When the question was decided last year, they renewed their request.  They represented to me, that no person knew the beginning and progress of this great work so well as myself; that it was a pity that such knowledge should die with me; that such a history would be useful; that it would promote good feelings among men; that it would urge them to benevolent exertions; that it would supply them with hope in the midst of these; that it would teach them many valuable lessons;—­these and other things were said to me.  But, encouraging as they were, I never lost sight of the objection; which is the subject of this chapter; nor did I ever fail to declare, that though, considering the part I had taken in this great cause, I might be qualified better than some others, yet it was a task too delicate for me to perform.  I always foresaw that I could not avoid making myself too prominent an object in such a history, and that I should be liable, on that account, to the suspicion of writing it for the purpose of sounding my own praise.

With this objection my friends were not satisfied.  They answered, that I might treat the History of the Abolition of the Slave Trade as a species of biography, or as the history of a part of my own life:  that people, who had much less weighty matters to communicate, wrote their own histories; and that no one charged them with vanity for so doing.

I own I was not convinced by this answer.  I determined, however, in compliance with their wishes, to examine the objection more minutely, and to see if I could overcome it more satisfactorily to my own mind.  With this view, I endeavoured to anticipate the course which such a history would take.  I saw clearly, in the first place, that there were times, for months together, when the committee for the abolition of the Slave Trade was labouring without me, and when I myself for an equal space of time was labouring in distant parts of the kingdom without them.  Hence I perceived that, if my own exertions were left out, there would be repeated chasms in this history; and, indeed, that it could not be completed without the frequent mention of myself.  And I was willing to hope that this would be so obvious to the good sense of the reader, that if he should think me vain-glorious in the early part of it, he would afterwards, when he advanced in the perusal of it, acquit me of such a charge.  This consideration was the first which removed my objection on this head.  That there can be no ground for any charge of ostentation, as far as the origin of this history is concerned, so I hope to convince him there, can be none, by showing him in what light I have always viewed myself in connexion with the committee, to which I have had the honour to belong.