that one only is allowed where there would be two pupil teachers.

The assistance offered by these Minutes will call up, we have no doubt, new efforts in the cause of education. They will encourage and assist the clergy and other managers of schools to undertake improvements in them of which they had heretofore been hopeless; and they are well adapted to the present state of parties and of the public mind. They leave local agencies wholly untouched, and by stimulating and encouraging educational zeal wherever it exists, they will create more of those model schools over the face of the country,- each a centre of educational activity for the surrounding district. Thus, however partial and inadequate in their present operation, they will carry on public opinion; and that the more surely, as they will come slowly into operation-imposing the public burden gradually leaving time for prejudices to disappear imperceptibly and with decency, and for the national will to concentrate and to strengthen itself.

These measures apply only to England and Wales, but the state of education in Scotland is discussed in the seventh chapter of the work before us in terms which show it also to be under the consideration of the Cabinet.

The fact that Sir James Kay Shuttleworth's works have always appeared at great crises of the Education question will, we trust, be considered to justify our extended notice of this. We close it with a sense of the public gratitude due to him for the history he has given us of that remarkable conflict in which for so many years he has taken a part, and for the labour with which, at a time when he describes himself to be worn by ' work, scathed by former controversies, and restored slowly to life after four years of suffering,' he has accumulated the fruits of a long experience, and recorded the observations which a rare sagacity in the administration of public affairs, and great opportunities, have enabled him to make.

The key-note to his book the principle which it brings chiefly under discussion, and has for its chief object to develop -is the religious government of the school. His master-thought appears to be the foundation of a sound education for the people of England on a religious basis; and he has in it, we are convinced, the cordial sympathies of the public.

These observations apply with scarcely less force to the second great educational measure which is announced in the work before us, and which is incorporated in an Act for the support of schools in Municipal Boroughs. This Act authorises the levying of a borough rate for the maintenance of schools within

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the borough, and constitutes a School Committee for the distribution of it, at the rate of two pence per scholar, provided that the income of the school, from other sources, amounts to three pence per scholar, and that the school be admissible to the benefits of the existing Parliamentary grants. It further provides that the children of the indigent classes, when in the receipt of out-door relief, and not at work, shall be sent to school by the guardians, who are to pay two pence per week for their instruction. Schools thus aided by a borough-rate are, moreover, admissible to the aid granted by the Committee of Council to other schools on the same condition. From these various sources the income of a borough school may amount to thirty-two shillings per scholar.

Lastly, a comprehensive Government measure is announced for the better administration of Charitable Trusts.

NOTE.-We are glad to observe that Sir James Kay Shuttleworth expresses a very decided opinion on a subject which is one of considerable importance, and which has been much discussed. With reference to the publication and trading in school books by the Government, Sir James Kay Shuttleworth remarks: It is essential that the Government should avoid every 'form of interference which could discourage individual enter'prise, the freedom of opinion, and the natural action of literature on the popular intelligence and taste, or of the trade in books in their production and diffusion. The Government is not an author, a holder of copyrights, a publisher of books, nor a patron of methods; much less is it to interfere in the formation of opinion, by making Schools the organs of its own doctrines.' And he adds, I concur with the great publishing houses of London in their objections to any sale of the books of the Irish Commissioners in Great Britain, except through the ordinary channels of trade.'

This is an opinion founded on sound principles. The act of copyright creates a monopoly for the encouragement of literature, and thus for the benefit of the public. It never was contemplated that the Government should buy up, or in any way hold, these monopolies. If they hold them, they must either trade in books, and carry on the business of booksellers in all its details, or they must restrict the use of their works to their own schools. In the one case they embark in a business they cannot carry on without prejudice to the public interest; in the other, they deprive the public of the books they have every

right to demand, inasmuch as they have been constructed at their own cost. It would, indeed, be a narrow and exclusive policy, little to be commended, were the Government to use the influence they possess, to encourage the most able writers, free of money payment, to write books restricted to the use of their own schools. It cannot be supposed that any writer would, of his own choice, restrict the circulation and utility of his writings to a particular class of schools. On the contrary, he should desire that they might have the widest diffusion, thus extending the public benefit, and at the same time securing to himself, in the most legitimate way, that just reward which should result to him from a public recognition of the value of his services.

ART. VIII.- Politique de la Restauration en 1822 et 1823. Par M. LE COMTE DE MARCELLUS, Ancien Ministre Plénipotentiaire. Paris: 1853.

MONSIEUR DE CHATEAUBRIAND has somewhere observed

that the Government of Louis XVIII. was the best restingplace of France on the declivity of revolutions. The force of this remark is increased by the impartiality of advancing time, and the experience of more deplorable vicissitudes. At the present moment especially, when the condition of that great nation is such that we are more disposed to avert our eyes from its voluntary servitude than to commemorate and applaud its sacrifices for freedom, the fifteen years of the Restoration deserve to be remembered as an era of extraordinary promise; and we the more lament the bigotry and the follies which hurried it to a grievous and early termination. The Government of the French Restoration combined the varied and abundant talents of more than one age. Amongst its elder servants and advisers, the lofty traditions, the great names, and the refined manners of the old French Court were not yet extinct, for the Duc de Richelieu and the Duc Mathieu de Montmorency sate in its councils; to these were added the statesmanlike prudence of M. de Villèle, the judgment of M. de Serre, the brilliancy and eloquence of M. de Chateaubriand. The Chamber of Peers, hereditary in rank and independent by position, included all that was most eminent in the military and civil service of the Empire, as well as of the Royalist party. The Chamber of Deputies was alternately swayed by the austere gravity of M. Royer Collard, and the vehement eloquence of Manuel or General Foy. The schools teemed with the instruction and the eloquence of the first thinkers of the age. Guizot had in

voked the genius of philosophical history and constitutional government; Victor Cousin rekindled among the countrymen of Descartes the august but almost extinct traditions of a school of ideal philosophy; Villemain gave new life to literary criticism; whilst Thierry, Thiers, and Mignet, opened their career by the narrative of revolutions whose influence was heightened by the force and fidelity of their language. Even poetry revived once more on the prosaic soil of France; for Lamartine opened a vein of sentiment in meditative verse which none of his countrymen had attempted; Casimir Delavigne and Victor Hugo gave a romantic colour to the lyrics of a new age; and Béranger, the most national of French writers since La Fontaine, found, in the slight melody of his songs, touches to stir the hearts of a people. Why pursue the contrast which these recollections, scarce a quarter of a century old, suggest to the mind? We cannot recall a more mysterious reverse in human affairs than that this short and splendid period should have left no traces on the French nation, except in the imperishable pages of her literature; and that by far the greater part of the men we have named illustrious in every department of philosophy and government should have survived the constitution they founded, the monarchy they served, the liberty they loved, and even the epoch they adorned.

This reflection may suffice to account for the peculiar interest with which we turn to the political annals of the Restoration, even in the diffuse and inaccurate pages of M. de Lamartine's last historical production. But Louis XVIII. deserves a more trustworthy historian, and we have no doubt that the memoirs and the correspondence of his reign will gradually disclose to the world the existence of far greater ability and liberality than was supposed to exist at the Bourbon Court; especially, for example, the extensive collection of historical and personal reminiscences, still in manuscript, to which the venerable Chancellor Duke Pasquier is understood to have recently put the finishing touch. The volume before us is one of the earliest contributions to the history of this period; and although we can place neither M. de Chateaubriand nor M. de Marcellus in the first rank of the political servants of the Crown of France, their private and authentic correspondence is extremely characteristic, and it deserves the more notice in this country, as it concerns transactions in which the British Cabinet of 1823 played a very prominent part.

It was upon the 16th of September, 1822, that Mr. Canning relinquished the Governor-Generalship of India to which he had been appointed, and received, for the second time, the seals of

the Foreign Office, then vacant by the death of Lord Londonderry, which had taken place about a month before. M. de Chateaubriand had been up to that time the ambassador of France in London; and M. de Marcellus, then a young diplomatist of twenty-four, had just joined the Embassy as its secretary. The moment was one pregnant with interest, for the Congress of Verona was about to assemble. The question of the intervention of the Holy Alliance in the internal affairs of Spain lowered on the political horizon. The Eastern question was to be considered; the ascendancy of Austria over Italy consolidated; and the questions of the Slave Trade and of piracy in the American seas discussed. But, more than all the rest, a change of vital moment had taken place, for the first time since 1815, in the spirit of the Foreign Minister of England. Lord Castlereagh had framed and followed a system of policy more conformable to the views of Prince Metternich than to the public opinion and interests of the English people, for he had sacrificed the popularity and, in some degree, the influence of the British Cabinet to an habitual compliance with the views of the continental confederacy. Upon the occurrence of the melancholy event which terminated his career, Prince Metternich spoke of it as an irreparable loss,' and the expression was never forgotten or forgiven by Lord Londonderry's successor. Mr. Canning was often wrong in his judgment, often misled by his own vivid imaginative powers; but he aspired to restore England to the independence and the spirit of her own proud and free policy in the councils of Europe; and whilst the House of Commons rang with his eloquence, and the world with his fame, he found himself opposed by the diplomatic maxims, the manœuvres, the artifices, and the resentment of every other Court, not excepting that of France. This change might have given an immediate and peculiar interest to the duties which M. de Chateaubriand still discharged at the Court of St. James. But the ambition of that singular personage was already directed to higher objects. London afforded no sufficient field to his insatiable vanity. At the very moment when Mr. Canning took office, Chateaubriand aspired to figure amongst the plenipotentiaries of France at Verona, to defeat his rivals and to supplant his colleagues on the most active scene of European politics, and eventually to assume, on the fall of M. de Montmorency, the direction of the foreign policy of the House of Bourbon. Never were the emulous and often conflicting tendencies of French and English diplomacy swayed by two men in whom an enthusiastic temperament and inordinate personal ambition were more conspicuous than in M. de Chateaubriand and in Mr.