to be. A better education should have produced more vigorous original thinkers, à more elevated standard of taste, information more exact as well as more diffused, and nobler principles of action. We find instead an increased readiness to turn to any one of a hundred employments by which money can be made: a sharpness of faculty, a belief in mechanism as the ruling genius of all things, a remarkable adaptability to mechanical pursuits; but along with it not only an absence of real knowledge on ninetenths of the subjects with which their memories have been loaded, but an absence of genuine interest in anything not convertible into dollars, an impoverishment of literary taste, while at the same time there is a conceit of knowledge on all subjects, rising from a smattering acquaintance with the surface of them, perhaps more mentally injurious than complete and conscious ignorance. People so trained read, and form and express their own opinions about everything. They are the patrons of art, and their taste is the standard of excellence. The education acts upon the literature; the literature reacts on the education; and instead of the sinewy thoughts of the classic writers, which were strung into the minds of the older students, instead of the exact knowledge of a few excellent things which made them understand what knowledge was, and enabled them to distinguish at a glance the charlatan from the true master, we have an infinitely extended sciolism which has no accurate acquaintance with anything, and is ready at any moment to be the dupe of confident imposture.

All ranks and all sorts are educated together. It is the boast of the United States that all her children are started fairly in the race of life, that every boy in a common school knows that he may become President of the Republic. So it was said a few years ago that every

French drummer-boy knew that he carried a marshal's baton in his knapsack. Yet the knowledge does not seem to have produced a very elevating effect in the French army.

We may look down as much as we please on our grandfathers' ideas; but their notions on this subject were more rational than ours. We ought not to set before a boy the chance of becoming President of the Republic, or president of anything; we should teach him first to be a good man, and next to do his work, whatever it be, as well as it can possibly be done. It is better that a boy should learn to make a shoe excellently than to write bad exercises in half a dozen languages. The wider we make the area of superficial cultivation, the more we destroy the power of perceiving what good cultivation means; the more we are condemning the generations which are to succeed to creative barrenness and intellectual incapacity. Our philosophy and our practice seek unconsciously the same level. Our creed about ourselves and our destiny takes the colour of the objects which we pursue with the most serious earnestness. Our men of science are fast satisfying themselves, at last, that mankind are highly developed apes. The theory has been suggested many times already. It could find no hearing while religion and intellectual culture retained their old dominion. The Gospel of St. John, the 'Antigone,' or 'Hamlet,' lie external altogether to the sphere of the ape's activity. The achievements of the nineteenth century, of which it boasts as the final efflorescence of the human soul, lie a great deal nearer to our newlyrecognised kindred.

The steamship and the railway, the electric telegraph and the infinite multitude of kindred machineries, may easily enough be evolutions of qualities, of which we perceive the germs in many creatures beside the apes. If

these are indeed our last and sublimest triumphs; if it is in the direction of these that the progress of the race is to continue, then indeed I can be content to look back with proper tenderness on my hairy ancestry. Instead of 'a little lower than the angels,' I can bear to look on myself as 'a little higher than the apes;' and 'Pickwick'shall be as beautiful as the 'Tempest,' and Herbert Spencer more profound than Aristotle, and the electric cable of greater value to mankind than the prophecies of Isaiah or the Republic of Plato.

SEA STUDIES.

To a man of middle age whose occupations have long confined him to the unexhilarating atmosphere of a library, there is something unspeakably delightful in a sea voyage. Increasing years, if they bring little else that is agreeable with them, bring to some of us immunity from sea-sickness. The regularity of habit on board a ship, the absence of dinner parties, the exchange of the table in the close room for the open deck under an awning, and the ever-blowing breeze which the motion of the vessel forbids to sink into a calm, give vigour to the tired system, restore the conscious enjoyment of elastic health, and even mock us for the moment with the belief that age is an illusion, and that the wild freshness of the morning of life has not yet passed away for ever. Above our heads is the arch of the sky, around us the ocean, rolling free and fresh as it rolled a million years ago, and our spirits catch a contagion from the elements. Our step on the boards recovers its buoyancy. We are rocked to rest at night by a gentle movement which soothes us into a dreamless sleep of childhood, and we wake with the certainty that we are beyond the reach of the postman. We are shut off, as in a Catholic retreat, from the worries and anxieties of the world. No Times upon the breakfast-table calls our thoughts to the last news from Paris or St. Petersburg, or the vehemently-expressed nothings of last night's debate in Parlia

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ment. Once, indeed, when I was crossing the Atlantic in a Cunard Steamer, the steward entered the saloon with a pile of fresh damp sheets under his arm. "Has it come to this?' I said to myself. Has Yankee enterprise invaded even the ocean, and robbed us even of our ten days' respite from the leading article and the latest intelligence?' But the steward was but playing pleasantly with the spiritual appetite of the passengers. He had kept back half the stock which he had brought with him from Liverpool, and had preserved it between moistened blankets; if the reality was beyond our reach we might stay our hunger with the imaginary substitute. This was the explanation of the mystery; the waste of waters was still unconquered, and such of us as prized our brief interval of tranquillity were left undisturbed.

I am speaking at present, however, not of the stormy passage across what the Americans call the herring pond, but of the delicious latitudes of the trades, where the water is sapphire blue, where soft airs breathe lightly on the surface, and the sharp jerk of the angry wave is never felt; where the flying fish spring from under the bows on either side of the ship like lines of spreading foam, where you sleep with your door and windows wide open, a sheet the heaviest covering which you can bear, and the air is sweet and balmy as in that far distant land where Menelaus dwells because he was the son-inlaw of Zeus :

Where never falls or rain, or hail, or snow,

And ever off the sea the cooling breezes blow.

Here newspapers, here letters even from those who are nearest to us are an intrusion into the session of sweet silent thought' which has been snatched out of the tumult of our ordinary existence. We enter the world alone, we leave it alone. There is always a part