Remedy for Scottish Difficulties. 503 voted exclusively to Educational subjects, and in the fervour and power with which many of the discussions are conducted. Nothing, perhaps, more strikingly illustrates the difference between the condition of England and Scotland, than the fact that, while almost every educating section in England has its vigorous periodical, there is not in all Scotland a single serial devoted to the interests of public Education. Apart from the question of University improvement, Scottish Educational thought has been stereotyped for nearly thirty years; and almost every movement, whether backward or forward-to right or left-has been mechanical to some impulse from England. This is a change in our history which our educationists may well examine. What is to be done? The time has come when there must be renewed efforts to frame and establish a National System on a broad and liberal basis, not an implantation from Ireland or England, but an evolution from amid our own National experiences, and adapted to the altered condition of society. The difficulty hitherto has been to legislate so as to preserve the Bible in the common school, and secure the support of the "Voluntary party." Solutions have been attempted again and again, so earnest and liberal, as to give promise, though they failed, of success, to repeated and modified trial. Now that the dust of agitation and controversy has been carried past us, we may profit by our mistakes, and relay our foundations. In the resolutions agreed to at the public meeting of the National Education Society held in Edinburgh in 1850, religious instruction in the Common School was left altogether to the haphazard deliverances of School Committees, chosen from amid masses of the community. The Church was ignored as an educating power; and the resolutions, though influentially supported and advocated with consummate ability, proved generally unacceptable. In the "Proposal for a System of National Education," signed by Dr Cunningham, Dr Candlish, and others, there was provision made that the Government inspectors "satisfy themselves as to the moral and religious character of candidates" for teacherships, "but without imposing any test of conformity;" and, further, that "the religious instruction be given exclusively from the authorised version of the Holy Scriptures and the Shorter Catechism." The Church was so far recognised, that the ministers of different denominations might have liberty of visiting. The proposal was very unacceptable to a large class, because it legislated at all as to religious instruction in the school; and to another class, because it left to the decision of inspectors the religious character of the teacher; and, further, because, if the teacher proved incompetent or immoral, there was no local manageinent or control provided. The Sheriff was to have the incon gruous task of settling all difficulties, disputes, and delinquencies. It provided for religious instruction, but swept from those most interested in the school, every trace of religious control; and, while it recognised the Established Church and other Presbyterian bodies, as entitled to take an interest in schools and watch over their efficiency, it denied them any jurisdiction, and transferred to the Sheriff-court the functions of a court of conscience. For these and similar reasons, the "Proposal," though closer in its tone and arrangements to the general wishes of the people than the resolutions already noticed, did not carry with it sufficient support. The difficulty may be obviated by a legislation which deals in this country, not with the Education in the School, but with the Local Managers or Board out of it: Let the legislation give such constitution to the Local Boards as will be a guarantee, that the best instruction, secular and religious, will be efficiently imparted: Let them be constituted on the tacit recognition of the threefold responsibility of the parent, the Church and the State: Let the Town-Councils elect three of their members,—and let the Presbyteries,-Established, Free, and United Presbyterianelect each a representative, as the Local Educational Board, with power to add to their number three others, if they see necessary. This would enable the Board to obtain the co-operation of clergymen and laymen of other denominations, distinguished for their interest and influence in local education. Each school district might have also its commissioner, chosen by resident heads of families, to take part in the deliberations of the Board. But we omit details, and refer to the admirable work by Sir James Kay Shuttleworth, as having many valuable hints on this view of the subject. This is the only course, we think, likely to extricate conflicting parties from the disgraceful dead-lock in which, for many years, they have been lying; and to give the country a satisfactory guarantee, without statutory obligations, that the Education shall unite the thoroughly intellectual with the moral and religious. With this start, and free from the encumbrances of ecclesiastical and political antagonisms, it will be comparatively easy to carry improvements upward through all our intermediate institutions. But difficulties, dark and almost overwhelmingly saddening, meet us when we look outward and downward on the simmering masses, out of which our Ragged-Schools and Reformatories are ever filling. Oppressive revelations of the social disorganisation and disease of the sinking and sunken, are spread before us in the calmly written and invaluable work by Mr Thomson of 1 "Public Education," pp. 396-409. Compulsory Education a National Necessity. 505 Banchory, "Punishment and Prevention." It exhibits the more effective methods yet attempted for prevention and reformation. But what avail they all? Ragged Schools and Reformatories are but skirting the borders of the sinking and the sunken, without permanently lessening the mass. Our manifold appliances yet scratch the surface, and gather in a few floating particles for improvement. Were there no reproducing, nor rapid filling up of the empty space, the whole mass might ultimately yield to the play of benevolence and philanthropy, as the solid rock moulders into pliability and fruitfulness under the gentle influences of the air, the glistening dewdrop and the silent sunbeam. But such result is here improbable. Nor, will a National System avail. The most perfectly equipped network of National Schools, spread over the whole country, and lowered to encircle the most sunken, will assuredly not avail. All experience attests, that to raise the sunken, or to arrest the sinking, something more direct and stringent is needed,-in short, that compulsory Education is now a National necessity. The claims of the labour market must no longer triumph over the rights of children,-covetous employers and parents must be no longer permitted to lay the body, heart, intellect, and spirit of the helpless young a sacrifice on the altar of Traffic, and to raise imposing structures out of finest sensibilities, while they crush hopeful intellects which they keep for ever dark, and consciences which they too often touch only to deaden. Britain has already broken in upon the sacredness of the labour-market by smiting off the fetters of the slave; and why not, by regulative legislation, lighten for her own children the burden of premature toil? The difficulties are not insuperable in the way of extending to all employments the principle of the Factory Act, and of applying Educational tests as the condition both of half and of full time labour. For the hundreds of thousands who are growing up untaught, a source of misery to themselves, and of weakness to the state, increasing our taxation, multiplying our refor matories, and exhausting public benevolence, nothing short of direct compulsion will suffice. The Educational condition of our sinking and sunken population, demands extraordinary remedial measures. We pity the imbecility which for generations leaves untouched the Pontine Marshes while they diffuse the elements of disease and death; but wherein is Britain better, so long as she allows her moral jungles to send abroad freely, on the breeze of every passing influence, the seeds of idleness, vagrancy, and crime? ART. IX.-1. Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin: Comprising the_celebrated Political and Satirical Poems, Parodies, and Jeuxd'Esprit of the Right Hon. George Canning, the Earl of Carlisle, Marquis Wellesley, the Right Hon. J. H. Frere, W. Gifford, Esq., the Right Hon. W. Pitt, G. Ellis, Esq., and Others. With Explanatory Notes. By CHARLES EDMONDS. Second Edition. London, 1854. 8vo. 2. Melibaus-Hipponax. The Biglow Papers. Edited, with an Introduction, Notes, Glossary, and Copious Index, by HOMER WILBUR, A.M. Fourth Edition. Boston, 1856. 8vo. 3. The Age: a Colloquial Satire. By PHILIP JAMES Bailey. London, 1858. 8vo. 4. Humbug Attacked, in Church, Law, Physic, Army, and Navy. A Poem. By Mr JOHN BULL, Jun. London, 1858. 8vo. 5. Two Millions. By WILLIAM ALLEN BUTLER, Author of "Nothing to Wear." London, 1858. 8vo. THE poetry of the Anti-Jacobin, now more than half a century old, contains the latest specimens which have been produced in England of true satire of satire which is likely to stand the test of time. The satires of Moore and Byron are already obsolete, and would rarely meet our eyes but for the place they necessarily occupy in the "complete works" of these poets. The condition under which satire is likely to be well-written, are even more rare than those which produce good poetry. The writer must be a man of very great vigour of intellect-even greater than that which would make a good poet upon grave subjects— for he must subdue and bring into the realm of poetry the most refractory kind of matter; and he must have a good grievance, one which has the rare recommendation of having at once a special and temporal, and an abiding, public interest. Personal satires, without the latter element, are in reality no more than vulgar libels-allowing the maxim, "the greater the truth, the greater the libel ;" and satires, without the personal, or party, element, are not satires, but "didactic poems"-things which the world has very properly agreed to nauseate. That which is to blame in the social body, before it can be assimilated by the poetical digestion, must be cooked up with the salt of wit and the pepper of personality. Even then there is something very unsatisfactory, to the cultivated imagination, in most forms of satire. With the lapse of time, the salt always loses some of its sharpness, and the pepper becomes less pricking to the palate; and the harsh and essentially unpoetical and properly unversifi able negative character of censure, acquires a more or less repulsive predominance. We are strongly of opinion that parodyalthough sadly susceptible of foolish application-is the form of satire which best justifies the employment of verse. Verse, even of the lowest kind, is an assertion, at the outset, of thoughts and feelings which "move harmonious numbers." Now, mere censure, or mere ridicule, does not do any such thing; witness the satires of Pope, which are, for the most part, the smoothest, and, at the same time, the least "harmonious" numbers in the world. Pope's numbers never approach to being musical, properly speaking, except when he rises above the merely negative character of most of his satires, and becomes really indignant, or when he assumes a sympathy with what he satirises, as in that delightful poem, "The Rape of the Lock." In the first case, the negative character of blame or ridicule becomes subordinated to the positive and poetical love of good, implied in indignation; and, in the second, he adopts the truest form of satire-its most thoroughly poetical and genuine form-that of a humourous adoption of, and assumption of, sympathy with the absurd. Most of the satires of the Anti-Jacobin were written in the happiest form, and under the happiest conditions. Their authors were men of great intellectual vigour and worldly knowledge, -that essential constituent of the truly poetical no less than the political character; and they had a most excellent grievance. The doctrines of the French Revolution had been more or less accepted in England, to an extent which must have seemed indescribably alarming to men who did not need to wait for the subsequent practical results, to be convinced of and horrified at their nature. Men of the purest lives and highest imaginations, Wordsworth, Southey, Coleridge, among others, were deceived and seduced by the boast of the near approach of that "good time coming," which has at all times possessed such charms for the poetical fancy, but which has always been laughed at by men whose judgment has been cultivated by a knowledge of the world and a thorough training in moral and historical science. Here was an evil which united the personal and temporary with the abiding interest, in the highest degree. As long as human nature is human nature, there will always be a considerable class of persons at whom the finger of scorn, pointed by the authors of the "Anti-Jacobin," towards persons now no more, will stand equally directed; but it was only under the temporary predominance of, and threatened danger from, the principles of that class in England, at the time of the French Revolution, that those persons and principles could produce the amount of interest required as a basis for satire. The recollection of the interest and importance which once attached to the verses of the Anti-Jacobin, |