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Jail Reformation-Neglect of Physical Training.

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ment, cleanliness, and ventilation, fitted equally for the detention and reformation of criminals, and meriting the name the Dutch-in advance of other nations in prison discipline give to. their prisons, of a Bettering-House.

Thus, in sixty years patriotism and benevolence have triumphed over ignorance and apathy in our jails, and the horrid secrets of our prisons been exposed and extinguished. The pests of filth and fever have now passed from the abodes of the criminal, the pauper, and the lunatic, to the dwellings of the industrious poor. The physical state of the Scottish population in the large towns is dragging down the intellectual and the moral character of the nation, and the circumstances of home and neighbourhood are visibly more than a match for church and school. Somuch as the Scottish operative is intellectually superior to the English, he is inferior in physical and social habits; and it is becoming daily more palpable, that it is a blunder in human nature to attempt elevating one part of our nature without the other. This inferiority in physical and social habits is no doubt due in part to that absenteeism of so many of the upper classes which long afflicted Scotland, although in a less degree than Ireland; partly also, it must be admitted, to the more recent development of wealth in Scotland, and to her nobles having their eyes and their affections, since the Union, directed everywhere but to the rising towns and villages on their own properties. Neither can it be concealed, that whatever the clergy of Scotland, Established and Dissenting, have done for the inner man, they have not hitherto felt it to be any part of their duty to stimulate their flocks to those manifold outward improvements on which so much of the happiness and wellbeing of society is ultimately found to depend, and without which the religion, morals, and intelligence of Scotland, are exposed to temptations and influences too much for human nature. Some, no doubt, taking what they deem a higher and more spiritual view of these duties, thought these subjects altogether beneath their attention; others, who had the will, finding themselves unbacked by the wealthy, or in collision with the indolence, pride, and prejudices of the poorer part of their flocks, abandoned the attempt to do good in this direction as hopeless. From whatever cause, the physical training and social habits of the people have been strangely neglected; and there is not that inseparable connexion between cleanliness and godliness which in the south has raised almost into an article of faith the saying, that "Cleanliness is next to Godliness." Dirt and piety are not so uncommon in the northern as in the southern part of our island; and were the Géné ral Assembly of the Established or Free Church to end fortli a pastoral, such as John Wesley sixty years ago addressed to

the preachers of his Denomination, enjoining the body's purity next to the soul's, and denouncing filthy Christians as no Christians at all, it would excite some surprise, from the novelty of its doctrine, and be felt to be more plain than pleasant. Even in the noble scheme which the Free Church has devised for the intellectual and religious education of all willing to receive education at its hands, that very education which is visibly most needed amongst the children of the working-classes in Scotland has been deferred to a more convenient season, and forms no part of the outline of a scheme intended not only for its own congregations but for missionary localities in the worst parts of the towns of Scotland. Reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, are provided for boys and girls alike; but no provision is yet made for the training of girls in those everyday matters which bring decency, comfort, and happiness, into the poor man's home. What the Free Church, with all its educational zeal, has overlooked or postponed, we rejoice to see the Government has adopted as an integral part of its proposals. Schools of female industry, to teach only domestic and feminine art, are to be the objects of its grants and endowments; and Englishmen have shown their directness and practical good sense by providing for the females of England-what ought ever, next to female piety, to be the first and foremost thing to women-the means of preparing themselves to be efficient housewives and mothers. We have little fear but this mistake will be rapidly corrected, and the noble scheme of the Free Church made comprehensive of all that is needful to the elevation of the fallen population of the towns of Scotland. That rapid amalgamation with England by railways which is now so near, while it may bring into Scotland, if not stoutly resisted, Sabbath desecration, with all its attendant evils, will, we trust, bring also a taste for English habits, and English cleanliness, and English attention to the external circumstances of the poor. We trust the two nations, now about to come into still closer union, will give and take each other's improvements with a rapidity unknown before. Alone, we despair of Scottish capitalists and proprietors doing aught efficient for Scottish towns; but the example and pressure of England will work with the principle and good sense and intelligence of Scotland. The scourge of famine has disclosed the neglect of the Scottish Highlands, and a cottier system of misery and indolence only surpassed by the cottiers of Ireland. Religion has done much for the Highlanders, and taught them to perfection the passive virtues. The active virtues they have yet to learn; but, by the blessing of Him who from "seeming evil still educes good," we do not despair of the Scottish Highlands emerging from the famine, renovated in social character and habits, and the era of the famine become, through

Sir Walter Scott's story of his Kinsman.

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the discipline of misfortune, identified with national progress and prosperity. It may be, the next visit of suffering and calamity will be to the towns and their crowded and neglected popula tion, either in the shape of pestilence or commercial stagnation, or popular discontent, wearied with suffering and stung by some passing event into madness-when city capitalists may be made to feel that they have paid too dear for their rapidly-acquired fortunes, and that when property delays its duties it prepares its own ruin. Sir Walter Scott tells of a kinsman of his own, who on being told that a family vault in the parish church-yard was decaying, and like to fall in, and that £10 would make the repairs, proffered only £5. It would not do. Two years after he proffered the full sum. A report was then made, that the

breaches were now so much increased that £20 would scarce serve. He hesitated, hummed, and haw'd for three years more; then offered £20. The wind and rain had not awaited his de

cision, and less than £50 would not now serve. A year afterwards he sent a cheque for the £50, which was returned by post with the intelligence that the aisle had fallen the preceding week.

May the common Maker of rich and poor avert this spirit of procrastination and apathy from our beloved country. Nought is wanted but the same sense of duty, the same sense of danger, which has already gained so many triumphs of benevolence in this country over selfishness and indifference-which extinguished the slave-trade and slavery-which is putting limits to the hours of factory labour, and rearing legislative bulwarks between property and poverty. The same spirit of self-sacrifice, the same high principle and lofty resolution still lives, with energies only invigorated by past success. If our social evils are not to be left to redress themselves by terrible calamities, we must anticipate and prevent them-disperse ere it is too late those woes that are gathering fast in the skirts of our commercial greatness-and, by raising the fallen, deliver our country from those calamities with which Ireland is now threatened, by the sins of of her improvident and unthinking aristocracy.

ART. IV.-Lives of Simon Lord Lovat, and Duncan Forbes of Culloden. From original Sources. By JOHN HILL BURTON, Advocate, Author of "The Life of David Hume." London, 1847.

age.

WE lately had occasion in this Journal, to consider at some length the more prominent features of the Jacobitism of the last Our remarks were confined chiefly to the effects produced by the commotions arising out of the downfall of an ancient dynasty, on the general interests of the country, rather than on the destiny of individuals. The generalities with which, with such an object, we were obliged to deal, compelled us to disregard many of those picturesque details of individual biography, which constitute the most interesting part of this branch of Scottish history; and it is therefore with much gratification, that we are now enabled to fill up blanks that were unavoidable, by a rapid sketch of the story of one of the leading Jacobites, and of one of the few prominent Royalists whose name has descended to us untarnished by incapacity or cruelty.

When we glance over the history of the Jacobites, even in their most fortunate and happy moments, we are amazed to find how little of real ability they displayed; and how, instead of conduct rising with the occasion, they wasted themselves in a fondness of transient applause-courted by vanity, given by flattery, and vanishing in show, like the qualities which acquired it. Such were Mar and all the leaders of the first rebellion; and if there was more self-sacrifice in the Jacobites of the '45, they have little claim to respect on the score of energy in improving victory or remedying defeat. There was one exception to the mediocrity, which would, ere this, have covered them with oblivion, were it not for the heroism of their deaths; and he who organized, and as often betrayed their schemes, who crushed the first rebellion, and was himself overwhelmed in the second, deserves notice as well from the historical importance he has thus obtained, as from the extraordinary exhibition of character he has left us, and the extraordinary adventures of which he was the hero. In Lovat's life will be found a better insight into the social, and therefore real condition of the people of the north of Scotland, in the transition-time in which he lived, than can be found any where out of the Waverley Novels.

He joins together the old age of feudal misrule, and that of settled government-connecting the reigns of the last Stuarts with the era of Hume and Robertson, and the kindred spirits who threw so bright a light on the commencement of our literary

Lovat at the University of Aberdeen.

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history. His biography has thus a charm in illustrating both epochs by his own example. The feudal tyrant in the wilds of Stratherick-a law unto himself-exercising unbounded power over the lives and fortunes of a numerous vassalage, is found united in the person of the same man who shone as a courtier in the palace of Louis le Grand-who was the correspondent and friend of literary men, and devoted much of his leisure to writing pious letters to the pious. There is too, so much of the bandit in this man's history, that no fictitious narrative of border feud can exceed it in interest. We read it now with far livelier feelings than it would have produced in his own age; for, in proportion to the maturity of our civilization, is our interest in the portraiture of ruder times-the novelty of the descriptions being aided in producing this effect, by a latent contrast in favour of present comforts. Since then-a century has passed away-dynasties have been extinguished;-Europe has been revolutionized, and its social condition has undergone a change, more complete than had been felt in all the previous ages since the Crusades.

Lovat was born in the year 1676, in the reign of Charles the Second. He was the second son of the peer of Lovat, and was early sent to the University of Aberdeen, at which he appears to have been diligent. He acquired there the extensive acquaintance with the precepts of morality, scattered through the ancient classics, and which he applied with much facility and tact in the exigencies of his subsequent career. Is there any man who accuses him of treachery, which at the particular moment it did not suit his purpose to disclose, he cites you from Virgil the picture of a good man, the victim of the world's slander, and the object of divine commiseration;-is he anxious to condole with one whose father or brother he has hurried to his account, he brings from Seneca solemn reflections on mortality; and if he wishes to describe a patriot's death, he applies to himself the language of Horace, as to the beatific rapture consequent on dying for one's country.

After leaving the University, his first act was to induce his cousin, the then Lord Lovat, to endeavour to disinherit his only child, a daughter, and to call to the succession, to the honours and estates, Simon's father and himself, as the nearest male-heirs. The cousin died in the year 1696, and then began a long struggle, which occupied about thirty years, between Lovat on the one hand, and the heiress and her friends on the other, in regard to the succession. Her uncle, the Marquis of Athole, was at that time influential with the Government; and from that influence, and the violence of his opponent, he was enabled to direct against Lovat the whole artillery of the law, with which indeed, the latter had a stand-up fight until the day of his death. Athole first at

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