debts?
With his merits as to the Abolition, (if that be what is meant by his
character,)--merits which it was a mere fabrication to pretend that
Clarkson had ever been slow to acknowledge,--those letters had
absolutely no possible connexion; and whoever, on this score, affects to
defend this publication, is capable of vindicating the printing any
private letter upon the most delicate subject, by any man who writes the
history of any other affair, or who writes on any subject from which the
correspondence is wholly foreign. It is proper to add, that the editors
of this Journal have most properly published a retractation of the
charges made, in their ignorance of the whole facts of the case.

The acute and sagacious editor of T. Clarkson's vindication, has given
his reasons for suspecting that this criticism, in the _Edinburgh
Review_, must have proceeded from some party directly concerned in the
publication of Wilberforce's life. We enter into no discussion of the
circumstantial evidence adduced in favour of this supposition. The
editors of the Journal are the parties to whom we look; and as they,
after being to all appearance misled by some partial writer, have made
the best reparation for an involuntary error, by doing justice to the
injured party, we can have no further remark to make upon the subject.

But it is impossible to close these pages without mentioning the
extraordinary merit of this latest, and, in all likelihood, this last
production of Clarkson's pen. It is indeed a most able performance, and
has been admired by some of the ablest controversial writers of the age,
as a model of excellence in controversial writing. Plain, vigorous,
convincing, perfectly calm and temperate, devoid of all acrimony, barely
saying enough to repel unjust aggression without one word of
retaliation, never losing sight for a moment of its purely defensive
object, and accordingly, from the singleness of purpose with which that
object is pursued, attaining it with the most triumphant success,--no
wonder that the public judgment has been loudly and universally
pronounced in its favour, that its adversaries have been reduced to
absolute silence, that its author's name has been exalted even higher
than before it stood. But the wonder is to see such unimpaired vigour at
four-score years of age, after a life of unwearied labour, latterly
clouded by domestic calamity, and a spirit as young as ever in zeal for
justice, tempered only by