amusement. We are really glad to see that the labours of the commissioners for inquiring into the laws of real property have the approval of 'The Quarterly;' and that these commissioners are described as pursuing their inquiries "diligently and ably." We are not suspicious of this praise; for we have reason to believe that neither official frowns nor smiles would deter the gentlemen who form this commission from a stern discharge of their duty. The principles laid down in this article are precisely those upon which the most important parts of the celebrated speech of Mr. Brougham, last session, were grounded. The reviewer speaks thus of a "general registration in England":it is evident that the present system is so ingeniously contrived, that it aust be admitted to be wrong in whatever manner the question be decided. If the English statutes are advantageous, they ought to be forthwith extended to every county;-if disadvantageous, they should be forthwith repealed; for it is not easily reconciled to any sound principles of legislation that the law of real property should change on passing under Temple Barthat there should be two different codes for Fulham and for Putney-for Holborn and High Holborn,-or that a protection against fraud should be afforded to Yorkshire which is denied to the men of Lancaster, on the opposite bank of the Ribble.

The article on Hajji Baba,' though somewhat late, is exceedingly clever. How true is the philosophy with which it commences :

An old acquaintance of ours, as remarkable for the grotesque queerness of his physiognomy, as for the kindness and gentleness of his disposition, was asked by a friend, where he had been? He replied, he had been seeing the lion, which was at that time an object of curiosity-(we are not sure whether it was Nero or Cato): ' And what,' rejoined the querist,' did the lion think of you? The jest passed as a good one; and yet under it lies something that is serious and true.

When a civilized people have gazed, at their leisure, upon one of those uninstructed productions of rude nature whom they term barbarians, the next object of natural curiosity is, to learn what opinion the barbarian has formed of the new state of society into which he is introduced-what the lion thinks of his visiters. Will the simple, unsophisticated being, we ask ourselves, be more inclined to reverence us, who direct the thunder and lightning by our command of electricity-controul the course of the winds by our steam-engines turn night into day by our gas-erect the most stupendous edifices by our machinery-soar into mid-air like eagles-at pleasure dive into the earth like moles ?-or, to take us as individuals, and despise the effeminate child of social policy, whom the community have deprived of half his rights-who dares not avenge a blow without having recourse to a constable-who, like a pampered jade, cannot go but thirty miles a day without a halt or endure hunger, were it only for twenty-four hours, without suffering and complaint-whose life is undignified by trophies acquired in the chase or the battle-and whose death is not graced by a few preliminary tortures, applied to the most sensitive parts, in order to ascertain his decided superiority to ordinary mortals? We are equally desirous to know what the swarthy stranger may think of our social institutions, of our complicated system of justice in comparison with the dictum of the chief, sitting in the gate of the village, or the award of the elders of the tribe, assembled around the council fire; and even, in a lower and lighter point of view, what he thinks of our habits and forms of ordinary life,-that artificial and conventional ceremonial, which so broadly distinguishes different ranks from each other, and binds together so closely those who belong to the same grade.

And now for Mr. Southey. Elementary Teaching' is a capital

specimen of the great merits and the great faults of this writer. The quantity of the odds and ends of knowledge which he brings to bear on every question is perfectly astonishing; and no man can tack his scraps together into a more appropriate or graceful garment. In this vesture there is nothing of the formality of the patchwork of indifferent artists-nothing of the violent contrasts of form and colour of which our grandmothers were so proud in their quilting: but the whole is a piece of beautiful embroidery, in which the old and the new are so intimately blended, that neither the ancient tatters of silk, nor the modern bits of buckram can be easily separated by an unpractised eye. The garment is a sightly garment-and it only lacks strength and durability. It will not stand a good tug. Nothing can be more delightful than Mr. Southey's account of the early history of scholastic education; and admirable, indeed, are the lessons which he draws from his storehouse of anecdote :

Little did King Solomon apprehend, when his unfortunate saying concerning the rod fell from his lips, that it would occasion more havoc among birch trees than was made among the cedars for the building of his temple, and his house of the forest of Lebanon! Many is the phlebotomist who, with this text in his mouth, has taken the rod in hand, when he himself, for ill teaching, or ill temper, or both, has deserved it far more than the poor boy who, whether slow of comprehension, or stupified by terror, has stood entrussed and trembling before him. But the theory that severity was indispensably required had been formed to justify the practice -as theories never will be wanting in support of any practice, however preposterous and unjust-and then the practice must be continued to support the theory! Boys were flogged, not for any offence which they had committed, not for anything which they had done or left undone, not for incapacity of learning or unwillingness to learn, but upon the abstract principle that they ought to be flogged—and that, upon the authority of the wisest of men, the child would be spoiled if the rod were spared! Erasmus relates an atrocity of one whom he does not indeed name, but who is believed to be Colet, the dean of St. Paul's, a good as well as a munificent man ; and, strange as it may seem, said by Erasmus himself to have delighted in children with a natural and Christian feeling: nevertheless he thought no discipline could be too severe in his school, and whenever he dined there, one or two boys were served up to be flogged for the dessert. On one such occasion, when Erasmus was present, he called up a meek, gentle boy of ten years old, who had lately been earnestly commended to his care by a tender mother, ordered him to be flogged for some pretended fault which the child had never committed, and saw him flogged till the victim was fainting under the scourge; not that he has deserved this,' said he aside to Erasmus, while this was going on, but it is fit to humble him! These indubitable facts may render credible the commencement of Robert the Devil's career, as related in the romance; and the story of the schoolman, whom the boys put to death with their penknives.

Is not this capital?-Is not this a shaking of our old institutions with a vengeance? What, abolish the rod, Mr. Southey, in spite of King Solomon and Dr. Busby; in spite, too, let us tell you, of many of the Busbys of the present day? Why this is a fearful backsliding of the laureate-this is the old Thomas Day" of the Joan of Arc times come back. And yet the man does not say a word that can affect any living human being. "Dr. Parr was the last learned schoolmaster who was professedly an amateur of the rod" and "Charity

schools seem to have been the last places in which the old system of barbarity was retained." Is the rod then abolished at Eton ?-or Winchester? Are not young men of eighteen yet obliged to submit to this horrible degradation, this tearing up of all the feelings of decency and honour? And why do they submit? What is it restrains their natural impulse to spit at the ruthless pedagogue, and tell him that his enforcement of such a custom is a disgrace to the country and the age in which he lives? Because the slightest resistance would be followed by the dreadful and still more atrocious penalty of expulsion. We have stated in a former number what this penalty meansruin for life. When Dr. Keate came to the head-mastership of Eton, he is said to have flogged eighty of the fifth and sixth forms for a month, on account of their non-compliance with a new, and to them arbitrary, regulation; and we have heard that within these few years one of three brothers, the major, the minor, or the minimus, was flogged every morning-for stupidity. And then Mr. Southey talks of these things, as if they belonged to a past age. We wish he had spoken of flogging, as a system, with the same indignation he speaks of fagging. These words, on that subject, are in the present 'Quarterly':

There is nothing to be said in defence of the system which might not be applied in defence of the slave-trade, or the Turkish despotism; and it is to be hoped that public opinion will put it down before some flagrant case of brutality shall call for a public example.

We remember that it was considered a great piece of Jacobinism in the Examiner,' about ten years since, to write in much milder terms of this atrocity,

And yet the writer of this article in the 'Quarterly' does speak such home truths to the ears of those who would have scouted them from any professedly liberal writer, that we cannot but admire and quote:

Whatever simplification was made in the old grammar, the method of teaching continued, till our own days, to be what Professor Pillans calls mechanical rather than intellectual. Milton complained that we did "amiss to spend seven or eight years in scraping together as much miserable Latin and Greek as might be learned otherwise easily and delightfully in one year;" and he might have added-as is in one year forgotten by the greater number of those who have thus imperfectly acquired it. What was amiss in Milton's time has not been amended. It is observed by Paley that, at our public schools, "quick parts are cultivated, slow ones are neglected." The remark will hold good of all large schools, and of the large majority of smaller ones as well; and the reason wherefore there should be this general failurewherefore so very few are made scholars so as to retain in after life the scholarship which they have acquired in boyhood-is, that few are under the necessity of keeping up their knowledge of this kind, few have the opportunity of exercising it, and fewer still the inclination. Of this, both boys and masters are, each in their station, sensible. The boy, unless he is destined for one of the learned professions, or has a disposition for learning, persuades himself that learning can be of no use to him; that he has been sent to school because it is the custom, and because his father was there before him; but that, as soon as he shall have left school, he may forget his Latin and Greek, as he very well knows his father has forgotten them, and as it is the custom to do. Thus, the whole thick-head family, and a great proportion, also, of those with better wits, who are born to fine linen and the silver

spoon, feel, think, speak, and act accordingly; and thus, it should be added in justice to all parties, it is generally expected by their parents that they should act.

When, then, will ultimately reform the great schools-banish the flogging and the fagging systems-and make education to be, what the word really means-a preparation for the grave duties of afterlife, and not a mode of spending the best years of youth in the most useless and uncomfortable manner that can possibly be desvied?-The utter inability of the systems of those great schools to keep pace with the general intellectual improvement of the age;-and the growing rivalry of a few schools, where not only what is really useful is taught, but where boys are treated as rational and accountable beings, and not driven into obedience like brute beasts-these things will work the reform. Already two or three of the public schools, which it would be invidious to mention, are falling into utter decay, and are become "the shadows of a shade." And this will be the case with all, unless the principles upon which they are conducted are absolutely changed.Hear ye, who talk of your superior acquirements, and look down upon the vulgar herd,-hear ye what Mr. Southey says of the condition to which ye are fast coming, if ye do not bestir yourselves in the race which ye are now doomed to run :—

In proportion as information is diffused among all classes, it becomes essential not merely to the well-being but to the stability of the state, that the education of the higher classes should be rendered more efficient; and that they should take with them from our public schools and universities something more than the manners and spirit, and that sort of knowledge of the world which they cannot help acquiring there. For it is not to the hereditary nobility alone that considerable political power,-actual power as well as influence, is intrusted by our practical constitution. Country gentlemen, and in a less degree those who are born to an inheritance of commercial wealth, have their share of this power, and are born also to the responsibilities and duties which power of any kind brings with it. Now it is for the general good, even more than for that of the privileged classes themselves, that their privileges, power, and influence should be preserved; but this cannot be, unless the possessors show themselves worthy of the advantages which they enjoy, and able to defend and to maintain them. In a country like this, the constitution cannot be kept together by the attraction of cohesion: assailed it is, and shaken it may be, by some hurricane of popular opinion raised by political jugglers, who, like Lapland witches, "can sell a storm for a dollar, which for ten thousand they cannot allay." Whatever is for the general good, whatever is just and reasonable, will ultimately stand: but unless they who shall be depositaries of this power, when the storm rages, are so qualified as to make it manifest that it is for the general good, and therefore reasonable and just and necessary that they should continue in their hereditary station, they must fall. It is no wisdom to dissemble this; the way to overcome danger is to provide against it, and expect it, and meet it resolutely.

This is excellent. But why does Mr. Southey, while he speaks the truth himself, quarrel with others for speaking it?

The schoolmaster, it has been said, is abroad. It was said in a tone and temper implying that, in the opinion of the speaker, certain of our institutions had as much to apprehend from the progress of popular education, as the Roman Catholic religion has to fear from the circulation of the Scriptures.

The temper in which these memorable words were used, as we understand them, was this-that the people, in the schoolmaster, had a shield against the possible oppressions of the soldier; and that oppression of any kind, whether it came in the form of the power of the sword, or the power of the law, could not stand against that great principle, that government is for the good of all, and for the injury of none. This principle the people learn to assert with the tone of men knowing their own strength, when they understand, thoroughly, in the spread of general information, what are the real foundations upon which the rule of a free and an enlightened nation can alone be built. We entirely agree with Mr. Southey in the following, and many other passages, and cannot in the least understand wherein he differs from the warmest advocates of education; and why he talks of "the tares amongst the wheat," when he alludes to those men, who, above all others, have made it necessary that the Quarterly Review' should write in such a style as this:

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The maxim that it is politic to keep the people in ignorance, will not be maintained in any country where the rulers are conscious of upright intentions, and confident likewise in the intrinsic worth of the institutions which it is their duty to uphold, knowing those institutions to be founded on the rock of righteous principles. They know, also, that the best means of preserving them from danger is so to promote the increase of general information, as to make the people perceive how intimately their own well-being depends upon the stability of the state, thus making them wise to obedience. Sir William D'Avenant, who lived in an age little favourable to the principles of free government, saw this truth distinctly. "The received opinion that the people ought to be continued in ignorance," said he," is a maxim sounding like the little subtlety of one that is a statesman only by birth or beard, and merits not his place by much thinking. For ignorance is rude, censorious, jealous, obstinate, and proud; these being exactly the ingredients of which disobedience is made: and obedience proceeds from ample consideration, of which knowledge consists; and knowledge will soon put into one scale the weight of oppression, and in the other, the heavy burden which disobedience lays on us in the effects of civil war; and then, even tyranny will seem much lighter, when the hand of supreme power binds up our load, and lays it artfully on us, than disobedience, (the parent of confusion) when we all load one another, in which every one irregularly increases his fellow's burden to lessen his own."

But Mr. Southey, while he quotes this excellent passage of D'Avenant, does not tell us wherein we, of these days, differ from that writer, who lived too near a period when men of all sides were apt to run to arms, for the redress of grievances, or the enforcement of tyranny. After the wars of the parliament, he might indeed be pardoned for perceiving only one political consequence of knowledge.—“Knowledge will soon put into one scale the weight of oppression, and, in the other, the heavy burden which disobedience lays on us in the effects of civil war.". But knowledge will do something more now-a-days. It will put into one scale the weight of the oppression;-and it will hang up the scale before the eyes of men, to shew what a hateful thing oppression is, and how it disturbs the happy equilibrium of the social state; and, one by one, it will throw its own arguments into the opposite scale-light as a feather perhaps at first, but gradually gathering weight and consistency-and, one by one, it will wring from its adver