dramatic pieces (The Lying Valet, Lethe, The Guardian, Miss in her Teens, Irish Widow, &c.). and his alterations and adaptation of old plays, which together fill four volumes, evinced his knowledge of stage effect and his appreciation of lively dialogue and action; but he cannot be said to have added one new or original character to the drama. He was joint author with Colman of The Clandestine Illarriage, in which he is said to have written his famous part of Lord Ogleby. The excellent farce, High sze below Stairs, appears to have been wrongly attributed to Garrick, and to be by Townley, a clergyman. As a matter of course he
wrote many prologues and epilogues.
Garrick’s correspondence (published, with a short memoir by anden, in '2 vols. 4to), and the notices of him in the memoirs of Hannah More and Madame D'Arblay, and above all in Boswell's Life of Johnson, bear testimony to his general worth, and to his many fascinating qualities as a fricnd and companion. The earlier biographies of Garrick are by Arthur Murphy (2 vols. 1801) and by the bookseller Tom Davies (2 vols., 4th ed., 1805), the latter a‘work of some merit, but occasionally inaccurate and con- fused as to dates. Mr I’crcy F itzgerald's Life (‘2 vols. 1868) is full and spirited. A charming essay on Garrick appeared in the Quarterly Review, July 1868.
[[Author:William Lloyd Garrison|WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON]], the founder and leader of the movement for the abolition of slavery in the United States of America, was born in N ewburyport, Massachusetts, December 10, 1805. His parents were from the British province of New Brunswick. The father, a sea- captain, went away from home when William was a child, and it is not known whether he died at sea or on the land. The mother is said to have been a woman of high character, charming in person, and eminent for piety. For her William had the deepest reverence, and he is supposed to have inherited from her the moral qualities that specially fitted him for his career. She was entirely dependent for the support of herself and children upon her labours as a nurse. She was able to give William but a meagre chance for an education, but he had a taste for books, and made the most of his limited opportunities. She first set him to learn the trade of a shoemaker, and, when she found this did not suit him, let him try his hand at cabinet- making. But the latter pleased him no better than the former. In October 1818, however, when he was in his fourteenth. year, he was made more than content by being indentured to Ephraim W. Allen, proprietor of the New- burg/port Herald, to learn the trade of a printer. He found in this occupation a happy stimulus to his literary taste and ambition, as well as some available opportunities for mental culture. He soon became an expert compositor, and after a time began to write anonymously for the Herald. His communications won the commendation of the editor, who had not at first the slightest suspicion that he was the author. He also wrote for other papers with equal success. A series of political essays, written by him for the Salem Gazette, was copied by a preminent Philadelphia journal, the editor of which attributed them to the Hon. Timothy Pickering, a distinguished statesman of Massachusetts. His skill as a printer won for him the position of foreman, while his ability as a writer was so marked that the editor of the Herald, when temporarily called away from his post, left the paper in his charge.
The printing-office was for him, what it has been for many another poor boy, no mean substitute for the academy and the college. He was full of enthusiasm for liberty; the struggle of the Greeks to throw off the Turkish yoke enlisted his warmest sympathy, and at one time he seriously thought of entering the West Point Academy and fitting himself for a soldier’s career. Ilis apprenticeship ended th11 his minority in 1826, when he began the publication of a new paper, the Free Press, in his native place. This paper was full of spirit and intellectual force, but Newbury- port was a sleepy place and did not appreciate a periodical so fresh and free ; and so the enterprise failed. Mr Garrison then went to Boston, where, after working for a time as a journeyman printer, he became the editor of the National Philanthropist, the first journal established in America to promote the cause of total abstin- ence from intoxicating liquors. His work in this paper was highly appreciated by the friends of temperance, but a change in the pro- prietorship led to his withdrawal before the end of a year. In 1828 he was induced to establish the Journal of the Times at Ben- nington, Vermont, to support the re-election to the presidency of the United States of John Quincy Adams. The new paper, though attractive in many ways, and full of force and fire, was too far ahead of public sentiment on moral questions to win a large sup- port. Nthther or not it would have lived if he had continued to be its editor, it is impossible to say; but the time had come at last when he was to enter upon the work with which his name will be for ever associated. In Boston he had met Benjamin Lundy, a Quaker philanthropist, who had been for years engaged in an effort to convince the people of the United States that they ought to do something to promote the abolition of slavery. Mr Garrison had been deeply moved by Mr Lundy’s appeals, and after going to Vermont he showed the deepest interest in the slavery question. Mr Lundy was then publishing in Baltimore a small monthly paper, entitled Genius of Unirorsal Enmneipatz'on, and he resolved to go to Bennington and invite Mr Garrison to join him in the editorship. “'ith this object in View he walked from Boston to Bcnnington, through the frost and snow of a New England winter, a distance of 125 miles. His mission was successful. Mr Garrison was deeply impressed by the good Quakcr's zeal and deVOtion, and be resolved to join him and devote himself thereafter to the work of abolishing slavery.
In pursuance of this plan he Went to Baltimore in the autumn of 1829. and thenceforth the Genius was published weekly, under the joint editorship of the two men. It was understood, however, that Mr Garrison would do most of the editorial work, while Mr Lundy would spend most of his time in lecturing and procuring subscribers. On one point the two editors differed radically, Lundy being the advocate of gradual, and Garrison the champion of im- mediate emancipation. The former Was possessed with the idea that the negroes, on being emancipated, must be colonized some- where beyond the limits of the United States ; the latter held that they should be emancipated on the soil of the country, with all the rights of freemen. In view of this difference it was agreed that each should speak on his own individual responsibility in the paper, al'ipending his initial to each of his articles for the information of the reader. It deserves mention here that Mr Garrison was then in utter ignorance of the change previously wrought in the opinions of English abolitionists by Elizabeth Heyrick’s pamphlet in favour of immediate, in distinction from gradual emancipation. The sinful- ness of slavery being admitted, the duty of immediate emancipation to his clear ethical instinct was perfectly manifest. He saw that it would be idle to expose and denounce the evils of slavery, while responsibility for the system was placed upon former generations, and the duty of abolishing it transferred to an indefinite future. His demand for immediate emancipation fell like a tocsin upon the ears of slaveholders. For general talk about the evils of slavery they cared little, but this assertion that every slave was entitled to in- stant freedom tilled them with alarm and roused them to anger, for they saw that. if the conscience of the nation were to respond to the proposition, the system must inevitably fall. The Genius, now that it had become a vehicle for this dangerous doctrine, was a paper to be feared and intensely hated. Baltimore was then one of the centres of the domestic slave trade, and upon this traffic Mr Garrison heaped the strongest denunciations. A vessel owned in Newburyport having taken a cargo of slaves from Baltimore to New Orleans, he characterized the transaction as an act of “ domestic piracy,’ ' and avowed his purpose to “cover with thick infamy" those engaged therein. He was thereupon prosecuted for libel by the owner of the vessel, fined in the sum of fifty dollars, mulcted in costs of court, and, in default of payment, Committed to jail. His imprisonment created much excitement, and in some quarters, in spite of the pro- slavery spirit of the time, was a subject of indignant comment in public as well as private. The excitement was fed by the publica- tion of two or three striking sonnets, instinct with the spirit of liberty, which Mr Garrison inscribed on the walls of his cell. One of these, Freedom of Mind, is remarkable for freshness of thought and terseness of expression, and will probably hold a permanent place in American literature.
John G. Whittier, the Quaker poet, intercedcd with Henry Clay to pav Mr Garrison’s fine and thus release him from prison. To the credit of the slaveholding statesman it must be said .tllflt he responded favourably, but before he had time for the regulate pre-
- ↑ This is reprinted here, with the consent of Messrs Charles Scribner’s Sons, of New York, from their work entitled Garrison: an Outline of his Life, by Oliver Johnson. New York. 1879. Copyright, 1879, by Charles Scribner’s Sons.
