medical officers for the inspection of lunatic asylums, medical officers of the new unions, medical inspectors of recruits, medical service for the granting certificates for children under the provisions of the Factory Act, medical service for the post-mortem examinations of bodies, the subject of coroners' inquests, which it appears from the mortuary registries of violent deaths in England amount to between 11,000 and 12,000 annually, for which a fee of a guinea each is given. These and other services are divided in such portions as only to afford remuneration in such sums as 40l., 50l., 60l., or 801. each; and many smaller and few larger amounts.' But after all that may justly be said in favour of medical assistance, Mr. Chadwick evidently considers that the chief physician of his sanitary system is the district engineer. We have many engineers at work-but no real good can be effected on a large scale unless there be system in the operations, and authority extending over more than this or that small object or locality. 'In the districts,' says Mr. Chadwick, where the greatest defects prevail, we find such an array of officers for the superintendence of public structures, as would lead to the à priori conclusion of a high degree of perfection in the work, from the apparent subdivision of labour in which it is distributed. In the same petty districts we have surveyors of sewers appointed, by the commissioners of sewers, surveyors of turnpike-roads appointed by the trustees of the turnpike-trusts, surveyors of highways appointed by the inhabitants in vestry, or by district boards under the Highway Act; paid district surveyors appointed by the justices, surveyors of paving under local Acts, surveyors of building under the Building Act, surveyors of county-bridges, &c. The qualifications of a civil engineer involve the knowledge of the prices of the materials and labour used in construction, and also the preparation of surveys and the general qualifications for valuations, which are usually enhanced by the extent of the range of different descriptions of property with which the valuator is conversant. The public demands for the services of such officers as valuators are often as mischievously separated and distributed as the services for the construction and maintenance of public works. Thus we have often, within the same districts, one set of persons appointed for the execution of valuations and surveys for the levy of the poor-rates; another set for the surveys and valuations for the assessed-taxes; another for the land-tax; another for the highway-rates; another for the sewer-rates; another for the borough-rates; another for the church-rates; another for the county-rates, where parishes neglect to pay, or are unequally assessed, and for extra-parochial places; another for tithe commutation; and these services are generally badly rendered separately at an undue expense.' On comparing the actual expense of the repairs of roads under a scientific management of the highways with the present cost, Mr. Chadwick estimates, that upwards of 500,000l. per annum might be saved on that branch of administration alone. In the collection of the county-rates, he considers that, by simple arrangements, 1000l. a-year might be saved in one county (Kent), sufficient for defraying the expense of constructing permanent drains for upwards of 500 tenements; and from a vast accumulation of similar data Mr. Chadwick states, as his deliberate opinion, that, by a consolidation of the collection of rates, enough might be saved from the collection of one local tax-the sewersrate-to pay the expense of scientific officers throughout the country. Supposing,' he says, 'population and new buildings for their accommodation to proceed at the rate at which they have hitherto done in the boroughs, and supposing all the new houses to be only fourth-rate, the expense, at the ordinary rate of payment of surveyors' fees, would be about 30,000l. per annum for the new houses alone. Fees of half the amount required for every new building are allowed for every alteration of an old one, and the total expense of such structures would probably be near 50,000l. in the towns alone-an expense equal to the pay of the whole corps of Royal Engineers, or 240 men of science, for Great Britain and Ireland. 'But at the rate of increase of the population of Great Britain, to accommodate them, 59,000 new tenements are required, affording, if all that have equal need receive equal care, fees to the amount of no less than from 80,000l. to 100,000l. per annum. This would afford payment equal to that of the whole corps of sappers and miners, or nearly 1000 trained men, in addition to the corps of engineers. 'From a consideration of the science and skill now obtained for the public from these two corps for general service, some conception may be formed of the science and skill that might be obtained in appointments for local service, by pre-appointed securities for the possession of the like qualifications, but which are now thrown away in separate appointments at an enormous expense, where qualifications are entirely neglected.' If, when our carriage is broken, we send for the coachmaker -if, when our chronometer stops, we send for the watchmaker, and so on,-it surely follows that when patches of fever are found vegetating in all directions around us—when pestilence of our own concocting, like an unwholesome mist, is rising out of the burial-grounds, courts, alleys, and cul-de-sacs of our towns, and out of the undrained portions of the country-and when every parish-purse throughout the kingdom is suffering from the unnatural number of widows and orphans, which, in consequence of these removable causes, it is obliged by law to maintain,-in short, when sanitary measures are at last proved to be necessary, -there can surely exist among reasonable men no doubt that the physician and the engineer are the head and the hand profes sionally So long as we sionally most competent to undertake the cure. could affect to be ignorant of the evils that environ us, it was deemed unnecessary to send for either; but from the day of the publication of the evidence before us, this excuse, like a poisonous weed plucked from the ground, has been gradually withering. Even if the amount of mischief by which we are surrounded were a fixed quantity, it surely ought to create among us very serious alarm; but, on the contrary, every day it is becoming more and more formidable. The sea-beaten shores of Great Britain remain unaltered-but the population within them is already increasing at the rate of 230,000 persons per annum. In the year, therefore, that has just closed, people enough to fill a whole county of the size of Worcestershire, or of the North riding of Yorkshire, have been poured upon us; and every progressive year the measure of increase will become larger. What is to be the result of such an increasing addition to our population it is awful enough, under any circumstances, to contemplate; but if every living individual de mortuis nil nisi bonum'-be allowed to continue to pollute the air-our commonwealth as much as he pleases; if pollution be allowed to continue to engender disease-disease, demoralization-and demoralization, mutiny and rebellion by a young mob-the punishment of our apathy and negligence, sooner than we expect it, may become, like that of Cain, greater than we can bear. We cannot take leave of Mr. Chadwick without expressing our high sense of the energy with which he has conducted this allimportant investigation, the benevolent feeling towards the poor and the suffering which has evidently animated and sustained him in his long labours, and the sagacity which distinguishes all his leading suggestions. ART. VIII.-Lays of Ancient Rome. By Thomas Babington Macaulay. 8vo. pp. 191. London. 1842. THIS HIS was a bold undertaking, even for Mr. Macaulay: the success is beyond our expectation. Mr. Macaulay's fine youthful ballads on our Civil Wars and on the French League-the Cavalier and Roundhead and the Battle of Ivry-were still fresh upon our memory: yet we could not be without some apprehension lest he should emperil his reputation in the attempt to throw back into its old poetic form that which has been familiar to us from our boyhood as Roman history. The task not merely required the power of writing ballad-verse with unflagging spirit, with rapid and picturesque brevity, with the bold distinctness as to character character and incident which is essential to that kind of poetry, but likewise a full, yet unobtrusive scholarship, which should keep it true to the people and to the times. Schiller's beautiful ballads on some of the incidents of Grecian mythology and history, though perhaps correct in all their allusions, have still something of the reflective tone of modern poetry; but Schiller did not give them as remains of Grecian song. In Mr. Macaulay's case the self-denial was harder: he had absolutely to reject everything which might not have struck the popular eye, have cloven to the popular ear, or stirred the popular heart in the earliest days of Rome. Nor is this task to be achieved by pedantic faithfulness of costume: witness in this respect the difference between Walter Scott and his imitators, the latter far more sedulously correct in their antiquarianism, but, by that very elaborate correctness, constantly betraying that their knowledge is got up for the occasion. This truthfulness must flow from copiousness of knowledge, long before worked into the mind, and ready to suggest itself spontaneously when wanted-not to be sought out, or transferred from a commonplace-book, with a dull and servile appeal to authority. In these Lays we are now and then disturbed by too close a reminiscence of some of the familiar turns of our own ballad or Border poetry, the tone and cadence of which it was perhaps impossible to avoid; but the metre-if metre it may be called-of the Saturnian verses of the old minstrels of Rome, seems really to have had a strong similarity and relationship with our own, and with almost all other rude poetry. What we least approve under this head are one or two spirited and effective, but direct, imitations of a very peculiar march of Marmion-that hurried tempestuous reduplication, so characteristic that it was more than any other feature aimed at in James Smith's capital parody. Mr. Macaulay, as may be anticipated, adopts to its utmost extent the hypothesis that the early Roman history grew out of the popular poetry. Niebuhr assigns to Perizonius* the first bint of this theory, which his own authority has gone far to establish as the general opinion among almost all recent writers of Roman * Has Mr. Macaulay, who is said to forget nothing, quite forgotten one Butler, unquestionably the earliest modern who alludes to Roman Lays? history. Mr. Macaulay's remarkably lucid and forcible statement of the theory is likely to gain some proselytes, who may have been perplexed, rather than convinced, by the somewhat abstruse reasonings of Niebuhr, or hardened into disbelief by the dictatorial tone which he, in the full conviction of his own superior acquaintance with the subject, and of its irrefragable truth, thought that he might justly assume. The illustrations from the English and Spanish chroniclers of the manner in which poetry passes into history appear to us extremely happy, and will tempt us hereafter to present them to our readers. This question of the poetic origin of the early Roman history, we would remind our readers, is very different from that of its utter uncertainty, as shown by Beaufort, Levesque de Pouilly, and other writers. The theory is conservative rather than destructive. It tends at least to invest these old stories in the dignity of some kind of truth, rather than to leave them in the neglected rubbish of mere fable. The philosophic historian of the present day will not venture to disdain even mythic history, the more imaginative form of the poetic annals of nations. But there is a great difference between mythic and heroic legend: Niebuhr himself has pointed this out with his usual sound discrimination. The inventive faculty has a very different office in the religious allegory or mythological legend of the priest and the epic song of the popular bard. Only a small portion of the early Roman history is absolutely mythicthe birth of Romulus and Remus, the apotheosis of Romulus, the intercourse of Numa with the nymph Egeria. We should reluctantly yield up the real personality either of the founder or the lawgiver. In this border-ground between the mythic and the historic, it is the sunset of the religious legend which sheds its glowing colouring over the reality of life, rather than the thin and incorporeal impersonations of the myth which harden into actual and sensible existence. Almost all the rest, however, of the unhistoric period of Roman tradition is that popular poetry which has its groundwork in truth. This poetry is not purely inventive: it selects, embellishes, aggrandizes incidents and characters: it surrenders itself in the first place to that insuperable tendency to depart from sober truth incident to all poets-the insatiate desire of seizing and making the most of the poetic element, the sublime, the striking, the picturesque, the pathetic; of discarding the mean, the trivial, the ineffective; of dwelling solely and exclusively upon that which would arrest the eager ear and maintain the mute attention of an enthralled audience. Besides this, appealing to, living on popular passion, such poetry would be instinct itself with passion: it would be a flatterer, perhaps an honest flatterer, of family |