early filling of the cask, though the liquor has all run out, and spreads a bouquet of Mantuan or Venusian odours even upon parish-vestry and six-stalled stable. So may our little orphan-friend Jane Wilkins leave her school at twelve years old. She may forget the cunning of her hand, and make strange gropings after the capitals which commence her name; she may not remember the exact order of events in any of the books she read, or even the words of the collects with which she began the studies of the day; but the flavour remains. She recollects the charming tales she was allowed to read at home, the reverent frame both of body and mind with which she heard the opening and closing benedictions on the school; and the Bible lessons and Prayer-book devotions become connected in her grateful but now reclouded mind with the hopeful, living, trusting days of her childhood, before she outgrew the tutelary care of so many gentle ladies, and the good old rector who has now been long in his grave. And this is one of the things that are still overlooked in considering the advantages of a village school. Nobody supposes that the extent of information it conveys is its chief value. In no other way do the different ranks and classes take their places so easily, so amicably, or so usefully. The squire's young daughter teaches the cottager's child; there is a tie established between them for life, far stronger than any amount of almsgiving on one side, or gratitude on the other. This is a sort of charity which elevates both the giver and the taker, and degrades neither. It is, like mercy, twice blest; the intercourse between the two extremes of social life reveals a hitherto unexplored world to each other. Lady Clara Vere de Vere learns that there are noble and generous sentiments, which derive none of their force from "Norman blood;" and the village girl discovers how beautifully kindness, meekness, and affection can unite themselves in "the daughter of a hundred earls."

In thousands of English parishes this is no fancied state of things. In others it is only slightly modified by the element of dissent-but the Dis

senters have the wisdom and manliness to avow their conscientious convictions, and support rival establishments, which need not necessarily be hostile to the parish school, where a similar course is pursued, with the difference, that the religious portion of the teaching is unconnected with the Church. In some few places a tertium quid has been rendered indispensable by the animosities of several conflicting sects; and a sacrifice has been made of all distinctive dogmas, each party being reconciled to the surrender of its own arms by the sight of its antagonists reduced to an equally unaggressive condition. That this state of things cannot long exist on a great scale, has been proved to demonstration by the feeling excited by it in Ireland. Where there is not open opposition, there is secret enmity; and this not on one side only. The voluntary surrender of their weapons seems not to diminish the belligerent propensities of either party. Like the disarmed Sepoys who attacked a regiment of horse with nothing but the woodwork of their beds, the Papists make onslaughts on the secular or ungodly system, as they call it, with anathemas from nominal bishops, and curses from their holy father the Pope. The Protestants retort with dreadful allusions to the scarlet woman, and the love of darkness characteristic of persons whose deeds are evil; so that till Popery loses in reality its distinctive elements, combination is impossible. For Popery's whole life is distinction. Inasmuch as a man is a good Christian, trusting solely in the merits of the Saviour, allowing to others the liberty he claims to himself, willing to render reasonable service, and ready at all times to show the grounds for the faith that is in him-disbelieving man's claim to infallibility in wisdom, or impeccability in act; inasmuch as he is all this, he is a bad Papist. If these were the doctrines he held, in what respect would he differ from any conscientious inquirer who took the Bible and the primitive Church as his rule of faith? We need not wonder, therefore, that the high souls of the "pinchbeck prelates" are offended at any attempt to disseminate the

book which, so far from being the charter of their authority, is an everlasting protest against their assumptions; and we may certainly conclude that the Bible in any form, or even in any portion, will never be willingly introduced in schools where the believers in holy relics and winking Virgins have the power to exclude it. There can be no durable compromise between parties who have actually nothing in common. People talk loosely of the grounds on which Catholics and Protestants can meet, of the identity of their faith in certain central points, and of the possibility of some noble scheme of comprehensive Christianity which shall embrace the followers of Loyola and the followers of Knox. We know not in what terra incognita the common ground can be discovered on which the Papists would allow the Protestants the slightest right of ownership or occupation. They must be all or nothing. They deny that we have any belief. We are still wandering in the blank regions of space, unshone upon by the central sun whose earthly seat is in Rome. We should have to surrender everything we value in order to purchase the inestimable benefits of the rays of that immaculate luminary; our apostolical Church, our conscientious dissent, our daily press, our general literature, our personal liberties. When our deceased and foolish friends the Puseyites began their career of external Popery, everybody saw that, when the panto mimic nature of the movement was perceived, the performers themselves would throw off their motley, and grin through horse-collars no more. Though some still persist in displaying their particoloured pantaloons and bobbing coxcombs, it is with a depressing consciousness that their very seriousness makes them more intensely ridiculous-as Grimaldi excited louder shouts when he played Hamlet than when he sang Codlins ;" and the country parishes, which for some years were frightened from their propriety by a quiet decent gentleman from Oxford putting on such extraordinary apparel, and speaking in a sing-song tone, and walking with the astonished clerk, in a procession of two, from the vestry

"Hot

door to the communion-rails, and performing various other antics too tedious to be enumerated in the limits of a handbill, have now long returned to the ancient paths on which so many generations have trod, and listen, well pleased, to distinctly-read prayers and sensible practical sermons. If a little more reverence is shown during the service, if a little more pastoral superintendence is extended to school, and even playground, than previously to the evidently impossible attempt to combine ante-reformation forms with post-reformation enlightenment, so much the better. Let all things be done decently and in order. Let the Church reassume its consistency and importance, not only as a congregation of faithful men, but as a great and time-honoured establishment, where its members are guarded from the crotchets or follies of individual clergymen by the rules and sentiments of the whole body; and let her voice be listened to, not as conveying the words of infallible wisdom, but as those of a gracious mother concerned for nothing so much as for the peace and happiness of her children.

Delivered from these histrionic and unbecoming buffooneries, a day of quiet and unity was expected after the storm. Now at least, we all thought, there will be no discussions about gowns and surplices, copes and chasubles. There will be no subtle and unscrupulous intellect at work to perform feats of legerdemain with grammar and syntax, as Wiljalba Frikell does with eggs and omelets-tossing an adjective here and a preposition there, so that a contradiction became a corroboration, and Oxford fairly changed places with Trent; while the artificer of all these metamorphoses stood,

"Like Katerfelto with his hair on end,

At his own wonders wondering for his bread."

The common-sense of the land had revolted against the dishonesty of the proceedings which had deluded so many shallow and credulous spectators, and the detected impostor was forced into the easy martyrdom of leaving an institution which de

clared him unfit for its service, and entering the ranks of another and hostile society which finds renegades and traitors the fittest implements it can employ. Astræa was now about to return with the golden age of early Christianity, and the rising generation should be imbued with a useful and sensible education unalloyed with mummery or superstition. The great societies-the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, the National Society, and others opened their stores and sent forth waggon-loads of books approved by their committees, among whom were many of the bishops; the shelves of the school libraries became filled with a class of volumes from which no harm could possibly arise to doctrine or morals;histories, voyages, travels, and biographies. But as the sagacious bestowers of all this mental food knew that children could not flourish for ever on heavy dishes, however wholesome in themselves, they took care to mix a little fruit, and even ornamented pastry, with their bill of fare. They knew that those little people had other faculties besides memory and perception-that they had imagination and wonder and awe; and they might also have read in some very elementary books of metaphysics, that without those last properties religion itself is impossible, and the profession of it sinks into a mere verbal expression of belief, without the power of rising into the really Christian realisation of it in worship, prayer, and praise. So they sent down books which appealed to the fancy;— imaginary lives of extraordinary boys -travels by impossible ways into altogether undiscoverable countriesstories, you may even call them, of common life, where a presentment of other states of coexistent society was offered to the unsophisticated village boy or girl;-but in all, rigid honesty, high sentiment, Christian charity, and universal good-feeling, were inculcated from beginning to end. And capital books some of them are, even for more advanced readers than the occupiers of the benches in the parish school. A selection of characters and incidents could be made out of those little six

penny pamphlets which would furnish materials for half-a-dozen threevolume travels. The author of this present writing confesses that there are various Martha Browns and Tommy Joneses from whom he has derived more pleasure than from half the circulating-library peerage. Fitzaltemonts and De Geraldines are nothing to them; and the ingenious devices by which honour and truthfulness are shown to be the best policy in the case of certain village heroes who resist the temptations thrown in their way, and prefer doing their work to having a game at cricket when detection is absolutely impossible, would do no discredit to the most inventive of taletellers. We confess also that when the work is merely watching a few cows, and other ten boys are waiting in a part of the parish perfectly out of sight-and the day is delightful for the wickets, and no harm can arise from our having just an hour's play--we should have struggled with less Roman persistency than our gay friend Jack Bates-and how were we to know that farmer Edwards was at that moment in the peartree over our heads, listening to every word we said, and determining in his own mind to reward or punish according as we yielded or stood firm?

But the book-store was not solely for the use of the children attending the school. In many villages the benefit was extended to the parents of the scholars, or even to any inhabitant of the parish, on payment of a nominal sum. A certain number of volumes were given out weekly, on an appointed day, and an observant clergyman had it in his power to form a good guess at the character and qualities of every family in his charge by the choice they made of the volumes from the library. If the Saturday Magazine was peculiarly thumbed at the article "Mechanics," he might be sure that young Frederick Wheelman, the carpenter's son, was following his father's example, and studying the science of measures and forces. If the Universal Traveller was too long kept by Widow Green, wouldn't he know that she had not heard for a long long time

from her eldest son, the sailor, who had gone a voyage to the Salwannahs; and she was, of course, anxious to know what sort of a place it was, and who had gone there before him? With the guarantee offered by the name of the great Society on whose list a book was found, or by the fact of its presentation by a member of the Church, and, above all, by the fact of every volume having been submitted to the approval of the preceding rector, or perhaps of several rectors in succession, the new incumbent, in most places, found the library all made to his hand. He found the catalogue alphabetically arranged, the two or three most active of the school visitors taking the distribution of the books in turn, the managing cominittee submitting the accounts to his inspection, and, in short, the whole machinery of school and lending library in full action, precisely as it had been carried on during the incumbency of his predecessors. Nothing but an insane love of power or an ungenerous distrust of those predecessors' zeal, or a vain feeling of superiority to their judgment, or a desire for startling changes with no adequate cause, would lead a new-comer to overthrow existing regulations, and cast doubts, in the minds of the population, on the teaching of the departed rectors and curates, who all professed to present them with nothing contrary to the Bible and Prayer-book. And yet we know of some cases where a morbid spirit of discontent with existing arrangements manifests itself in that small section of the Establishment which prides itself on departing, as far as the law will allow it, from the recognised teaching of the Church of England. There are parishes going through the process of purification from the heresies of the disciples of Barrow and South, as if a great pestilence was threatened by the contamination of their words; and the salubrity of the air to be breathed by the reinvigorated parishioners, is further assured by the substitution, for those dangerous theologians, of such disinfecting vessels of grace as Whitefield and Wesley. A number of young and crude followers of the

late Mr Gorham avail themselves of the strong feeling of Churchmanship, which is more active at the present moment than for some generations past, in support of very un-Churchmanlike schemes. They employ, for instance, the ecclesiastical authority acknowledged as inherent in their office to establish principles hostile to all ecclesiastical authority whatever. They use their ordination to proclaim their disbelief in the usefulness of orders; they quote the sacramental services to introduce a total denial of the doctrines contained in them; and, in short, appear to have wormed their way into the garrison principally with a view of pulling down the flag. When some of the Tractarian leaders were convicted of remaining in the Church after their conversion was complete, on the avowed ground that their doing so would be more beneficial to the Holy Catholic cause than if they made open profession of their faith, a great outcry was raised against their shameless dishonesty. An impartial observer must pass the same sentence on the opposite side, and blame them equally for eating the bread they do not earn, and betraying the cause they have sworn to defend. More respectable than either of these two unprincipled extremes would be a brazen-faced, stout-armed Papist, ready to go all the lengths required logically by his creed; or a severe-browed, hollow-eyed sectary, willing equally to slay or be slain for the faith that is in him, like the soldiers of Marston Moor, or the Cameronians of Bothwell Brig. We should know how to defend ourselves against either; but a mixture of the two-the priestly assumption of the Romanist, and the truculent ignorance of the fanatic-appearing in these days in the gentle disguise of an ultra-evangelical divine, can only be laughed at as an anachronism. In an earlier age he might have been equally divided between Loyola and John of Leyden, his love of power qualifying him for the one, and his contempt for the moral law as applied to saints, justifying his excesses in the service of the other; but at present his double existence is simply ridiculous. Loyola won't have

him, as not clever enough to deceive; and John of Leyden despises him, as terrified at the new police. It might have been better for some of the lay members of the party if stupidity and the police had been equally effectual in their case-if Mr Cameron had been a little less ingenious, and Sir John Dean Paul a little more mindful of Detective A 1. But the friends and admirers of those fallen stars fortunately do not run much risk of being led astray by their disastrous influence. A felon's dress is not the distinguishing mark of the world's enmity which they covetthey only "like to be despised," not punished, and are satisfied with the metaphorical stripes which an evil generation inflicts on them in the shape of contumely and neglect. There is balm in Gilead for all such wounds as these; for are there not tea-tables where they reign supreme in the midst of aged spinsters and thickly-buttered rolls? and are there not footstools worked by fair fingers, on which no presumptuous marriage-ring has had the audacity to show itself? and are there not bands for their necks, and even among the more enterprising is not the sacred mystery of their slumbers intrenched on with the help of embroidered nightcaps and slippers of captivating device? Refreshed after their sufferings by such angel ministrants, they wish the whole universe had poured forth its malice upon them, and sneered at them with more bitter animosity, and reviled them with more irritating expressions for what are merely its disregard of their lessons, and discussion of their statements, and disbelief in their scholarship or common-sense? "Their wound is great in that it is so small." They long for greater trials, and defy the gods of the Gentiles to mortal combat in hopes of heavier blows. For it is a universal feature in those individuals' mental constitution that the moment you differ from them you bow the knee to Baal. You become an idolater, you and all your house; and your deafness to their finest lucubrations is attributed to the fact that your ears are filled with the enticing words of Dagon. It is to root out this fero

cious idol that all their efforts are directed; and the places in which the ancient divinity hides himself are truly amazing. He is perceptible to their Ithuriel eye in the leading articles of the Times, and, we are sorry to say, is not unfrequently detected grinning with hideous jaws from the pages of Maga herself. He presides, in short, over all literature, which produces as the appalling result of the civilisation of this boasted century, that not only a big book is an evil, but that all books are evil. Have we not heard with most condemnable iteration that the whole literary food of this age and nation is rank poison-that fiction is wicked, and plays abominable, and history deleterious, and poems atrocious, and archæology corrupting, and philosophy demoralising; and that only a slight and almost imperceptible difference exists between Shakespeare, Scott, Bulwer, Dickens, Thackeray, Tennyson, and Voltaire, and what are called the other atheists of the French Revolution? No wonder an onslaught is made on all printed volumes, with the same energy that the curate and barber in Don Quixote displayed against the books of chivalry, with the difference that the critics on that great occasion gave some good reason for their conduct, whereas the inquisitors of the present time decline to assign any reason whatever.

And yet this is not altogether true. We have been informed of an instance in which the unfortunate expurgator condescended to state the causes of his condemnation of the offending volumes; and as this instance will show the absurd and yet dangerous spirit of exclusiveness with which others, perhaps, are actuated, we will state the facts-nothing extenuating, nor setting down aught in malice:-A certain parish-which we will call Fairleas-bestirred itself in Church matters about ten years ago, subscribed money, employed an architect, and replaced an old building, which had grown inadequate to the growth of the population, with a new fabric of faultless taste and of the requisite size. But a church of so much beauty required everything to be in a concatenation accordingly;