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.

*

**

*

**

*

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 ParaQuay 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.

3 S

kind has no other opinions. One man in a million is capable of forming an opinion, a conclusion derived from evidence and deduced by reasoning. Others borrow it; such is the mass of opinions. Opinion is fashion: and hence it varies, and hence the Catholic Church is the best of all possible churches, and the British Constitution the best of all possible constitutions,-till the Reformed Church becomes still better, and James is followed by William. It is but the last cut of the last coat, after all.

Its power extends from the Zenith to the Nadir, from pole to pole. There are fashions in mousetraps, and law, and shoemaking, and physic, and furniture, and religion, and painting, and architecture, and cookery, and morals, and drinking, and preaching, and swearing, and fighting, and education, and fortification, and navigation, and lamplighting, and toothdrawing, and fish sauce, and blacking, and politics, and even in love! and in commerce, and beauty, and colonization, and emigration, and population, and taxation, and political economy, and in poetry, and oratory, and novel writing, and balloons, and in Mr. Matthews, and the Diorama, and the Royal Society, and the Elephant at Exeter Change, and in Exeter Change itself, and the Bazaar of Soho Square, and in Soho Square itself, and Grosvenor Square, and Pall Mall, and the Park, and in riding, and driving, and eating, and clubs, and Moulsey Hurst, and Eton, and Westminster, and cockfighting, and duelling, and joint-stock companies, and-Cospetto!-we must end somewhere, for there is no end.

Why, here are theses for a folio as big as the Arcadia. We are not going to cram them into the Lilliput of our Magazine. Believe it not, gentle reader. But there is a fashion in magazines too; and while ours is The Fashion, shall we not take our ease in our own Magazine in our own way.

Firstly, therefore, of mousetraps. But as we foresee interminable infinity in a long perspective before us, we must rein-in while it is yet time.

That there should be a fashion in eating!-The very monkey cracks his nuts as did the original monkey, whom Dr. Clarke proves to have been the very Opis that tempted the mother of all fashions and the first mantua-maker. It is not the fashion that the Great Sirloin, England's glory, should be seen at the table; and, therefore, it is hacked by the butler, or, in defect of him, by a bungling footman, and we are cheated out of our dinners. It is not the fashion that vegetables should be placed on the table with the first course, and as there are not servants enough to help every one, we must go without. It is the fashion, to place them on the table with the second course when we do not want them; but it would be unfashionable to place enough there; and the gardener ery wisely sells them to Covent Garden market, that the unfaables may eat them, and that he may become a land-surveyor rseryman in the King's Road. It is the fashion in France eal the rough deal board with a table-cloth; and, therefore,

we spend our money in mahogany, that we too may conceal its beauties in the same manner. It was the fashion to think Madeira the most wholesome of wines, it is now the fashion to think it the most unwholesome: it is the fashion to say that malt liquor is poison: it is the fashion to call wine poison. It was the fashion to dine at twelve, it is the fashion to dine at eight: it was the fashion to drink wine after dinner, it is the fashion to drink it at dinner. It is unfashionable to drink small-beer, it is unfashionable to drink your neighbour's health, to be helped twice from the same dish; but it is fashionable to display your tooth-pick case, and wash your mouth before a whole company. There is another corresponding fashion yet, but we pass that over.

It is the fashion to take snuff, it was not the fashion to take snuff, it was the fashion to take snuff, it will be the fashion not to take it. It was the fashion to stuff prisoners into dungeons, it is the fashion to build palaces for them. It was the fashion to go to Ranelagh, and to walk circles like horses in a mill. Ranelagh has fallen, and the circles are now walked in the tread-mill. Negro slavery has become unfashionable; so have boots and leather breeches. Rail-ways are becoming more fashionable than canals, and quadrilles have superseded country dances.

In former days it was the fashion to enter this squalling world, under the protection, as by the toils, of the fairer sex. Fashion has discovered that this is impossible, that we must all be throttled in the operation, and Mrs. Shandy must now lie-in in town, and her Juno Lucina must wear breeches. By double-headed Janus it is even so. Thus did punch_become unfashionable, and smoking and swearing, except at the Custom House and the Old Bailey; just as the Habeas Corpus did for a time, and as apprenticeships and the Trinity Board will soon be-that is-we hope; and for somewhat a longer time.

Now, Dr. Parr and his wig were once the fashion, and so was Mrs. Fry they are past and passing, as is Lady Morgan, Count Rumford, Dr. Burney, and Sir Humphrey Davy. It was once the fashion to pave a high road when it passed through a town, and there were bills for paving and lighting, which went hand in hand as inseparably as John and Richard of legal notoriety. But Doe and Roe go no longer in couples; the town that was paved is now unpaved, and mud is now the fashion as stones were before.

It was the fashion to be afraid of France, it is now the fashion to fear the Scythian-and mad dogs; and Veluti is the last of his once fashionable race. It is fashionable to be purblind, to exclaim against steel traps, and to canonize poachers. Humanity is the fashion-philanthropy, ultra-philanthropy; and French wine is becoming more fashionable every day. The fashion of logic and metaphysics has been superseded by that of chemistry and geology; but, of all the sciences, the supreme in fashion are craniology and political economy.

And if freemasonry has become unfashionable, in spite of His Royal Highness the Duke of Sussex, the Athenæum, and the