stern control of a stepmother—a species of government at best far from being desirable, but in the case of the young Clappertons, rendered peculiarly arbitrary and despotic, from the concurrence of a variety of incidental circumstances. In the first place, their stepmother, conscious that she was deemed by the friends of the family an unsuitable match for their father, must have been haunted incessantly by a feeling, not at all likely to soothe and sweeten her temper, or fitted to dispose her to regard the children of the former marriage with any considerable degree of complacency; by a feeling not likely to lead her to watch over such of them as were subject to her management with any very vigilant attention, to make her extremely solicitous about their comfort or improvement, or to visit them with a treatment any way marked by kind and tender affection. In the second place, she soon had children of her own, and these, by degrees, increased, till they amounted to the number of seven; and it will readily be allowed, that her own offspring were naturally fitted more strongly to engage her affections and to engross her solicitude, than those children with whom she had only an adventitious relationship. And in the third place, it would appear that Dr. Clapperton himself, the father of the African traveller, was not by any means so attentive to the interests of his immense family as he ought to have been; for his brother, the colonel, says of him, “He might have made a fortune, but unfortunately he was, like his father, careless of money;” and we believe the fact cannot be denied; nor, moreover, can it be disguised that the condition into which he fell in his latter days was owing, partly at least, to a culpable neglect of his professional duties.[3] When, therefore, it is considered that as his father advanced in years, his circumstances in life so much declined, as at last to reduce him into a state of abject indigence,—while at the same time his family was constantly increasing in number, and that it was the melancholy lot of our traveller to lose his mother in his infancy, and so scarcely ever to have had the happiness to experience the soothing and heart-impressive influence of maternal tenderness and maternal care, but, on the contrary, to be placed at that tender age under the care and control of a stepmother,—it will be abundantly obvious that his life commenced under the most unpropitious auspices that can well be imagined. SECT. III.—HIS BIRTH, EDUCATION, AND YOUTHFUL ADVENTURES.