stitions of monarchy; and taught an inherency himself to be persuaded to evince a talent for of the office in the person, in order to make the the Real, the Individual; and he brought in his office itself a nullity, and the Premiership, with POOR BILL!! When we hear the minister's its accompanying majority, the sole and perma- talent for finance so loudly trumpeted, we turn nent power of the State. And now came the involuntarily to his POOR BILL-to that acknowl French Revolution. This was a new event; edged abortion-that unanswerable evidence of the old routine of reasoning, the common trade, his ignorance respecting all the fundamental of politics were to become obsolete. He ap-relations and actions of property, and of the peared wholly unprepared for it: half favoring, social union! half condemning, ignorant of what he favored, and why he condemned, he neither displayed the honest enthusiasm and fixed principle of Mr. Fox, nor the intimate acquaintance with the general nature of man, and the consequent prescience of Mr. Burke. genius, from whose works the idea still remains, when the feeling is passed away-remains to connect itself with the other feelings, and com bine with new impressions!) The mere man of talent hears him with admiration-the mere man of genius with contempt--the philosopher neither admires nor contemns, but listens to him with a deep and solemn interest, tracing in the effects of his eloquence the power of words and phrases, and that peculiar constitution of human affairs in their present state, which so eminently favors this power. As his reasonings, even so is his eloquence. One character pervades his whole being. Words on words, finely arranged, and so dexterously consequent, that the whole bears the semblance of argument, and still keeps awake a sense of surprise; but when all is done, nothing rememAfter the declaration of war, long did he berable has been said; no one philosophical recontinue in the common cant of office, in decla- mark, no one image, not even a pointed aphorism. mation about the Scheldt and Holland, and all Not a sentence of Mr. Pitt's has ever been quoted, the vulgar causes of common contests! and or formed the favorite phrase of the day-a thing when at last the immense genius of his new unexampled in any man of equal reputation. supporter had beat him out of these words (words But while he speaks, the effect varies according signifying places and dead objects, and signifying to the character of his auditor. The man of no nothing more), he adopted other words in their talent is swallowed up in surprise; and when places, other generalities-Atheism and Jacob- the speech is ended, he remembers his feelings, inism-phrases, which he learned from Mr. but nothing distinct of that which produced them Burke, but without learning the philosophical (how opposite an effect to that of nature and definitions and involved consequences, with which that great man accompanied those words. Since the death of Mr. Burke, the forms and the sentiments, and the tone of the French have undergone many and important changes: how, indeed, is it possible that it should be otherwise, while man is the creature of experience! But still Mr. Pitt proceeds in an endless repetition of the same general phrases. This is his element; deprive him of general and abstract phrases, and you reduce him to silence. But you can not deprive him of them. Press him to specify an individual fact of advantage to be derived from a war, and he answers, Security! Call upon him to particularize a crime, and he exclaims, Jacobinism! Abstractions defined by abstractions! Generalities defined by generalities! As a minister of finance, he is still, as ever, the man of words and abstractions! Figures, custom-house reports, imports and exports, commerce and revenue-all flourishing, all splendid! Never was such a prosperous country, as England, under his administration! Let it be objected, that the agriculture of the country is, by the overbalance of commerce, and by various and complex causes, in such a state, that the country hangs as a pensioner for bread on its neighbors, and a bad season uniformly threatens us with famine. This (it is replied) is owing to Our PROSPERITY-all prosperous nations are in great distress for food!-still PROSPERITY, still GENERAL PHRASES, uninforced by one single image, one single fact of real national amelioration; of any one comfort enjoyed, where it was not before enjoyed; of any one class of society becoming healthier, wiser, or happier. These are things, these are realities; and these Mr. Pitt has neither the imagination to body forth, nor the sensibility to feel for. Once, .ndeed, in an evil hour, intriguing for popularity, he suffered Such appears to us to be the prime minister of Great Britain, whether we consider him as a statesman or as an orator. The same character betrays itself in his private life; the same coldness to realities, and to all whose excellence relates to reality. He has patronized no science, he has raised no man of genius from obscurity; he counts no one prime work of God among his friends. From the same source he has no attachment to female society, no fondness for children, no perceptions of beauty in natural scenery; but he is fond of convivial indulgences, of that stimulation, which, keeping up the glow of selfimportance and the sense of internal power, gives feelings without the mediation of ideas. We These are the elements of his mind; the accidents of his fortune, the circumstances that enabled such a mind to acquire and retain such a power, would form a subject of a philosophical history, and that, too, of no scanty size. can scarcely furnish the chapter of contents to a work, which would comprise subjects so important and delicate, as the causes of the diffusion and intensity of secret influence; the machinery and state intrigue of marriages; the overbalance of the commercial interest; the panic of property struck by the late revolution; the short-sighted. ness of the careful; the carelessness of the far sighted; and all those many and various events | in wealth, but wallowing in ignorance, is put to which have given to a decorous profession of the experimentum crucis of "his mark." The religion, and a seemliness of private morals, such number of petty jurors--in rural districts espe an unwonted weight in the attainment and pres- cially-who can only sign with a cross is ervation of public power. We are unable to enormous. It is not unusual to see parish determine whether it be more consolatary or documents of great local importance defaced humiliating to human nature, that so many with the same humiliating symbol by persons complexities of event, situation, character, age, whose office shows them to be not only men of and country, should be necessary in order to the mark," but men of substance. We have printed production of a Mr. Pitt. already specimens of the partial ignorance which passes under the ken of the Post Office authorities, and we may venture to assert, that such specimens of penmanship and orthography are not to be matched in any other country in Europe. A house wife in humble life need only turn to the file of her tradesmen's bills to discover hieroglyphics which render them so many arithmetical puzzles. In short, the practica! evidences of the low ebb to which the plainest rudiments of education in this country has fallen, are too common to bear repetition. We can not pass through the streets, we can not enter a place of public assembly, or ramble in the fields, without the gloomy shadow of Ignorance sweeping over us. [From Household Words.] IGNORANCE OF THE ENGLISH. THE lamentable deficiency of the commonest rudiments of education, which still exists among the humbler classes of the nation, is never so darkly apparent as when we compare their condition with that of people of similar rank in other countries. When we do so, we find that England stands the lowest in the scale of what truly must be looked upon as Civilization; for she provides fewer means for promoting it than any of her neighbors. With us, education is a commodity to be trafficked in: abroad, it is a duty. Here, schoolmasters are perfectly irresponsible except to their paymasters; in other countries, teachers are appointed by the state, and a rigid supervision is maintained over the trainers of youth, both as regards competency and moral conduct. In England, whoever is too poor to buy the article education, can get none of it for himself or his offspring; in other parts of Europe, either the government (as in Germany), or public opinion (as in America), enforces it upon the youthful population. What are the consequences? One is revealed by a comparison between the proportion of scholars in elementary schools to the entire population of other countries, and that in our own. Taking the whole of northern Europeincluding Scotland, and France, and Belgium (where education is at a low ebb), we find that to every 2 of the population, there is one child acquiring the rudiments of knowledge; while in England there is only one such pupil to every fourteen inhabitants. The rural population is indeed in a worse plight than the other classes. We quote-with the attestation of our own experi ence-the following passage from one of a series of articles which have recently appeared in a morning newspaper: 'Taking the adult class of agricultural laborers, it is almost impossible to exaggerate the ignorance in which they live and move and have their being. As they work in the fields, the external world has some hold upon them through the medium of their senses; but to all the higher exercises of intellect, they are perfect strangers. You can not address one of them without being at once painfully struck with the intellectual darkness which enshrouds him. There is in general neither speculation in his eyes, nor intelligence in his countenance. The whole expression is more that of an animal than of a man. He is wanting, too, in the erect and independent bearing of a man. When you, accost him, if he is not insolent-which he seldom is-he is timid and shrinking, his whole manner showing that he feels himself at a distance from you, greater than should separate It has been calculated that there are, at the any two classes of men. He is often doubtful present day in England and Wales, nearly when you address, and suspicious when you 8,000,000 persons who can neither read nor question him; he is seemingly oppressed with write that is to say, nearly one quarter of the the interview, while it lasts, and obviously population. Also, that of all the children be- relieved when it is over. These are the traits tween five and fourteen, more than one half which I can affirm them to possess as a class, attend no place of instruction. These state- after having come in contact with many hundreds ments-compiled by Mr. Kay, from official and of farm laborers. They belong to a generation other authentic sources, for his work on the for whose intellectual culture little or nothing Social Condition and Education of the Poor in was done. As a class, they have no amusements England and Europe, would be hard to believe, beyond the indulgence of sense. if we had not to encounter in our every-day life out of ten, recreation is associated in their minds degrees of illiteracy which would be startling, if with nothing higher than sensuality. I have we were not thoroughly used to it. Wherever frequently asked clergymen and others, if they we turn, ignorance, not always allied to poverty, often find the adult peasant reading for his own stares us in the face. If we look in the Gazette, or others' amusement? The invariable answer at the list of partnerships dissolved, not a month is, that such a sight is seldom or never witnessed. passes but some unhappy man, rolling perhaps In the first place, the great bulk of them can not In nine cases read. In the next, a large proportion of those who can, do so with too much difficulty to admit of the exercise being an amusement to them. Again, few of those who can read with comparative ease, have the taste for doing so. It is but justice to them to say, that many of those who can not read, have bitterly regretted, in my hearing, their inability to do so. I shall never forget the tone in which an old woman in Cornwall intimated to me what a comfort it would now be to her, could she only read her Bible in her lonely hours." We now turn to the high lights of the picture as presented abroad, and which, from their very brightness, throw our own intellectual gloom into deeper shade. Mr. Kay observes in the work we have already cited: "It is a great fact, however much we may be inclined to doubt it, that throughout Prussia, Saxony, Bavaria, Bohemia, Wirtemberg, Baden, Hesse Darmstadt, Hesse Cassel, Gotha, Nassau, Hanover, Denmark, Switzerland, Norway, and the Austrian Empire, ALL the children are actually at this present time attending school, and are receiving a careful, religious, moral, and intellectual education, from highly educated and efficient teachers. Over the vast tract of country which I have mentioned, as well as in Holland, and the greater part of France, all the children above six years of age are daily acquiring useful knowledge and good habits under the influence of moral, religious, and learned teachers. ALL the youth of the greater part of these countries, below the age of twenty-one years, can read, write, and cipher, and know the Bible History, and the history of their own country. No children are left idle and dirty in the streets of the towns-there is no class of children to be compared in any respect to the children who frequent our "ragged schools"—all the children, even of the poorest parents, are, in a great part of these countries, in dress, appearance, cleanliness, and manners, as polished and civilized as the children of our middle classes; the children of the poor in Germany are so civilized that the rich often send their children to the schools intended for the poor; and, lastly, in a great part of Germany and Switzerland, the children of the poor are receiving a better education than that given in England to the children of the greater part of our middle classes." "I remember one day," says Mr. Kay in another page, "when walking near Berlin in the company of Herr Hintz, a professor in Dr. Diesterweg's Normal College, and of another teacher, we saw a poor woman cutting up, in the road, logs of wood for winter use. My companions pointed her out to me, and said, 'Perhaps you will scarcely believe it, but in the neighborhood of Berlin, poor women, like that one, read translations of Sir Walter Scott's Novels, and many of the interesting works of your language, besides those of the principal writers of Germany.' This account was afterward confirmed by the testimony of several other persons. Often and often have I seen the poor cab-drivers of Berlin, while waiting for a Tare, amusing themselves by reading German books, which they had brought with them in the morning, expressly for the purpose of supplying amusement and occupation for their leisure hours. In many parts of these countries, the peasants and the workmen of the towns attend regular weekly lectures or weekly classes, where they practice singing or chanting, or learn mechanical drawing, history, or science. The intelligence of the poorer classes of these countries is shown by their manners. The whole appearance of a German peasant who has been brought up under this system, i. e., of any of the poor who have not attained the age of thirty-five years, is very different to that of our own peasantry. The German, Swiss, or Dutch peasant, who has grown up to manhood under the new system, and since the old feudal system was overthrown, is not nearly so often, as with us, distinguished by an uncouth dialect. On the contrary, they speak as their teachers speak, clearly, without hesitation, and grammatically. They answer questions politely, readily, and with the ease which shows they have been accustomed to mingle with men of greater wealth and of better education than themselves. They do not appear embarrased, still less do they appear gawkish or stupid, when addressed. If, in asking a peasant a question, a stranger, according to the polite custom of the country, raises his hat, the first words of reply are the quietly uttered ones, I pray you, sir, be covered.' A Prussian peasant is always polite and respectful to a stranger, but quite as much at his ease as when speaking to one of his own fellows." Surely the contrast presented between the efforts of the schoolmaster abroad and his inactivity at home—refuting, as it does, our hourly boastings of "intellectual progress"-should arouse us, energetically and practically, to the work of educational extension. LINES BY ROBERT SOUTHEY. (FROM AN UNPUBLISHED AUTOGRAPH.) THE days of Infancy are all a dream, How fair, but oh! how short they seem'Tis Life's sweet opening SPRING ' The days of Youth advance : Manhood-matured with wisdom's fruit, Reward of learning's deep pursuitSucceeds, as AUTUMN follows Summer's prime And that, and that, alas! goes by; And what ensues? The languid eye, The failing frame, the soul o'ercast; 'Tis WINTER'S sickening, withering blast, Life's blessed season-for it is the last. [From the Autobiography of Leigh Hunt.] THE SCHOOLMASTER OF COLERIDGE AND LAMB. BY LEIGH HUNT. pletely show his character, and at the same time relieve the reader's indignation by something ludicrous in their excess. We had a few boarders at the school; boys, whose parents were too rich to let them go on the foundation. Among them, in my time, was Carlton, a son of Lord BOYER, the upper master of Christ-Hospital Dorchester; Macdonald, one of the Lord Chief -famous for the mention of him by COLERIDGE and LAMB-was a short, stout man, inclining to punchiness, with large face and hands, an aquiline nose, long upper lip, and a sharp mouth. His eye was close and cruel. The spectacles which he wore threw a balm over it. Being a clergyman, he dressed in black, with a powdered wig. His clothes were cut short; his hands hung out of the sleeves, with tight wristbands, as if ready for execution; and as he generally wore gray worsted stockings, very tight, with a little balustrade leg, his whole appearance presented something formidably succinct, hard, and mechanical. In fact, his weak side, and undoubtedly his natural destination, lay in carpentry; and he accordingly carried, in a side-pocket made on purpose, a carpenter's rule. The merits of BOYER consisted in his being a good verbal scholar, and conscientiously acting up to the letter of time and attention. I have seen him nod at the close of the long summer school-hours, wearied out; and I should have pitied him, if he had taught us any thing but to fear. Though a clergyman, very orthodox, and of rigid morals, he indulged himself in an oath, which was God's-my-life!" When you were out in your lesson, he turned upon you a round, staring eye like a fish; and he had a trick of pinching you under the chin, and by the lobes of the ears, till he would make the blood come. He has many times lifted a boy off the ground in this way. He was, indeed, a proper tyrant, passionate and capricious; would take violent likes and dislikes to the same boys; fondle some without any apparent reason, though he had a leaning to the servile, and, perhaps, to the sons of rich people; and he would persecute others in a manner truly frightful. I have seen him beat a sickly-looking, melancholy boy (C―n) about the head and ears, till the poor fellow, hot, dry-eyed, and confused, seemed lost in bewilderment. C -n, not long after he took orders, died out of his senses. I do not attribute that catastrophe to the master; and of course he could not wish to do him any lasting mischief. He had no imagination of any But there is no saying how far his treatment of the boy might have contributed to prevent a cure. Tyrannical schoolmasters nowadays are to be found, perhaps, exclusively in such inferior schools as those described with such masterly and indignant edification by my friend Charles Dickens; but they formerly seemed to have abounded in all; and masters, as well as boys, have escaped the chance of many bitter reflections, since a wiser and more generous intercourse has come up between them. sort. Baron's sons; and R, the son of a rich merchant. Carlton, who was a fine fellow, manly, and full of good sense, took his new master and his caresses very coolly, and did not want them. Little Macdonald also could dispense with them, and would put on his delicate gloves after lesson, with an air as if he resumed his patrician plumage. R was meeker, and willing to be encouraged; and there would the master sit, with his arm round his tall waist, helping him to his Greek verbs, as a nurse does bread and milk to an infant; and repeating them, when he missed, with a fond patience, that astonished us criminals in drugget. Very different was the treatment of a boy on the foundation, whose friends, by some means or other, had prevailed on the master to pay him an extra attention, and try to get him on. He had come into the school at an age later than usual, and could hardly read. There was a book used by the learners in reading, called "Dialogues between a Missionary and an Indian." It was a poor performance, full of inconclusive arguments and other commonplaces. The boy in question used to appear with this book in his hand in the middle of the school, the master standing behind him. The lesson was to begin. Poor whose great fault lay in a deep-toned drawl of his syllables and the omission of his stops, stood half-looking at the book, and half-casting his eye toward the right of him, whence the blows were to proceed. The master looked over him; and his hand was ready. I am not exact in my quotation at this distance of time; but the spirit of one of the passages that I recollect was to the following purport, and thus did the teacher and his pupil proceed: One anecdote of his injustice will suffice for all. It is of ludicrous enormity; nor do I be I have some stories of Boyer, that will com- lieve any thing more flagrantly willful was ever youth of high spirit, whom he had struck, went to the school-door, opened it, and, turning round with the handle in his grasp, told him he would never set foot again in the place, unless he promised to treat him with more delicacy. "Come back, child-come back!" said the other, pale, and in a faint voice. There was a dead si lence. Favell came back, and nothing more was done. done by himself. I heard Mr. C— the suf- did not like such matters to go before the gov. ferer, now a most respectable person in a governors. Another time, Favell, a Grecian, a ernment office, relate it with a due relish, long after quitting the school. The master was in the habit of " 'spiting" C—; that is to say, of taking every opportunity to be severe with him, nobody knew why. One day he comes into the school, and finds him placed in the middle of it with three other boys. He was not in one of his worst humors, and did not secm inclined to punish them, till he saw his antagonist. "Oh, oh, sir!" said he; "what! you are among them, are you?" and gave him an exclusive thump on the face. He then turned to one of the Grecians, and said, "I have not time to flog all these boys; make them draw lots, and I'll punish one." The lots were drawn, and C's was favorable. "Oh, oh!" returned the master, when he saw them, "you have escaped, have you, sir?" and pulling out his watch, and turning again to the Grecian, observed, that he found he had time to punish the whole three; "and, sir," added he to C, with another slap, "I'll begin with you." He then took the boy into the library and flogged him; and, on issuing forth again, had the face to say, with an air of indifference, "I have not time, after all, to punish these two other boys; let them take care how they provoke me another time." Often did I wish that I was a fairy, in order to play him tricks like a Caliban. We used to sit and fancy what we should do with his wig; how we would hamper and vex him; "put knives in his pillow, and halters in his pew." To venture on a joke in our own mortal persons, was like playing with Polyphemus. One afternoon, when he was nodding with sleep over a lesson, a boy of the name of Meaer, who stood behind him, ventured to take a pin, and begin advancing with it up his wig. The hollow, exhibited between the wig and the nape of the neck, invited him. The boys encouraged this daring act of gallantry. Nods and becks, and then whispers of "Go it, M.!" gave more and more valor to his hand. On a sudden, the master's head falls back; he starts, with eyes like a shark; and seizing the unfortunate culprit, who stood helpless in the act of holding the pin, caught hold of him, fiery with passion. A "swinging task" ensued, which kept him at home all the holidays. One of these tasks would consist of an impossible quantity of Virgil, which the learner, unable to retain it at once, wasted his heart and soul out "to get up," till it was too late. Sometimes, however, our despot got into a dilemma, and then he did not know how to get out of it. A boy, now and then, would be roused into open and fierce remonstrance. I recollect S., afterward one of the mildest of preachers, starting up in his place, and pouring forth on his astonished hearer a torrent of invectives and threats, which the other could only answer by looking pale, and uttering a few threats in return. Nothing came of it. He A sentiment, unaccompanied with something practical, would have been lost upon him D— who went afterward to the Military College at Woolwich, played him a trick, ap parently between jest and earnest, which amused us exceedingly. He was to be flogged; and the dreadful door of the library was approached. (They did not invest the books with flowers, as Montaigne recommends.) Down falls the criminal, and, twisting himself about the master's legs, which he does the more when the other attempts to move, repeats without ceasing, "Oh, good God! consider my father, sir: my father, sir; you know my father!" The point was felt to be getting ludicrous, and was given up. P- now a popular preacher, was in the habit of entertaining the boys that way. He was a regular wag; and would snatch his jokes out of the very flame and fury of the master, like snap-dragon. Whenever the other struck him, P. would get up; and, half to avoid the blows, and half render them ridiculous, begin moving about the school-room, making all sorts of antics. When he was struck in the face, he would clap his hand with affected vehemence to the place, and cry as rapidly, "Oh, Lord!" If the blow came on the arm, he would grasp his arm, with a similar exclamation. The master would then go, driving and kicking him; while the patient accompanied every blow with the same comments and illustrations, making faces to us by way of index. What a bit of a golden age was it, when the Rev. Mr. Steevens, one of the under grammarmasters, took his place, on some occasion, for a short time! Steevens was short and fat, with a handsome, cordial face. You loved him as you looked at him; and seemed as if you should love him the more, the fatter he became. I stammered when I was at that time of life; which was an infirmity that used to get me into terrible trouble with the master. Steevens used to say, on the other hand, "Here comes our little black-haired friend, who stammers so. Now, let us see what we can do for him." The consequence was, I did not hesitate half so much as with the other. When I did, it was out of impatience to please him. Such of us were not liked the better by the master, as were in favor with his wife. She was a sprightly, good-looking woman, with black eyes, and was beheld with transport by the boys, whenever she appeared at the school-door. Her husband's name, uttered in a mingled tone of good-nature and imperativeness, brought him |