a fatal necessity, which he had always deprecated. He edited an annual entitled
"Friendship's Offering," and seemed to he irrecoverably doomed to such humble
and precarious authorship, when, fortunately, an article which he had written
upon the subject of slavery in South Africa before he left the colony, and transmitted to the "New Monthly Magazine," arrested the attention of Messrs. Z.
Macaulay and Buxton, by whose influence he was appointed secretary to the
Anti-slavery Society. No situation could have been more accordant with his
predilections. He had hitherto been the advocate of the enslaved Hottentot
and injured Caffre, while the recollection of his own wrongs gave a double edge
to his remonstrances, and fresh fire to his eloquence ; but now there was full
scope for his pen upon the subject, and that, too, not in behalf of one or two
tribes, but of humanity at large. He not only threw himself heartily into the
work, but inspired others with congenial enthusiasm, while the directors of the
society could not sufficiently admire the greatness of his zeal and value of his
services. At length, as all the world well knows, the persevering labours of the
slavery abolitionists were crowned with success, and on the 27th of June, 1834,
the document of the society announcing the act of abolition, and inviting all
interested in the cause to set apart the approaching 1st of August as a day of religious gratitude and thanksgiving, was signed "Thomas Pringle." In this
way he had unconsciously been removed from Africa, the interests of whose
oppressed children he had so deeply at heart, to a situation where he could the
most effectually promote the great work to which his philanthropic energies
were devoted. What, compared with this, would his solitary appeals have been in behalf of Hottentots, Bosjesmen, and Bechuanas?
And now his appointed work was done. He had lived, and toiled, and succeeded and what further can man expect upon earth? Only the day after the document was given forth that proclaimed the triumph of Africa and humanity, Pringle was attacked by his last illness, and from the most trivial of causes a crumb of bread that had passed down the windpipe, and occasioned a severe fit of coughing, by which some small blood-vessel was lacerated. Consumption followed; but, unaware of the fact, his chief wish was to return to the Cape, and settle, with a few hundred pounds, upon 'a farm on the frontier of Caffraria. As a voyage was judged necessary for the recovery of his health, he resolved to combine this with his wish to become a settler, and had engaged a passage to the Cape, with his wife and sister-in-law; but his disease assumed such an aspect that he was unable to embark. The result may be easily guessed; he sunk under the cureless malady, and expired on the 5th of December, 1834, in his forty-sixth year. His remains were interred in Bunhill Fields, and a stone, with an elegant inscription by William Kennedy, marks the place where they lie.
R.
RANDOLPH Thomas, Earl of Moray.—This ancient Scottish paladin, who occupies so prominent a part in the wars of Robert Bruce, was sister's son of that great sovereign. He first appears among the adherents of good King Robert, when the latter commenced his desperate attempt to win the crown of Scotland, and make it worth wearing. In this way his name, as Thomas Randolph, knight of Strah-don, occurs in the list of that intrepid band who crowned
