spacious fields allotted for all gymnics, sports, and honest recreations." Parks for the people are an invention of the last twenty years. "I will have conduits of sweet and good water, aptly disposed in each town." London is still poisoned by the filth of Water-companies. "I will have colleges of mathematicians, musicians and actors, physicians, artists, and philosophers, that all arts and sciences may sooner be perfected and better learned." What has any English Government done for arts and sciences from that hour to this? "I will provide public schools of all kinds, singing, dancing, fencing, and especially of grammar and languages, not to be taught by those tedious precepts ordinarily used, but by use, example, conversation." Compared with our population, are we doing much more in the way of Public Schools of all kinds than in the days of Edward VI., when a few grammar-schools were wrung out of the spoils of the Reformation? In the Registrar-General's Report of Marriages, in 1851, it is shown that one man in three, and one woman in two, could not write.

Of property in land Burton has something to say. He would regulate "what for lords, what for tenants. And because they (the tenants) shall be better encouraged to improve such lands they hold -manure, plant trees, drain, fence-they shall have long leases, a known rent, and known fine, to free them from those intolerable exactions of tyrannyzing landlords." Are these the rules of landlord and tenant at this day? But Democritus is

no hater of the great-no leveller. "Plato's community in many things is impious, absurd, and ridiculous; it takes away all splendour and magnificence. I will have several orders, degrees of nobility, and those hereditary. But as some dignities shall be hereditary, so some again by election or by gift, besides free offices, pensions, annuities, which, like the golden apple, shall be given to the worthiest and best deserving, both in war and peace." Let any man who is not a younger son of a patrician house-not the relative of one who keeps the Canvassing Book of a corruptible Boroughlet any one who has simply done the State service in a way the State never recognises, the improvement of his age-let him ask for the smallest paring of the golden apple, and see what answer he will get from the Secretary of the Treasury, who has only six letters for the code of his office— barter.

"My form of government shall be monarchical. Few laws, but those severely kept, plainly put down, and in the mother tongue, that every man may understand." Legislation has been hard at work, for two centuries, in multiplying statutes that could not be administered, and heaping up enactments that could not be understood. It has been doing a little, too, with Commerce and Taxation, in a way that the plain-thinking John Burton does not recommend: "Of such wares as are transported or brought in, if they be necessary, commodious, and such as nearly concern man's life, as corn, wood, coal, VOL. I.

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and such provision as we cannot want, I will have little or no custom paid, no taxes." England's corn and meat taxes expired only in the last Parlia– ment; and London's coal taxes yet oppress three or four millions, that there may be high festival amongst those who, of all men and all bodies of men, are 'fruges consumere nati." Democritus would regulate the Church, too. No impropriations, no lay patrons of church livings, or one private man ; but common societies, corporations, &c., and those rectors of benefices to be chosen out of the Universities, examined and approved as the literati in China." Look at "The Clergy List," for 1854. In some things, however, our author is unreasonable. He says, "if it were possible, I would have such priests as would imitate Christ." He would have, too, "charitable lawyers that should love their neighbours as themselves." Nevertheless, he does take a practical view or so of legal affairs. "Judges and other officers shall be aptly disposed in each province, villages, cities, as common arbitrators to hear causes, and end all controversies." We have now County Courts; but how were controversies ended twenty years ago? How are they ended now in the Court of the subtlest learning and the best paid wisdom-the High Court of Chancery-to which Burton could not allude when he held "No controversy to depend above a year, but without all delays, and further appeals, to be speedily dispatched, and finally concluded in that time allotted"?

Amongst the other paradoxes of Democritus he holds “First scholars to take place, then soldiers; for I am of Vegetius his opinion, a scholar deserves better than a soldier, because Unius ætatis sunt quæ fortiter fiunt, quæ vero pro utilitate reipublicæ scribuntur, æterna." "* The honour-givers of our time know that all such assertions of the rights of literature come from literary men-partial judges of their own case. "Cedant arma togæ" is a foolish maxim. Let the fighters get peerages and ribbons—always provided that they beware the pen. There cannot be a greater proof of the superiority of our age to such prejudices as Burton propagated, when he put forth a claim to public reward for the man "that invents anything for public good in any art or science, or writes a Treatise."

What a singular notion has Burton of the recreations of the people! "As all conditions shall be tied to their task, so none shall be over tired, but have their set times of recreation and holidays-feasts and merry meetings, even to the meanest artificer, or basest servant, once a week to sing or dance, or do whatsoever he shall please. If any be drunk, he shall drink no more wine or strong drink in a twelvemonth after." Our rule is that the meanest artificer or basest servant may have a holiday "once a week." But no recreations; no communing with Heaven in the fields; no going forth to look at mountains and lakes, in cheap boats; no familiarity

* Those who contend bravely are for an age: those who write for the good of the commonwealth, for all time.

with rare animals and plants in choice gardens; no gazing upon great works of art, in which God speaks as in any other creation, in noble galleries. Nothing but strong drink, in dirty hovels where no sober man comes-drink in abundance once a week, always provided real happiness is not sought after.

"I will have weights and measures the same throughout." How long have we had this uniformity? "For defensive wars, I will have forces ready at a small warning, by land and sea." The theory is questioned. "I will have no multiplicity It is not cenof offices, of supplying by deputies.'

turies ago since "the king's turnspit was a member of Parliament."* It is about ten years since the Six Clerks and the Sixty Clerks were abolished, with pensions enough to furnish endowments for the education of all the couples that in 1851 made their marks in the Parish Registers.

The poetical Commonwealth of Democritus junior is based upon his previous estimate of the madness of his generation. We have given a few sentences of his about legal improvements. He is rabid about lawyers-"gowned vultures," as he calls them. But how truly he describes some evils that still exist amongst us, and which we still bear patiently! "Our forefathers, as a worthy Chorographer of ours observes,+ had wont, with a few golden crosses, and lines in verse, make all conveyAnd such was the candour and integrity of succeeding ages, that a deed, as I have

ances, assurances.

* Burke's speech on Economical Reform. † Camden.