"GRANVILLE Suann."—Dy Edward Lascelles. Oxford Untversity Press.
108. 6d.
This is thie biography of a famous rank, a Don Quixote of the cighteenth century whose life was largely spent in tilting at windmills. A mild-looking, sweet-faced maniac, he is probably best known to us today as the man who put an end to slavery in England, and who with Wilberforce, helped to Kill the slave trade abroad in the last years of the eighteenth century.
To describe Sharp as a crank is perhaps unfair, though it is none the less true, We may console ourselves with the thought that if Sharp had not been a crank his fight against slavery would never Tt all a wretched, realed negro sav, Jonathan Strong, outside brother's surgery in Mincing Lane, one day in 1765. The slave had been beaten and left to starve by his, he was now almost blind Poor Sharp did his best to relieve their distress, "but the more he gave the wider went his fame as a philanthropist, and the greater became the crowd of prospective pensioners" at his door. Thus, to relieve the philanthropist as well as his pensioners, came about the ill-fated idea of setting up a negro colony in, Sierra Leone, that pesti srous district in Africa known the White Man's Utopian experiment which collapsed not so much through lack of support as through a return to. barbarism on the part of the colonists and neighbours, But these are only the outlines of Sharp's crowded life which Mr.
aaseclles has ye-told so unaffectedly, Especially good is that corner of his canvas where he describes for us Sharp's declining years. To. was still the "groat Mr. Sharp," but eloquence had dwindled away to zearecly audible mutterings about the quite unfit for work. The Sharp brothers took him in, had him installed in a hospital, and all but cured. When his master came Horn of Daniel stalked through upon him in the streets, a few nionths later, he seems to have regretted having parted with him, 0 he had him kidnapped and sold to a planter for £20, As soon as Sharp heard the news, he went to the Poultry Counter prison where Stromz wax being tained, while awaiting shipment for the West Indies, and "in a fow minutes heard enough to start him on the crusade which ended in the abolition of the slave trade." The story of that crusade fourht against by all the best lawyers, and won on i technical point by a man who up till that time had never opened 2 treatise on law is an extraordinary one,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.