not in quite so pious a spirit as the real robin. Let us have "Bob the Corn-Law Repealer" instead of "Jack the Giant Killer," and let Mr. Bright eat the hasty-pudding.

"Jack and the Bean-stalk" is more unmercifully handled than even "Hop-o'-my-Thumb." The whole story is taken to pieces and built up on a new model, in which history and fiction, facts and fairies, modern philanthropy and old-world benevolence, are plastered together in a distorted caricature of the simple, truthful old fiction. We have heard much of restoring the monuments of Westminster Abbey. If Mr. Scott intends to follow the example of Mr. George Cruikshank, he cannot do better than begin by making a Siamese-Twin monument for Edward I. and Mr. Wilberforce. Fancy Jack living in the time of Alfred the Great, and having a sister called Ady! Fancy his father being Sir Ethelbert, an imprisoned Saxon knight! Fancy the giant being merely a large Dane, and the bean-stalk only growing up to the lofty cliff where he lives! Fancy all this jumbled up with a more than ordinarily recondite apparatus of real fairies, and the whole summed up with red lights and a display of fireworks, and some idea may be formed of the pitiable condition to which Mr. George Cruikshank has reduced this delightful old story. Instead of allowing the poor giant, after having been stripped of his property, to break his neck naturally from the bean-stalk, and so make a good and satisfactory end, Mr. George Cruikshank binds him up by a dull form of rythmical enchantment, never sung in any nursery, and then puts him on a moral treadmill, and makes him drag on a protracted existence in great wretchedness and sobriety:

"A council was then held as to what was to be done with the Giant-whether he was to be killed or kept prisoner. Jack's mother, out of gratitude to the Giantess for having saved her life and the lives of her children, and indeed, as it appeared, her husband's life also, prayed the king to spare the Giant's life. King Alfred granted her petition; and being a wise king, he determined to turn such great

strength to some useful purpose, and therefore placed him under guard in the royal quarries, to hew out great stones for building royal and public places. The Giant's wife was allowed to live with him; and as he never had any intoxicating liquor to get tipsy with, he never beat or ill-used her any more, and they lived happily for many years."

Happily the artist's instinct makes head against the author's weakness; and the giant of the picture is a real genuine Giant, and not an overgrown Dane.

Nothing is so hurtful to a child as this inseparable intermixture of history and fiction. It is certain to deprave his taste, which you will find instinctively to rebel against it, and it may confuse his sense of veracity. The most truthful child very readily discovers the nature of imaginative fiction, and keeps it apart in his mind from the facts he lays hold of as realities of the past, and it is most unwise to perplex him in his distinctions. As many ogres, dwarfs, fairies, and enchanted princesses as you please, only don't mix them with Danes and the CornLaws; and let the lessons that fairy-stories naturally teach remain unencumbered with principles of general benevolence and the enforcement of necessary sanitary improvements. And as to the bad morality, the slur Mr. Cruikshank casts on our old friends, and the fears he entertains of the spread of their example, is very uncalled for. Children don't look too nicely into the stomachs of giants, and their appetite for slaughter is a very harmless thing. They picture things vividly, but not minutely or precisely. Greatly as they love details when brought before them, their fancy has little power of supplying them. A child tells his story with the broadest possible statements of fact, and omits the subordinate accompaniments; and the best old tales adopt the same manner, relieving it by picturesque vividness in one or two special instances of minute detail. These shocking incidents, which wring the unhappy Mr. Cruikshank's heart, and fill his head with visions of blood and bowels, run without any

such horrible deposits through the open mind of the child; and though he would shrink with terror from the sight of a wound, and weep at the least injury to those he loves, he does not scruple to lead scores of giants to the gallows, and behead all the ogres that come in his way. Are they not his natural enemies, too? They are taken for granted in all his romances as feræ naturæ, pests of the earth, and fair booty to every champion who has the courage and address to lay them low.

But it is not necessary to plead for the character of these doughty heroes, or to maintain the unimpeachable morality of their memoirs. The truth is, the child does not drag them into the Court of Ethics at all; at any rate he soon learns to look at them as occupying_an unmoral ground of their own. Lamb's plea for the dramatists of Charles the Second's time may, with far more justice, be used for the actors in these stories. They dwell in the land of romance, far away from the realities of life; and the child's instincts appreciate this, and he is in no danger of adopting the guile of Puss in Boots, or the marauding disposition of Jack of the Bean-stalk. They bring him neither good nor evil in a moral point of view; but they supply food for his imagination and his sense of humour. It is true the more blood-thirsty among them may not be adapted for too tender and susceptible dispositions, to which they sometimes occasion terror and distress; but such instances we should rather judge to be tokens of a want of due robustness in the character of the particular child than as proof that such tales are unfitted for children in general.

We recommend "all instructors of youth" to buy the books, burn the letter-press, and preserve the pictures; and we earnestly entreat George Cruikshank to renounce his sacrilegious alterations, and be to us again what he

once was.

519

THE POLICE.*

SIR ROBERT PEEL'S Act, organising our present Police Force, was one of the many executive Reforms which entitle his memory to the gratitude of the community. On the whole, it has worked well; but those fears which at the time of its introduction were so broadly expressed, that it would open opportunities for petty oppression, and trench on that personal liberty which is an Englishman's peculiar boast, have proved to be not entirely without foundation. The upper and middle classes are excessively unwilling to listen to any animadversions on the Police; they derive all the benefits of the institution, and its defects very rarely touch them. Their property and their persons are protected, and they owe to the Policeman freedom from a thousand anxieties. To them he is the well-attired respectful officer, ever ready to assist them in little difficulties; temperate though steady in his opposition to venial infringements of the law; is sensible enough to wink at a little excess in well-dressed men ; is a name of terror to importunate beggars and insolent caband even if he be a little too familiar down-stairs, the good housekeeper tolerates his constant attendance as the best protection from burglars, just as she keeps a cat, though he too may now and then make free in the larder.

men;

Yet there is a class to whom the Policeman does not appear to fulfil simply the functions of a Guardian Angel. It is a class who never want him to clear the way to a carriage; whom he very inadequately protects from any

* Published in The Inquirer of Saturday, Feb. 26, 1853.

but the last extremes of violence; whom sometimes his duties and sometimes his temper require him to coerce; to whom he does not feel bound to be polite; and whom if drunk he takes not home, but to the station-house. Among this class there is a soreness of feeling about the Police, which is a very unpleasant symptom. It arises less from the inconvenience endured from a vigorous execution of real duties (the thieves don't feel it) than from petty acts of oppression and injustice. That arbitrary power, even within a very narrow range, cannot be entrusted to men, especially uneducated men, without some degree of abuse, is a truth that should only make us the more anxious to limit so inevitable an evil, and neither indolence nor cowardice ought to prevent us from steadily repressing it within the very narrowest boundaries. The Policeman is protected in the discharge of his duty by a special severity of the law, and rightly so; but, on the other hand, a breach of the law by its appointed guardians constitutes, and ought to be visited as a double offence. Several incidents lately have tended to show that our Police are growing too sensible of the power and immunity of their office, and not sufficiently so of its responsibilities. Some of the Metropolitan parishes have laid formal complaints of them before the Secretary of State. The temporary deification they received at the time of the Great Exhibition, when they were felt doubly necessary, and therefore doubly adored by all old ladies and feeble persons generally, has, we fear, done something permanently to impair their character. A Policeman on duty considers himself taboo, a sacred vessel; to "interfere with a Policeman in the discharge of his duty" is a recognised expression for the worst form of lèse-majesté now known; and the holy man himself thinks it no less a crime to interpose where he is acting in excess of his duty, or even when culpably departing from it. The great flaw in the working of the system, and the practical point to which we wish to draw attention, is the extreme