cated; but it is only a very slight advance. More than 70,000 criminals are annually sentenced to less than six months' confinement. They are imprisoned in our county and borough gaols, where they are supported and yet further demoralised at the public expense. The terms of detention now usual are too short to allow of any effectual reformatory influences, if such could exist in provincial prisons as at present administered. By the establishment of industrial prisons of various kinds in the several districts of the kingdom, the great mass of English offenders might be made to defray the cost of their own maintenance while in custody, and perhaps something more. This is no mere hypothesis. Though a result never yet accomplished in England, it has been achieved elsewhere. "In the gaols of Massachusetts, in the United States," says Mr. Pearson, "the prisoners, out of the produce of their industry, maintained themselves and their keepers, paid for their diet, clothing, and bedding, for the repairs of the prison, and the salary of every officer, from the governor down to the lowest turnkey; and by the sale of surplus productions they were enabled to present each prisoner, on his discharge, with four dollars and a new suit of clothes-to create a sinking-fund to liquidate the cost of constructing the building, and to subscribe a considerable sum to that excellent institution, the Boston Prison Discipline Society."* Effects scarcely less successful have been realised in Belgium and France; in the Spanish prison of Valencia, under Colonel Montesinos; and at Munich, by M. Obermaier. Hard labour during detention would, as we have on another occasion urged, have both a deterring and reforming effect, in addition to its economical advantages. No doubt a considerable` outlay would be requisite at first; but it would be money well invested. No doubt it would be difficult to find fit officers for as many industrial prisons as would be needed if the system were all at once introduced; but by trying the experiment (if it can be so named, after its proved success in the United States and on the Continent) in one or two districts, and extending it as its usefulness became manifest, a training school would be formed for future officers, the number of whom might be proportioned to the demand for them. Whether the prisons should be mainly agricultural, or in any cases fitted up rather for manufactures and the practice of mechanical arts, is a question which need not be entered on now. The general principle once granted, that convicts must be kept at home, and made self-supporting, experience will gradually show the best means of securing these ends. We should have, we believe, comparatively few recommittals. Prisoners on their discharge would still have obstacles to *Letter to the Lord Mayor, pp. 35, 36. contend with, but to a degree much less than at present. They would be fitter for work, and more inclined to it, than now is ordinarily the case; and this being known, they would meet with readier employment. The formation of patronage-societies would no doubt be a useful aid to many discharged offenders, and, by affording timely assistance, might prevent relapses into crime otherwise inevitable. But though a valuable appendage, such societies do not form a part of a judicious scheme of secondary punishments, and are therefore beyond the scope of our subject; our remarks on which we conclude with the following forcible reflections of Mr. Pearson : "If the honest millions, as they pass through life, can, and do, during what is recognised as the producing age, not only provide for their own wants, but create a large surplus, by which the non-producing classes are supported and the institutions of society are maintained, it surely ought not to be endured that any portion of the same race, and of the producing age, . . . . should be permitted to renounce their allegiance to the fundamental law of their existence, and declare in practice, that by the sweat of the face of other men, they will eat of earth's choicest fruits. The only rational, merciful, and effectual corrective of such of fenders against all laws, human and divine, is, I repeat, to classify and place them in secure prisons, surrounded by lofty and substantial walls, to subject them week by week to seventy, or, at least, sixty hours of useful and profitable work, to allow them sixty, or at most, seventy hours for food, rest, cleanliness, and their other bodily requirements; to give them twenty-eight hours with means and opportunities for mental, moral, and spiritual instruction, and for the public and private worship of God.* . . . . If any Government having thus placed at its disposal annually the hundred millions of hours of confiscated labour, which 30,000 criminals would yield, cannot make the class not only self-supporting, but productive of a surplus for the future benefit of those who produce it, such a Government would be pronounced by men of business unfit to be at the head of a great manufacturing and commercial people."+ * Of course we do not insist on the exact distribution of time which recommends itself to Mr. Pearson. † Letter to the Lord Mayor, pp. 30, 31. ART. III.-THE CLUBS OF LONDON. Miscellanies: Prose and Verse. By W. M. Thackeray. Vol. I. The Book of Snobs. London: Bradbury and Evans. Handbook of London, Past and Present. By Peter Cunningham, F.S.A. London: John Murray. Letters of Horace Walpole. Complete Edition. Edited by Peter Cunningham, F.S.A. Vols. I. and II. London: Bentley. WHY does not some great author write the "Mysteries of the Club-Houses; or, St. James's Street unveiled?" asks the great historiographer of the snobs. Considering the magnificent figure those palaces of Pall Mall make in our metropolis,-the celebrities, social, political, and literary, included in their thousands of members, the associations which float about the older of them, as White's and Brookes's, Boodle's and Arthur's, the stateliness of their decorations, the luxuriousness of their upholstery, the elaborateness of their kitchens,it has always puzzled us why "the Clubs of London" have not been more written about. We only know of one book under that title; and a very miserable book it is. The first volume is made up of threadbare stories of Brookes's, dully, pertly, inaccurately, and lengthily told; with irrelevant chapters on Irish bulls, the Irish peasantry, and fighting Fitzgerald. The second volume comprises a hundred-and-thirty pages of tedious personality about the sublime Society of the Beefsteaks; a chapter on the Hole-in-the-Wall Club at Norwich; another on "the King of Clubs," the least intolerable part of the book; and a collection of supplementary anecdotes,-the new ones not good, and the good ones not new. The Clubs of London deserve a historian of a very different kind from the Irish bookseller's hack; in which class, from internal evidence, we should rank the author of this trashy compilation. Properly comprehended, the history of London Clubs is the history of London manners since the Restoration. Nay, tracing the Club to its antecedents, we fairly get back to Shakespeare's London, with what Ben Jonson's Tom Barber calls its four cardinal quarters of news "The Court, St. Paul's, Exchange, and Westminster Hall." The Club now-a-days, in fact, is for your man-about-town what the staple of news, the ordinary, and the tobacco-office, together, * The Clubs of London; with Anecdotes of their Members, Sketches of Character, and Conversations. In 2 vols. London: Colburn, 1828. were for the gallant of the seventeenth century. Old Dekker, in his Gull's Horn-Book, was writing The Book of Snobs of his day. Just as The Snobographer describes old Jawkins in the coffeeroom of "the No-Surrender," waving the Standard, swaggering, and haranguing; or Spitfire, great upon foreign affairs, and oracular on the treasons of Lord Palmerston and the designs of Russia; or Fawney, sidling along in his shiny boots, with his endless greasy simper, and his profound interest in every body's business; or Messrs. Spavin and Cockspur growling together in a corner about sporting matters; or Wiggle and Waggle, the lady-killers; or Captain Shindy, throwing all the club into an uproar about the quality of his mutton-chopso the Elizabethan humorist, in his chapter, "How a Gallant should behave himself in an Ordinary," depicts the Paul's captain bragging about the Portugal, Cadiz, or Island voyage, or vaunting his employments in Ireland and the Low Countries, and "publishing his languages" for the benefit of the untravelled listeners; the courtier, with his politic discourse of great lords; and the poet, "after a turn or two in the room, pulling out his gloves, with an epigram, satire, or sonnet fastened in one of them." Thackeray paints not more minutely the affectations and table-habits of our own Club coffee-rooms, than Dekker the humours of the Ordinary, the handling of the tobacco-box, "the whiff," "the ring," and all the other tricks of taking your right Trinidado; the carving, the criticism, and the dicing,- till "the parings of fruit and cheese are in the voider; cards and dice lie stinking in the fire; the guests are all up; the gilt rapiers ready to be hanged; and the French lackey and the Irish footboy shrugging at the doors with their masters' hobby-horses, to ride to the new play." Have any of our readers ever speculated on the etymology of the word "club," or asked themselves whether it points to the entertainment or the bill? Do we arrive at it by way of the old 'prentice-cry of "Clubs! Clubs!"-in allusion to the good-fellowship of those who "club" together to eat, drink, and be merry; or, as that respectable authority, Skinner, maintains, through the Anglo-Saxon clifian, cleofian (our "cleave"), from the division of the reckoning among the guests round the table? As clifian and its English equivalent include the correlative meanings "to stick together" and "to separate," we may perhaps be allowed to take either view, pace etymologorum. We are not aware of any example earlier than the Restoration of the word being used in the sense of a social gathering. The first "club" we read of is an association, not of roystering Cavaliers, but of sober Puritans. This was the "Rota," or "Coffee Club," as Pepys calls it, which met in New Palace Yard, "where they take water, the next house to the staires, at one Miles's; where was made purposely a large ovall table, with a passage in the middle for Miles to deliver his coffee." Round this table, "in a room every evening as full as it could be crammed" (says Aubrey), sat Milton and Marvell, Cyriac Skinner, Harrington, Nevill, and their friends, discussing abstract political questions, like members of the Union at Oxford and Cambridge. Hither, in January 1660,-the same month in which Monk marched across the Tweed in defiance of the Rump, came Pepys, and "heard very good discourse in answer to Mr. Harrington's answer, who said that the state of the Roman government was not a settled government; and so it was no wonder the balance of prosperity was in one hand and the command in another, it being therefore always in a posture of war: but it was carried by ballot that it was a steady government, though, it is true, by the voices it had been carried before that it was an unsteady government. So to-morrow it is to be proved by the opponents that the balance lay in one hand, and the government in another." The Clubs we hear of at that time were all political. Besides the Rota, there was the old Royalist club, "the Sealed Knot," which the year before the Restoration had organised a general insurrection in favour of the king. Unluckily, they had a spy among them-Sir Richard Willis-who had long fingered Cromwell's money as one of his private "intelligencers;" and the leaders, on his information, were arrested, and committed to prison. There was the "King Club," all the members of which were called "King" Then there were doubtless Rump Clubs by dozens; and on the other side the Calf's-Head Clubs, which continued into the next century. The flaming Jacobite who wrote the secret history* of this club in 1703, ascribes its institution to Milton, and some other creatures of the Commonwealth." But he very likely confounded the Calf's-Head with the Rota. The Calf's-Head Club had no fixed house for meeting, but removed their quarters as they saw convenient. In 1695 their place of assemblage was in a blind alley about Moorfields, where, on the 30th of January in that year, Jerry White, Cromwell's old chaplain, said grace after the anniversary dinner. The cloth removed, a calf's-skull filled with wine was set on the table, and an anthem" was sung while a brimmer went about to the pious memory of him that killed the tyrant. "Some * Harleian Miscellany, vol. viii. † See "Toland's Invitation to Dismal to dine with the Calf's-Head Club,” published among Swift's poems: "While an alluding hymn some artist sings, |