From Westminster Hall, where he had been held so long in painful suspense, the happy freedman, with glad tidings of deliverance, hurried to his angel protector, Granville Sharp, who, though organizing and sustaining these proceedings, was restrained by unobtrusive modesty from all attendance in court, that he might in no wise irritate the Chief Justice, unfortunately prepossessed against his endeavor. And thus closed the most remarkable constitutional battle in English history, fought by a simple clerk, once apprentice to a linen-draper, against the merchants of London, backed by great names in law, and by the most exalted magistrate of the age. Like the stripling David, he went forth to the contest with only a sling and a few smooth stones from the brook; and Goliath fell prostrate. Not merely the individual slave, but upwards of fourteen thousand human beings,--four times as many slaves as could be counted throughout New England at the adoption of the National Constitution,--rejoiced in emancipation; a slave-hunt was made impossible in the streets of London; and a great principle was set up which will stand forever as a Landmark of Freedom. This triumph, hailed at the time by the friends of human happiness with exultation and delight, was commemorated by poetry and eloquence. It prompted Cowper, in his "Task," to these touching verses:-- "Slaves cannot breathe in England; if their lungs Receive our air, that moment they are free: They touch our country, and their shackles fall. That's noble, and bespeaks a nation proud And jealous of the blessing. Spread it, then, And let it circulate through every vein Of all your Empire, that, where Britain's power Is felt, mankind may feel her mercy too." It inspired Curran to a burst of eloquence, grand, and familiar to all who hear me. "I speak in the spirit of the British law, which makes Liberty commensurate with and inseparable from British soil,--which proclaims even to the stranger and sojourner, the moment he sets his foot upon British earth, that the ground on which he treads is holy and consecrated by the genius of Universal Emancipation. No matter in what language his doom may have been pronounced,--no matter what complexion, incompatible with Freedom, an Indian or an African sun may have burnt upon him,--no matter in what disastrous battle his liberty may have been cloven down,--no matter with what solemnities he may have been devoted upon the altar of Slavery: the first moment he touches the sacred soil of Britain, the altar and the god sink together in the dust, his soul walks abroad in her own majesty, his body swells beyond the measure of his chains that burst from around him, and he stands redeemed, regenerated, and disenthralled by the irresistible genius of Universal Emancipation."[160]