NEW MODES OF EDUCATION.

"I am convinced, Yorick, that there is a North-west passage to the intellectual world; and that the soul of man has shorter ways of going to work, in furnishing itself with knowledge and instruction, than we generally take with it."-Tristram Shandy.

I REMEMBER having somewhere read of an ingenious person who, being possessed of a large library, employed it chiefly in misplacing particular volumes; and when he had perfectly forgotten the circumstance, amusing himself in searching for the stray books. Man is said to be naturally a chase-loving animal, and I do not see why a book-hunt may not afford as much sport as a pack of foxhounds. Certainly there are many worse ways of employing the goods of this life, and of turning advantages into curses and as the great majority of readers see nothing in books beyond mere amusement, there is the less to cavil at in the pastime of this worthy trifler. If, however, we look somewhat deeper into the subject, we shall find in the best selected and most choice libraries the great majority of books serving merely to put those of more value out of our heads, and preventing us from laying our hands at once upon the matter of which we are immediately in want. Deduction being made of those volumes which contain false facts, false reasonings, or false arrangements and associations of ideas, the most extensive collections would shrink into a very diminutive compass; insomuch, that the more a man is learned the less knowing he will generally be found. The mere book-worm, burying his scanty mother-wit beneath a load of antiquated error and authoritative absurdity, is therefore scarcely better occupied than the gentleman here quoted; and, like him, employs his time in losing books among books, till, to use a proverbial expression, he can no longer see the wood for trees.

In the carlier stages of civilization the great obstacle to education was the want of books, or rather the want of ideas to be registered in them. The principal difficulty in our own time arises from the multiplicity of our stores, which have rendered even the knowledge of title-pages a species of learning, and the catalogue raisonnée of authors too much for heads of no ordinary capacity.

In a storm at sea the prudent navigator flings overboard his bulkiest and least valuable commodities; and the commonest builder, having completed his edifice, takes care to remove the scaffolding: while in literature the ship is suffered to sink before a particle of lumber is thrown overboard, and the cords and the scaffolding, the pegs and the ladders of knowledge, are esteemed its most ornamental parts, and are preserved and exhibited, on all occasions, with a pride commensurate with its folly.

There are, however, very few evils so extreme as to yield no collateral advantages. The difficulties and unwieldiness of learning possess many. But for such artificial and adventitious obsta

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cles, the pathway being too plain, and the ascent too gentle, we should have every common fellow climbing and grasping at the forbidden fruit. Knowledge would no longer be a distinction, and what is worse, it would cease to be a source of power. As things are managed at present we contrive to spend seven years in acquiring the commonest trade, while the greater part of a long life is scarce sufficient to make a man master of the learned professions. This is a fine source of emoluments and distinctions. What, in the name of fortune, would become of the physician's fee, if Galen and Hippocrates went out of fashion; and if a knowledge of the means by which the antients missed their mark, were not as essential as an acquaintance with the simplest observations of fact. What would become of the whole tribe of lawyers, if codes were intelligible; or of theologians, if creeds had no mystery?-why, they would starve. They could not dig, and to beg they would be ashamed." Is it not, therefore, a wise disposition of things, which not only clothes the naked, and feeds the hungry, but begets all sorts of luxuries and comforts for its favourites? Then again, it would puzzle a Say, a Malthus, and a Ricardo, put together, to find out an employment for the fellows of our colleges, and "enable them to get rid of that long disease, their life," if all that is worth knowing could be obtained by a hop, skip, and a jump; and nothing remained in after-life but to put our acquirements to practice. Lancastrian schools, and "short methods with beginners," may indeed be useful enough in giving the first elements to the poor who require to be taught, as hobnails are counted, by the hundred; but it may very safely be doubted, whether any scheme for rendering men's services to society available at shorter periods than formerly should be deemed advantageous; or whether they are not to be considered as having a direct tendency to produce undue competition, and overstock the market.

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The wisdom of our ancestors has prudently determined that no one shall be permitted to govern the affairs of the nation before he is by law admitted to the management of his own estate; without this" fundamental feature" in the British constitution it might reasonably be feared (so short are the cuts to political knowledge), that Eton and Harrow would assume the reins of state; that fagging" would be substituted for the slave-trade; that oppositionists would be liable to receive from ministers an occasional "good licking," and high treason be punished with a "toss in the blanket." It may be questioned whether the dignity of parlia ment would be consulted when a call of the House was issued in the Etonian formula of " Come here, last goes;" or if a committee were censured for "shirking" a report.

As things are, however, the bad effects of that precocity, which short methods have introduced, are manifested in that great diffi

culty which parents find in filling up the years between their children's leaving college and the time when it is proper for them to appear on the stage of life. Formerly the first degree was rarely obtained before one or two-and-twenty; but now, when it may be had by seventeen or eighteen, there are three or four years gained which hang most miserably upon hand.* For it is self-evident that a young man, or boy, (as the case may be), having completed his education, has nothing more to learn; while, on the other hand, it would not be safe to trust a mere child behind the scenes at the French Opera, or at the Salon and Frescati. It really is very hard to find employment for a person who can perfectly unravel the prosody of a Greek chorus, who has a competent knowledge of divinity, and "is up to" a binomial.

The women, indeed, manage these matters much better. Years of unremitted application are necessary for a person without taste or talent, to make out the effect of a drawing with a stump, to put the front view of a square house in the middle of a sheet of paper, and arrange trees symmetrically on each side of it, or to paint every leaf conspicuous in a bunch of roses as stiff and unnatural as a dandy's waist. The piano-forte, likewise, is never perfectly mastered:-four hours a-day, through a long life, will not attain perfection.

In the present age, in which the plague has gone totally out of fashion, and especially now that Europe is too poor to go to war, the danger of competition is hourly increasing; and the discovery of short methods, by bringing genius too soon into the field, will soon be felt, like steam-engines, to be an intolerable evil. Under such circumstances there will be no alternative left; but, on the one hand, either to drown the superfluous children with the Chinese, or, as Swift proposed to the Irish, to eat them; or on the other, to revive, in its fullest extent, the wisdom of our ancestors, and to recover those valuable methods practised in antiquity, by which few persons could get bread while they had a tooth left to eat it. Now, although eating children might be deemed a pleasant accession to the cuisine Angloise, there are many reasons for supposing that the practice could not easily be brought into fashion; and the British legislature have evinced too strong an objection to reforming the criminal code, in the matter of capital punishments, to hope for the abolition of existing laws against infanticide. No

* The Editor is but too happy to receive lively articles like the present, in which he may nevertheless find a great many opinions to which he does not subscribe, and statements which he imagines to be inaccurate. He fully believes this satire on the too short education of the modern youth of England at the Universities to be totally unfounded. In the days of Henry the VIIIth and Elizabeth, a young English gentleman was supposed to have finished his education at seventeen. At present, boys go to Eton at the age of eight, and remain till they are seventeen or eighteen, and who does not know that a degree with honour at our Universities is never obtained at a very early age by the most promising geniuses.

thing remains, therefore, but to take the bull by the horns, and endeavour fairly and honestly to reduce our systems to a necessary pitch of difficulty and of labour.

For this purpose a short Act of Parliament might be introduced early in the approaching sessions, or pinned as a rider to the Mutiny Act, first

To abolish printing, and to return to the use of manuscripts, which, besides the increased value it would give to our rare collections, would have the contingent advantage of settling all disputes concerning the liberty of the press.

2d. To render the use of the Arabic cypher unlawful after the 1st of January, 1822, and to introduce the abacus and the Roman numerals into all counting-houses; the woods and forests department being engaged to furnish the Bank and the Treasury with the requisite tuns of homegrown timber for the construction of tallies. This project would meet with general approbation in the House, since it would prevent country gentlemen from abusing its patience with discussions on the details of finance, which the present clearness of the public accounts places within the reach of every foolish orator.

3d. To abolish the use of all sorts of machinery, to substitute the axe for the saw, and compel men to eat their meat with their fingers.

4th. To reform the mail-coaches, and diligently to bring back the roads over all the hills, and through all the circuitous tracks they have within the last century abandoned.

5th. To direct that all public reports be drawn up in syllogism, and all propositions defended à priori.

6th. To take away the privilege of franking from all letters addressed without the full complement of "Righte Worshipfuls" and "My very highly esteemeds."

7th. To direct that no degrees be given in our Universities, and no persons permitted to practise the learned professions without reiterated examinations, to prove that they are deeply versed in the abstrusest futilities.

8th. To confer premiums upon commentators and homily writers, and to stamp medals for the encouragement of verbal criticism.

A vast many additional enactments would naturally suggest themselves to those entrusted with framing the bill, upon which it is unnecessary now to enlarge. I shall therefore content myself with appealing to yourself, Mr. Editor, whether I am not in the right, and my friend Tom totally mistaken in his views of this subject. Certain I am, that if Tom's argument be worth a farthing, you and I are not always great benefactors to the community by our monthly contributions to the overgrown mass. what can we do? The public will have Magazines, and that's their own affair. So farewell till next month. Your constant correspondent,

M.

But

FRENCH AND ENGLISH TRAGEDY. NO. 111.

THERE is an interval of about thirty years between Garnier and Hardy, and this period was by no means unprolific of dramatists. But it would be waste of time to notice productions now wholly disregarded or unknown, and remarkable only for their rapidly increas ing divergence from the classic path into a style and manner since known by the opposition title of THE ROMANTIC.

The precise period of Hardy's appearance, is not determined,-it was some time between 1590 and 1600. He soon outstripped all competition and was regarded as a prodigy. It was most natural-for he produced eight hundred pieces, and wrote a play in three days! Of this formidable array, but forty have been rescued from destructionand not one from oblivion. Those that remain, are, for the most part, tragi-comedies-a deformed mass of horror and licentiousness. His tragic style is mean, and his thoughts meagre, scarcely ever reaching the eloquence of tragedy. His principal work, is the Greek romance of Theagenes and Chariclea, dramatised into eight consecutive plays or parts, which, like the Spaniards, he denominated "Days." With a curious naïveté he entitles the indecent perils and coarse trials to which he subjects the faith and chastity of his heroine, "Les chastes et loyales amours de Theagene et de Chariclee," after the original romance. He has left a tragedy, entitled," Scedase, ou l'hospitalité violée," which exceeds in horror the disgustful atrocities of Titus Andronicus. The story is in Plutarch's life of Pelopidas. Two young Spartans, whilst enjoying hospitality in the house of an inhabitant of Leuctra, fired with a brutal passion, violate and murder the two virgin daughters of their host. The outrage commences on the stage, and is completed behind the scenes, whence the cries of the women continue to be heard by the audience. In a subsequent scene the wretched victims appear on the stage, uttering against the two ruffians furious curses and menaces, and the gallants, to escape present annoyance and future vengeance, cut the throats of the two paramours, and throw the bodies into a pit, before the eyes of the audience! There is a tragic comedy by him, entitled Cornelia, and founded on the same novel of Cervantes, which furnished the subject of Fletcher's well-known comedy of the Chances, recently brought out as an opera at Covent Garden. The plot in both plays is nearly the same; and though Fletcher's be passably licentious, Hardy is as far beyond him in obscenity as he is beneath him in talent. The heroine is seen in bed, holding dialogue with the two cavaliers, and a courtesan is discovered in flagrante delicto with a page. The language is in perfect unison with the situations. It would be uninteresting, indeed revolting, to notice these wretched productions in detail. Many of them, founded on Spanish and Italian novels, are the same in plot as some plays of Shakspeare and Fletcher, with a further and surcharged resemblance in the conduct, wherever the scenes of the two English poets are most vicious in poetical and moral taste.

The fecundity of Hardy, (says Fontenelle), his plays once looked into, ceases to be a wonder. It is easily accounted for by his man