This letter was found a few years ago, and was shown to the aged man who, after his long life of usefulness, had at last entered upon that period of rest from which he was never to be roused again. It so chanced that I called on him soon after he had seen it. I have this note of my visit:— “He spoke with great emotion of the hard work and anxieties of his youth, and said that he had broken down several times before he gave up the school. He and his brother Matthew used constantly to talk over school matters—too much so by a great deal. He had been lately shown a letter written by his father, saying that he was going to London for a holiday, and that not a word must be said to him about business, for he greatly needed rest, and had already done the work of a life-time. ‘And so I had,’ my uncle said to me, with a voice broken with emotion.”[49] If any still smile at the young man’s “long course of experiments,” surely it will be with a smile of kindly pity and not of contempt. The trepidation which we are told attended the youthful reformer at every step is, I fancy, a rhetorical flourish of Matthew’s. There was but little trepidation in Rowland Hill at any period of his life. In his early years his daring would have seemed in almost any other man the most overweening rashness. But, as I have already said, he knew what he could do, and always kept well within his powers. The first mention of his new system in his Journal is as follows:—