wise and
gallant Lewis, who explored for us the Western wilderness, or Edward
Coles, one of the rare men who know how to surrender, for conscience'
sake, home, fortune, ease, and good repute.

While he was still in college he became deeply interested in the
question, whether men could rightfully hold property in men. At that
time the best of the educated class at the South were still
abolitionists in a romantic or sentimental sense, just as Queen Marie
Antoinette was a republican during the American Revolution. Here and
there a young man like George Wythe had set free his slaves and gone
into the profession of the law. With the great majority, however, their
disapproval of slavery was only an affair of the intellect, which led to
no practical results. It was not such with Edward Coles. The moment you
look at the portrait given in the recent sketch of his life by Mr. E. B.
Washburne, you perceive that he was a person who might be slow to make
up his mind, but who, when he had once discovered the right course,
could never again be at peace with himself until he had followed it.

While at college he read everything on the subject of slavery that fell
in his way, and he studied it in the light of the Declaration of
Independence, which assured him that men are born free and equal and
endowed with certain natural rights which are inalienable. He made up
his mind, while he was still a student, that it was wrong to hold
slaves, and he resolved that he would neither hold them nor live in a
State which permitted slaves to be held. He was determined, however, to
do nothing rashly. One reason which induced him to accept the place
offered him by Mr. Madison was his desire of getting a knowledge of the
remoter parts of the Union, in order to choose the place where he could
settle his slaves most advantageously.

While he was yet a member of the presidential household, he held that
celebrated correspondence with Mr. Jefferson, in which he urged the
ex-President to devote the rest of his life to promoting the abolition
of slavery. Mr. Jefferson replied that the task was too arduous for a
man who had passed his seventieth year. It was like bidding old Priam
buckle on the armor of Hector.

"This enterprise," he added, "is for the young, for those who can follow
it up and bear it through to its consummation. It shall have all my
prayers and these are the only weapons of an old man. But, in the mean
time, are you right in abandoning t