And consequently all conceivable,-literally all conceivable forms of immorality were brought to imagination, most of them into experiment, and the greater number into prevailing practice, in those nations: insomuch that the sated monarch would have imposed nearly as difficult a task on ingenuity in calling for the invention of a new vice, as of a new pleasure. They would perhaps have been identical demands when he was the person to be pleased." (P. 35—41.)

After this display of the ignorance of the heathen world, Mr. Foster brings successively under his review the benighted state of that part of the globe which has sunk under the influence of the Mohammedan imposture; the continuing depression of the human mind under the papal domination, and even subsequently to the reformation; his aim being to shew that whatever alterations may have taken place in creeds and canons, and in civil and ecclesiastical constitutions, nothing effectual has been done for the extrication of the great masses of population of which nations numerically consist, from their state of moral and spiritual ignorance. This, he contends, and as we think judiciously and ably contends, is only to be accomplished by a serious and high-spirited national endeavour to bring instruction home to the very doors of the people. We ourselves are further persuaded that no general political reforms will reach to the homes and bosoms of the people; neither do we dare to think that any plan of general education will effect any substantial reform, unless religion is its polar star; nor that even with religion for its paramount object the great end will be answered, unless those who are to be the conductors and executors of the plan, receive themselves such an education at our schools and universities as may animate them with a sincere love of human souls, and send them forth to the holy task penetrated with' the sense of their own accountability.

The ignorance prevailing in the most splendid junctures of our own history, and even during the last century, Mr. Foster shews to have been very great, considered with reference to the body of the people. And though he admits the prospect to have been brightening since the æra of national and Sunday schools, the wide circulation of religious and moral tracts, and the institution of societies for diffusing the word of God, we have still, according to him, a melancholy spectacle of ignorance and brutality prevailing through a vast proportion of the lower classes of society. To exemplify this statement of the low condition of the moral and intellectual character of the common people at the present moment, Mr. Foster expatiates very largely upon the ferocious and cruel sports which fill up the principal part of their leisure, and we heartily wish that this part of his book might make its due impression. But.

education simply is no remedy for this evil;-among the most highly educated, are to be found the patrons of these wretched pastimes. Nothing but specific religious cultivation can efface this stain of original depravity, and dispose a hard heart to be either just or merciful. It is in the following accurate terms that Mr. Foster describes the manner in which time is wasted or abused by the uninstructed part of the community.

"These, however, are their most harmless modes of wasting the time. For, while we might think of the many hours merged by them in apathy and needless sleep, with a wish that those hours could be recovered to the account of their existence, we might well think with a wish that the hours could be struck out of it which they may sometimes give, instead, to conversation; in parties where ignorance, coarse vulgarity, and profaneness, are to support the dialogue, on topics the most to their taste; always including, as the most welcome to that taste, the depravities and scandals of the neighbourhood; while all the reproach and ridicule, expended with the warmest good will on those depravities, have uniformly the strange result, of making the censors the less disinclined themselves to practise them, and only a little better instructed how to do it with impunity. In many instances there is the additional mischief, that these assemblings for corrupt communication find their resort at the public house, where intemperance and ribaldry may season each other, if the pecuniary means can be afforded, even at the cost of distress at home.-But short of this depravity, the worthlessness of the communications of a number of grossly ignorant beings is easy to be imagined, besides that most of us have been made judges of their quality by numberless occasions of unavoidably hearing samples of them.

"In the finer seasons of the year, much of these leisure spaces of time can be expended out of doors; and we have still only to refer each one to his own observation of the account to which they are turned, in the lives of beings whose lot allows but so contracted a portion of time to be, at the best, applied directly to the highest purposes of life. -Here the hater of all such schemes of improvement, as would threaten to turn the lower order into what that hater may probably call Methodists, in other words, into rational creatures and christians, comes in with a ready cant of humanity and commiseration. And why, he says, with an affected indignation of philanthropy, why should not the poor creatures enjoy a little fresh air and cheerful sunshine, and have a chance for keeping their health, confined as many of them are, for the greatest part of their time, in narrow squalid rooms, unwholesome shops, or one kind or other of disagreeable places and employments? Very true, we answer; and why should they not be collected in groups by the road side, in readiness for any thing that, in passing, may furnish occasions for gross jocularity, practising some impertinence, or uttering some jeering scurrility, at the expense of persons going by; shouting with laughter at the effect of the sport, and inspiriting it all with infernal imprecations? Or why should they not from a little conventicle for cursing, blaspheming, and blackguard

obstreperousness in the street, about the entrance of one of the haunts of intoxication; where they are perfectly safe from that far worse mischief of a gloomy fanaticism, with which they might have been smitten if seduced to frequent the meeting-house twenty paces off? Or why should not the children, growing into the stage called youth, be turned loose through the lanes, roads, and fields, to form a brawling impudent rabble, trained by their association to every low vice, and ambitiously emulating, in voice, visage, and manners, the drabs and ruffians of maturer growth? Or why should not the young men and women collect in clusters, or range about or beyond the neighbourhood in bands, for revel, frolic, and all kinds of coarse mirth, to come back late at night to quarrel with their wretched elders, who perhaps envy them their capacity for such wild gaieties and strollings, while rating them for their disorderly habits? We say, where can be the harm of all this? What reasonable and benevolent man would think of making any objection to it? Reasonable and benevolent, for these are qualities expressly boasted by the opposers of an improved education of the people, while in such opposition they virtually avow their appro

bation of all that we have here described.

"We have allowed most fully the plea of how little time, comparatively, could be afforded by the lower classes from their indispensable employments to the concern of mental improvement; and also that of the fatigue consequent on them, and causing a temporary incapacity of effort in any other way. But here we see that, nevertheless, time, strength, and wakefulness, and spring and spirit for exertion, are found for a vast deal of busy diversion.

"This is the manner in which the spare time of the week-days goes to waste, and worse; but the Sunday is welcomed as giving scope for the same things on the larger scale. It is very striking to consider, that several millions, we may safely assert, of our English people, come to what should be years of discretion, are almost completely exempt from any manner of conscience respecting this seventh part of time, not merely as to any required consecration of it to religion, but as to its being under any claim or of any worth at all, otherwise than for amusement. It is actually regarded by them as a section of time far less under obligation than any other. They take it as so absolutely at their free disposal, by a right so exclusively vested in their taste and will, that a demand made even in behalf of their own most important interests is contemptuously repelled as an interference. If the idea occurs at all of claims which they have heard that God should make on the hours, it is dismissed with the thought that it really cannot signify to him how creatures, condemned by his appointment to toil all the rest of the week, may wish to spend this one day, on which the secular taskmaster manumits them, and He, the spiritual one, might surely do as much. An immense number pay no attention whatever to any sort of religious worship; and multitudes of those that do afford an hour to such an observance, do it either as a mode of amusement, or by way of taking a license of exemption from any further accountableness as to the manner in which they may like to spend the day. It is the natural consequence of all this, that there is more folly,

if not more crime, committed on this, than on all the other six days together.

"Thus man, at least ignorant man, is unfit to be trusted with any thing under heaven; since a remarkable appointment for raising the general tenour of moral existence, has, with these persons, the effect of sinking it. Those favoured portions of their time, interposed at regular and frequent intervals, with a mark of the divine benediction upon them, might, without any approach toward the punctilious and burdensome austerity in the manner of improving them which some good men in former times enjoined, be the means of diffusing a degree of light and dignity over the whole series of their days; whereas an unhappily large number of those of our people who are now arrived near the close of that long series, have to look back on the Sundays as having been made, in a peculiar manner, the dishonour and bane of their life." (P. 143-148.)

It is thus that Mr. Foster paints the state of ignorance and brutal apathy in which the part of the people, commonly called the lower orders, even at this day, notwithstanding the numerous schemes afloat for their improvement, are sunk. And yet with some inconsistency we are told of the perilous predicament in which the established order of things is placed by a certain ominous expansion of mind, a fearful demonstration of an universal feeling of wrong, oppression, and exclusion, fast spreading through the great mass of the people, a spirit of revolt, a deep and settled antipathy towards that order which by the arrangements and constitutions of society are in the enjoyment of comfort, wealth, or station. Mr. Foster dwells upon these portentous signs of the times, not altogether with complacency, but with a descriptive energy, and an ardent manner of putting the case, which conveyed to our minds a suspicion that he does not think this supposed feeling of the multitude entirely without justification;-what his politics may be we will not inquire, but we have some curiosity to know how so reasoning and religious a mind can see aught in the general character of the British government and constitution, to afford a shadow of justification for so hostile a combination against it, and all that it upholds and protects. For our own parts we think Mr. Foster mainly right in the ignorance he imputes to the mass of the people even in this enlightened country; but we cannot reconcile with this imputed ignorance the frightful anticipation, of which he has endeavoured to impose the belief, of a grand irruption about to take place through all the fences and barriers of settled rule and ancient authority, by the million challenging their rights of participation and equal enjoyment. All this looks very fine upon paper,-it gives play and effect to a rhetorical pen,-it may suit the choleric temper of political opposition; it may gratify the spleen of religious dissent; but

we do not believe that there is either philosophy or mystery in the case; it is the ignorance of which Mr. Foster complains, villainously acted upon by a numerous body of factious malcontents, men of desperate circumstances speculating upon their country's ruin, and desirous of trying the chances of revolution, which forms the real combination of hostility in this country, (for to this country we confine our remarks) and to be met and provided against by the conservative energies of the constitution, and the agency of sound religious instruction; but not to be subdued or neutralized by a mere pen-ink-andpaper education, or the widest and most liberal concession of the rights of scholarship. This ignorance, thus villainously acted upon, will, in spite of all that mere general education can do, remain unchanged. By throwing in certain ingredients, indeed, which mere general education may furnish, it may be made to boil and bubble, to fume and roar, but it will be ignorance still in a state of turbid effervescence, and noxious evaporation. Not one particle of useful, applicable information, of that information which lays the foundation of good neighbourhood, kind habits, political contentedness, or moral obedience, no, nor of desirable liberty, will be the result. Let any man who has the well-being of his country seriously at heart, look at the moral state of those who have received this neutral education-the numbers it has added to the dupes of inflammatory falsehoods, and the victims of a debauching press-the frightful' numerical majority of those who have received this sort of education, at this moment declaring with the voice and organs which it has supplied to them on the side of what God and His Scripture condemn, and then let him say whether in his conscience he thinks any good will come of any discipline for the poor but that which may open their eyes to their own awful predicament as accountable creatures.

ART. XII.-The Diary of an Invalid; being the Journal of a Tour, in Pursuit of Health; in Portugal, Italy, Switzerland, and France, in the Years 1817, 1818, and 1819. By Henry Matthews, A. M. 8vo. pp. 518. Murray. London, 1820. THE travels of a sick man promise but little entertainment or information; and in general we may be said to be unjust towards what we see and hear in foreign countries when we publish concerning them the results of our own morbid impressions. In the journal before us, however, we find nothing of the lan