45 Biographical Sketch of Mr. Roscoe. 46 perhaps too cordially united,) Mr. Roscoe was busily employed in writing the History of Lorenzo dê Medicis. This work was begun about the year 1790, and published early in 1796. buzz of ignorant applause, raised by the leaders of literary fashion, is now still. The sentence of sober judgment confirms the verdict which was pronounced according to the dictates of first impressions. The liberal acumen of Parr has assayed the Life of Lo Life's bitter draught with harsher bitter fill, Blast every joy, and add to every ill ; The trembling limbs with galling iron bind, Nor loose the heavier bondage of the mind. Thus, by his own reflections, Mr. Roscoe was prepared to enter with On its first appearance, public opiardour into the views of the friends nion proclaimed in its favour; and of suffering humanity. He had fre- this was confirmed by the decisions of quent conversations with Mr. Clark-criticism, through the ordeal of which son, who first drew the attention of the it quickly passed. Since that period, the kingdom at large to this national dis- literary world have had time to recover grace. A specious pamphlet was pub-from the dazzle of surprise; and the fished in defence of the trade, entitled, "Seriptural Researches into the Licitness of the Slave Trade," and written by a Spanish Jesuit of the name of Harris. Mr. Roscoe answered it with great spirit and acuteness, in a counter-pamphlet, called “ A Scriptural Refutation of a Pamphlet lately pub-renzo, and has found it sterling gold. ished by the Rev. Raymund Harris." But this copious and interesting subject awaked all his sympathies, and the public were gratified by a most affecting poem, entitled, "The Wrongs of Africa," which Mr. Roscoe intended to complete in three parts. The two first appeared in 1787, and 1788, but the lovers of genuine poetry have to lament that he has not yet fulfilled his promise of favouring them with the third. During several years, expectation was kept alive; but circumstances have still occurred, to diminish the hopes that were once entertained. A mind so active and generous as Mr. Roscoe's, could not remain uninterested in that stupendous event, the French revolution. He of course caught the enthusiastic glow that warmed the breasts of the friends of freedom, while they beheld a mighty nation throwing off the fetters of despotism; and fondly hoped that the consequences of their exertions would be lasting peace, good order, and equal laws. He even tuned the lyre on this bewitching theme, and proclaimed the praises of Freedom in a translation of one of Petrarch's Odes, which found its way into the Mercurio Italico; a song entitled, "Millions be Free;" and the famous poem, Vine-covered Hills," which may be classed among the most finished compositions in the English language. "The During the season of tumult and discord, which succeeded the attempt of the combined powers to reinstate, in the plenitude of its authority, the despotism of France, (an attempt, in which this country, fatally to itself, its author from the merciless tomahawk Its dignity and grace have shielded of the writer* of the Pursuits of Literature; and we may fairly presume, that its rank is fixed among the most splendid ornaments of English com position. lic have been affected by the peruThe admiration with which the pubsal of this work will, no doubt, be increased by a knowledge of the circumstances in which it was composed. At the time when it was projected, Mr. Roscoe lived at the distance of two miles from Liverpool, whither he the business of his office. The dry was obliged daily to repair to attend and tedious details of law occupied his attention during the whole of the alone, he was able to dedicate to morning and afternoon; his evenings study: and it will be easily conceived, that a gentleman, surrounded by a numerous family, and whose company was courted by his friends, must have experienced, even at these hours, a variety of interruptions. No public library provided him with materials. The rare books which he had occasion to consult, he was obliged to procure in London at a considerable expense. But in the midst of all these difficulties, the work grew under his hands; and In order that it might be printed under his own immediate inspection, he established an excellent press in the town of Liverpool, and submitted to the disgusting toil of correcting the proofs. Soon after the appearance of his 47 Biographical Sketch of Mr. Roscoe. history, Mr. Roscoe relinquished the profession of an attorney, and entered himself at Gray's Inn, with a view of becoming and acting as a barrister. He took advantage of the leisure which the relinquishment of business afforded him, to enter upon the study of the Greek language; in which, according to the report of his intimate friends, he has made considerable progress. 48 sentation of his native town. After an arduous struggle, he was returned at the head of the poll. But when his friends retired from office, he experienced the mutability of popular favour, and found the probability of support so much diminished on the dissolution of parliament, which took place in 1807, that he declined standing another contest. It was, however, a high gratification to him, that during the short period of his parliamentary life, it was his lot to assist in the proscription of that blot on the national character, the African slave trade. On one of the debates on the bill, for the abolition of that odious traffic, he made a speech marked by firmness, good sense, and good feeling. The literary public had been so much gratified by the perusal of Mr. Roscoe's Life of Lorenzo dê Medicis, that they unanimously called upon him for the life of the son of that distinguished patron of letters and learned men, the celebrated Pontiff Leo X. The undertaking of this work was entirely congenial with Mr. Roscoe's taste Mr. Roscoe seems to have brought and wishes, and he soon commenced with him, on his return from public to its composition with his usual zeal and private life, a taste for political disindustry. In the year 1805, it was cussion, which he evinced in the publipublished in four volumes in quarto. cation of a few pamphlets on the topics Its reception was not quite so favour- of the day. These, as might be exable as that which was experienced by pected, were received with much comthe Life of Lorenzo dê Medicis. The mendation by one party, and with charm of surprise was diminished; much abuse by the other. Whatever and by his strictures on the conduct of may be their merits or demerits in some of our early reformers, who other respects, it was universally ac"though they had suffered persecu- knowledged, that they were written in tion, had not learned mercy," Mr. a spirit of urbanity which political Roscoe gave umbrage to ecclesiasti-writers in general would do well to cal bigotry. It soon, however, came imitate. to a second edition, and competent judges recognize in it the same fidelity in the narration of facts, the same taste in the fine arts, as characterised its precursor; expressed in a tone of style more nervous and compressed, than its author had hitherto exhibited. Whilst employed in the arrangement of the materials for this work, Mr. Roscoe was invited to take the situation of chief and active partner in the banking-house of Clarke and Sons, which had been long established in Liverpool; a situation which, with much reluctance, and, as the event proved, unfortunately for himself, his family, and the public, he accepted. The sequel of Mr. Roscoe's history cannot be narrated without pain. Whilst he was engaged in the pursuits of elegant literature, and in deeds of active benevolence, a series of untoward events compelled the banking establishment, in which he was concerned, to suspend its payment. By the liberality of the creditors, indulgence was afforded to enable it to retrieve its affairs; but the difficulties of the times precluded the possibility of this, and Mr. Roscoe, and his partners, were obliged to submit to the process of bankruptcy. To a man of Mr. Roscoe's temperament, this calamity, as affecting the During the whole of his life, Mr. interests of others, is no doubt exRoscoe had been an ardent admirer tremely grievous. As to himself, we of the political principles of Mr. Fox; are confident that he will bear misforand whilst the last Whig Administra- tune with firmness. In the hour of his tion were in office, he was solicited by adversity he will be consoled by the the friends of that administration in sympathies of friendship; and the acLiverpool, and by many others of dif- tivity of his mind will discover in the ferent political sentiments, on the dis-wide field of science and literature, solution of parliament in the year objects, the contemplation of which 1896, to stand candidate for the repre- will beguile the sense of affliction. THE name of Mr. Ward is well known among the Baptist missionaries, who, for zeal and usefulness, have of late been so justly distinguished among the idolaters of India. 50 superstition, which has no parallel in the history of tribes the most savage and barbarous. A female is despised as soon as she is born: she comes into the world amidst the frowns of her parents and friends, disappointed that the child is On returning to England, and surnot a boy. Every mother among the veying the various privileges and bless-tribe of Rajpoots puts her female child ings enjoyed by his countrymen, it was natural for him to contrast them with the barbarities he had been called to witness, during his long absence from home. In his several discourses, while making an appeal to the judgments and feelings of his hearers, Mr. Ward gave in detail, to large and deeply affected audiences, particularly in Liverpool, a recital of facts that filled every mind with horror. From these, the impression that was made will not be easily effaced. But as there are multitudes within the circulation of the Imperial Magazine, who had not the opportunity of hearing from his own lips an account of the melancholy incidents, we rejoice in being able to furnish, from his pen, a faithful narration of cruelties, which cannot be too widely diffused, nor too deeply deplored. On board the Ship Nestor, for New York, HAVING heard, in passing through Li- to death as soon as born. While I was in Bengal, I was informed of the case of a Rajpoot who had spared one of his daughters, and she lived till she attained the age when India girls are marriageable. A girl in the house of a Rajpoot was, however, so extraordinary a circumstance, that no parent chose to permit his son to marry her. The father then became alarmed for her chastity and the honour of his family, and he therefore took her aside one day, and with a hatchet eut her to pieces! These are the circumstances into which your sex enter into life in British India. In childhood and youth they have no education, no cultivation of any kind whatever. There is not a single girls' school in all India; and the mother being herself entirely unlettered, and being the devoted victim of a dark and cruel superstition, is utterly incapable of improving her child. The first days of the girl are therefore spent in an inanity which prepares her for a life doomed to be spent in superstition and vice. In the age of comparative childhood she is united in marriage without any knowledge of, or having ever seen, her husband: when they meet together for the first time, they are bound together for life. Thousands who are thus married in a state of childhood, lose their husbands without having ever lived with them, and are doomed to a life of To the Ladies of Liverpool, and of the widowhood; for the law forbids them United Kingdom. to re-marry. Parents in some cases THERE are in Hindoost'han seventy-marry fifty or sixty daughters to one five millions of your sex who can nei- Bramhun, that the family may be ther read nor write, and thirty millions raised to honour by a marriage relaof these are British subjects. In every tion to this man. These females never country not ameliorated by Chris- live with the husband, but in the houses tianity, the state of women has always of their own parents, or they leave the been most deplorable; but the Hindoo houses in which they have been thus legislators have absolutely made their sacrificed for the supposed honour of acquisition of the knowledge of letters the family, and enter the abodes of a curse, and they are by a positive infamy and ruin. prohibition denied all access to their Scriptures. Being thus degraded, even by their Sacred Writings, women in India are in a state of ignorance and | Supposing the female, however, to have been united to a person who really becomes attached to her, what a mother, without the knowledge of the 51 Cruelties in India. 52 Two females roasted alive every day in one part of British India alone! At noon-day, and in the presence of numerous spectators, the poor widow, ensnared and drawn to the funeral pile, is tied to the dead body, pressed down on the faggots by strong levers; and burnt alive, her screams amidst the flames being drowned by shouts and music. Amidst the spectators is her own son, her first born, who, tre alphabet! Wholly unacquainted with But horrors still deeper are connectmankind, and with all the employments ed with the state of female society in of females in a civilized country; un- India. The English magistrates in the able either to make, to mend, or to presidency of Bengal, in their annual wash the clothes of her household! official returns to the Calcutta governShe never sits to eat with her husband, ment, state, that in the year 1817 (three but prepares his food, waits upon him, years ago,) seven hundred and six wo and partakes of what he leaves. If a men, widows, were either burnt alive friend, of the other sex, calls upon her or buried alive with the dead bodies of husband, she retires. She is veiled, or their husbands, in that part of British goes in a covered palanquin if she India. Is there any thing like this in leaves the house. She never mixes in the whole records of time? Have fires public companies. She derives no like these, and so numerous, ever been knowledge from the other sex, except kindled any where else on earth-or from the stories to which she may lis-graves like these ever been opened? ten from the mouth of a religious mendicant. She is, in fact, a mere animal kept for burden or for slaughter in the house of her husband. A case lately occurred in Calcutta, of a girl being burnt alive on the funeral pile with the dead body of the youth with whom she was that day to have been married. You will be prepared now, Ladies, to expect that such a system of mental darkness will have rendered the sex, in India, the devoted victims of ido-mendous idea! has set fire to the pile, latry: and such victims no other country, however savage, however benighted, can boast. What must be the state of the female mind when millions are found throwing the children of their vows into the sea; when a guard of Hindoo soldiers are necessary to prevent mothers throwing their living children into the jaws of the alligators, these mothers standing and watching the animal while it crushes the bones, tears the flesh, and drinks the blood of their own offspring! How deplorable the condition of your sex, when super-knees, as she sits in the centre of a deep stition thus extinguishes every sensibility of the female, and every feeling of the mother, and makes her more savage than the tiger which howls in the forest, which always spares and cherishes its own offspring. At the calls of superstition, many females immolate themselves by a voluntary death in the sacred rivers of India. A friend of mine, at the junction of the Jumna and the Ganges, at Allahabad, in one morning, saw, from his own window, sixteen females, with pans of water fastened to their sides, sink themselves in the river, a few bubbles of air arising only to the surface of the water after they were gone down. The drowning of so many kittens in England would excite more horror here, than the drowning of sixteen of your own sex in India! and watches the progress of the flames which are to consume the living mother to ashes, the mother who fed him from her breast, and dandled him on her knees, and who once looked up to him as the support of the declining days of herself and his father. I have seen three widows thus burnt alive, and could have witnessed many more such spectacles, had they not been too much for my feelings. Other widows are buried alive: here the female takes the dead body upon her grave, and her children and relations, who have prepared the grave, throw in the earth around her: two of these descend into the grave and trample the earth with their feet around the body of the widow. She sits an unremonstrating spectator of the process: the earth rises higher and higher around her; at length it reaches the head, when the remaining earth is thrown with haste upon her, and these children and relations mount the grave, and trample upon the head of the expiring victim!! O ye British mothers-ye British widows, to whom shall these desolate beings look? In whose ears shall these thousands of orphans cry, losing father and mother in one day, if not to you? Where shall we go? In what corner of this miserable world, full of the habitations of cruelty, shall we find femals 53 Historical Observations respecting Liverpool. society like this-widows and orphans | like these? Seventy-five millions in this state of ignorance? Say, how long, ye who never saw a tear, but ye wiped it away a wound, but ye attempted to heal it—a human sufferer, but ye poured consolation into his heart-how long shall these fires burn-these graves be opened? The appeal, my fair country-women, is to you, to every female in Britain. Government may do much to put an end to these immolations; but, without the communication of knowledge, these fires can never be wholly quenched, nor can your sex in India ever rise to that state to which Divine Providence has destined them. Don't despair-the victims are numerous; but on that account shall the life-boat not leave the shore? There can hardly be a misery connected with human existence, which the pity and the zeal of British females, under the blessings of Providence, is not able to remove; and if this dreadful case be properly felt in every town of the United Kingdom, these immolations must shortly cease for ever. Schools must be commenced-knowJedge must be communicated; and then the Hindoo female will be behind none of her sex in the charms which adorn the female character-in no mental elevation to which the highest rank of British females have attained. Other triumphs of humanity may have been gained by our Howards, our Clarksons, our Wilberforces, but this emancipation of the females and widows of British India must be the work of the British Fair. (Signed) W. W. OBSERVATIONS, HISTORICAL AND DESCRIPTIVE, RESPECTING LIVERPOOL. THE large, populous, and flourishing town of Liverpool, may be considered as holding, in a commercial point of view, a rank inferior to none in the British nation, with the exception of London; and even to this grand emporium of the world, it may be deemed in many respects a formidable rival. The enterprising spirit of its merchants, and the adventurous hardihood of its sailors, have carried its name into every quarter of the globe, and established its mercantile reputation among all the civilized nations of the earth. Liverpool however, notwithstanding its long-established and increasing re | 54 putation, is not a town of any considerable antiquity. Within the memory of many now living, its appearance has assumed a new aspect, and houses and streets now cover an extensive tract, which, within the reach of their recollection, was formerly clothed with verdure. Emerging thus from comparative obscurity into affluence and power, its origin has been but indistinctly marked; and its progressive movements from insignificance to wealth and influence, have partially escaped the notice of its merchants, to whose industrious activity, and successful speculations, it is chiefly indebted for its aggrandisement. On the origin of its name, different opinions have been entertained; and from the variations which occur in the orthography of the term Liverpool, its etymology, which perhaps was formerly distinct and unambiguous, is now rendered equivocal and uncertain. Liver, the former part of this name, is said by some to have heen derived from a species of Liverwort, which in some places abounded on its coasts. Others have contended that a particular species of water-fowl, denominated Liver or Lever, frequenting a collection of waters, which in ancient times was called the Pool, gave birth to this branch of its name. To favour this etymology, it is urged that the crest of the town-arms exhibits a bird, bearing this appellation. This fact, however, has been doubted by others, and powerful reasons have been assigned to destroy the application, but without substituting any thing more plausible in its stead. The latter part of the term appears evidently to have been derived from local circumstances. It seems to be admitted by universal consent, that the site now occupied by the Old Dock was formerly a pool, to which the tide flowed through Byrom-street, Whitechapel, and Paradise-street. On the border of this pool the town originally stood; and the primitive appellation is still preserved in the name of Poollane. But from what source soever the former term has been derived, there is decisive evidence that the compound was in existence so early as the days of Henry II., for in a charter bearing | date 1172, it is said to be a place |