opposition to private instruction. We may safely ask what world, what man, is taught at Eton or Oxford; but we will not be at the trouble of answering.

But the world is not a merely moral world. The physical world, the endless and mixed relations by which the two are intertwined, of all these, youth learns nothing. Even the improvement of the body, the perfecting of its physical powers, is neglected. We neglect all that forms the common routine of life and society, the very existence, not only of civil society but of man himself. The youth is not taught the nature of the world which he inhabits, of the universe that surrounds him, on both of which he is afterwards to depend so largely in the commonest details of life. He does not learn the nature, or even the names of the animals, the vegetables, the minerals, without the use of which he could not exist an hour; the forms into which art converts them, the means of their conversion, the artisans by whom they are converted, nor the endless arts by which it is, that he does not remain the savage creature which he was born. Nature has imbued him with the active and burning principle of curiosity, but we defeat her bounties by our neglect. Every thing, what we teach and what we omit, bears the stamp of the barbarism and ignorance of the monastic ages.

Hence it is, that science is not honoured in Britain. Cambridge, alone, even did it do to more purpose what it appears to perform, cannot by itself resist the torrent. Science, on which the wealth and power of Britain depend, is not honoured in Britain. It is not Learning. It has to fight its way to such honours as it can force from an unwilling public: it is not Greek and Latin. It works like a mole in the ground, unseen and unhonoured; but it raises imperishable structures, perhaps to see its own name perish before its face, before the lustre of a dealer in longs and shorts, the utility of an "elegant scholar." The peer despises the chemist, who teaches him whence comes the colour of his blue garter, the metallurgist, who shows him how to convert his barren hills to gold. A whole army of noble and ignoble legislators, meet annually to legislate, and it legislates on the sciences and the arts; yet scarcely one ray of science or art pervades the darkness of either House. Let those who doubt it consult the debates, the reports, the journals. Five parliaments have attempted to determine the best form for the felly of a wheel, and five parliaments have not agreed whether a pound weight exerts an equal pressure on one and on two square inches of surface. But they have learned to make Latin verses, and the law peers can probably parse Re, fa, lo, when the deficient syllables are supplied.

Such is the value attached to education, and most justly, that, to attain it, there is no sacrifice of personal enjoyment, or at least of wealth, which a judicious or affectionate parent will not submit to for his child. The misfortune is, that he does not ask himself what

education means. It is that which we have been attempting to tell him. He follows the road which his treacherous State has made and paved, and is satisfied. He is satisfied, because he has done what others do; because whatever is sanctioned by usage and the state, must be right. The personal sacrifice is not a trifle; to many, it is the difference between ease and poverty, or between wealth and difficulties. A whole family is rendered unhappy, its estates, perhaps, irrecoverably injured, and finally demolished, that one or more of its members may receive "a good education;" because a good education is better than wealth. We do not dispute it. But we deny that the Latin and Greek, the ignorance confirmed, the habits of idleness and vice acquired, at school and college, are a better patrimony than the one or two or three thousand pounds, which the youth, equally ignorant and probably less injured, might have in his possession, to work his way with through the world, had it not been idly expended. The parent has sold his patrimony for that which is not bread, and the child must now labour, as best he can, in struggling through the desert before him. [Westminster Review.

SELECTED FOR THE MUSEUM.

SOUTHEY'S TALE OF PARAGUAY,

WE fear that Mr. Southey has greatly over-rated the merits of this poem, and that it is unworthy of his high genius and reputation. He takes his motto from Wordsworth

"Go forth, my little book,

Go forth, and please the gentle and the good.”

Now, perhaps, Mr. Southey will not acknowledge those readers to be among "the gentle and the good," who are not pleased with his little book. For our own parts we have been pleased-considerably pleased with it-but our admiration of Mr. Southey's powers cannot blind us to that which the whole world, himself excepted, will pronounce to be a somewhat melancholy truth-namely, that the Tale of Paraguay" is, with many paltry, and a few fine passages, an exceedingly poor poem, feeble alike in design and execution.

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If the opinion which we have unwillingly expressed of this poem be erroneous, we have furnished the public with ample means of convicting us of critical incapacity. Undoubtedly there is a good deal in it to please-even to delight"the gentle and the good." But it is a faint, feeble, and heavy composition; and the "gentle and the good" will act prudently in perusing it before night-fall; for if read late in the evening, it will be apt to set the "gentle and the good" to sleep without a night-cap. Why will not our poets give us something very good? -Mr. Bowles, we think, could have written a better Tale of Paraguay than Mr. Southey.

SELECTED FOR THE MUSEUM.

MORE FASHIONS.

FASHION, the supreme God, or Goddess, and arbiter elegantiarum, or arbitrix, does not limit its rule to the collar of a coat or the altitude of a tucker alone. In all, in every thing, it is sovereign; to all, to every thing, it is the rule and the law; from its behests there is no appeal; to live according to it is to live according to nature and to the eternal fitness of things; to renounce it is to be condemned, as Dogberry says, to "eternal salvation."

To say where fashion is "bred," is not quite so easy; unless it be "engendered in the eyes," like fancy; for, like fancy, it dies "with gazing." We become wearied of the tyrant of the day; and, like the Grand Turk, he is deposed, or bowstringed, to make way for a new tyrant and a successor. We continue to adore the successor, as we worshipped the predecessor, "mox daturus progeniem vitiosorem," and so on, to the last syllable of recorded time.

Yet all fashions are not as ephemeral as the revolutions of the mutable sex. To some is given a shorter, and to some a longer date, like human life: some are secular in their durability; and while a few undergo a transmigration or demise that appears almost voluntary, others must be battered at, like Olympus, before they fall, crushed into atoms like the complicated beast in the Revelations. Thus, while the lion wig of Louis XIV. pined gradually away into a pigtail, while men scarcely marked the successive phases it required the battering rams of a whole nation to subvert the fashion of Lettres de Cachet and to replace them with the better fashion of Habeas Corpus.

But what is the real basis, cause, progenitor, of fashion?-Indolence. Indolence; the principle of imitation; the greater facility there is in following than in leading, defects in the thinking faculty, want of the reasoning faculty, want of sense, want of consideration respecting "the fitness of things." Man is but a monkey; and, like the monkeys in Quintus Curtius, he would even tie his legs together if he had a sufficient warranty. He cuts off his tail; believes it is all for the best, whether in government, or in drinking and swearing, till some other great baboon takes the lead and revolves the whole system.

When will man cease to be the slave of this tyrant? When he learns to reason and to think, to observe and to reason, to compare and conclude; and if we want to know why the versatile sex is peculiarly fashion's slave, there is the answer. It is best, because it is best.

Other people think so. It is easier to think from other people than from one's own head. This is what is called opinion. The opinions of mankind are like their coats. They are made by another person; adopted and worn, and they become property. ManVOL. VII. No. 42.-Museum.

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or poverty and debasement; live or die. If the state is to prosper, every member of it must understand his own profession, at least, whatever ornament he may superadd. It is a wise state that endeavours to make all its members useful; but that state are not we.

To try the system by its effects, is to examine many details; details, which, as far as our greater interests are concerned, we could not well examine without more personal allusion than we approve of: not, also, without a much longer history of past errors than we could find space for. But let any man investigate the history of our political conduct for the last century; of our policy, as well foreign as domestic; of our treaties, our wars, our commercial regulations, our legislation; and then say whether they are not marked by errors which were the produce of disgraceful ignorance. We see them now, partly by experience of their effects; but we see them also without this proof, because we see that their principles were faulty. We are better informed, because, by whatever means, we have been better educated; and we know that a better education would have saved us from much suffering, through a long space; suffering, of which we are still the victims.

This returns us to the question of a vicious education, or what is the same, of an useless one. If we have just said that, in education, there is something to avoid, and if we have shown the dangers, or the inutility, of what is called a literary education and a literary age, so there is something also to gain. It is a double gain, to avoid evil and choose good. If we educate a man for the purpose of building a ship, it is among timber, and rules, and ships, in a carpenter's yard. But he who is to administer the state; to direct taxation and commerce; to contrive laws; to administer, or to learn them; to conduct armies; or prescribe physic; does not learn legislation, or politics, or physic, or the military art, but Latin and Greek, syntax and poetry. Is education, then, but a name, or are the privileged orders to know every thing by intuition, while the operating ones must learn in youth to do what they are to perform in age? That statesmen do not learn their trade by intuition, their errors prove. That the soldier, the lawyer, and the physician, must learn theirs when they ought to be practising it, they feel but too plainly. Well may they weep their lost hours, and repent in vain their errors, and execrate the system which has robbed them of their youth, their liberty, and their money, and paid them in words and wind. Nay, not even thus. It is an age of literature, we have admitted. But solid literature is still a trade; and it is acquired by persevering industry, not at, or by, school and college, but after it, as are law and physic. The proof is before us; for those who have not had leisure or inclination after their school-days, have not acquired it, have not even acquired the simple art of writing their own language cently, of telling the world what they did, and thought, and saw. here many lawyers who have written in a style superior to an act of parliament? Britain has been engaged in a series ndid wars, by sea and land, and it has fought them splendidly.

It has been, and is, the rival in arms of Greece and Rome; yet not one of all its officers has produced a history of his own actions; nay, hardly one has penned a despatch that would have gained credit to a school-boy. At this moment, we have not a British history of our late "glorious" deeds of twenty years; except, indeed, Dr. Southey's. We have not even a writer on the military, or on the naval art, who deserves to be named. Such is the produce of Westminster and Eton, Oxford and Cambridge. They profess, at the very least, to teach letters, and yet they do not succeed in teaching their pupils to tell a plain story in their own tongue, or in any other tongue. To what other tests can we bring the system of our education? It has broken its promise; it has broken it in every way. It has not taught even the little it pretended to teach. Had it taught all, we have ploughed the field we were not to cultivate, and sown the seed which we never meant to reap.

Education, if intended for any thing, is intended to prepare subjects for the state. It is plain, therefore, that it should bear an analogy to its pursuits, and occupations, and laws, and constitution. The system which acted on the reverse principle, would be faulty; one which did not act on the direct principle, would be pronounced defective. The Catholic countries of Europe have erred in both ways; we err chiefly in the latter: not solely, however.

The Greeks and Romans, we have said it before, were wiser than we are. It was their object to form statesmen, legislators, orators, and warriors; and they trusted the education of their youth to orators, statesmen, and legislators, or to philosophers professing those sciences and arts. It has been said by one who has anticipated us on this subject, but in vain, that Solon would not have trusted the Spartans with the education of the Athenian youth, and that still less would Lycurgus have put his pupils under the Helots. It was to Antipater they made the noted reply, when he demanded a hundred and fifty of their children as hostages, that they preferred giving a hundred and fifty men, lest an improper education should corrupt their children.

Heaven forbid, however, that we should have been the first to say, what we may repeat after the same writer, that the governments of Europe have selected, and have acted absurdly in selecting, the clerical body, exclusively, to conduct the education of their youth. In Britain, indeed, it has not been placed under the control and direction of a body which esteems the head of its religion beyond the head of its government, which loves its own order above its country, and its exclusive institutions more than the laws of the state. It is not under a foreign control.

And yet it is conducted and directed by the clergy, and the clergy does all in its power to retain the direction in its own hands. Tailors educate tailors, and boatswains seamen; but the clergy of Britain educates statesmen, and lawyers, and soldiers, and merchants, and physicians. We will not say of them, that they have intruded into this office; we trust that we are too libeVOL. VII. No. 42.-Museum.

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