ticular cause small-pox is taken after vaccination, it is five or six times less dangerous than it would otherwise have been. The power of vaccination in exterminating small-pox, wholly consists in the fact that it is a small-pox which is not infectious. In some inscrutable way, passage through the lower organisation of the cow so alters the small-pox matter, that it will produce in the human body, only by immediate contact with the blood, a disorder of the mildest form, that may be borne at any age, in any state, and that shall not make the person touched with it a source of danger to those who come near. But there are certain conditions of successful vaccination. At the outset, the right sort of matter must be taken from the cow; for Jenner showed that the cow is liable to other pustular diseases which will communicate sores and raise vesicles not of the true form, and which give no protection against small-pox. Then, also, it should be taken only on the day when it is ripe, and from a pustule that has not been rubbed and broken. In taking it from the human body for dissemination, it is essential to observe this rule, and to observe also the rule that it must be taken from a healthy body, and especially from one that is not affected by a skin disease, for such disease will often modify the power of the vaccine matter. Absolute care in vaccination and universal adoption of it would have by this time fulfilled Jenner's utmost hope for the extinction of small-pox. What can be done is shown by the fact that for twenty years Sweden and Denmark were kept free from the disease. The Austrian government went so far as to order that no child should be admitted into any public school, have share in any public institution, or partake of the sacraments of the Church, unless he had been vaccinated. The care indicated by such exaggerated measures did succeed in the extirpation of small-pox for long periods. failure in ten cases, and spurious or imperfect vesicles in nine others." We may readily suppose that this degeneration of lymph does not arise from the mere act of transmission, but from the multiplication of the chances of imperfect vaccination hurtful to its quality, by the thousand and one vaccinators through whose hands it may have passed. Who can tell the pedigree of a pustule, or answer for the accidents interfering with the quality of matter that has been through many hundred systems? One ignorant or careless vaccinator who diffuses matter from the vaccinated arm of a child with skin disease, may cause the propagation of matter that shall give false confidence to hundreds of men. It is known that in the years seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen of the century, a vast number of vaccina.ions were made in different parts of Europe with inefficient lymph, and that persons vaccinated in those years have been found among the chief sufferers from small-pox. In spite, therefore, of the contrary assertion of the National Vaccine Establishment, made six years ago, we must agree with Mr. Simon, Dr. Watson, and others, that well-devised arrangements for the periodical renewal of lymph would give greater certainty and permanence to the protection it affords. The next requirement is, good vaccination. Vaccine matter must be taken for use from none but healthy bodies, always at the right time, and only from a perfect and true cow-pox vesicle, and by a vaccinator who has been taught to recognise its perfect form. No child is vaccinated properly, upon whose skin at least one vesicle is not allowed to run its whole natural course, unopened by the lancet and unbroken by rubbing. There is need also, of a full and accessible supply of the best vaccine matter, and of a good working system of compulsory vaccination. Give us these, and we may root out But it is said that the vaccine lymph is en-small-pox. feebled in power, by a long course of transmis- Having shown what we want, we may as well sion from arm to arm. We have seen that the consider what we have. Until eighteen 'forty we fresh lymph from the cow, obtained in our own had only the National Vaccine Establishment day, reproduces more exactly than the matter for public vaccination, and the free diffusion of commonly in use, the vaccine pustule described the cow-pock matter. In eighteen 'forty, act of by Jenner, which so strongly fortified the con- parliament declared that gratuitous vaccination, stitution. Small-pox after vaccination, or the not to be considered parish relief, might be power to take vaccination twice, which repre- claimed of the local authorities in all parishes of sents a power to take small-pox after vaccina- England and Wales. For the three years before tion, is by a great deal more common than it this law, the mortality from small-pox was seven used to be. There is annual vaccination in the hundred and seventy in a million; for the three Prussian army, and it is a most instructive fact years after this law, three hundred and four in a that in the old soldiers who were vaccinated thirty million. Still, more than five thousand peror forty years ago, vaccination will seldom take a sons, chiefly infants and children, perished of second time, while among the soldiers vaccinated the disease every year. For this reason, in during the last dozen years, second vaccination 'fifty-three, an act was passed to compel every often has an ominous success. About twenty years child to be vaccinated within four months of its ago, Mr. Estlin, whose evidence corresponds birth. At the registration of every birth, the with that of many other witnesses, said of the registrar was to give notice of the legal obligaVaccine Institution of Glasgow, that "in forty-tion, and of the penalty for neglect. At first three trials made with lymph newly obtained the act was readily obeyed, and deaths from from the cow, there had not been a single failure, small-pox fell to one hundred and fifty-two in whereas in the last preceding forty-three vaccina- the million. Then, it was found that nobody was tions made with a former lymph, there had been | charged with the enforcement of the law, or Its coercive with the recovery of penalties. power was therefore at an end. This oversight has yet to be remedied. The same act provided that none but qualified medical practitioners should be appointed by the parishes as public vaccinators. This was a gain. But the extension of the system of gratuitous vaccination has, of course, reduced very much the number of applicants for free vacci nation to the National Vaccine Establishment; and, while the demand on that institution for supplies of lymph has greatly increased, the source of its lymph has been drying up, and its power of selection has been, of course, proportionately restricted. The vaccination stations in the great towns are now, therefore, beginning to contribute supplies to the central establishment, of which lymph is to be obtained by every proper applicant. Most important of all, is a new use made of the large vaccine stations that have been formed. By a notification from the privy council, public vaccinators in the towns which contain medical schools are authorised to instruct students and give certificates of their proficiency. After the first day of the present year, except in certain stated cases, no person was to be contracted with for vaccination of the public, without evidence that he had been taught and examined by some public vaccinator authorised by the privy council for that purpose. Our present wants, therefore, are but two: firstly, some measure for the renewal of the vaccine matter: secondly, a system of compulsory vaccination that will include provision for the actual enforcement of its penalties. THE UNFINISHED POEM. TAKE it, reader-idly passing This, like hundred other lines; Take it, critic, great at classing Subtle genius' well-known sign. But, O reader! be thou dumb; Critic, let no keen wit come; For the hand that wrote or blurr'd Will not write another word, And the soul you scorn or prize Now than angels is more wise. Take it, heart of man or woman, This unfinished, broken strain, Whether it be poor and common, Or the noblest work of brain; Let that reverent heart sole sit Here in judgment over it, Tenderly, as you would read (Any one, of any creed, Any churchyard walking by), "Sacred to the memory." Wholly sacred: even as lingers Final word, or light glance cast, Or last clasp of life-warm fingers That we knew not was the last; Wholly sacred-as we lay, The day after funeral day, Their dear relics, great or small, Who need nothing, yet have allAll the best of us, that lies Hid with them in Paradise; Ir lately happened that I found myself rambling about the scenes among which my earliest days were passed; scenes from which I departed when I was a child, and which I did not revisit until I was a man. This is no uncommon chance, but one that befals some of us any day; perhaps it may not be quite uninteresting to compare notes with the reader respecting an experience so familiar and a journey so uncommercial. I will call my boyhood's home (and I feel like a Tenor in an English Opera when I mention it) Dullborough. Most of us come from Dullborough who come from a country town. As I left Dullborough in the days when there were no railroads in the land, I left it in a stagecoach. Through all the years that have since passed, have I ever lost the smell of the damp straw in which I was packed-like game-and forwarded, carriage paid, to the Cross Keys, Wood-street, Cheapside, London? There was no other inside passenger, and I consumed my sandwiches in solitude and dreariness, and it rained hard all the way, and I thought life sloppier than I had expected to find it. With this tender remembrance upon me, I was cavalierly shunted back into Dullborough the other day, by train. My ticket had been previously collected, like my taxes, and my shining new portmanteau had had a great plaster stuck upon it, and I had been defied by Act of Parliament to offer an objection to anything that was done to it, or me, under a penalty of not less than forty shillings or more than five pounds, compoundable for a term of imprisonment. When I had sent my disfigured property on to the hotel, I began to look about me; and the first discovery I made, was, that the Station had swallowed up the playing-field. It was gone. The two beautiful hawthorntrees, the hedge, the turf, and all those buttercups and daisies, had given place to the stoniest of jolting roads; while, beyond the Station, an ugly dark monster of a tunnel kept its jaws open, as if it had swallowed them and were ravenous for more destruction. The coach that had carried me away, was melodiously called Timpson's Blue-Eyed Maid, and belonged to Timpson, at the coach-office up-street; the locomotive engine that had brought me back, was called severely No. 97, and belonged to S. E. R., and was spitting ashes and hot-water over the blighted ground. When I had been let out at the platform-door, by the expression of my eye, if it catches his, that there is something wrong between us. Moreover, I felt that Pickford had no right to come rushing into Dullborough and deprive the town of a public picture. He is not Napoleon Bonaparte. When he took down the transparent stage-coach, he ought to have given the town a transparent van. With a gloomy conviction that Pickford is wholly utilitarian and unimaginative, I proceeded on my way. like a prisoner whom his turnkey grudgingly released, I looked in again over the low wall, at the scene of departed glories. Here, in the haymaking time, had I been delivered from the dungeons of Seringapatam, an immense pile (of haycock), by my countrymen, the victorious British (boy next door and his two cousins), and had been recognised with ecstasy by my affianced one (Miss Green), who had come all the way from England (second house in the terrace) to ransom me, and marry me. Here It is a mercy I have not a red and green lamp had I first heard in confidence, from one whose and a night-bell at my door, for in my very young father was greatly connected, being under Go- days I was taken to so many lyings-in that I vernment, of the existence of a terrible banditti, wonder I escaped becoming a professional martyr called "The Radicals," whose principles were, to them in after-life. I suppose I had a very that the Prince Regent wore stays, and that sympathetic nurse, with a large circle of married nobody had a right to any salary, and that the acquaintance. However that was, as I continued army and navy ought to be put down-horrors my walk through Dullborough, I found many at which I trembled in my bed, after suppli- houses to be solely associated in my mind with cating that the Radicals might be speedily this particular interest. At one little greentaken and hanged. Here, too, had we, the grocer's shop, down certain steps from the street, small boys of Boles's, had that cricket match I remembered to have waited on a lady who had against the small boys of Coles's, when Boles had four children (I am afraid to write five, and Coles had actually met upon the ground, though I fully believe it was five) at a birth. and when, instead of instantly hitting out at This meritorious woman held quite a Reception one another with the utmost fury, as we had all in her room on the morning when I was introhoped and expected, those sneaks had said re- duced there, and the sight of the house brought spectively, "I hope Mrs. Boles is well," and vividly to my mind how the four (five) deceased "I hope Mrs. Coles and the baby are doing young people lay, side by side, on a clean cloth charmingly." Could it be that, after all this, on a chest of drawers: reminding me by a homely and much more, the Playing-field was a Station, association, which I suspect their complexion to and No. 97 expectorated boiling-water and red-have assisted, of pigs' feet as they are usually hot cinders on it, and the whole belonged by Act of Parliament to S. E. R.? displayed at a neat tripe-shop. Hot caudle was handed round on the occasion, and I further As it could be, and was, I left the place with remembered as I stood contemplating the greena heavy heart for a walk all over the town. And grocer's, that a subscription was entered into first of Timpson's, up-street. When I departed among the company, which became extremely from Dullborough in the strawy arms of Timp-alarming to my consciousness of having pocketson's Blue-Eyed Maid, Timpson's was a mode- money on my person. This fact being known to rate-sized coach-office (in fact, a little coach-my conductress, whoever she was, I was earnestly office), with an oval transparency in the window, exhorted to contribute, but resolutely declined: which looked beautiful by night, representing therein disgusting the company, who gave me one of Timpson's coaches in the act of passing to understand that I must dismiss all expectaa milestone on the London road with great ve- tions of going to Heaven. locity, completely full inside and out, and all the How does it happen that when all else is passengers dressed in the first style of fashion, change wherever one goes, there yet seem, in and enjoying themselves tremendously. I found every place, to be some few people who never no such place as Timpson's now-no such bricks alter? As the sight of the greengrocer's house and rafters, not to mention the name-no such recalled these trivial incidents of long ago, the edifice on the teeming earth. Pickford had come identical greengrocer appeared on the steps, and knocked Timpson's down. Pickford had not with his hands in his pockets, and leaning his only knocked Timpson's down, but had knocked shoulder against the door-post, as my childish two or three houses down on each side of Timp-eyes had seen him many a time; indeed, there son's, and then had knocked the whole into one was his old mark on the door-post yet, as if great establishment, with a pair of big gates, his shadow had become a fixture there. It in and out of which, his (Pickford's) waggons was he himself; he might formally have been are, in these days, always rattling, with their an old-looking young man, or he might now drivers sitting up so high, that they look in at be a young-looking old man, but there he the second floor windows of the old fashioned was. In walking along the street, I had as yet houses in the High-street as they shake the town. looked in vain for a familiar face, or even a transI have not the honour of Pickford's acquaint-mitted face; here was the very greengrocer who ance, but I felt that he had done me an injury, not to say committed an act of boyslaughter, in running over my childhood in this rough manner; and if ever I meet Pickford driving one of his own monsters, and smoking a pipe the while (which is the custom of his men), he shall know had been weighing and handling baskets on the morning of the reception. As he brought with him a dawning remembrance that he had had no proprietary interest in those babies, I crossed the road, and accosted him on the subject. He was not in the least excited or of gratified or in any way roused, by the accuracy my recollection, but said, Yes, summut out of the common-he didn't remember how many it was (as if half a dozen babes either way made no difference)-had happened to a Mrs. What'sher-name, as once lodged there-but he didn't call it to mind, particular. Nettled by this phlegmatic conduct, I informed him that I had left the town when I was a child. He slowly returned, quite unsoftened and not without a sarcastic kind of complacency, Had I? Ah! And did I find it had got on tolerable well without me? Such is the difference (I thought, when I had left him a few hundred yards behind, and was by so much in a better temper) between going away from a place and remaining in it. had no right, I reflected, to be angry with the greengrocer for his want of interest. I was nothing to him: whereas he was the town, the cathedral, the bridge, the river, my childhood, and a large slice of my life, to me. [Conducted by his sake, that she fainted away. Many wondrous secrets of Nature had I come to the knowledge of in that sanctuary: of which not the least terrific were, that the witches in Macbeth bore an awful resemblance to the Thanes and other proper inhabitants of Scotland; and that the good King Duncan couldn't rest in his grave, but was constantly coming out of it, and calling himself somebody else. To the Theatre, therefore, I repaired for consolation. But I found very little, for it was in a bad and a declining way. A dealer in wine and bottled beer had already squeezed his trade into the box-office, and the theatrical money was taken-when it came—in kind of meat-safe in the passage. The dealer in wine and bottled beer must have insinuated himself under the stage too; for he announced that he had various descriptions of alcoholic drinks "in the wood," and there was no possible stowage for the wood anywhere else. Evidently, he was by degrees eating the establishment away to the core, and would soon have sole possession of it. It was To Let, and hopelessly so, for its old purposes; and there had been no entertainment within its walls for a long time, except a Panorama; and even that had been announced as the fatal meaning and the leaden import of those terrible expressions. No, there was no comfort in the Theatre. It was mysteriously gone, like my own youth. Unlike my own youth, it might be coming back some day; but there was little promise of it. Of course the town had shrunk fearfully, since I was a child there. I had entertained the impression that the High-street was at least as wide as Regent-street, London, or the Italian Boulevard at Paris. I found it little better than a lane. There was a public clock in it, which I". pleasingly instructive," and I knew too well had supposed to be the finest clock in the world; whereas it now turned out to be as inexpressive, moon-faced, and weak a clock as ever I saw. It belonged to a Town Hall, where I had seen an Indian (who I now suppose wasn't an Indian) swallow a sword (which I now suppose he didn't). This edifice had appeared to me in those days so glorious a structure, that I had set it up in my mind as the model on which the Genie of the Lamp built the palace for Aladdin. A mean little brick heap, like a demented chapel, with a few yawning persons in leather gaiters, and in the last extremity for something to do, lounging at the door with their hands in their pockets, and calling themselves a Corn Exchange! As the town was placarded with references to the Dullborough Mechanics' Institution, I thought I would go and look at that establishment next. There had been no such thing in the town, in my young day, and it occurred to me that its extreme prosperity might have brought adversity upon the Drama. I found the Institution with some difficulty, and should scarcely have known that I had found it if I had judged from its exThe Theatre was in existence, I found, on to its never having been finished, and having no ternal appearance only; but this was attributable asking the fishmonger, who had a compact show front: consequently, it led a modest and retired of stock in his window, consisting of a sole and existence up a stable-yard. It was (as I learnt, on a quart of shrimps-and I resolved to comfort inquiry) a most flourishing Institution, and of my mind by going to look at it. Richard the the highest benefit to the town: two triumphs Third, in a very uncomfortable cloak, had first which I was glad to understand were not at all appeared to me there, and had made my heart | impaired by the seeming drawbacks that no leap with terror by backing up against the stage-mechanics belonged to it, and that it was steeped box in which I was posted, while struggling for in debt to the chimney-pots. It had a large life against the virtuous Richmond. It was within those walls that I had learnt, as from a page of English history, how that wicked King slept in war-time on a sofa much too short for him, and how fearfully his conscience troubled his boots. There, too, had I first seen the funny countryman, but countryman of noble principles in a flowered waistcoat, crunch up his little hat and throw it on the ground, and pull off his coat, saying "Dom thee, squire, coom on with thy fistes then!" At which the lovely young woman who kept company with him (and who went out gleaning, in a narrow white muslin apron with five beautiful bars of five different coloured ribbons across it) was so frightened for room, which was approached by an infirm stepladder: the builder having declined to construct the intended staircase, without a present payment in cash, which Dullborough (though so profoundly appreciative of the Institution) seemed unaccountably bashful about subscribing. The large room had cost-or would, when paid for-five hundred pounds; and it had more mortar in it and more echoes, than one might have expected to get for the money. It was fitted up with a platform, and the usual lecturing tools, including a large black board of a menacing appearance. On referring to lists of the courses of lectures that had been given in this thriving Hall, I fancied I detected a shyness in admitting that human nature when at leisure has any desire whatever to be relieved and diverted; and a furtive sliding in of any poor make-weight piece of amusement, shamefacedly and edgewise. Thus, I observed that it was necessary for the members to be knocked on the head with Gas, Air, Water, Food, the Solar System, the Geological periods, Criticism on Milton, the Steam-engine, John Bunyan, and Arrow-Headed Inscriptions, before they might be tickled by those unaccountable choristers, the negro singers in the court costume of the reign of George the Second. Likewise, that they must be stunned by a weighty inquiry whether there was internal evidence in SHAKESPEARE's works, to prove that his uncle by the mother's side lived for some years at Stoke Newington, before they were brought-to by a Miscellaneous Concert. But indeed the masking of entertainment, and pretending it was something else—as people mask bedsteads when they are obliged to have them in sitting-rooms, and make believe that they are bookcases, sofas, chests of drawers, anything rather than bedsteads-was manifest even in the pretence of dreariness that the unfortunate entertainers themselves felt obliged in decency to put forth when they came here. One very agreeable professional singer who travelled with two professional ladies, knew better than to introduce either of those ladies to sing the ballad "Comin' through the Rye" without prefacing it himself, with some general remarks on wheat and clover; and even then, he dared not for his life call the song, a song, but disguised it in the bill as an "Illustration." In the library, also-fitted with shelves for three thousand books, and containing upwards of one hundred and seventy (presented copies mostly) seething their edges in damp plaster-there was such a painfully apologetic return of 62 offenders who had read Travels, Popular Biography, and mere Fiction descriptive of the aspirations of the hearts and souls of mere human creatures like themselves; and such an elaborate parade of 2 bright examples who had had down Euclid after the day's occupation and confinement; and 3 who had had down Metaphysics after ditto; and 1 who had had down Theology after ditto; and 4 who had worried Grammar, Political Economy, Botany, and Logarithms all at once after ditto; that I suspected the boasted class to be one man, who had been hired to do it. Emerging from the Mechanics' Institution and continuing my walk about the town, I still noticed everywhere the prevalence, to an extraordinary degree, of this custom of putting the natural demand for amusement out of sight, as some untidy housekeepers put dust, and pretending that it was swept away. And yet it was ministered to, in a dull and abortive manner, by all who made this feint. Looking in at what is called in Dullborough "the serious bookseller's," where, in my childhood, I had studied the faces of numbers of gentlemen depicted in rostrums with a gaslight on each side of them, and casting my eyes over the open pages of certain printed discourses there, I found a vast deal of aiming at jocosity and dramatic effect, even in them-yes, verily, even on the part of one very wrathful expounder who bitterly anathematised a poor little Circus. Similarly, in the reading provided for the young people enrolled in the Lasso of Love, and other excellent unions, I found the writers generally under a distressing sense that they must start (at all events) like story-tellers, and delude the young persons into the belief that they were going to be interesting. As I looked in at this window for twenty minutes by the clock, I am in a position to offer a friendly remonstrance-not bearing on this particular point-to the designers and engravers of the pictures in those publications. Have they considered the awful consequences likely to flow from their representations of Virtue? Have they asked themselves the question, whether the terrific prospect of acquiring that fearful chubbiness of head, unwieldiness of arm, feeble dislocation of leg, crispness of hair, and enormity of shirt-collar, which they represent as inseparable from Goodness, may not tend to confirm sensitive waverers, in Evil? A most impressive example (if I had believed it) of what a Dustman and a Sailor may come to, when they mend their ways, was presented to me in this same shop-window. When they were leaning (they were intimate friends) against a post, drunk and reckless, with surpassingly bad hats on, and their hair over their foreheads, they were rather picturesque, and looked as if they might be agreeable men if they would not be beasts. But when they had got over their bad propensities, and when, as a consequence, their heads had swelled alarmingly, their hair had got so curly that it lifted their blown-out cheeks up, their coat-cuffs were so long that they never could do any work, and their eyes were so wide open that they never could do any sleep, they presented a spectacle calculated to plunge a timid nature into the depths of Infamy. But, the clock that had so degenerated since I saw it last, admonished me that I had stayed here long enough; and I resumed my walk again. I had not gone fifty paces along the street when I was suddenly brought up by the sight of a man who got out of a little phaeton at the doctor's door, and went into the doctor's house. Immediately, the air was filled with the scent of trodden grass, and the perspective of years opened, and at the end of it was a little likeness of this man keeping a wicket, and I said, “God bless my soul! Joe Specks!" Through many changes and much work, I had preserved a tenderness for the memory of Joe, forasmuch as we had made the acquaintance of Roderick Random together, and had believed him to be no ruffian, but an ingenuous and engaging hero. Scorning to ask the boy left in the phaeton whether it was really Joe, and scorning even to read the brass plate on the door-so sure was I-I rang the bell and informed the servant maid that a stranger sought audience of Mr. Specks. Into a room, half surgery, half study, I was shown to await his coming, and I |