I

I. GRANVILLE Sharp and thE SLAVE-TRADE, Macmillan's Magazine,
II. CARDINAL LAVIGERIE AND THE SLAVE-
TRADE,

259

Blackwood's Magazine,

266

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A SPRIG OF HOLLY.

I FOUND it, a sprig of holly,

It had fallen from an unknown hand,
In the home of the pine and myrtle,
Far off in this southern land.

And I know not whose hand had cast it,
Or careless or rude with scorn,
Whether pleased with a brighter berry,
Or pricked with its guard of thorn.

But there it lay in the pathway,

Poor sprig with its berries three, Like a waif or a stray from England,

And it seemed as a message to me.

Then sudden there flashed a vision

Of a Christmas far away,
Of a firelight shed on a curtain red,
And the shouts of the children at play;

Then a fir-tree shone in the centre,

And around it a wondering ring, Where the Snow King kisses the Fairy, And the Fairy frowns at the King.

And the dances! the valse! the polka!

And Sir Roger must wait his turn; For with breath all aflame, the great Snapdragon came,

And how blue all the tapers burn!

And awe is on childish faces,

And as in all things below,

You must first begin, if you wish to win,
To suffer; a fact we know:

So the Snow King puffs at his fingers,
And the Fairy pities his pain,

Come down, and, humbly looking up, reside, Till in thy lowest home thou'rt laid to dwell, And I have come, thither to be thy guide. 'My mountains, oh, my mountains, fare ye well!"

66

Weeping- Oh, look on me once more!"
I cried.

But thickest mist encompassed every head,
And darkness round each pinnacle was spread.
One milky stream, from a great snowy
breast,

And had he now kissed her and not his blis- Came down with me, singing to my unrest,

ter,

She would not have frowned again.

And so through the long, bright evening,
Until all the games are played,
And child vows given (smile at them, Heaven!)
Forgotten as soon as made.

For there must be kissing and cooing
Of birds in the nest at play,

As there must be wedding and wooing
Of birds full-grown, some day.

And little Alice is sleeping

Wide-mouthed in a wide armchair, One fat round arm fast keeping

That idol with flaxen hair.

When - hark! Is it "ten" there striking?
And look! Do the lights burn low?
Then sudden is heard the terrible word,
Away! it is time to go!

And I started, and lo! the holly
Lay bright in the pathway there,

Bidding me not lament, since it, too, came
From the wild mountains, to the meadows

tame;

From its dark, silent cradle, clamorously
Called by the voices of the sounding sea;
Leaving the rocky turrets of the earth,
And the dark fragrant forests near its birth,
Whose hairy talons clasp each mossy stone,
Lest by the lightnings they should be o'er-
thrown:

Below these iron-footed giants grey,
Soft velvet carpets, with sweet blossoms gay,
Spread on the lowest steps of that steep way;
And here, disconsolate, I weeping lay,
Until the angel on my shoulder laid
A tender, pitying hand, and to me said:
"Lo! I have come to smooth thy downward

path,

And lead thee gently to thy home beneath;
Dry thy vain tears, and hush thy weak lament,
To strengthen, and support thee, am I sent.
And each
Look up once more look!"

awful head

With the dark-hued sheen of its prickly green In the departing light glowed ruby red.

Guarding its fruitage fair:

And I love it, my sprig of holly,
Though it boast but its berries three;
For whatever it seem to others,

It was surely a message to me.

"Now hast thou seen that last great glory

7

a Jew, who happened to reside in his master's family. Religious controversies arose, and in each case Sharp was met with a similar argument; the Socinian declaring that he erred in his interpretation of the New Testament from want of knowledge of Greek, while the Jew attributed the inferences which he drew from passages of the Old Testament to his ignorance of Hebrew. Determined not to be baffled, this apprentice lad, whose schooling had finished at the age of fif teen, devoted his spare time to the study first of Greek and afterwards of Hebrew, with the astonishing result that in after

THE International Congress at Brussels and the recent speech of Lord Salisbury at the Guildhall have directed public attention once more to the question of the slave-trade. The very name of slavery is now abhorrent to the ears not only of Englishmen, but of men of every Christian and civilized country. Half a century ago England paid many millions out of the national purse to compensate the WestIndian slave-holders for the liberation of their negroes. Since then slavery has been abolished in the Southern States of Amer-years he carried on successful controver ica, as one result of a long and cruel civil war; Russia, half-civilized as she is, has emancipated her serfs; and we are now working with other European powers for the suppression of the slave-trade on the east coast of Africa. But it is perhaps. not generally remembered that this indig. nation against a traffic in human flesh and blood dates back for only a century, and that the origin, the foundation-stone, as it were, of the war against slavery and all its attendant horrors was one somewhat obscure and now almost forgotten individual, Granville Sharp.

This great philanthropist was born in 1734, and was the son of Thomas Sharp, Archdeacon of Northumberland, a man well known in his day, and grandson of the still better-known John Sharp, who was chaplain-in-ordinary to James the Second, and was afterwards made Archbishop of York, by William the Third. In 1750 his father, who had a large family, withdrew him from school at Durham and bound him apprentice to a linen-draper named Halsey, in London; and he continued to be connected with trade until the year 1758, when he obtained a clerkship in the Ordnance Office.

But already in the young apprentice we see the extraordinary force of character and intellectual capacity which afterwards distinguished the man. Brought up, as he had been, in an orthodox clerical family, and firmly convinced of the truths of the Christian revelation, he was during his apprenticeship brought into contact first with a Socinian and afterwards with

sies with the leading Greek and Hebrew scholars of the day, and actually invented a rule with regard to the use of the Greek article in Scripture which has since been very generally adopted.

But it is with the philanthropic efforts of Granville Sharp, rather than with his literary achievements that we have to deal, although doubtless his controversy with the celebrated Dr. Kennicott on a point of Hebrew scholarship trained his remarkable intellect for the part which he subsequently took in a great legal strife. It was in the year 1765 that a seeming accident turned his active sympathies towards the wrongs of the African slaves. His brother, William Sharp, who was one of the first London surgeons of his day, opened his house every morning for the gratuitous relief of the poor, and on one occasion a negro, named Jonathan Strong, appeared in a miserable condition to ask for medical aid. It appeared on inquiry that he had been the slave of a lawyer at Barbadoes, named Lisle, who had first destroyed his health by barbarous treatment and then turned him adrift in the streets. The Sharps befriended him; he was admitted into St. Bartholomew's Hospital, and after a time he recovered suffi ciently to be placed in service. ill-luck, or, as the sequel showed, goodluck would have it, about two years afterwards Jonathan was recognized in the streets by his former master. Seeing the negro apparently in good health again, the lawyer determined to recover what he called his property, and with the assist

But as

he employed a leading solicitor, and retained Sir James Eyre, afterwards lord chief justice of the Common Pleas. And this was the result after considering the case, his solicitor brought him a copy of an opinion given in 1729 by York and Talbot, the attorney and solicitor-general of the day, affirming that a slave coming from the West Indies to Great Britain or Ireland does not become free, and told him that it was hopeless to attempt any defence, as Lord Chief Justice Mansfield held the same opinion.

ance of two officers of the lord mayor suc- first step was naturally to obtain the ceeded in kidnapping Strong, intimidating best legal advice, and with that view his new master to whom he appealed for protection, and lodging him in gaol. From thence the negro wrote a letter to his former benefactor, Granville Sharp, who, undeterred by the evasions of the authorities of the prison, insisted on seeing him, and then with characteristic decision (to quote from his diary) "charged the master of the prison at his own peril not to deliver him up to any person whatever who might claim him, until he had been carried before the lord mayor, Sir Thomas Kite, to whom Granville Sharp immediately went and gave information that a Jonathan Strong had been confined there without any warrant, and he therefore requested but fortunately for the cause of humanof his lordship to summon those persons who detained him, and to give Granville Sharp notice to attend at the same time. This request was complied with."

Ninety-nine men out of a hundred would now have given the case up in despair,

ity, Granville Sharp was the hundredth. "Thus forsaken by my professional defenders," he wrote some years afterwards, "I was compelled, through want of regu The diary then goes on to relate a lar legal assistance, to make a hopeless stormy sitting at the Mansion House, at attempt at self-defence, though I was which Sharp found himself confronted by totally unacquainted either with the prac two persons who claimed the negro; one tice of the law or the foundation of it, a public notary, who produced a bill of having never opened a law-book (except sale from the original master to a Jamaica the Bible) until that time when I most planter, named Kerr; the other man reluctantly undertook to search the innamed Lair, the captain of the vessel indexes of a law-library which my bookwhich Strong was to be taken away. The seller had lately purchased." lord mayor having dismissed the claim, Lair seized the negro by the arm, and told his lordship that he took him as the property of Mr. Kerr. But Sharp, again equal to the occasion, promptly charged the captain with an assault, and he at once quitted his hold.

The junior clerk in the Ordnance Office attacking the lord chief justice on a point of law might, as in the case of his controversy with Dr. Kennicott, be compared to David in his combat with Goliath; and, like his Hebrew predecessor, the modern David was destined to conquer with the sling and the stone of his own abilities and of faith in the justice of his cause. Without instruction, without assistance, discouraged by several legal authorities, including the celebrated Blackstone, to whom he appealed, and deserted, as has been stated, by his own lawyers, for two whole years he devoted himself to his ob

The slave-owner was not, however, going to let his prey slip from his grasp so easily. He at once instituted a lawsuit against Sharp and his brother James for having obtained the liberation of the negro, and knowing the former to be a man of peace, he endeavored to intimidate him by demanding "gentlemanlike satisfaction." Sharp's reply is characteristic | ject “faint yet pursuing." of the man and of his sense of humor: "I told him that as he had studied the law so many years, he should want no satisfaction that the law could give him." To this satisfaction Sharp now addressed himself, and he gave it in a manner which would hardly have been thought possible. His

Before the final term at which he had to answer the charge against himself and his brother, he produced in manuscript his tract "On the Injustice of tolerating Slavery in England," in which he defended the course which he had taken with such learning, research, and closeness of argu

ment, that the preconceived opinions of the lawyers among whom it was circulated were shaken to their foundations, and the counsel for the prosecution were so intimidated that they declined to persevere with the action.

mutual consent of Lord Mansfield and Sharp. It was similar to those of Strong and Lewis. Somerset was a Virginian negro who had been seized and conveyed on board ship by his former master, a Mr. Charles Stewart. He appealed to Sharp, who at once took up the case, and placed it in the hands of eminent legal counsel.

Sharp thus remained master of the field in the first skirmish of outposts, but it was only to be the prelude to a general We have no space to enter into the deassault on his main position. Already in tails of this celebrated trial. The counsel his tract he had boldly carried the war on the side of the negro were led by Mr. into the enemy's country, and, basing his Sergeant Davy, while Mr. Dunning and arguments on an act of Charles the Sec- another appeared for Stewart. Sharp sup. ond, had declared that not only the seller plied Davy and his coadjutors with his of the negro, but all who had aided and notes on the trial of Lewis, and appears to abetted in the transaction were liable to have borne the whole, or at least the main heavy fines and costs; and it was but a part, of the expense; but to the eternal short time before the force of his reason- honor of the bar it must be stated that the ing was again to be felt. Another negro, whole of his counsel refused to accept any named Lewis, had been kidnapped by his recompense for their services. Unfortu former master, a Mr. Stapylton, and car-nately there is another side to the picture. ried on board a ship bound for Jamaica. Dunning, who defended Stewart, was the Sharp obtained a writ of Habeas Corpus, same who at the trial of Lewis had held up had it served on board the ship, which | Sharp's tract and declared his readiness had been detained in the Downs, and to maintain in any court of England that brought back the negro in triumph. The case was subsequently tried at the King's Bench before Lord Mansfield, and in the course of it a Mr. Dunning, who had been retained as counsel on behalf of the negro, held up Sharp's tract in his hand and publicly declared that he was ready to maintain in any of the courts of Great Britain, that no man could be legally detained as a slave in this country. The wary chief justice seems to have evaded the real point at issue by discharging the negro on the ground that Stapylton had failed to prove that he was even nominally his property; but he practically refused to pass any judgment upon the slave-owner, a proceeding against which Sharp indig. nantly protested.

no property could here exist in a slave. Granville Sharp's opinion of his conduct was expressed in a manner very severe for so charitable a man. "And yet after so solemn a declaration he, Mr. Dunning, appeared on the opposite side of the question (against James Somerset) the very next year! This is an abominable and insufferable practice in lawyers, to undertake causes diametrically opposite to their own declared opinions of law and common justice."

The case was opened in February, 1772, before Lord Mansfield assisted by the three justices, Ashton, Willes, and Ashurst. To use the words of Mr. Prince Hoare, Sharp's biographer, "the cause of liberty was no longer to be tried on But the trials of the cases of Strong, the ground of a mere special indictment, Lewis, and of two or three other negroes, but on the broad principle of the essenhad not decided the question of the ab-tial and constitutional right of every man stract right of slaves to freedom in En- in England to the liberty of his person, gland. Public opinion continued to fluctuate on the subject, and that of Lord Mansfield was known to be adverse to the slave.

At length in 1772 the case of James Somerset presented itself, and appears to have been selected as a test case, with the

unless forfeited by the laws of England." The counsel for the negro based themselves mainly on Sharp's now celebrated argument, that "all the people who come into this country immediately become subject to the laws of this country, are gov. erned by the laws, regulated entirely in