stimulus than a check to that intense application by which the means of future distinction would be the most effectually secured.

The time, we believe, is wholly gone by, when some confused and rude notion prevailed among the middle classes and the Dissenters, that the faculties on which success in life depended were very little connected with intellectual improvement, and that a cultivated understanding was by no means a recommendation to a minister of the gospel; that the conduct of the shop, the manufactory, and the farm, was rather injured than improved by any knowledge beyond that which the shop, the farm, and the manufactory yielded, and that the power of enforcing the truths of religion was enjoyed in greatest perfection by him who, possessing the knowledge of his Bible, was not encumbered with knowledge of any other kind.

Our persuasion that the benefits of knowledge are sufficiently appreciated by the classes whom it is now our principal purpose to address, will hinder us from entering into an analysis of the antiquated objections to which we have thus referred. The futility of them indeed is apparent. Do not such objectors allow that one man excels another, in the shop, in the farm, or the manufactory? Why, having observed what makes one man to excel, should we not convey the same faculty to as many as we can? Why, having observed what would raise the whole to a greater degree of excellence than that which is now attained by the most successful, should we not be anxious to bestow this advantage upon them? One man in the shop or the farm excels his neighbour in the shop or the farm, by what? By turning to better account the circumstances of the shop or the farm. How does one man turn them to a better, another to a worse account? By two things; by an attentive observation of the course of the circumstances as they pass; and by accurately judging of the nature and consequences of each circum

stance.

That the habits and faculties of mind subservient to those important purposes are conveyed by education, is acknowledged by the objectors themselves as matter of general experience. Why else do they make preference of the youths who, in well-regulated families, are brought up to habits of attention, habits of thought and consideration, to youths who, in ill-regulated families, have been habituated only to examples of giddiness and precipitation, have been abandoned to their own inexperience, and have only dissipated their

attention and time?

The grand advantage of the higher branches of education is to generate these master faculties, the faculties of keen and unwearied attention, and of prompt and unerring judgment, in a degree in which nothing else can impart them. It is well known that no exercise of the mind requires so intense and unbroken an application of attention as the mathematics and other superior sciences; and habits of attention are formed in the acquisition of such branches of knowledge, which are turned with singular advantage to the active pursuits of life.

On what, again, does good judgment of necessity depend? On a knowledge, assuredly, of the circumstances to be judged of. But in what line of business are these circumstances not so numerous, and connected with so many other circumstances, in other departments, that nothing but the highest education can give a competent knowledge of them all? It follows that the men who are without the advantage of such an education; who are obliged to form their judgments upon partial views; to draw conclusions from a certain number of circumstances, which form only a part of those upon which the result they are in quest of depends, because on account of the narrow views

which a narrow education implies, they are not acquainted with the rest, must be perpetually liable to the formation of wrong judgments; and wanting in those means of clear and correct judgment which the more enlarged knowledge derived from a liberal education can alone supply.

This is a difference fully recognised in the remarkable case of medicine; and as the reason extends to every system of action, which must be founded upon a system of knowledge complete or incomplete, the case of medicine ought to have suggested, much more generally than it has done, the difference between the quack artist and the instructed artist, in every department of human action. What is the difference between the quack doctor and the enlightened physician? Only this, that the one uses all the knowledge which a complete education bestows; and the other, without the knowledge derived from a liberal education, knows only what his own practice has suggested to him. Wherein, therefore, is he inferior to the well-educated physician? In this, that he is a less accurate judge of the circumstances on which health and disease depend. He looks only at a few circumstances, when the result depends on a great many. He knows not the connexions among circumstances; which it is above all things the business of an enlightened education to teach. The grand object of an enlightened education is to render familiar to the mind of the pupil the laws of nature; which is, in fact, to make hin acquainted with the connexions among circumstances. By an enlightened education he is taught to combine these connexions into groupes; to give names to the groupes; to bring in this manner the greatest number possible of such connexions within the grasp of the mind, and to hold the knowledge of them always ready whenever there is occasion to use it.

There are few, we trust, of our readers who cannot make the application of this very obvious but most important doctrine to the general occupations of the middle rank of life. How many, for example, and recondite are the laws of nature which are concerned in the operations of him who cultivates the ground; the gardener, the farmer, the grazier! These laws of nature are the connexions among the circumstances on which the results pursued by him depend. These results will most assuredly be attained in greatest degree, and with greatest certainty, where the knowledge of the causes on which they depend, that is, the knowledge of those connexions above-mentioned, those laws of nature, is the most perfectly enjoyed. How many advantages, to mention but one of the numerous branches of knowledge with which the business of the farmer is connected, must he possess, who is fully acquainted with the laws of vegetation, who knows the structure and habits of plants, the elements, combinations and properties of soils, the food of plants, the circumstances which stimulate, and those which retard their growth, and who, knowing the powers with which he has to operate, has acquired habits of forming new combinations of those powers, adapted to the varying circumstances in which he has to apply them,-over the man who, without any knowledge but that of a blind routine, ploughs the ground and throws in the seed, merely because his father did so before him, and in the self-same manner; and who looks upon all improvement as a sort of injury to the dead, and hardly differing from a sin!

Without stopping to shew how many combinations are involved in the proceedings of the manufacturer and the merchant, and how impossible it is for any but the man who has all the knowledge which it is the business of the most complete education to bestow, to be master of all those combinations, and capable of turning them to his own advantage, we shall only speak of one other happy result of a generous education, and that in few words;

its effect in raising the mind; the importance to a man's inward self of the feeling that he is an intellectual being; that he has acquired something which takes him out of the class of inferior animals; the animals, whose only guide is their senses, which have no range of ideas beyond the objects they have seen and touched and tasted, and are condemned to move in one unaltered and unimproving track from the beginning to the end of their career. Compared with the dull, the monotonous, the gloomy existence made up of this narrow circle of sensations and ideas, tiresome because perpetually recurring, and less and less exciting as the sensibility of the organs decays, how infinitely superior, even as a thing to be enjoyed, as a companion, as the inmate of the breast, the dearest and most important of all companions, counsellers, and friends, is the mind, so furnished, and so instructed, that it looks behind and before, and on every side; the mind that can bring before its possessor the vast spectacle of nature, and the laws by which its mighty operations are guided, the astonishing powers which man has acquired over the events of nature, from observing philosophically the laws by which they are produced; and the greater, unspeakably greater, power which he is yet destined to acquire, by the improved application of his intellect to the same important course of observation; in fine, the mind which, not confined to the events and objects of the physical world, can trace the history of man, from his first rude beginnings, through the varied series of acts in the different regions of the earth, to that state of improvement in which, in the more favourable circumstances, he is now to be found; and which can even anticipate his future history, and exult in the progressive happiness which, through a long train of improvements, he is yet to attain! Such a mind is a perpetual feast. No source of pleasure, no antidote against misery, worthy to be compared with it, is found in the lot of man. If we did nothing by enlarged education but open this source of happiness, no exertion would be too great to confer the blessing on as many as possible of our fellow-men. But this is not all; this is a small portion only of the inestimable advantages it bestows. This, and this alone, is the mind which marks the circumstances by which human improvement is accelerated or retarded, and exerts its powers for the aggrandisement of the one, the extinction of the other. This, and this alone, is the mind which takes rational cognizance of the institutions. by which the order of society is more or less perfectly preserved, which marks the principles whence the good, the principles also whence the evil effects proceed, and can form a salutary notion of what ought to be done to render perfect the social institutions of man, and yield to him all the advantages which his union with his fellows is calculated to afford.

The last which we shall mention of the salutary effects of an instructed mind, is the improvement of private morals. No fact of human nature is better ascertained than this, that the classes of men whose range of ideas is the narrowest are the most prone to vice. Of the labouring classes it is commonly observed, that those who have the most monotonous occupations, who are confined to the constant repetition of a small number of operations, and whose senses and thoughts, for almost the whole of their waking hours, are chained to a few objects, are the most irresistibly drawn to intoxication. In truth, it is not easy for a man who has no experience of a mind sated with the endless repetition of the same few ideas, to have any conception of the pleasure which men with minds in that unhappy state derive from the stimulus of strong liquors. This it is which alone gives any variety to the irksome sameness of their minds, which imparts intensity for the time to images and feelings become dull from perpetual recurrence, and affords a

rapid flow of ideas to men whose habitual state of consciousness is the oppressive feeling, as it were, of a mental stagnation. Nor is this all. The monotony and dulness of this life gives a craving for excitement. Hence, the adventures of crime, the risks and dangers which attend it, are often to such people a positive pleasure, and they are hurried to the more daring violations of the order of society, to escape from the sameness of a vacant mind. As few things are more remarkable than the many points of resemblance between the extreme classes, the highest and lowest of all, none of these points is more worthy of attention than that which we are now considering, the narrow circle of ideas and its effect upon morals. In the narrowness of the circle of ideas no class comes so near the lowest of all as the highest. Few individuals in that class can endure books, or have profited by the ceremonies and forms of education through which they have passed. Being exempt from the cares of life, they have none of those ideas which the occupations of the middle classes force them to acquire. The circle of their ideas, therefore, is confined to their amusements and pleasures, the ceremonial of fashionable life, and the private history of a few scores of families which associate with one another only, which they call the world, and which in truth are the world to them, because they are acquainted with no other part of it. Horses and dogs and wine and women form but a narrow circle of ideas, even when the trappings of state are combined with them. After a time the monotony of this life becomes intolerable, and more intense excitement is required. Noblemen take to the gaming table for relief from the anguish of a monotonous mind; degraded workmen rob and steal. It is to a great degree from the same cause, that the chace becomes a passion to the one and poaching to the other.

With these convictions deeply stamped upon our minds, the reader will anticipate the opinion which we have formed of the projected institution for the higher branches of education in this metropolis. If this project be carried into execution as it may be, and as we think there is great reason to suppose that it will be, the foundation of the University of London will constitute an era, not only in the history of England, but in that of human kind. There is hardly an event which we can contemplate of greater importance to the species at large, than the right education of the middle classes of Englishmen. From them as from a centre would radiate knowledge and civilization to the ends of the earth, and with a rapidity and efficacy which no other place as a centre could possibly bestow.

The situation of London is altogether, in this point of view, without a parallel. The immense population and immense wealth of this metropolis exhibit a greater amount of persons who may be considered in the middle rank of life, than is to be found assembled in any other spot on the face of the earth. If the middle rank of Englishmen be the rank on which the prosperity and glory of England more peculiarly depend, that portion of the middle rank who are assembled in London, and in whose hands the active business of the capital is placed, is the portion who exert the greatest influence on the rest, and from whom the character of the whole is to a great degree derived.

Hitherto the means of education provided for this the most important of all portions of the British population, have been most imperfect; hardly more than sufficient to communicate those elementary acquirements which the lowest departments of business require. How much the country has suffered from this misfortune may be inferred from what we have already advanced. It is not possible to tell, nor easy to conceive, how far this nation would have

been advanced in all that constitutes the prosperity and happiness of human society, had a better education been earlier bestowed upon the population of London.

The University of London starts in circumstances which afford the highest promise. It is bound by no antiquated forms and rules. It receives its formation in an age of the highest illumination, and must be adapted to the circumstances and ideas of the time. It has for one of the very elements of its composition the most important of all elements, the principle of perpetual improvement. It will profit by its own experience, and by the lights which are shed upon the arts of instruction in every quarter of the globe: and whatever is found to be best for training the human mind to its highest state of excellence, it will hasten to make its own. An institute which is not progressive, for training the human mind, whose highest attribute it is to be progressive, is the worst and the most glaring of all absurdities.

The public possesses the highest possible security that the University of London will go on to deserve the approbation of the public; because it is by the approbation of the public alone that it can exist. This is an advantage of unspeakable importance. The University of London possesses no independent funds on which it can subsist in luxury and splendour, whether it deserve the esteem or contempt of the community. The University of London, therefore, must act up to the highest ideas of the enlightened men of the age. Every individual connected with it will have the strongest interest in acting so as to command the approbation of the public. By the important principle of paying the professors wholly or in greater part by the fees of the pupils, the motive to make the instruction of every class admirable, in order that it may be admired, is raised to its greatest height. And as the only reward which the conductors and superintendents of this organ of instruction can propose to themselves, is the approbation of the public, and the spectacle of the great good which they produce, they are happily so situated that in order to obtain their reward they must effectually deserve it.

The commencement of the London University is fortunate in another respect; that eminent men in all the walks of instruction abound; that the metropolis is the great mart of intellect; that men of talent are almost always eager to make considerable sacrifices in order to enjoy a residence in the capital; that the teachers in the London University will be placed most conspicuously in the eye of the public, and that from all these circumstances the institution will have the inestimable advantage of choosing men eminently qualified for their duty in every department of instruction.

Having dwelt with so much satisfaction on the advantages resulting to the middle class as a body from the University of London, in which middle class the Dissenters form a conspicuous portion, we must not forget the advantages which are peculiarly afforded to the Dissenters.

It is a source of deep regret, that, up to this hour, no adequate means of an intellectual education have been provided for the teachers of religion among the Dissenters. Certainly, it is a matter of the greatest importance, that as many as possible of those who teach the people religion, who shape their moral sentiments, and apply, with all the skill of which they are masters, the hopes and fears of futurity to multiply acts of one kind, restrain acts of another kind, should be enlightened men, and possessed of the virtues of enlightened men. Well do we know, and these pages, we trust, are not wanting in proofs, that there are highly enlightened men among the Dissenting clergy. But this is the merit of the individuals. These are men who have educated themselves. Had the proper discipline and instruction