'A single soul is richer than all worlds-
Its acts are only shadows of itself;

And oft its wondrous wealth is all unknown.

"Tis like a mountain-range, whose rugged sides

Feed starveling flocks of sheep; pierce the bare sides,
And they ooze plenteous gold. We must go down

And work our souls like mines; make books our lamps,
Not shrines, to worship at; nor heed the world—
Let it go roaring past.'

This list is not complete, nor is it intended to be more than a collection of examples, for the purpose of exciting working men to study and composition. The annals of publishing are constantly adding new names to the literature of labour.

We would have the higher branches of learning extended to all, and higher intelligence cultivated by all. We have seen that the advantages can now be enjoyed-that the advancement can be made. It now remains for all, and especially for the young, to aspire and do their best, to cultivate their minds, by a perusal of the best authors, to appreciate lofty and suggestive thought. We look forward to the day when men of handicraft will be men of mind, men of literature-when, as great men are rapidly becoming fewer in relation to the abilities of others, all will attain greatness. We cannot,' says an accomplished writer in one of our Reviews-' we cannot surpass Pericles (as a statesman), or Plato (as a philosopher), or Praxiteles (as a statuary); but we may look forward to the day, and contribute to hasten its arrival, when mankind shall be made up of such-when these great men shall have become types, not anomalies-specimens, not marvels-when the ideal shall be realized, and the selected good, and the surpassing great of former ages, shall be the average actualities of being, and not, as now, at once our reproach and our despair.'

We look forward to this because, among other reasons, of the beneficent and elevating influence of Christianity, which has not yet seen its highest style among men at large. When its pure and heavenly doctrines shall have fully moulded the mind and heart of humanity, the sons of men will have an intellectual acuteness and power, and an emotional excellence, transcendently higher than they have at present. Excelsior!

'Deeper, deeper let us toil

In the mines of knowledge;

Nature's wealth, and learning's spoil,
Win from school and college-
Delve we there for richer gems

Than the stars of diadems.'

ART.

ART. II.-The Life and Remains of Douglas Jerrold. By his Son, Blanchard Jerrold. London: Kent and Co.

"THE Life of Douglas Jerrold,' by his son, is an excellent performance. Gracefully affectionate, gracefully filial, it is at the same time candid, modest, and truthful. If one feels always that it is a reverent and loving son that speaks, one feels also that it is a sincere and loyal man. In both respects, indeed, there is that in the book that endears the writer to the reader. Its spirit throughout is gentle and ingenuous; and the whole series of pictures it presents seems, as it were, to lie pleasantly, peacefully distinct in the clear, mild light of an amiable and kindly nature. Well-arranged and orderly, all is lightly, skilfully touched: there is grace in what is said, and there is grace in what is not said. In short, the little book is right acceptable, right welcome. One feels pleased and satisfied that the man finds such a biographer; one feels pleased and satisfied that the father owned such a son.

Besides that knowledge of him acquired from his writings, it is our fortune to have possessed, in respect to Jerrold, just sufficient personal acquaintance to render this life peculiarly attractive to us. It effects for us the rounding of the picture: what was known lends a charm to what was unknown; and the latter points the former. The solemn thought, too, sighs round us like a ghost, that he, of whom we read, he, whom we knew, has-in the prime of life, when the harvest waved before him, ripe for the gathering-passed from among us, and will no more speak to mortals! And so memories of the past mingle with the pictures of the present, as if to the music of far-off, melancholy bells, while feelings rise within us of indefinable regret, of indefinable sadness.

It is these feelings that have prompted-as we hope they will accompany and guide-the following notice.

The parents of Douglas Jerrold were but strolling players, for, n as managers of the theatre at Sheerness, they could hardly rogate a higher title. That he was born in London (and the date is January 3, 1803) was probably a contingency due to the precarious profession of the family; for it is a fact, as well that the south of England was its usual habitat, as that the infant Jerrold was carried thither in his swaddling-clothes. The first four years of his life, indeed, were spent at Cranbrook, in Kent, where Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Jerrold, patronized and protected by Sir Walter and Lady James, the great people of Angley,' had thankfully set up their modest theatre, under the rude rafters of a thatch-covered barn. The earliest impressions, then, of the future wit must have been those of green fresh pastures and tawdry theatrical properties, of fragrant wild flowers and unfragrant tallow, of the simple music of the sheep-bell and the squeak of fife VOL. 2.-No. 5,

C

and

and fiddle. The eyes of the fair-haired, red-cheeked, stout little fellow must have opened round and large over these antitheses, so curiously typical of the main perceptions and leading imagery that characterized the literary efforts of his later years. How strange it must have seemed to him to pass, perhaps on the occasion of a rehearsal, from the fresh common (his little fist full, probably, of buttercups) into that squalid, murky barn, with its spectral rafters, and its skeleton-like benches, and the rough-hewn stage, and the coarse scenery, that should represent in the evening all the grandeurs of the earth! Loving the breezy fields, and the fragrant hedges, and the fleecy sheep, and the cloud and the blue of heaven, how odd the darned flesh-coloured tights must have seemed to him -the great, glaring, staring, glass jewelry, the pasteboard helmet, the cavalier cloak, the braggadocio boots, the pistols, swords, and daggers!

Nor when, at four years of age, he was removed to Sheerness, could the contrasts and contrarieties that still surrounded him have appeared to this curious and eager little soul one whit less striking. For the green meadows and the woolly sheep he has now the filthy streets and coarse populace of one of the filthiest and coarsest of seaports. In compensation, however, from the window of his lonely room-in which his good granny, for security, while she takes the money at the theatre, locks him up nightly—he can descry, away over the unsightly houses, the sea, and, on its glittering bosom, frigates queening it, or mightier bulks of war-ships glooming, solid, fast, like castellated keeps of founded stone.

But he is not always confined now to his room o' nights: when such necessity presents itself, he, too, supporting some suitable rôle, must do duty on the boards. Kean himself, then little bigger or better than a blackguard boy, has, as Rolla, carried this infant to the footlights. How the quick, susceptible little fellow must have looked and wondered at the scenes he saw! The benches, now no longer ghastly and spectral in the daylight, but filledfilled with such faces!-the oily brown ones of several hundred Jacks, and the blowsy red ones of as many Molls! Then the uproar, the whistling, the bellowing, the quarrelling, and the trampling-the loud comments, and the still louder accompaniments of the spectators! Then the green-room, and the men and women, and their dressing and undressing there! Surely neither variety nor contrariety is wanting here to excite and stimulate. Soon one of these strange men, in that strange green-room, takes interest enough in the willing little lad to teach him his letters; and soon he is able to cheer his solitude, when locked up o' nights, with "Roderick Random' and the Death of Abel.'

What a strange web of influences it is here given us to see! What strange and contradictory materials must have constituted

the

the thinking furniture of that poor little prisoner! The sheep-bell, and the fresh meadows, and all the sweet scents and sights and sounds of country life are still dear to his memory; and out there, far away before him, is the mighty sea! But under him are the filthy streets, and the mean houses, and the meaner people! And again, but just at hand, there is that rude playhouse, where the life he knows so well is now at its ruddiest! Then the books he reads, Roderick Random' and the Death of Abel!'

We must bear in mind, too, at what an epoch it is he lives; we must bear in mind that these are the days of Austerlitz and Trafalgar; when the armies of Napoleon are dominant on every land, and the fleets of Nelson vigilant in every sea. It is a mighty hour, and the minds of men are mightily stirred. Throughout all England there is but one element, and it is enthusiasm-enthusiasm for our sea-victories and enthusiasm for our sea-heroes-enthusiasm which leaps out in every look, tone, gesture of every man that meets his fellow on the street-enthusiasm that is caught up, shared, and declaimed nightly by every one of those dingy actors within the dingy little theatre of Sheerness. It is not wonderful, then, that he, too, the quick, spirited little Jerrold should, in such circumstances, acquire a feverish longing for the sea; for it is a quick, spirited little Jerrold: no sickly, puny cageling, dying of the pip, is this, but a stout, vigorous little fellow, with plenty of indignant vehemence in him, and an instantaneous, instinctive impulse, not to shrink when attacked, but to stand up fiercely for himself. The sea and its contrasts, then, are the next experiences of little Jerrold; but before we follow him thither we must advert to yet another source of contrast that lay for him in the characters of his parents.

His mother was young; his father was old-older than the very grandmother; for the present Mrs. Samuel Jerrold was the second wife of her lord, and the wife's mother was the junior of the wife's husband. It is she, Douglas's mother, who is the soul of the family, and the soul of the theatre also; and much reason she has to keep her wits about her, not for the sake of the young ravens only (she has two boys and two girls), but for that of her aged partner also. He, for his part, the good old man, has been cuffed, and huffed, and buffeted in this sad world, and in that sad calling of his, till he is as mild, and meek, and pliant as well-kneaded dough-as limp as manipulated pasteboard-and is content and happy in the quiet of whatever out-of-the-way corner the swirls and eddies of the draught may chance to sweep him. He plays any character-Richmond or the Ghost in Hamlet-for his place now is thankfully in any gap that the exigencies of the occasion may present. He is happy, the good, quiet, well-kneaded Samuel, if things will just get along without stopping: he likes the fireside;

he likes the repose of a quiet novel; he likes the serenity of a pensive pot of purl. His peculiar glory and his pride, however, the firm fundament of his life in this world, the soil on which he grows what we may call his secret-is a pair of pumps. Pumps! yes; but then they are the pumps of Garrick; and they are still alive with the energy of the immortal sole. Poor old man! how one sympathises with him! How one rejoices, as he rejoices, in the rock of those shoes, on which he can so securely found himself! How one delights to know that his poor storm-buffeted bark had such an anchor to let down and ride at! As one thinks of all these cuffings, and huffings, and buffetings, and of the good, limp, pliant nature into which they have pressed, and turned, and kneaded him, one is glad to think that such an undeniable fountain of consolation was conceded him as this of Garrick's shoes.

Douglas does not seem to have enjoyed much attention from his mother. She, poor woman, had doubtless enough to do, for, as the phrase is, all devolved on her; and, in after years, while the good, easy old man is left by the fireside, we get glimpses of her flitting busily hither and thither on provincial engagements.

The maternal grandmother, Mrs. Reid, whose maiden name was Douglas, seems to have been the only one from whom little Jerrold received, during the whole of his infancy and boyhood, any regular and special guidance. She seems to have been Scotch; and from her, doubtless, little Douglas inherited, not his Scotch name only, but his Scotch blood also; for that perfervidum ingenium ascribed by Buchanan to the Scots was here, south of the Tweed, in the vehement individuality of Douglas Jerrold, as perfectly exemplified as ever, north of the Tweed, in any of the children proper of the ancient Caledonia.

One other point, which must have influenced the thoughts and feelings of our young ambitious aspirant, we must yet notice before following him to his ship-it is the absence of a pedigree. Mr. Blanchard Jerrold, as he says himself, has not been at much pains to elaborate an ancestral tree;' the strolling player is traced no further than his own father, a horsedealer at Hackney; and all the facts of the case are as freely, frankly, and unreservedly stated, as it has ever been our lot to witness on the part of any one discoursing in these 'old-clo'' days of his own birth and parentage. Still human nature will be human nature; and there is a touch or two here that are human nature itself. We trust, however, that we shall be seen to be merely yielding to the temptation of a naturalist, and not, in reality, unkindly, when we just slightly accentuate a phrase or two in the family legend.

The son,' proceeds the said legend, referring to Douglas's father, the strolling player, the son of Mr. Jerrold, of Hackney (who was a large dealer in horses, at a time when horses were

eagerly