band; little Tiptoe elevated his crest, and willing to shew the Irish dean the greatness of his dignity, turned his back on the young gentleman. The truth was, he had mounted to the eminence, and now kicked down the ladder by which he had ascended:

For lowliness is young

ambition's ladder

Whereto the climber upward turns his face;
But when he once attains the utmost round,
He then unto the ladder turns his back;
Looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees
By which he did ascend.'

He was no sooner invested with his new authority, than he sét about meddling with and altering most of the regulations and customs, by which the college boys had been wont to be guided for time immemorial. I do not mean that he attempted, or wished to alter any of those things, which savoured strongly of scoundrelism and of iniquity; his petty and confined view could take no range of prospect, his muddy and hebetated brain could not accurately perceive, that by laying down two or three principles as the broad basis of action, he

might convert into an useful and honourable seminary of education, a system, which for cruelty, and despotism, and want of principle, might claim the highest rank in the whole scale of villainy, from the devil down to Lord Chesterfield. He insisted. that the bands, worn round the neck, should be longer; that the gowns should be buttoned close up under the chin, to the great hazard of suffocation; that the college gate should not be opened till eight, instead of six o'clock in the morning; that the boys should not go so often to

....., and many more mutations of equal importance made this sapient governor, and all, forsooth, to render the college discipline more strict, and more rigid, for, our ci-devant infant-scourger was a vehement disciplinarian. All this time the augean stable was increasing in filth, all this while not a single effort was made to destroy, or to debilitate

Moloch, horrid king, besmear'd with blood

Of human sacrifice, and parent's tears,

Tho' for the noise of superstition's din,

The shout of ignorance, and mystery,

• Their children's cries unheard that pass'd thro' fire, To his grim idol.'

Was the precious Tiptoe yet to learn, was he so very little acquainted with human nature as not to know, that, unless the mind is first enlightened, there is nothing we are so tenacious of, nothing we part with so reluctantly, as long established customs? It is an act of cruel and tyrannic power to abolish customs, without removing their causes. Parents have sacrificed their children, because their own lives rendered burthensome and miserable, they thought it religious and humane to return immediately to the Deity, wretches destined for the same fare. Old men have been sacrificed to prevent their lingering by inevitable famine. Customs introduced by necessity, or by a dreadful kind of humanity, have been brought forward, by superstition, into better circumstances, and coutinued by those who derived advantage from them, when the original causes were forgotten. But it is the business of the

Legislature to remove the cause, not to for bid the effect. The Government occasioning wretchedness, reconciling parents to the sacrifice of their children should be the object of its attention: or if superstition continue inhuman and destructive customs for the advantage of its priests, the customs are not to be forbidden by actions of tyranny, or by legislative power; but the superstition is to be removed by the introduction of knowledge. The opinions of men are formed by education, and their customs by government. To correct or to abolish actions arising from those opinions, or customs, we must apply to the causes in education, or in government. To attempt it by acts of power, is forbidding the production of fruit without eradicating or demolishing the tree.' The boys had always been accustomed to visit the hill on Tuesdays, and on Thursdays; they had always seen the gates open at six in the morning; they had never worn bands streaming down to the middle of their waists; they had been altogether unused to the choking sensation of a rough button, and a coarse black cloth

grasping their throats. And here, let not the dull frigidity of your would-be philosophers affect to exclaim, And what mighty, matter if ...... ............................................................ was not visited twice in a week; if the gates were not open till eight o'clock in the morning; if the bands were some three inches longer than usual, or if the boys' throats were tightened by the grasp of a coarse collar! But let these wisdom-mongers learn, that to the children at ..., these customs, and these privileges, were of as much consequence, as are the magna charta, the bill of rights, and the habeas corpus act to the British people at large. It is want of sense, it is want of adequacy, not to make allowance for circumstances; not to be able to scan and survey the springs and motives of actions, with their effects and consequences, in every situation and in every department of life. Surely he must be more than a madman, or beneath an idiot, who imagines, that what interests the school-boy will rouse the attention of the statesman; or that what affects the unenlightened mob, will act upon the mind of the philosopher. But thus it