Love had no place, nor natural charity?
The parlour spaniel when she heard his step,
Rose slowly from the hearth and stole aside
With creeping pace; she never raised her eyes
To woo kind words from him, nor laid her head
Upraised upon his knee, with fondling whine:
How could it be but thus? Arithmetic
Was the sole science he was ever taught.
The multiplication table was his creed,
His pater-noster, and his decalogue.

When yet he was a boy, and should have breathed
The open
air and sunshine of the fields,

To give his blood its natural spring and play,
He in a close and dusky counting-house,

Smoke-dried, and seared, and shrivelled up his heart.
So from the way in which he was train'd up
His feet departed not; he toil'd and moil'd,
Poor muck-worm! through his threescore years and ten,
And when the earth shall now be shovelled on him,
If that which served him for a soul were still
Within its husk, 'twould still be dirt to dirt.

S. Yet your next newspapers will blazon him
For industry and honourable wealth,

A bright example.

T. Even half a million

Gets him no other praise. But come this way
Some twelvemonths hence, and you will find his virtues
Trimly set forth in lapidary lines,

Faith, with her torch beside, and little Cupids
Dropping upon his urn their marble tears.-SOUTHEY.

SPEECH OF DR CHALMERS IN DEFENCE OF SABBATH-SCHOOLS.

The object of Sabbath-schools is to make the young wise unto salvation through the medium of the Word of God, and for this purpose to exercise their attention and their memory, and their understanding, and their every faculty which belongs to them, on the sacred volume of inspiration. You will at least allow that during the whole work of such an institution the right seed and the appropriate soil for the reception of it are brought in contact with each other, and

the only thing wanted to complete the human part of the arrangement is a qualified agent for the purpose of depositing this seed. Now, there is one class of objectors to this system who must find it quite impossible to allege in opposition to it the difficulty of finding such agents. They conceive, and they honestly conceive, it to be hurtful on the principle of its withdrawing the young from the moral and religious guardianship of their parents. Such an objection as this supposes the great mass of parents to be qualified for the Christian education of their families, and I most readily admit this to be the case in as far as the qualification of mere talent is concerned. Parents, generally speaking,. labour under no natural disqualification for the effective training up of their offspring in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, and why? Just because, agreeably to all I have stated on this subject, every one of them may if he will have access to the Bible, every one of them may if he will have access to the Mediator, through whom the things of God may, through the medium of the Bible, be revealed to the understanding-every one of them may if he will have the benefit of the teaching of the Holy Ghost, and through prayer for wisdom as he stands in need of it, may obtain a plentiful supply of that wisdom in virtue of which he may win the souls of his family. With all this in my mind, I can have no doubt as to the general competency of parents for the Christian charge of their families, nor do I think that the land in which we dwell will ever become a land of righteousness till many a parent shall have reared in his own home the altar of piety, and shall have set up a school of instruction under the sanctuary of his own roof, and within the retirement of his own walls.

Let me now recur to the objection I have already adverted to as applied to the institution of Sabbath-schools,—that it detaches children from the moral and religious guardianship of their parents. I ask if the holders of this argument would turn it against the measure of an additional church in this the city of our habitation? Now, the precise effect of this additional church would be to take families from their homes. It would be transferring in part the business of their instruction away from the natural guardians; and yet, in spite of this circumstance, the men who send their offspring to the house of God are the very men to whom I would look for the most vigilant system of Christian super

intendence in their own houses. And the men who do not send them are most assuredly not the men from whom we would rightly expect such a deep, such an ever-working and earnest concern for the religion of their offspring, that they could not bear them out of their dwellings on the day which is set apart for the solemn exercises of religion, nor confide them to any management but the in-door management of a strict system of household regulation. Now, my brethren, it is right you should know, that in reference to one-half of the population of our city, such institutions as those we are now pleading for are the only substitutes they have it in . their power to resort to in the room of additional churches. There is no other out-of-door instruction to which they can possibly send them. And while, in the mind of the objector, there exists the conception that this Sabbath-school hour is additional to a whole day of regular attendance on the ordinary means, the real state of the case is, that it is the only hour of the day on which a very large proportion of the young have a religious pretext for being away from under the eye and the guardianship of their parents.

But, again, I have fully conceded to you, that in point of natural qualification there does exist among the generality of parents a sufficiency of talent, and, if any of them will, he may have a sufficiency of grace for bringing up his children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. Now, though I have conceded to you the existence of the talent, I cannot, with my eye open to the real state of matters, concede to you the existence of the will. The practical merits of this question are very much to be decided by the existing state of practice and of disposition as to the work of family ministrations. Now, I aver, that in a very great number of instances they are abandoned altogether, and that not because Sabbath-schools have relieved parents of the feeling of that responsibility which belongs to them, but because they have positively no such feeling to give any agitation or disturbance to their consciences at all. The alternative with many children is not between the advantage of out-of-door and the advantage of within-door instruction: the alternative is between out-of-door instruction or none at all. The alternative is not between one species of instruction and another the alternative is between one species of instruction and no instruction whatever. If the seed be not deposited in this particular way, then it is never deposited.

:

And I do think, that in these circumstances it is giving up the efficacy of the Word-it is saying that God may send it forth, and that it will return to him void-it is stamping an inefficacy upon the Bible, and withholding from it all that virtue which every true believer must assign to it, to hold that there is a way in which the knowledge of it may be given, (and that, too, you will observe, the only way in which it can be given in this particular instance), and given with judgment, too,-for you have no right to assume in behalf of your argument an incompetent teacher; that there is a way in which prayers for its efficacy are lifted up, and lifted up with faith, too,-for you have no right to assume in behalf of your argument a dishonest or an unbelieving teacher; and yet that the deposition of the seed, and the exertions of the labourers, and the intercessions of a believing heart for the fruit of the labour-that all these expedients have been put in operation, and yet that in the face of Bible promises and Bible assurances, all have turned out to be an insignificant parade, without produce and without efficacy.

But lastly, it strikes me that this said objection proceeds upon an entire miscalculation of human nature. You cannot state with arithmetical precision the number of parents who take no concern, and feel no responsibility whatever about their offspring, and who yet would allow them their hour of Sabbath education if the education were provided. But all such children may reap the most decisive good and get no harm from such institutions as we are now pleading for. Neither can we state with arithmetical precision the number of parents who have some conscience upon this subject, but that conscience so slender in its demands, that it would be quieted by the simple act of sending their children to such a school, and then feel itself relieved from the burden of all further cognizance. But should there be any parent of this description, may it not be shrewdly suspected that, with a conscience so slender, all his household ministrations, when he had them, would be proportionally slender, and that the loss of these ministrations to the young, may be amply made up by such a system of teaching, as we have no right to suppose will be conducted in any other spirit than that of wisdom and piety. And lastly, we cannot state with arithmetical precision the number of parents who are in plain and honest earnest about the Christianity of

their children. Should they judge it better to keep their families at home they will of course do so, and in reference to them there is neither good nor evil accruing from the institution in question. But for my own part, I can conceive an enlightened Christian father to judge and to act otherwise upon this question, to count it on the whole an advantage to his young that they attended this Bible seminary, and that just on the same principle that it is an advantage for them to attend the ministrations of a clergyman-to take the benefit of the out-of-door instruction, and feel at the same time as powerfully instigated as before to set up an active and exemplary system within the bosom of his family -to avail himself of the school, not as a substitute for his own exertions, but as a powerful accession to them.

SCENE-KING, QUEEN, HAMLET.

King. How is it, Hamlet, that the clouds still hang on you?

Ham. Not so, my Lord, I am too much i' th' sun.
Queen. Good Hamlet, cast thy nighted colour off,
And let thine eye look like a friend on Denmark.
Do not, for ever, with thy veiled lids,
Seek for thy noble father in the dust;
Thou know'st 'tis common; all that live must die,
Passing through nature to eternity.

Ham. Ay, Madam, it is common.
Queen. If it be,

I know not seems:

Why seems it so particular with thee?
Ham. Seems, Madam? nay, it is;
"Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,
Nor customary suits of solemn black,
Nor windy suspiration of forc'd breath,
No, nor the fruitful river in the

eye,

Nor the dejected 'haviour of the visage,

Together with all forms, moods, shows of grief,
That can denote me truly. These indeed seem,
For they are actions that a man might play;
But I have that within which passeth show:
These but the trappings and the suits of wo.

King. 'Tis sweet and commendable in your nature
Hamlet,