9. Lastly, there is an objection, which lies beyond the limits of my duty, but which I feel too forcibly to pass in perfect silence. It is feared that in some monitorial schools a knowledge of the most sacred truths and solemn duties is communicated in a manner but too well calculated to make religion permanently distasteful. Where the capital fault is avoided, at the best memory alone can be addressed; for how is it possible that monitors of nine, or ten, or eleven, should be trusted to illustrate and enforce the doctrines and precepts of revelation?

Deeply convinced of the absolute failure of the monitorial system as a means of instruction, and of the moral dangers accompanying it, I witness with hearty satisfaction the progress of its disappearance. Edinburgh, St. Mary; Liverpool, St. Thomas, St. Nicholas (girls'), St. Peter's (girls'), St. Mary's (girls'); Wigan, St. John's; Newcastle, St. Andrew; Darlington; Stockport (boys'), and other schools, have been cleared of the heavy squares of desks, and rearranged in convenient parallel groups. The same system is ordinarily adopted in new schools, as at Liverpool, St. Anne and St. Francis; Manchester, St. Chad; Preston, Talbot Schools-and elsewhere. Under this system, benches and desks twelve feet in length, facing inwards, are arranged three deep in groups along one or both of the sides. The children are taught, mainly in their seats, by a teacher or assistant sitting or standing in front of the division, with easel and black-board, or map or picture.

Doubtless an adult trained teacher and a separate class-room for every thirty children, if attainable, would approach still nearer to perfection; but the organisation now becoming general possesses great advantages over the monitorial plan. The more advanced children are instructed and trained immediately by the head-teacher. The younger are in charge of regular assistants, fairly qualified, always within sight and hearing; the classification is natural and real; the apprentices' powers are exercised and strengthened; no time is wasted in needless evolutions; and progress is generally satisfactory. These results follow the change where the teacher understands the reasons of it, and possesses skill to turn it to account. There may be cases where the improvement is apparent only; as there certainly are schools in which, by merely shortening the desks and forming large classes, skilful teachers have removed in great measure the evils of the monitorial system."

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Reviews.

MR. MONTGOMERY'S "POETRY:" RELIGIOUS

SENTIMENTALISM.

1. The Sanctuary; a Companion in Verse for the English Prayer-Book. By Robert Montgomery, M.A., author of "The Christian Life," "Omnipresence of the Deity," &c. Chapman and Hall.

2. The Omnipresence of the Deity, and other Poems. By Robert Montgomery, A. M. Twenty-eighth edition. Chapman and Hall.

A FRIEND of ours, much given to anecdotes, tells the following apologue à propos of the supposed inferiority of the intellect of the moderns to that of the ancients :-When Jupiter first proposed to make the world and its inhabitants, he created two masses of substance, the one of brains, and the other of the proper material for the flesh, bones, and sinews of man; and he handed them over to Mercury, to be employed in the fabrication of the human species. Now Mercury, being a clever dog himself, fully appreciated the advantage of cleverness in others, and did not like to turn out his handiwork in any thing like a second-rate condition. Accordingly he bestowed a very considerable portion of brains upon the earlier specimens of the human race. By and by, finding that the mass of brains committed to his charge was rapidly diminishing, he went off to Jupiter, and begged to know whether it was his intention to create many more men. Certainly," says Jove," I shall."

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"Then, by Jove," cried the god of eloquence-for no doubt he had already learnt the polite art of asseveration"I don't know what I shall do for brains for them."

"I know nothing about that," replies the king of gods and men; "I gave you a quantity of brains proportionate to the number of men and women you would have to fabricate, and you must make the best you can of the job."

Whereupon, says the story, Mercury, having a mighty small stock of brains left to work with, proceeded to make up the deficiency with pumpkin in all future individuals of the human race.

The title-page of this new edition of the Rev. Robert Montgomery's great work, 'The Omnipresence of the Deity, for

"The twenty

cibly brings to our memory the above story. eighth edition!" Is it possible? What an enormous mass of pumpkin must Mercury have bestowed upon the reading public of the British isles! The twenty-eighth edition! Let us see; how many readers does that probably give? When writers become as popular as Mr. Montgomery certainly is, and the editions of their works are counted by the dozen, it is usual to print at least two thousand copies of each edition. Say, then, at a guess, that each edition has been about that number on the average, and we have between fifty and sixty thousand readers, or purchasers, for that species of production which Mr. Montgomery, his publishers, and his admirers, agree to call "poetry." Here is pumpkin, indeed; and no brains, even in the smallest quantity, wherewith to animate the inert mass.

Readers of a certain age will remember that when this poem" was in the first glow of its popularity, and had been puffed into a very decided success, Mr. Macaulay attacked it in the Edinburgh Review, and administered on its author one of the funniest flagellations ever bestowed by critic on unfortunate scribe. Those who think the press is " omnipotent," and fancy that nobody could live who was stamped upon by an Edinburgh or Quarterly reviewer in old times, or is victimised by writers in the Times now-a-days, must have been astonished to perceive what vigorous vitality this same "poem" has shown, notwithstanding its entire annihilation at the hands of Thomas Babington Macaulay. From year to year it has lived and thriven, bringing golden rewards into the breechespockets of its author-if so sublime a writer can condescend to wear so sublunary a garment;—and awaking, as Mr. Montgomery would say, responsive echoes in the minds of tens of thousands of pious gentlemen and ladies.

Moreover, it is clear that with a vastly numerous class of book-buyers Mr. Montgomery is the poet of the day; not crowned with laurel by the Queen, but enshrined in the hearts of faithful votaries, who, as soon as any thing new comes forth from his pen, rush to the booksellers' and order “Mr. Montgomery's last." We cannot call to mind the names of them all. There is" Satan," and "Luther," and "Woman"—(three favourite subjects to whom Mr. Montgomery has an eye whenever he writes)-and " The Christian Life," and what others we know not; but they are enough, when collected into one volume, as is the custom with booksellers in the case of all great poets, to fill a space so large as to sell for twenty shillings.

Apollo, however, does not always strike the lyre, and Mr.

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Montgomery oftentimes delivers his oracles in prose; or, at any rate, not in verse; for, if we may judge from a speech delivered by our author at Glasgow on the subject of slavery, and here reprinted (very modestly) as a note to what he calls a Universal Prayer," his prose is quite on a level with his poetry." Such as it is, it certainly sells well. There is God and Man, which has reached a third edition; The Gospel in Advance of the Age-(what does that mean?), third edition; Christianity, sixth edition; Spiritual Discourses, third edition; and so forth. In fact, it is plain that Mr. Montgomery is an idol, with fitting hosts of reverent worshippers, who take him for a god, and believe in him, and buy his books. True, he is only an idol of the school that frequents proprietary chapels, and clothes its tutelary deities in rustling silk, and makes offerings of slippers and other such small adornments, and consists almost exclusively of the less intellectual of the female sex: but he is an idol still; and from the oracles he utters the patient listener may gather somewhat of information respecting the minds of his fellow-creatures, which, if not highly elevating, is at least curious, and moves the soul to pity. Let us glance, then, at the kind of stuff which fifty or sixty thousand voices have pronounced to be poetry, and religious poetry too, and whose manufacturer this materialistic and war-making age still delights to honour.

In his more juvenile days Mr. Montgomery was the fluent utterer of unlimited melodramatic nonsense. There was no end of his lines, whether blank or rhyming; but they were all alike in one respect-it was often difficult to make head or tail of their meaning. Sense and syntax Mr. Montgomery held in equal scorn. But in those days he was all for the thunder-and-lightning school of " poetry." His earlier books remind one of that respectable flunky in the Pickwick Papers whom Sam Weller designates by the name of "Blazes." The Omnipresence of the Deity, as it stood for its first dozen editions or so, with the other kindred progeny from the "poet's" fertile mind, was all "blazes." Cataracts, torrents, flashes, crashes, whirlwinds, storm-demons, ocean-heavings, earthquakes, volcanoes, and all the rest of the theatrical property-man's apparatus for the last scene of a demoniacal spectacle, were our author's familiars. He was still a young Oxford undergraduate while he enchanted the "grandmothers of England;" and we can almost imagine him pacing to and fro in his college garret and astonishing the scouts with his prophetic numbers.

The Oxford undergraduate is now, and long has been, a clergyman of the English Establishment,—and we have no

doubt a very respectable one. But-qualis ab incepto-he still holds sense and syntax as matters beneath his notice. He is now no longer melodramatic save at intervals, when the old war-horse snorts and stamps at the sound of the accustomed trumpet. His mood is for the most part metaphysical, transcendental, and sentimental, with a considerable dash of the domestic. He has learned the realities of life, and has found that besides thunders and lightnings, earthquakes and volcanoes, storm-fiends and ocean-heavings, there are such things as tea-parties, and babies, and bread-and-butter. Keble, the booksellers' advertisements tell him, sells better than Milton; and a puff of the Book of Common Prayer will find readers who count Paradise Lost a bore, and L'Allegro unintelligible and profane. So he has thrown aside his trombones and his kettle-drums, and now pipes small melodies on the flageolet. He is nevertheless no more a Keble now than he was once a Milton; and his votaries are still of that very numerous class, who read poetry in order to have their sensibilities gently stroked down, rather than to be awakened to thought, or refreshed for the strenuous struggle of life.

A few chance passages from this twenty-eighth and revised. edition of Mr. Montgomery's first production, and a few more from his last labour, The Sanctuary, will be enough to show the intelligent reader of what stuff the minds of many thousands of respectable Englishmen and Englishwomen are still made. This twenty-eighth edition of The Omnipresence of the Deity contains moreover many additional compositions of more recent date; and especially one gem, as remarkable, we should say, in its way, as the "Koh-i-noor," the celebrated "mountain-of-light" diamond. This jewel is called "Wellington," and is a sort of ode on the funeral of the Duke; enlivened by the addition, in the form of notes, of the Times article on the Duke's death, and Mr. Disraeli's speech in the House of Commons on the same occasion. Both of these Mr. Montgomery considers to be "master-pieces of eulogy." Why he reprints the latter of the two, considering that it is in part a detected plagiarism, we cannot divine, unless it be that he is on the look-out for promotion from the ex-chancellor, if ever a happy chance should again toss him into the ministry. The "ode" itself Mr. Montgomery dedicates to his own wife, informing the reader, with the best of taste, that she has more than twenty relations who have fought and served under the victim of her husband's verse. We should like to give our readers the whole of this "ode," as being on the whole the most ludicrous piece of doggrel which successful impudence ever had the face to print and call it