to any decently protective amount, endure an irregular standing army of 100,000, and probably more, daily and nightly to make inroads upon our liberties-nay, our properties and our lives.

"The total number of offenders sentenced to imprisonment (at assizes and by summary conviction) is about 100,000 annually, and the average term of their imprisonment is about six weeks. Hence the number liberated from prison, usually to recommence a criminal career, may be easily estimated. In the year 1848, of 104,485 offenders imprisoned, 86,318 were imprisoned under three months, and 18,167 above three months. Of these only 2585 were sentenced for a year and upwards." *

This awful number of criminals, doubtless far short of the truth-for there is no calculation of the many who escape, and no note taken of the equally criminal fraudulent adulterators of goods of all kinds, who bring disgrace upon the name of trade -shows that there is something very wrong in the moral training of the people. May it not be a question, if we have not given more importance to the acquirement of knowledge in arts, sciences, and book-learning, than to a sound moral and religious education to that education which teaches contentment? The writer of the Census Report complains of the working classes "having for some generations past been tutored not to look beyond their station." There is no fear of any lack of proper ambition where adaptive abilities show themselves; but it is strange to hear that sound teaching impugned. But where, it may be asked, is this tutoring, so objected to, to be found? Where-but in the very best educational page that ever was publishedthe very best, not for knowledge, but for moral training? It is the too frequent rejection of this admirable, beautiful, simple, easy page of education, that should be the subject of lamentation. It is the rejection of the most precious portion of the Church of England's authorised training- the Church Catechism. It is there, indeed, this wholesome maxim of con

tent, which so offends the statistician, is to be found it is that which has been inculcated universally in "generations past." It is so admirable, it cannot be repeated too often. In the duty to one's neighbour is implied one's duty to one's-self. "My duty towards my neighbour is to love him as myself, and to do to all men as I would they should do unto me: to love, honour, and succour my father and mother; to honour and obey the King (Queen), and all that are put in authority under him (her); to submit myself to all my governors, teachers, spiritual pastors, and masters; to order myself lowly and reverently to all my betters; to hurt nobody by word nor deed; to be true and just in all my dealings; to bear no malice nor hatred in my heart; to keep my hands from picking and stealing, and my tongue from evil-speaking, lying, and slandering; to keep my body in temperance, soberness, and chastity; not to covet nor desire other men's goods, but to learn and labour truly to get mine own living, and to do my duty in that state of life unto which it shall please God to call me." There is no universal "vaulting ambition " inculcated here, no envy of stations above, no antic upward leapings of discontent. The aids afforded to what, in spite of the statistician's lamentation, I would still call this souring vice, are so many in the industriously circulated "literature of the poor," of which there is in one of the Quarterlies a frightful account, that it almost makes one doubt even the elementary learning, unless the humbler classes can be protected from an atrociously licentious or irreligious literature. Moral and religious training is of the first importance; other knowledge will take care of itself, and be more duly sought after for its own sake when the other and better discipline has taken root. I am happy to say that training-schools of the best character are settling themselves in the land. The Church of England is doing her duty. It is the merely secular education which is to be feared-the false importance which is ascribed to mere secular knowledge; as if the lock of truth had never been

hampered with the false key of knowledge. Have all the knowing men in the world been good men, or wise men? The arrogance and pride of learning have ever been notorious. The varieties of discordances, falsities, subtleties, ingenuities, discrepancies-the very madnesses, the puerilities of the learned, prove that studies take leaps beyond reason's fence, and there, as by a fatal recompense, they find themselves in controversy's land of labyrinths, from which there is no escape, no getting back again into common-sense ground. If learning with its millions of volumes could make men of one mind, it would be something. But the great business of learning seems to be to set men by the ears, and make them contradict each other. If any science could be secure, you would say it is mathematics, which Plato styles the road to instruction, κατα παιδειαν οδον. Yet Hobbes wrote against the pride of geometricians, affirming that Euclid is full of errors. Take a whole university of scholars dismissed upon the world's stage to speak and to act. They who had learned at the same desk, had gathered of the same tree of knowledge, what are they but opponents to each other disputants upon the very principles of all things concerning religion and politics, moral sentiments, and even the very sciences called exact? The most knowing become makers of crotchets, wherewith, when they have forced themselves into "commissions," they pelt the whole people.

There is not a commission set up that does not justly cause a jealousy -a suspicion of the setting up a whim to overrule common sense. Even in the consultations about this very thing (education), what disagreements are there, not only as to religion or no religion, but as to the materials of which the forced-meat balls wherewith the people shall be crammed shall be made? This one is for thrusting the classical languages into our vernacular, for feeding the infantine population on Greek roots till they can stammer out the compounds and derivations; another strenuously opposes this, and is for cutting out (eliminating) the tongue of Pericles.

Poor young England, stuffed and

crammed, his eyes starting out of his head, and in perpetual danger of intellectual apoplexy!

It may be all very well for the very extraordinarily gifted, who can walk across the common of Ignorance into knowledge Paradise with the march-ofintellect pace; all able, like the Prussian students admired by Mr Kay, to turn their hands to any odd "jobs;" but the dull-the destined to act quite another part in life-they will become fatuous under this high brain-pressure. They will be left behind, and piteously resemble the geese on the common, with their heads in the rank grass, only raised to hiss at a stranger-slow goers and quick gabblers. Besides, Eusebius, I fear in modern, overstrained education, the dead-weight of "facts" will overwhelm incipient imaginations. Facts cannot civilise; but imagination, which sets all the generous feelings of the young into motion, and which commences its work at the mother's knee, is the first humaniser. Heroism of the best kind has grown out of children's old tales, such as, in the earliest stage, Jack the Giant Killer and the Seven Champions of Christendom. I can believe that those fabulous heroes have been fighting our glorious battles;-Ientertain a temporary Pythagorean creed. Cinderella and the Damsels rescued by the Champions have tamed many a young savage. The boy who, in his dreams, has never fought a giant, nor saved a lovely maiden from a dragon, never will make a true man. well-developed man has borrowed from the tenderness of a motherlyinstructed childhood. The chivalric spirit is the worker-out of civilisation. Let facts sink into the earth, or die upon its surface like rotten leaves, if they are to be accumulated and forced into young minds, to the exclusion of generous fictions, that, promoting love and valour, become by them noble truths. No, Eusebius. "Once upon a time," at a mother's knee, and afterwards under the flickering light and shade of a secret place in a greenwood, is the real talisman, the "Open Sesame" by which excellent virtues enter young minds;the rock of the heart opens to the words. Let not facts smother the age of heroism. That great civiliser is

The

We have left him pacing up and down in the fore-court of the Grange -much inclined to be rebellious and impatient, though scarcely quite certain what he is chafed about. It is moderately calm this morning out of doors;—a dim, cloudy day—what the villagers call "fresh" at Briarford, which means that the atmosphere has a great deal of rain in it, and at the smallest provocation would throw a heavy handful right in the face of the passer-by. At present, only a fresh chill drop comes now and then in the sweep of the wind; and the bare trees are visible below, with many a bend and deprecating courtesy, propitiating the favour of this well-known and familiar gale. Against the cold skythough there is in reality no sky to be seen, but only a pale black tumult of confused clouds relieved against a horizon, only a little paler and more luminous than themselves-the little tower of Briarford church rises from among its mound of graves. And yonder are the clustered roofs of the village, the tops of stacks and gables, of barns, and low-lying cottages sending up faint curls of blue smoke, and faint sounds of life awaking into the misty heavens. Beyond these, a long extent of pasture-fields, where some few patient cows graze meekly and with discomfort, and the far-away snarl of the sea, curling white over the sandbanks, and receding with its heavy leaden tint behind into the cloudy sky; this is all the prospect, and it is not the most comforting or cheerful prospect in the world, even when one knows that the bright breakfast-table and warmer atmosphere of the Grange lie so close behind.

Percy has not grown to his full height yet, and will not be gigantic even when he has done so; his hair rises with a sort of crested fulness from that brow of his, where so many lines and puckers are visible already -lines of vivid expression, and quick,

mobile, changing thoughtfulness, where no pain is, but only life and energy, vivacious and young. All the lines of Percy's face are quick, variable, wavering lines, trembling full of incipient sunshine and laughter, yet never entirely free of shadow, as of a suspended cloud. No one can quite prophesy what sudden revolution is to come next upon those bright young features, where the flying emotion comes and goes, as the light and shadow passes upon the face of this broad country round. At present, the expression is only extremely impatient, somewhat fretful and annoyed; though, to tell the truth, Percy's reasons for annoyance are something of a doubtful character. He would be puzzled himself to explain them. This only Percy knows-that Elizabeth, his beautiful sister, is extremely likely to be married by-and-by, and quite sure to yield to the arrangements made for her, and to submit to the time imposed, whatever her own inclinations may be. Percy does not pause to consider, that the active part in such negotiations does, after all, belong to the bridegroom; that Elizabeth Vivian would remain Elizabeth Vivian to the end of time, before she would step forward and say what day she would be married. In fact, Percy does not take the trouble to consider anything, but only resents for his sister, very hotly and warmly; and says again, he would not let them make a child of him, if he were shefor it does not occur to Percy what an extreme impossibility that is; nor how unlike to his irritable impetuous self-the genius and wildest spirit of the family is his sister Elizabeth, in her queenly submission and womanliness, whom no one could humiliate, humble as she always is.

There is no covering on Percy's head, where the wild locks begin to toss about in the wind as he quickens the pace of his musings. This boy, who begins to be a man, is nineteen

only, and has the world before him; -the world before him!-and he spurns it with his young triumphant foot, this subject-globe, made to be conquered. As he hurries to and fro upon this platform of his, the old warm family home behind, and the level country spreading broad before, something mighty and great, called in the vocabulary of fancy, Fate, Fortune, and the World, lies under the dreamer's eyes. His pace quickens, and this mass of matted hair shakes out its love-locks on the breeze. Ab, a very different thing from the everydays which will make life to Percy Vivian, as to all other mortal creatures, is the wild bright prospect on which Percy Vivian looks abroad. Neither map nor description could convey to any other mind the faintest idea of this which appears to him. There are no panoramas made of that celestial country;-the view is too aerial and too dazzling for any landscape - painter. Every one for himself, and not another, has a chance to look once into the charmed and glimmering vista; and Percy gazes, with his brilliant eyes, into the heart of this enchantment now.

Oh and alas for all those grand futures which may be;-what halting, worn-out decrepid things they come forth at the other end of this magnificent arch of fancy !-poor, plethoric fortunes of money, instead of the glorious, generous, canonized Fortune of Hope; daily burdens, hard, and petty, and odious, instead of the noble martyrdoms and heroisms which were in our dreams; but, as for Percy Vivian, to-day is only the present to-day of boyhood and youth to him-youth, and boyhood, and education, all tending onward-and no succession of mornings and evenings, but a great Ocean of the Future; the World, a giant Goliah, and not a thronging army of little ills and little men, spreads full before the dazzled vision of the boy about to set out upon his life.

The family estates-an imposing title-represent no such very imposing income; and though authorities say that the modern agriculture which Squire Percy despised may make Squire Philip a very much richer man than his father, this increase has all to be realised. In any case, it is a certain

fact that the heir will have quite a small enough income to maintain his rank as head of the family; a rank of which the youngest member of it, Sophy herself, is fully more tenacious than Philip. So Percy must make his own fortune, and Percy is extremely well disposed to do this, and would be indignant at the very idea of remaining ignobly at home; has been even heard, indeed, felicitating himself on his second sonship, and exulting over his elder brother, who has no better chance all his life than that of being a country squire, whereas it is impossible to predict what extraor dinary chances lie before Percy. This is'so far well; but it is much easier to decide that Percy shall make his fortune, than to decide the means by which it shall be made—and many a family council, many an "advice" from Colonel Morton and from Uncle Blundell, have gone to the decision. Percy himself, if rather hard to please when a suggestion is made, still remains somewhat indifferent; he says he does not care what his profession is, but it turns out that he does care enough to pronounce a most unhesitating negative on various proposals made to him. One, however, which has the advantage of being opposed at once by Uncle Blundell and Colonel Morton, fixes Percy's wandering fancy. Disposed to it from the first, he is bound to it for ever, as soon as he discovers that both the advisers in question unite in disliking the idea. So Percy will be a lawyer—a barrister— a student of the Temple-and never wavers again in his choice.

Perhaps the charm of the desultory, ungoverned young man's life of which he reads-that life in chambers, enlightened by all that is witty, gay, and free, where household trammels are not, nor ordinary restraints, but only the high honour and truth, that gospel of manliness which is preached by sundry leaders of the youthful mind of these days-has fully more influence upon Percy, than that quite different aspect of his chosen life, which discloses future Lord Chancellors and Justices burning the midnight oil in the dim recesses of the Temple. However that may be, Percy Vivian scorns an over-distinctness in his dreams-he neither deter