"never to begin a book without finishing it"; "never to consider a book finished until it is mastered"; and "to study everything with the whole mind."
When only thirty-two, Buxton entered Parliament, and at once assumed that position of influence there of which every honest, earnest, well-informed man is secure who enters that assembly of the first gentlemen in the world. The principal question to which he devoted himself was complete emancipation of the slaves in the British colonies. He himself used to attribute the interest which he early felt in this question to the influence of Priscilla Gurney, one of the Earlham family—a woman of a fine intellect and warm heart, abounding in illustrious virtues. When on her deathbed, in 1821, she repeatedly sent for Buxton, and urged him "to make the cause of the slaves the great object of his life." Her last act was to attempt to reiterate the solemn charge, and she expired in the ineffectual effort. Buxton never forgot her counsel; he named one of his daughters after her; and on the day on which she was married from his house, on the 1st of August, 1834—the day of negro emancipation—after his Priscilla had been manumitted from her filial service, and left her father's home in the company of her husband, Buxton sat down and thus wrote to a friend: "The bride is just gone; everything has passed off to admiration; and there is not a slave in the British colonies!"
Buxton was no genius—not a great intellectual leader nor discoverer, but mainly an earnest, straightforward, resolute, energetic man. Indeed, his whole character is most forcibly expressed in
