learned in one; because strangers are received in France with a degree of hospitality which is often prejudicial to the natives; because the French language is so general, that every thing which is new, useful, and advantageous to society, is diffused with incalculable increase in France?'

With every respect for this author, who is a very able and a very benevolent appreciator of all that is good, we must say that we have not read many things more ill founded, and less liberal than the above. His assertions are erroneous, and his conclusions unwarranted. It is utterly incorrect to say that France has been more instrumental than England in diffusing the methods of mutual instruction. England, according to his own reluctant confession, did spread the method over Asia, Africa and America; and if Europe was for a while excepted, it was only because the French themselves had debarred her from all communication with its coasts. At length came peace; and Europe saw that 15 years of instruction had been lost to her entire population by means of those restraints, and took immediate measures to indemnify herself for the misfortune. As to the causes to which this author ascribes the rapid diffusion of the new methods from France, we really cannot help thinking that a free press of long standing-280 daily or weekly newspapers-innumerable pamphlets and publications of every descriptionepistolary correspondence, about six times greater-personal communications, about forty times greater-public meetings for serious purposes, about six hundred times greater than in his country-had been more efficacious methods of spreading useful knowledge, than the chitchat of coteries, and the prattle of boudoirs; and that Mr Lancaster alone had done more to diffuse his system, than all the capers that have been cut from one salon into ten, by the very nimblest of all the Parisian multipliers of modish intelligence. As to hospitality, all we shall observe is, that, while 7000 English travellers were arrested and detained in France, contrary to all the rules and practice of civilized nations, more than three times that number of French fugitives received their daily bread, and found security in England only. Such wholesale hospitality is equal to a large stock of petty politeness. The fact is, that the moment of peace, which opened our usual relations with the world, was also that which brought the armies of Europe into the French capital, where all might learn what France herself had learned but the year before in England. It is some centuries, we are happy to think, since England could boast of such an opportunity of communicating good.

But since the anxiety of the French for propagating the British method to foreign countries, was so great, how did it hap

pen that she never thought of doing so till England had set her the example—and that the germs of the improvement, when scattered in her soil, were suffered to languish and expire? How does it happen, that no vestige of them has been preserved in any of her records; and that, in order to prove the Chevalier Pawlet's establishment ever had being, we must turn to two foreign journals, and one of those English-to the Journal de Geneve for December 1787, and to the English Repertory for August 1788?

Although the Lancasterian methods have made considerable progress in France, it does not appear that they have received any improvement; or that they have been applied to any thing further than mere elementary instruction in writing and reading French, in arithmetic, in drawing, and in singing. Not one of the improvements which the French, at their outset, were in such a hurry to propose, has been brought to maturity. For some years they have been meditating grand reforms in the mode of teaching arithmetic; which, according to Monsieur de Gerando, one of the stoutest champions of French monopoly, is in the English system a blind routine. But nothing has yet been done; and while they have been talking of projected ameliorations and extensions, we have actually applied the method to Greek and Latin, in the High School of Edinburgh, in the Charter-House of St Paul's, and other establishments. We have not either heard that any adults in France have, as in Britain, manifested a desire to be instructed. In these Islands, scholars of every age have flocked in with supplications to be educated; and one instance occurred, of a man aged 107, who was taught by his great grand-daughter, and lived to enjoy his new acquirement two years.

Two parties continue, at this moment, to divide all the inapathy of France, upon the subject of mutual instruction. Those who oppose it, found their opposition upon the evils which, they say, must result from giving knowledge to the lower classes; upon its being made a tool of jacobinism, infidelity, &c.; and assert, that the schools of the Freres ignorantins are adequate to all the purposes of necessary education. Those very schools, however, received, in their day, the same portion of abuse and oppression to which every project for instructing the people of France, has been condemned. The following account of that establishment is principally extracted from the Life of the Abbé de la Salle, published by the Abbé de Montes in 1783.

The first opposition which the worthy Abbé Salle met with, originated among his own scholars; who, without any proyocation, reviled, insulted, and even struck their venerable

teacher. One of the brothers having carried away a sum of money which had been bequeathed to the Society, denied all knowledge of the founder, and deserted from the Order. The first school which the Abbé had founded, was immediately destroyed,-and he was condemned to labour in silence. The secrecy to which popular prejudice and clamour had reduced him and his fellow-labourers, involved the whole concern in indiscriminate suspicion and prosecution. Former teachers, who wished to maintain the monopoly they had hitherto possessed of instruction, obtained an order to shut his schools. The Regent, Duke of Orleans, refused him letterspatent; and these humane and benevolent brothers, pursued by the hisses and insults of an ignorant and exasperated populace, thought they made a very comfortable retreat through the streets of Paris, when they escaped lapidation. The schools were proscribed by a dignitary of the Church, and impeached before the Lieutenant de Police. The brothers were condemned to pay a fine of 50 francs each, and the Abbé de la Salle to pay 2000. A few days before his death, this respectable man, who deserved the approbation of all who value what is truly valuable, was laid under an interdict by the Archbishop of Rouen, and expired under the displeasure of the Holy See.

But the calamities which the brothers were doomed to suffer did not end here. They were attacked in every direction at once. Should the reader wish to study the spirit of those times in France, he may find amusement in a Journal called Les Nouvelles Ecclésiastiques,' for 1767. The accusations preferred against the poor Freres ignorantins, are very numerous, but may be reduced under these heads;-intrigues, religious and mundane; proselytism; fanaticism; swindling; cruelty; violence; theft; &c.

To neutralize this acrimony, however, the virtuous Abbé was exalted to nothing less than canonization, among his partisans; and many persons attested, as eyewitnesses, the miracles which he operated. A patient he embraced, recovered instantly of a fever, for which the physicians had given him over. Brother Giles was cured of a headach, by applying to the part affected, a letter he had received from his revered Superior; and brother Timothy's knee was relieved from a white swelling, by the sign of the cross, which he made over it. Another brother shook off a quartan ague, by swallowing a bolus of grease collected from off the square cap of the Abbot; and brother Bartholomew swore that he appeared to him, after death.

The world would have grown old to very little purpose, if, at the same time, it had not grown a little wiser; and it cannot be

expected that attempts made to instruct mankind should be reprobated with equal bitterness in the 19th, as in the 18th century:-Yet, even against the present methods, many strictures have appeared, which would not have dishonoured the gloomy zeal of any century, however remote,-though it is true that they have not been balanced by the same predilection for canonization and miracles. We have not room to give any particular account of these diatribes-nor are they worthy of any. But to show the spirit of the modern French opposers of improvement, we may give a word or two.

One of these begins with this phrase. The schools for mu❝tual instruction were established in England by Mr Lancaster, a Quaker. Now, it is notorious that Quakers are fana<tics; enemies to all authority; who hold the reveries of their • imaginations as indisputable oracles; who believe that all men are equal, and deny the existence of a future state.' The same sage author dreads the empire which a master, uncontrouled by any other superintendant, may acquire over his scholars; and says, could one be found who would not make an ill use of it, and should he die, where shall we find a second? He gives a terrific picture, which we know to be a true one, of the morals of near 200 children, imprisoned in Paris for various crimes; and who are so depraved, that the Minister of Marine refused to admit them into the Royal Navy.

The Catholic Pere de Famille, again, is very indignant that any method imported from England should be approved of in France. Anne ulla putetis

Dona carere dolis Danaum?"

S'il a plu à quelques Troyens d'accueillir, avec confiance, le present des Grecs; si des Anglomanes aiment à se passionner pour une chimere, par cela seul, qu'elle nous vient du pays • des méchaniques, ce n'est pas une raison pour nous de partager cette idolatrie.'-In 1816, we are then informed, this person was in England, and visited a prison (new Bedlam ?), one of the seven wonders of England, which was then erecting in the quarter of Westminster Abbey. It is three quarters of a mile long, and of a proportionate width; and is destined to receive the fruit of this new tree of science.

Such absurdities, we must presume, cannot long produce any effect anywhere: But it is certain, that a very serious obstacle to the introduction of the Lancasterian methods in France, arises from the opinions of those who either condemn the Revolution in toto, or severely reprobate its excesses. Both the one and the other affirm, that the too great diffusion of knowledge, among the inferior orders, brought on the calamities which they deplore; and

that, if so many of the people had not been taught to read and write, France and Europe would not have been thus cruelly distracted. Without espousing the opinion of either party, we would say to the former, that, if they whose interest it was to oppose the revolution in France had been more enlightened, and better stocked with arguments and means to detect the supposed fallacy of the doctrines advanced by their adversaries, the higher orders of that country might have made a happier stand against their assailants. To the latter we may say, that, if a greater proportion of the population had been educated and instructed, so many could not have been impelled to acts of barbarism and injustice, by the sophistry of ill-minded incendiaries.

The age of Louis XIV. was that from which the state of knowledge in France, such as it was at the period when the Revolution broke out, may fairly be said to have taken its tone, That Monarch, more anxious for his own glory than the happiness of his subjects, viewed, with the same feelings, their progress in arms as in the arts, in science and in literature. He used his whole influence to impel them to climb to the splendid heights of knowledge, without having trodden any of the paths which usually lead to it; but the multitude remained nearly as it was before, having caught nothing of themens divinior' from those who distinguished themselves, but a vague and idle sentiment of admiration, rather than of appreciation. This, however, was all that a despot could desire at home; and it was sufficient to dazzle the world into a belief that his nation was-what he would not for his diadem it had been in reality-the most enlightened of Europe. The light there was, was collected in detached orbs, and not at all diffused throughout the system. There was but little of it certainly among the courtiers and nobility;-but it was not from its possessors that they suffered in an after age; and we would just ask the modern partisans of French ignorance this question: -Among those who burned and demolished the mansions of the rich, in every province of France; who massacred unarmed prisoners, in every town; dragged half-dead bodies through the streets of Paris; fixed the heads of the innocent on the ends of pikes; devoured the flesh, and licked up the blood of their fellow-creatures; who daily shrieked applause at the foot of the reeking guillotine,-how many were there who could read and write? how many among the Pastoureaux, the Cabochiens, the Bourguignons, the Armagnacs, in former times? how many among the defaulters of the Jacquerie? What was the state of instruction among the nobility, when, in the reign of Charles VI, Luxembourgh, Harcourt, La Fosseuse, L'Isle-Adam, de Bar, Chev