Magog. My puny thoughts could not sustain the load of the words in which I tried to clothe them." In speaking of Johnson himself, he said, "He shone strongly on the angles of a thought."

But Mr. Hall had a higher style of conversation, in which fancy, play.. fulness, and point were laid aside, or made subservient to the inculcation of some great moral lesson. To a clergyman who, from evil habit, had be

come fond of brandy and water, to an extent that involved his character and his peace, Mr. Hall, by a premeditated effort, when the brandy-bibber asked for the favourite beverage, replied, "Call things by their right name, and you shall have as much as you please." Why don't I employ the right name? I ask for a glass of brandy and water." "That is the current, but not the appropriate name; ask for a glass of liquid fire, and distilled damnation, and you shall have a gallon." The poor man became pale, and seemed struggling with anger. "But," says Hall,"knowing I did not mean to insult him, he stretched out his hand and said, "Brother Hall, I thank you from the bottom of my heart ;" and from that time he ceased to take brandy and water. To a lady who told that she had put on her nightcap, and lain down with her little girl, to get her to sleep, pretending she was to sleep with her, Mr. Hall said, "Excuse me, Madam: do you wish your child to grow up a liar?" When the lady pro. tested not; "Then bear with me while I say, never act a lie before her: children are very quick observers, and soon learn that that which assumes to be what it is not, is a lie, whether acted or spoken." And this was uttered with a kindness which precluded offence. In his own system of education, Mr. Hall does not appear to have been either active or strict. He had no laid-down plan of training or discipline. "He was," says his biographer, "remarkably affectionate, and indulgent; but he did nothing systematically to correct defects, to guide or excite their minds. Now and then he recommended a book to his daughters; one, perhaps, which he had read himself with peculiar satisfaction." There are one or two more points on which we should have liked to mention the opinions of Mr. Hall; and among these is the modern system of "reviewing," of which, from feeling and principle, he had a fixed and conscientious detestation. Nothing annoyed him so much as some intrusive friend or brother soliciting his pen to usher a volume into the world -as the review," written by so eminent a person, threw over the work a reflected lustre. "With respect to the reviewing Mr. —'s Sermon," he writes to a friend, I must be excused. I have entirely done with reviewing. It is an occupation, of all others, I dislike. If you wish me to publish, you should never wish me to review; for you are not aware what a serious interruption it is." Another unanswerable reason follows: "I have read Mr. -'s Sermon with much pleasure. It is judicious, serious, and affecting; but I am well aware how extravagantly his friends have always over-rated his talents; and were I to review, and express myself in such terms only as the occasion would justify, I should mortify instead of gratifying. In truth, reviewing at the request of particular friends is a snare for the conscience. I never wished any person to review for me."

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As frequent exactions of this kind were made upon Mr. Hall, we find, in his correspondence, many remonstrances against the unreasonableness of such demands, as a mere inroad on time; besides that repugnance which, in his mind, became an almost morbid feeling. In a letter to Mr. Josiah Conder, who had been assailing him for some special (not personal) object, he says, among other strong things, "Were such things determined by choice, it is my deliberate opinion, I should prefer going out of the world by any tolerable mode of death, rather than incur the necessity of writing three or four articles in a year. I must, therefore, beg and entreat I may not be urged again upon a subject so ineffably repugnant to all the sentiments of my heart." Mr Hall's apprenticeship to the review..

ing craft was served in the ECLECTIC REVIEW; and we see how he took to the trade. This Review began about 1804 ; and in 1824 Hall protests-he "never looks into either the Eclectic, or any Review”—Edinburgh and Quarterly included no doubt-and wishes" the whole tribe could be put an end to." The Westminster and Tait's Magazine must rejoice in not having been in existence when this stern denunciation was made, with some other fell curse, conveyed by Dr. Gregory in a series of portentous stars, shedding lurid light over page 539, vol. v. In the same volume Hall asserts, that, under the then regime, we were "doomed to receive our first impression and opinion of books from some of the wickedest, and others of the stupidest of men; men, some of whom have not sense to write upon any subject, nor others honesty to read what they pretend to criticise; yet sit in judgment upon all performances, and issue their ignorant and foolish oracles to the public." The shameless want of principle in the system of reviewing, justly stigmatized by Hall, has, like every other wickedness which becomes excessive, tended to correct itself. Reviewing is still far from perfect: but arrogance, petulance, flippancy, gross ignorance, and intolerable insolence, have received a decided check. It would be unjust to take our temporary and reluctant leave of this most important work without acknowledging our deep feeling of the affectionateness and reverence with which Dr. Gregory has fulfilled the most delicate office which one friend can perform to another. There is, as we have intimated, in a solitary instance, either an extreme caution, or a cast of thought, which we, as fervent admirers of the manly-minded, though not all-perfect preacher, cannot approve. There are, moreover, a want of concoction, and sundry faults of arrangement, sufficiently explained by the circumstances under which the work is brought out, and which, in a second edition, may easily be removed; but the right spirit is here, and to us this is all in all.

THE SLAVE TRADE.-VOYAGE TO WESTERN AFRICA.*

THE gracious speech of his Majesty at the opening of Parliament, has produced, at least, one disappointment. It gives no echo to the long and loud professions of the Whig party generally, nor yet to those of the individual members of the Whig administration, who formerly took a lead in the emancipation of British Colonial Slaves. This, in the manifesto, so to speak, of a liberal government to a new and reformed Parliament, and to a people now first enjoying a large measure of representative freedom, is a singular omission; and we can easily conceive the disappointment to thousands in both kingdoms, and particularly to those English dissenters in the North of England, in whose ears the eloquence of Mr. Brougham, in the last popular oration he ever made, is still ringing, when they perused a royal speech, made at the most august period of our history, the assembling of a free Parliament, and found no allusion to the existence of the monstrous iniquity, the national sin, of Colonial Slavery. There may be reasons for this silence; but they should not, and cannot, prove satisfactory.

To the actual state of slavery in the Colonies, which presents nothing to make the friends of emancipation abate one jot in their efforts, we

A Voyage to Western Africa. By P. Leonard- Edinburgh: W. Tait,

may soon have occasion to recur. At present, our attention has been drawn to the state of the trade,—the fountain-head of the iniquity, in which it must be vigorously attacked, if it is to be successfully attacked at all,—by a highly meritorious volume, drawn up from actual observation; in which the traffic, not of past times, but as it exists, in defiance of all our Treaties and Acts of Parliament, at the present moment is depicted. This simple record of facts is worth volumes of eloquence. In September, 1830, the writer, Mr. Leonard, sailed from England for the Western Coast of Africa in the Dryad frigate, commanded by Captain Hayes, who had been appointed to the African station for suppressing the Slave Trade. The early objects seen by the voyager are described with liveliness and force; but, to us, these are of minor importance; and the first event demanding notice is the Dryad meeting, near Sierra Leone, the brig Plumper, which had just examined a vessel under French colours, with 300 slaves on board, bound for Guadaloupe. And, now, mark the efficiency of our treaties to suppress the Slave Trade: neither British ships, nor those of any other power, are permitted the right of search in French vessels; the French prevention squadron shows no great zeal in the service; and, accordingly, this slave ship, like many others, sailing at one time under the white flag, but now under the tricolor, could not lawfully be detained, and so proceeded in peace to the end of her voyage. The colours of France, and fictitious French papers, are continually employed by the Spanish and Portuguese slavedealers to give impunity to their nefarious speculations. It is also stated by our author to be the general opinion in Sierra Leone, that the French Government has never yet sincerely wished to destroy the traffic. Before the Dryad arrived on the coast, there had been several rather desperate actions between British vessels and slavers; the crews of the latter, from the nature of their engagement, having every motive to defend their ships to the last extremity. The basis of the agreement is exactly the old Buccaneer principle—no prey, no pay. Mr. Leonard says,— "They defend themselves to the utmost, as they receive no part of their wages, which is from thirty to sixty dollars a month, according to the rank they hold, until their live cargo is safely disembarked at the destined port; when they have a certain number of dollars additional, according to the number of slaves landed alive; and, in the event of capture, they forfeit every thing."

There is injustice in passing, in total silence, those parts of the Voyage which shows the author's descriptive powers to advantage; and which, with many readers, will form the main attraction of his work; but we have already declared our object, and must be contented with indicating, that general readers will find much to gratify them in this volume. This premised, we proceed:-The low place the African holds in the scale of being is an opinion not confined exactly to those who would palter with conscience, to gloze over their dealings in the flesh and blood of their fellow creatures. There was no evidence of this inferiority, in our sootycomplexioned brethren, visible to Mr. Leonard. In the settlement of Sierra Leone, the various clans of negroes hold as high a place in the scale of intellect, as any of the other tongues and tribes that people that singular place.

"I examined," he says, "several classes in each school, and studiously compared the acquirements of the liberated African with the other children. There was no perceptible difference. The lights and shades of intellect seemed to bear much the same proportion among them, as among the children of our own labouring classes at home. For the age of these children, their progress, under the system of education adopted, seemed to be very rapid."

We have been long blessed with a Government, which, whether at home or in the Colonies, was always far superior to the meanness of calculation

about pounds, shillings, and pence. In Freetown, is a church which cost from £50,000 to £80,000; which naturally being found far too large for the purposes for which churches are presumed to be intended, was converted into the uses of the synagogue at Jerusalem, a place for wrangling and bargaining. It is now undergoing reduction, and may, after the expenditure of a few more thousands, be a church at last.

Travellers and voyagers, go where they will, appear to entertain a prejudice against the Missionaries. From this Mr. Leonard is not quite exempt, and it has led him into occasional injustice. The infamous case which he mentions of the seduction of an English girl, is bad enough; but there must have been some better reason for other missionaries refusing longer to superintend the schools of the liberated Africans, than sympathy with their fallen brother. Mr. Leonard's description of Kissey, a village of liberated Africans, in the neighbourhood of Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, exhibits a picture of the free settlements, which it is delightful to contemplate. It is full of promise.

"During our stay here," he says, "among other liberated African villages, I visited Kissey, situated about four miles to the eastward of Freetown, on the side of a gentle acclivity, about a mile from the river side. There is an excellent road to this village, and Wellington, situated a little farther on, winding round the base of those lofty mountains behind Freetown, here still embellished with rich foliage, and diversified with valleys and ravines, clothed in the gayest manner imaginable. On the left hand, the wide, still, and expansive river is seen at a little distance, slowly stealing towards the sea. All between the road and its sloping bank is covered with long grass, yellow with the sun, appearing like ripe corn, waving in the gentle breeze, interspersed with groves and solitary trees, and the straggling, thatched huts of the manumitted slaves. The base of the hills on the right is embraced by several European villas and farms, well laid out, and ornamented with hedgerows of pine-apple plants, which grow wild here in every direction; and close to the road, on both sides, throughout its whole extent, numerous cottages are placed, each surrounded by a piece of well cultivated ground, full of cassada, cocoa plants, and fruit trees, and hedged in, and ornamented with several kinds of creeping plants,-the residences of liberated Africans, who have been some time in the colony.

"On approaching Kissey, the only striking objects which present themselves are the church, a large unoccupied government house, and two or three other civilized looking buildings, residences of the liberated African manager, and a few missionary assistants. All the rest has the appearance of a complete Indian village; the huts, peeping through groves of plantain and banana trees, formed of poles stuck in the ground, interwoven with twigs of mangrove, after the manner of a basket, the crevices filled up with clay, and the roof thatched with rank meadow grass. They are separated from each other by the pieces of ground allotted to each inhabitant, and by streets of respectable width; and consequently, although the whole contain only from eight hundred to one thousand persons, they are scattered over a very considerable extent of surface. All the liberated African villages in the colony are very similar in appearance. Of these, Regent's Town, in the mountain district, about three miles from this, is considered the finest.

"During my visits to Kissey, I occasionally entered the church,—a large unfinished building, capable of containing nearly one thousand persons, while the negro children were singing at the pitch of their shrill voices, a diurnal song of praise, superintended by a black missionary assistant, belonging to the village. When I entered, they, of course, all looked round and smiled, but continued, with open mouths and teeth of ivory, to scream their canticle to the end of the verse; when all was hush, and, at a given signal from the teacher, a hundred little voices squeaked "Good evening, Sir!" repeating the salutation two or three times. As my visits were always accidental, the children were, of course, quite unprepared; and I cannot speak too highly of the progress they appeared to have made in reading and writing, of their clean and neat appearance, and the intelligent smiles of health, pleasure, and curiosity, that beamed from every countenance. In the discipline of these village schools, however, so far as I could learn, there is too much time lost in singing psalms and hymns; the greater part of the day being passed in this exercise.

"The view from the upper part of the rising ground in which Kissey is situated, embraces some striking and beautiful objects."