palsy calling in the aid of a staff to prop his feeble and decaying tabernacle. Most generous forefathers! Your posterity boast of your moral worth, and your far-diffused intelligence: what a pity you could not feel it in your heart, to be a little more grateful towards those to whom you were in a great measure indebted for such inestimable blessings. Oh, if there lives in this wide world one human being who has bowels of compassion for the sufferings of another, he will shed tears of retrospective sorrow over the miseries of this poor forlorn cast-away, when he beholds him struggling with the complicated diseases of his own frame, and the niggard narrowness of his fortune. He will weep most sincerely when he beholds, or imagines he beholds, the man of letters labouring, and labouring most successfully, to fix the alphabet in the liquid memory of some brainless cub, whose dull eye has no distinct conception of any difference in characters. What a world of labour to let the best of them know the difference between b and d, and p and q. And then comes the practical management of the whole school. There was life, and spirit, and vigour, and insolence, and rebellion, in the rising generation of that period, and strict discipline was a thing not easily established or preserved. Ill-read lessons ill-recited tasks-utter inattention to every thing in the world, but mischief-idleness that laughed at admonition, and set the scourge at defiance-sullen stupidity, that would neither be kicked, cuffed, nor wheedled into a sense of duty-obduracy that gloried in suffering like a Spartan-impatience that fretted itself, and tormented others under the least restraint-heedlessness that overlooked the plainest consequences of actions, and ran headlong into eternal blunders-lying, that looked up in the master's face with brazen audacity, and denied what he himself had witnessed with his own eyes— juvenile dishonesty that stood convicted without feeling disgraced -endless excuses for duties neglected-books torn and strewed in every direction-slates broken-copies slurred and blotched-last of all, downright disobedience, that impudently set its face against all authority, and sturdy rebellion that threatened to thrust out the poor pedagogue, and turn his academy into a puerile republic. Such are a few of the internal disorders that the village Dominie of former times was called upon to repress. There were external circumstances, however, which, though less irritating, were more calculated to degrade the dignity of his character and office. Among these, were the occasional presents he received from the parents of his pupils, not as rewards for diligence in the exercise of his profession, not as gifts of friendship, but either as plain and unequivocal bribes, or, at other times, as contributions from the tender-hearted and benevolent, who were aware of his necessities. These piecemeal contributions to his ill-stored pantry, were necessarily productive of a painful feeling of beggarly dependence on his part, under whose influence no mind, however elevated, could long retain its original dignity. His Candlemas offering was a small scheme to increase his narrow income; it was a periodical pleading of poverty, that brought his misery under the review of his employers, and made him be talked of as one who was receiving the benefit of a public subscription. His coal money too, a tax still exacted, was seldom paid with cheerfulness; and in some remote districts of the country, where coal was not very abundant, the children might be seen on the winter mornings trudging along to school each with his daily or weekly contributions of peats under his arm, for the school fire. What an inglorious thing was it to see the poor Dominie, as was the case in some quarters, marching at the head of his school, on a certain day of the year, with a son of tweedledee fiddling on before him, or bringing up the rear of the motley procession, till they reached the door of his wealthy and perhaps noble patron, who gratified his generous soul by causing bread and milk to be distributed among the little ur. chins who danced before his door, and by bestowing upon their venerable preceptor the munificent annual donation of—One Guinea! The poor soul had likewise many gratuitous duties to perform, for which a dose of usquebaugh was the commonly proffered recompense. Petitions for the poor, love letters, acrostics, valentines, and all the puerile nonsense both in prose and verse, that makes up the ephemeral literature of a little village; solutions of crabbed questions in arithmetic for old pupils-lengthened compositions on polemical divinity written at the solicitation of some half-defeated dogmatist in theology and a host of minor obligations, always thankfully received because always to be had for nothing. Surrounded by all these vilifying circumstances, performing all these ill-requited services, and seldom or never rising above the condition of absolute dependence, the common feeling towards him was pity, mingled in some with a single grain of contempt, and in others with a rude and ignorant admiration of his intellectual attainments. It was of all things most humiliating to behold him on the first morning of the week calling on the little tremblers around him for their weekly school fees, and assuming a sort of mock dignity upon the occasion, the better to conceal from himself the inward debasement of spirit which he felt, when he took the slender pittance from the little hand he had often scourged, and was perhaps about to scourge again, five minutes after receiving this fractional portion of his subsistence from it. And then to hear him bawling out to some helpless child of poverty, who had failed in his weekly payment, "Go, tell your illiterate pawrents to send me that tippence half penny of school wages, or leave my school this instant." No wonder the unhappy man was a little crazy in intellect and infirm in body. To see a poor debilitated creature of the kind we have spoken of, labouring in a village school, with some fifty or sixty sturdy vagabonds, whose hard heads were obdurately sealed against instruction, and whose robust bodies were capable of bearing the severest flagellation without wincing, was surely a sight calculated to make every man of reflection thank his Maker that he was not reduced to the necessity of "teaching the young idea how to shoot." Only imagine the deafening uproar, and the tumultuous confusion that sometimes reigned in these little seminaries. We have laughed heartily when we heard an ancient friend of ours, who began to run his career of life somewhere about the beginning of the last century, mention that he once passed one of those schools during a tremendous tempest of riotous insubordination, when the baffled teacher, unable to repress the horrible sedition that raged within, rushed towards the door, stood there, stretched out his one hand to his pupils in the interior, the other to the passengers in the street, and, with the distorted features, the frantic gesticulations, and the impassioned voice of a maniac, exclaimed to the unsympathizing passengers, "Just let any decent Christian look in here, I say let any decent Christian just look in here and tell me candidly if he ever saw such a pack of incarnate devils as these boys on the face of the earth." Every one laughed, and no one looked in, and the Dominie continued-" They are not boys, they are hell-hounds-it is intolerable, perfectly intolerable! -curse it! I shall lock my doors for ever, and give up school-keeping altogether;" and, so saying, or rather shouting, the distracted man rushed back to assume the reins of his almost subverted government. The man was mad, no doubt of it. The way in which schools were managed in former times was enough to drive any man mad. To have one's income made up of weekly twopences, groats, and sixpences,-to be "worn to the bone with sharp misery," -to have one's constitution broken down with the most intolerable drudgery,-to be tormented all day with dyspepsy, and ridden with incubus all night,—to be ill clothed, ill lodged, and ill fed, were evils too serious to be borne with patience by any human being. The man of set phrases and pedantic peculiarities has been gathered to his fathers, and with him have vanished the fantastical punishments, the unmerciful flagellations, and the capricious despotism that cowed the weakness of childhood into cowardice, or exalted puerile independence of spirit into hatred of authority, and an unqualified abhorrence of every thing that wore the aspect of learning. The graves of the fraternity are without headstone or inscription, and the memory of their doings is growing dim in the distance of the past; and no child of the present generation may rue that he was then unborn, Peace to their ashes! May they repose softly and silently, they made noise enough in the world when alive, and we have yet uproar sufficient without them. Edin. Liter. Gazette THE THREE DAYS OF FRANCE. "Cent peuples divers Chanteront, en brisant leurs fers, Honneur aux enfans de la France"-BE FRIENDS of the freeman's hopes, upraise A glad, exulting strain! A spirit, as of ancient days, Glows on our earth again! Seek ye no more in mouldering urns Look up! the fire ye worship burns Imperial France! this costliest gem, This one best boon of Heaven, Was all thy trophied diadem Yet lacked and now 'tis given. Is nobly crowned at last! Now may ye lay the silvered head To sleep in thankful trust, That Freedom's foot, alone, shall tread Above your honoured dust. Bright youth of France! for gifts like thine Firm soul, that grasped the great design; And every land, where Virtue breathes, Fair girls of France! your loving snares To bind such lion-hearts as theirs, As you would guard your virgin charms And ye! the beardless warrior-host. Well may glad France your glories boast, God's help reward you! gallant wights, Thus early for your country's rights,- Lo! Hist'ry's muse her sleep hath burst, And fan your triumphs, as she nursed The spirit of a thousand years Is kindling in her glance, And swells her accents, as she hears Brave hearts of France! in every time, Wherever Freedom's martyrs weep, All lips shall burn, all bosoms leap, If aught of good, devout, and high If aught of glory shall not die, O gallant men! 'tis yours! Strong trust ye claim, and grateful pride And bid your swords "God speed!" Be wakeful! though the blast should pause, Be merciful! so pure a cause Aye! breathe a prayer, yet low and deep The tears that nations shed Fall on that mound, whose dust ye keep O'er Gallia's patriot dead. Well rest the brave! yet living still Their spirits' voice shall be; Through every age the words shall thrill "We died-and France is free!" Tait's Edinburgh Magazine, |