one of the "lords of human kind": a citizen of
no mean city, but of one in which--

". . . e'en the peasant boasts these rights to scan,
And learns to venerate himself as man!"

He had all an Englishman's pride in England, as was prettily seen in
his reply to Mrs. Thrale in the theatre at Versailles; "Now we are here
what shall we act, Dr. Johnson? The Englishman at Paris?" "No, no; we
will try to act Harry the Fifth"; and at bottom he thought that a free
Englishman was too great a man to be patronized by any one on earth.

But there was something better than pride at the root of his whole
attitude towards the rich and the poor; and that was his humanity.
Again and again, as one studies him, one comes back to that, his
humanity, his love of men as men. It was that which made him one of
{126} the earliest and fiercest enemies of the slave trade. So early
as 1740 he maintained the natural right of the negroes to liberty; and
he once startled "some very grave men at Oxford" by giving as his toast
"Here's to the next insurrection of the negroes in the West Indies."
This was his invariable attitude from first to last, and it was no mere
scoring of a party point against the Americans when he asked, in
_Taxation No Tyranny_, "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for
liberty among the drivers of negroes?" No Tory prejudices and no
sophistical arguments were ever able to silence in him the voice of
common humanity. He spared his own country no more than the American
rebels, describing Jamaica as "a den of tyrants and a dungeon of
slaves," and speaking indignantly of the thousands of black men "who
are now repining under English cruelty." He denounced, as not only
wicked but also absurd and foolish, the opinion common among the
"English barbarians that cultivate the southern islands of America,"
that savages are to be regarded as scarcely distinct from animals; and
he dreaded discoveries of new lands because he was always afraid they
would result in conquest and cruelty.

And this was not the public and vicarious {127} humanity with which we
are too familiar. What he preached to others he practised himself. He
loved all life and all the men and women whom he saw living it. It
takes one's breath away at first to find the grave moralist of _The
Rambler_ coolly saying to Mrs. Thrale and Fanny Burney, "Oh, I loved
Bet Flint!" just after he had frankly explained to them that that lady
was "habitually a slut an