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Society is smoothed to that excess

That manners hardly differ more than dress."*

But the great characteristics of Classes will always prevail. The callous Doctor, the sporting Parson, the litigious Attorney, the pompous Corporator, the bullying Justice, the flogging Schoolmaster-those who in their power of good or evil moulded, in a large degree, the temper of their times-these are Modern Antiques. Such varieties of the old antiprogressive species are gone. But other varieties will arise, and buzz through their little day. Out of the democratic element may perhaps come as great nuisances as the exclusive has bred amongst us. Knowledge has produced essential changes in one generation. It is "a Fountain, such as it is not easy to discern where the issues and streams thereof will take and fall." But one thing is clear-Knowledge can never produce half the amount of evil which Ignorance has produced; and it may reasonably be doubted whether real Knowledge was ever productive of evil. The wise man, Lord Bacon, who termed Knowledge “a Fountain,” calls 66 upon us to rule and guide the course of the waters, by setting down this position, namely, that all Knowledge is to be limited by Religion, and to be referred to use and action." To limit Knowledge thus is not to narrow it; for its boundaries are the extremest range of God's creation, to be reverently discovered, step by step, by man's reason. * Byron.

+ Bacon.

I have no fear of Knowledge. I consider it my especial happiness to have lived in a progressive condition of society-progressive as regards the outward prosperity of the country-progressive in respect of the intellectual advancement of the People. There have been, and there still are, many evils in the transition state through which we are passing. We may have lost some of the simplicity of "the antique world." There are strong contrasts of manners, as I have shewn in some particulars, between the beginning and the middle of the halfcentury. There is more display I fear there is more selfishness. "Plain living and high thinking" have to be sought as a distinction amongst some of the more ambitious classes. But there never was a time when the great bulk of the community-in spite of many mistakes and omissions of duty-were more true to their inheritance of "titles manifold" amongst the nations:

"Sound healthy children of the God of Heaven."

* Wordsworth.

THE LEADING PROFESSION.

[The following paper was written before we had a Preventive Police; before Prisons were regulated upon some system, however imperfect; and when the terror of Capital Punishments-always threatened, but capriciously inflicted-was the sole principle upon which crime was sought to be repressed. We are in many respects wiser than we were thirty years ago; but a consideration of what we have amended may lead us to meditate upon what we have still to amend.]

THE choice of a profession was at all times an affair of difficulty, and it has become peculiarly so at a period when the avenues to success, whether in the walks of theology, of law, or of medicine, are blocked up by a crowd of eager competitors. Nor is the path to wealth, by the more beaten track of commercial pursuits, less impeded by the struggles of rivalry, the intrigues of connexion, or the overwhelming preponderance of enormous capital. For adventurous young men, not cursed by nature with a modest or studious turn, and who are impatient to take the post of honour by a coup-de-main, a state of war offers the ample field of the profession of arms; but in a time of peace that field is narrowed to a very aristocratic circle, and the plebeian spirit learns to be tamed in the never-ending rebuffs of the Horse Guards and of the Admiralty. All things considered, and

with a due regard to the necessary education, the certain rewards, and the few chances of failure, it appears to us that the profession which involves the least individual expense in its necessary studies, the aspirants being constantly trained at the public cost-which is supported by the greatest excitement of popular observation so as to satisfy the most insatiate appetite for fame-which presents the most open field for exertion, so as to leave the adventurer the largest choice of opportunities and which is fenced round from the attacks of private envy or revenge by the most powerful support of individual functionaries-that most cherished and honoured profession is that of a THIEF!

And, first, of the education of this profession.

We will imagine a youth to whom the honours. of his calling are not hereditary. He has been brought up, as other youths are, either in absolute ignorance of the world which has preceded him, and the world which is before him; or with such an acquaintance with the tendencies of mankind as they are learned in the book of history, or the safer volumes of experience, as will satisfy him that the least successful of the sons of men are the most conscientious. If he be utterly uninstructed in book-learning, and yet have a tolerable acquaintance with the things around him, he will see (if he open his eyes) that the one thing needful is money;-that cunning has a much surer grasp of that summum bonum than wisdom; --and that the contempt of society is only reserved

for the poor. Hence poverty, as Talleyrand said of the execution of the Duc d'Enghien, is worse than a crime-it is a blunder. If he derive his knowledge from the half truths, half fables of his species, he will discover that fraud and violence have always secured to themselves a much larger portion of what are called the blessings of lifecompetency, luxury, high station, influence, command-than sincerity and moderation. If he live in the country, he has constantly presented to his eyes the condition of a vast many miserable people, who are reduced to the utmost extremity of perpetual suffering their honest pride trampled upon, their affections outraged, their commonest wants unsupplied,—and for no personal demerit that he can perceive, but because they are laborious, patient, inoffensive, easily satisfied, content to do their duty in the station to which they are born. If he abide in a city, he discovers that most direct modes of obtaining a living are il paid-that squalid filth follows the scanty earnings of the mechanic-that the tradesman who vends an honest commodity cannot compete with the quack and the puffer-that insolent vice always thrusts modest virtue into the kennel. In either case he perceives that mankind, directly or indirectly, spend their lives in endeavours to abstract more than they have a right to abstract from the property of their neighbours. He commences, by dint of hard reasoning, a professional career of resolving to practise that philosophy which