the slave-trade with all his might.  “I desire of you, my Lords, in your humane frenzy, to show some humanity to the whites as well as to the negroes",—­illustrating this remark by a picture of the sufferings of an English trader who had risked thirty thousand pounds on the slave-trade that year.  When an entering wedge was attempted for the improvement of the bloody code of criminal law, Thurlow opposed it with passion.  The particular clause selected by the reformers was one which demanded that women who had been connected with any treasonable movements should be burnt alive.  It was proposed to reduce their punishment to the same scale as men’s.  Thurlow made it his duty to defend the ancient practice.  He was, in short, mixed up with every effort of his time, which we now consider disgraceful, for arresting the gradual progress of reform.

Now that Thurlow’s wine-cellar is a college-chapel, that young men study arithmetic in the room the Great Seal was stolen from, that Mr. Ruskin teaches water-color drawing in Thurlow’s bed-chamber, that Tom Brown, alias Mr. Hughes, presides over a weekly tea-party in the three-pair back, and drills the awkward squad of the working-men’s battalion in the garden, it seems worth while to show that at least some places in the world have improved in eighty years, whether the world itself is to be given up as a mistake or not.  We will let Lord Thurlow go, as Lord Campbell does, with this charitable wish:—­“I have not learned,” he says, “any particulars of his end, but I will hope that it was a good one.  I trust, that, conscious of the approaching change, having sincerely repented of his violence of temper, of the errors into which he had been led by worldly ambition, and of the irregularities of his private life, he had seen the worthlessness of the objects by which he had been allured; that, having gained the frame of mind which his awful situation required, he received the consolations of religion; and that, in charity with mankind, he tenderly bade a long and last adieu to the relations and friends who surrounded him.”  There is not an atom of fact known on which to found Lord Campbell’s hope.  But I, also, will leave Lord Thurlow with this charitable wish, and I will now ask the readers of the “Atlantic,” who may be enough interested in social reform and a mutual education, to see what has happened between his wine-cellar and ridge-pole since the “London Working-Men’s College” was established there.

The founder of the Working-Men’s College, as I have intimated, is the Rev. Frederic Denison Maurice, the eminent practical theologian.  Its age is now six years,—­as it was founded in the autumn of 1854.  He says himself, in a striking speech he made at Manchester not long since, that the plan originated in that “awful year 1848, which I shall always look upon as one of the great epochs in history.”  He says that “a knot of men, of different professions, lawyers, doctors, parsons, artists, chemists, and such like,”