subservient to books. To obtain religious men was his first object without them, religious books, he knew, were a dead letter, and with them they would spring up in abundance. But mere reading, according to Plato, instead of strengthening the mind, and assisting the memory, will only weaken it, by removing the necessity of exercise. It will make men, he says, conceited, by constituting them judges and critics instead of learners. It will leave them in their study of truth without a guide, or check, or interpreter; and as human reason at the very highest estimate must be in ignorance and error, so long at least as knowledge is still to be sought, the process of seeking it by ourselves can only end in multiplying mistakes; as every fresh arithmetical calculation, when one false item has been admitted, only increases the perplexity; and as the slightest divergence from a straight line carries us farther from it, the farther we advance. It will distract them, added Plato, into a multitude of different sects; every one being his own judge, and having his own peculiar bias of error, will have an error of his own for a conclusion. With the discovery of new means for circulating thought more thoughts will be circulated; and as the majority of thoughts are bad, the whole atmosphere will become impregnated with evil. There will be nothing to overcome indolence; no power to compel study when the book becomes tedious, or to insist on inquiry when the language is doubtful; and yet every one will have a smattering of knowledge; and thus you will rear up a generation of sickly, effeminate, unbelieving, superficial, capricious, contemptuous minds, between whom all truth will be lost; and you will become (what Mr. Carlyle has described) a people of sophists.* Use books in their proper place (precisely where Mr. Carlyle has not placed them); make them means of checking the teacher; of guarding truth against corruption; of preserving some record of it through successive generations; of supplying the deficiencies of oral and memorial transmission:-employ them to occupy leisure hours; to exercise independent thought; to supply new food for meditation; to prove, illustrate, enforce the lessons of the lips; to be with us in our closets, on sick-beds, in desert spots, in dying hours: let them be the voice with which we speak to a whole nation at once, even to the most distant lands, and a condensation of collected knowledge, always at hand to be consulted when there is no other tribunal of appeal,-do this, and the alphabet is indeed a gigantic power. And Mr. Carlyle will do well to enforce its communication and adoption, as one out of many means of curing our deep disease.

But here, too, the age has repeated the error, which has more

*See all this towards the end of the Phædrus.

than

than once been pointed out. They have mistaken the servant for the master; the check and drag on the machine for the propelling power. They think to educate by books, and not by man; and the inevitable result will be, that instead of diminishing the evil, they will only increase it. We are groaning under the effects of conceit, self-will, dissension, and disobedience; and we endeavour to remove them by a process which can engender nothing but more conceit and more self-will.

Nor do we think that Mr. Carlyle's second prescription will be more successful. It is a part, indeed, and an important part, of that grand scheme of real reform, which must be concerted and undertaken ere long by some gigantic mind, if the British empire is to retain its position among the nations; but which cannot be faced, much less executed, without some deep change in the principles of our leaders, and in the feelings of the people. But the disease, both of England and Ireland, is as complicated as it is inveterate; and the proposition of a simple remedy for such a state of things at once betrays the incompetency of the physician.

Before emigration is tried, let us endeavour to occupy our own waste lands. Millions of acres are still unreclaimed, both in Great Britain and Ireland. Stop the gambling speculation of our manufactures, and drain off the surplus population from our towns into the country. Let landlords plant colonies on their commons, and bogs, and mountains; plant them under their own eye, upon right principles of colonization, in organic bodies, with powers of self-government; with social privileges; with the germs of village institutions, especially with that first principle of social life and organization, an efficient ecclesiastical establishment in the centre. Restore something of the feudal spirit into our tenure of land. Raze, if you like, to the ground half an overgrown metropolis, and all the idle, gossipping, gaping watering-places, where those men who ought to be each in their own parishes, ruling their estates as the representatives of the great Estate, the Monarchy of the realm, are frittering away time, and money, and dignity, and intellect, in frivolous dissipations. If we are so fond of ruling-and ruling is, indeed, one of our noblest duties-let us rule each in our own appointed sphere. That passion which is now so common, of governing the country, while we neglect our tenants, is at least suspicious. Let each man take care of his own part, and the whole will take care of itself. But without a landlord in every part of the empire, exercising faithfully, and earnestly, and affectionately, the duties of a little monarch, and so carrying into the minutest details, from day to day, the principles of a paternal government, the best laws

and

and wisest legislators, sitting as abstractions in the senate, will only be a mockery. Then give to every landlord the best of coadjutors, appointed for him by God, a good religious clergyman; and let the church draw out her own organization and machinery to meet the wants of the crisis, and rouse herself to fight her battles with firmness, and zeal, and depth of thought, and of learning, without either compromise or intolerance-let all this be done, as it may be done, if each man will do his duty, in his own family and his own heart, and we may yet live. These are the only cures for our evils, the only answer to Mr. Carlyle's question on the condition of England.

When our own body is brought back to a healthy state, then we may be in a condition to propagate new empires by colonies. But the work of colonization is no light thing to be undertaken with a hot head and diseased heart; by emptying a sickly, ignorant mob upon an unoccupied country, and leaving them there to swell up by themselves into some fungus form of society. Nuisances and cesspools we may create by such a process as this, the only process of modern emigration; and from them we may poison the atmosphere of whole continents, as we have poisoned the atmosphere of Australia, and may breed a plague and pestilence, which will soon spread back into Europe. But it will give no relief to ourselves. Unless, while you drain off the present surplusage, you alter the present system of our manufacturing speculations, and of Irish land-tenure, by altering the habits of thought and feeling from which they have sprung, the largest and most ready drain which you could open would be unequal to relieve us. Population, if left to itself, uncontrolled by moral principle, by lessons of prudence, and by well-regulated wants, must labour under a perpetual dropsy. The disease continues; the means of palliating it must diminish with every fresh occupation of the neighbouring deserts. Moreover, those who are to emigrate are the very part of the nation whom you would most desire to retain. The weak, and ignorant, and helpless cannot move. Small capitalists, enterprising minds, young able-bodied men, with tastes and habits of a higher order, who cannot be made to acquiesce in a state of degradation in their own country, will go off to people America and Australia; and going without control, or bond of union, carrying with them no truth, no definite creed of religion, no stern moral sanction, or political obedience,-nothing but the animal craving for food and money, we dare to think they will generate a nation.

Is it not,' Mr. Carlyle asks, as if this swelling, simmering, neverresting Europe of ours stood once more on the verge of an expansion without parallel, struggling like a mighty tree again about to burst in

the

the embrace of summer, and shoot forth broad frondent boughs, which would fill the whole earth? A disease; but the noblest of all, as of her who is in pain and sore travail, but travail that she may be a mother, and say, Behold there is a new man born!'-Chartism, p. 113.

No! Mr. Carlyle, it is no such travail-it is the bursting of a wen!

ART. VI.-Ideen und Betrachtungen über die Eigenschaften der Musik (Ideas and Reflections on the Properties of Music). Hanover. 1839. pp. 50. THIS little work is the well-known, though not openly-avowed, production of Prince George of Hanover; and it is with unfeigned pleasure that we refer to it as incontestably establishing his claim to rank as the most accomplished amongst contemporary scions of royalty.

It is rare to find clearness of thought, precision of expression, and logical arrangement, combined with imagination and enthusiasm, in any authors except those who have been formed by a regular course of training superinduced on an original foundation of genius and good sense; nor, at the present moment, do we remember one on Walpole's long list of royal and noble authors, to whom the praise of these qualities can be impartially assigned. All of them, however, are to be found in the tract before us. Its scope is not extensive, nor are its views particularly remarkable for originality; but within the narrow limits the illustrious writer has prescribed to himself, he walks with the steady, confident, practised step of a master-keeping the main object constantly in view-analysing, defining, illustrating, and clearing the ground before him as he moves on-diverging occasionally to give vent to feelings excited by the mention of some glorious production of the art, but invariably returning at the precise moment that would be dictated by the severest rules of criticism.

We are afraid to speak warmly of the language, because one of its chief merits, the felicitous use of compounds, will not appear in our translated specimens; but its perspicuity, simplicity, and total absence of pretension will appear; and these are merits which readers, moderately conversant with the long, clumsy, entangled sentences, and the ambitious soarings and divings (into mist or mud, as the case may be), by which so much of the best literature of Germany is defaced, will not fail to appreciate at their true value in a young enthusiast, writing for the first time on a subject peculiarly calculated to suggest trains of thought and feeling which sober-minded people would smile at or condemn.

With these few prefatory remarks, we proceed to give a brief abstract of the publication; it being beside our present purpose to make it the basis of a regular treatise on the subject,-according to the established practice (occasionally more honoured in the breach than the observance) of our craft.

In a modest preface the prince warmly vindicates music from the imputation of being fit only for the amusement of the connoisseur, and claims a place amongst the most exalted objects of culture for this cherished idol of his soul:- From earliest youth has he been devoted to her, his companion and comforter through life-let him succeed in gaining over one new worshipper, or inpressing one disciple with a clearer conviction of her worth-let him only establish her ethereal origin, or induce a single reader to employ her high gifts to celebrate the Divine Author of her being, and the full purpose of this essay will be satisfied.'

The Introductory Remarks and Inquiries,' which come next, are an attempt to define music, or resolve it into its elements; and the Prince certainly extricates himself from this embarrassing task much better than the generality of German metaphysicians would have done. If he does not always quite satisfy us, we can follow him :

'What is music? Music is a language in tones. By means of music, thoughts, feelings, occurrences, natural phenomena, pictures, scenes from life of every kind, are as distinctly and intelligibly expressed as by any language whatever in words; and we ourselves are likewise able to express ourselves and understand others by their help. We shall therefore term music a language in tones," or a tone-speech," and the next thing to be done is to define the meaning of tone. What do we understand by the word tone? Every sound is called tone which is capable of being measured or weighed with another fixed sound. It is produced by regular vibrations or undulations of the air, which are caused either by the breath, as in singing and wind instruments, or by the stirring or touching of a string, or any other object or body capable of sound. Any collection of these measured tones depending on fixed rules is called music, in the same manner as by a collection of articulated sounds that which, in the more confined sense, we term language, is produced. And as a systematic putting-together of letters begets words, which influence our minds in many ways-just so, by the puttingtogether of tones we produce sounds, which equally affect our feelings. Or, to vary the phrase, the word-language is addressed directly to the mind, whilst the tone-language asserts its claim to the heart and soul, and operates indirectly and through them on the mind. That our feelings are to be affected by tones, however, is only to be explained in this manner that God gave man at his creation the capacity to communicate his thoughts and feelings, or excite similar thoughts and feelings in others, by certain applications and alternations of tones corresponding with certain emotions of the soul.

'Of