e Globe! "A voyage of discovery,
a circum-navigation of charity; to collate distresses, to gauge
wretchedness, to take the dimensions of human misery:" really it is very
fine. Captain Cook's voyage for the Terra Australis, Ross's, Franklin's
for the ditto Borealis: men make various cruises and voyages in
this world,--for want of money, want of work, and one or the other
want,--which are attended with their difficulties too, and do not make
the cruiser a demigod. On the whole, I have myself nothing but
respect, comparatively speaking, for the dull solid Howard, and his
"benevolence," and other impulses that set him cruising; Heaven
had grown weary of Jail-fevers, and other the like unjust penalties
inflicted upon scoundrels,--for scoundrels too, and even the very Devil,
should not have _more_ than their due;--and Heaven, in its opulence,
created a man to make an end of that. Created him; disgusted him with
the grocer business; tried him with Calvinism, rural ennui, and sore
bereavement in his Bedfordshire retreat;--and, in short, at last got
him set to his work, and in a condition to achieve it. For which I am
thankful to Heaven; and do also,--with doffed hat, humbly salute John
Howard. A practical solid man, if a dull and even dreary; "carries
his weighing-scales in his pocket:" when your jailer answers, "The
prisoner's allowance of food is so and so; and we observe it sacredly;
here, for example, is a ration."--"Hey! A ration this?" and solid John
suddenly produces his weighing-scales; weighs it, marks down in his
tablets what the actual quantity of it is. That is the art and manner of
the man. A man full of English accuracy; English veracity, solidity,
simplicity; by whom this universal Jail-commission, not to be paid for
in money but far otherwise, is set about, with all the slow energy, the
patience, practicality, sedulity and sagacity common to the best English
commissioners paid in money and not expressly otherwise.

For it is the glory of England that she has a turn for fidelity in
practical work; that sham-workers, though very numerous, are rarer than
elsewhere; that a man who undertakes work for you will still, in various
provinces of our affairs, do it, instead of merely seeming to do it.
John Howard, without pay in money, _did_ this of the Jail-fever, as
other Englishmen do work, in a truly workmanlike manner: his distinction
was that he did it without money. He had not 500 pounds or 5,000 pounds
a year of s