productions. The writers of this class have one, and one only, device for obtaining popular favour that of conglomerating crimes. Every page must have its two or three catastrophes ; and they dibble in their atrocities, one to every twenty lines, as regularly as if they were planting cauliflowers. With them everything depends on the abundance of blood and brains-not their own certainly; and provided the murders, robberies, rapes, treasons, trials, and executions are sufficiently numerous-and they can get some poor artist to prostitute his pencil for their illustration-the sale is sure to be extensive, and the minor theatres lose no time in dramatizing the new masterpiece.

The suggestions of our author for the prevention of crime among the middle class are limited to the establishment of boarding-houses and circles of reunion for the students at the university, and evening-lecture rooms for the young men employed in commercial pursuits. Great benefit would, he conceives, result to the students from the establishment of boarding-houses under judicious management; but the system to be enforced in them must be moderate, or it will disgust and drive away the young It should not exceed in strictness that to which they would be subject if residing with their own families. He is not aware that more than two of these establishments exist at present in Paris.

men.

'The shopmen and commercial clerks are in general little educated; the establishment of evening lecture-rooms for these young men would be attended with important advantages, both to themselves and to their employers these latter should defray all the expenses attending them. One lecture-room in each of the forty-eight Arrondissements would be sufficient to accomplish this object; and they should be placed under the immediate control of the municipal authorities.'

These suggestions are well meant; but here, as in all similar cases, the misfortune is, that the persons who would avail themselves of these advantages would be the moral and well-conducted; the vicious and ill-regulated would reject them altogether.

From the preventive M. Frégier proceeds to the remedial means—that is, the means by which existing vice and crime can best be controlled and diminished; and he chiefly directs his attention to the three vices most widely extended and most pregnant with crime-drunkenness, gambling, and prostitution.

'It is,' he says, ' an easy task for any political economist to point out a variety of plans which, if they could be carried into effect, would abate the vice of drunkenness: but, unfortunately, all these are good only in theory, and are means of prevention rather than of cure.-That all factory-children, whose parents are notorious drunkards, should be boarded and lodged by the manufacturer who employs them, and thus

screened

screened from the contagion of bad example at home, is one of these :that all the children of moral and well- conducted parents should perform their work at home, and, by so doing, avoid the demoralising effects of the vice-crowded factory, is another:-that societies under royal patronage should be established to procure for the entire mass of the working classes amusement, combined with instruction, during the Sundays and the other periods of idleness, is a third. All these plans would be excellent were they not impracticable. To subject every drunkard to punishment has been tried in Germany without success. Το increase the duties on wine and spirits has been recommended; but in a vine-growing country like France this would be a check to industry, and it would be unjust towards the sober portion of the community. Another plan is uniformly to publish in the newspapers an account of all the accidents, fatal quarrels, and crimes resulting from drunkenness. As, from the extension of education, every one will in a few years be able to read, this public exposure would tend powerfully to check the vice.'

We greatly doubt it; and, indeed, of all the suggestions brought forward in this section, there appears to us to be only one from which any important practical good might result. It is, that systematically, and by a mutual compact among all the manufacturers and master artificers, every habitual drunkard should be expelled from their establishments, however able a workman he may be. No doubt, if this system were generally and rigidly adopted, there would result from it, after a time, an important improvement in the habits of the working classes. M. Frégier does not advert to the temperance movement in Ireland and England. As he cannot be ignorant of it, his silence may, we presume, be attributed to his conviction that this singular impulse on the public mind will be of short duration.

Tolerated gambling-houses no longer exist in France; and the plan adopted by the government, of first suppressing them in the provincial towns, and then attacking the grand establishments in Paris, was politic and wise. It would appear, however, that the evil, if abated, is very far from being conquered. The vigilance of the police has, indeed, successfully put down the houses established for the specific purpose of clandestine gambling; but it has hitherto been foiled by the augmented numbers and activity of the maisons à parties. In these, high and unfair play is carried on, under the specious exterior of ordinary visiting, to a far greater extent than formerly; and our author is of opinion that alterations in the penal code are imperatively called for to meet these subtle evasions of the law.

Two diametrically opposite systems have been proposed for the reformation of the unhappy victims of prostitution. The advocates of the one, filled with the benevolent desire of reinstating

these

these women in the honest ranks of society, assert that it is the duty of the civil authorities to facilitate this object by assiduously labouring to introduce among them habits of order, forethought, and economy. The advocates of the other system reprobate, as vitally detrimental to public morals, any measures which would tend to blend these degraded beings with the respectable portion of the community, or to lessen the ignominy which attaches to them, and which forms one of the strongest safeguards, perhaps the strongest of all, to female virtue: they fear, also, that any improvements in the habits of these women would, in proportion as it lessened prostitution, augment illicit connexions more irreparably detrimental to the happiness of families. Far from promoting any objects of this nature, they are anxious to make the line of demarcation more clearly apparent than it is at present; and would willingly bring back the ancient laws which restricted women of this class to certain parts of each city, and obliged them to wear a peculiar dress. Our author inclines evidently to the milder of these systems, and so did also his great authority, ParentDuchâtelet in England this controversy is not likely to be agitated.

It is quite evident that the science of prison discipline is, of all others, the one nearest our author's heart; and his ardent partisanship in favour of the system of solitary confinement leads him, as we have already stated, to devote a very undue portion of his volumes to this especial subject. We shall not attempt to follow him through the details; the question being one which we but recently discussed, and which, if not actually decided in this country, may be considered as on the very eve of being so. The balance of evidence, we think, leaves little doubt that the bodily health does not suffer by even the most strict system of solitary confinement: but the case is by no means so clear with regard to the mind. Here, although the evidence is far from conclusive, there is strong ground for believing that long-protracted confinement, in a state of constant and absolute solitude, will injure the functions of the brain, and induce insanity, or permanent mental imbecility. The matter is one of such importance, that the only safe thing to do is at once to assume the fact to be so, and to act on that assumption. Confine a prisoner in a separate cell, interdict him absolutely and entirely from all communication whatever, either by eye or mouth, with his fellowprisoners; but give him employment and instruction-let him, in the course of each day, be visited by carefully-selected gaolers, by the master artisan who has to superintend his work, by the schoolmaster, the physician, and the chaplain-and experience has proved that there will not be the slightest cause to fear any injury to the

mind, however long such a course of solitary confinement shall continue, be it for years, or even for the whole of life. There is also the strongest evidence to prove, that amelioration of character, radical and permanent reformation, is the cheering and encouraging result in very numerous instances.-Under these modifications -and they may now be considered as points the necessity of which is generally conceded-the insulation of prisoners may be pronounced to be the best and most successful system which has yet been devised to punish crime and amend the criminal.

The great additional outlay necessary in the construction of a building where several hundred convicts are to be completely separated from each other, is a weightier objection than it may appear to be at first sight. Every portion of the establishment must be more elaborately fitted up than at present; the exercisegrounds must be multiplied, the passages and corridors must be peculiarly constructed, and the entire structure must be more extensive and more complicated. In some instances, the existing prisons might, by a considerable outlay, be rendered applicable to this new mode of confinement, but in the majority of cases it would be necessary that entirely new buildings should be erected. In many counties in England this demand upon the local revenues would almost amount to a prohibition; in all it would be severely felt but the object is one of such vital importance, that, when the superior advantages of the separate system shall no longer be a matter of dispute, the legislature will, we have no doubt, lend a willing aid to extend it throughout the kingdom. The first expense is the only real difficulty; for although the charges of superintendence will be increased, this is a trivial consideration, and will be compensated for a hundred-fold by the gradual diminution of crime.

M. Frégier claims for his country the merit of extending a much greater degree of paternal solicitude towards a convict on his dismissal from prison than is usual in England. In France, a liberal portion of the profits of his work is paid to him when he is discharged, and he is thus not compelled by actual want, as is too frequently the case in England, at once to resume his career of crime. This is wise and worthy of imitation; but the system established in France for the surveillance of liberated prisoners, the convict-passports given them, and the societies of patronage, as they are called, the object of which is to facilitate their re-introduction into society, are considered by our author as failures; and he is of opinion, that, except as relates to the younger classes of criminals, they should be abolished altogether. He is decided in his condemnation of our penal settlements; the formation of agricultural colonies in the mother country for the employment

of

of liberated prisoners he demonstrates to be attended with insurmountable objections; and the result at which he arrives is, that the best chance to render the liberated criminal an inoffensive and useful member of society is to give him moral instruction, and the knowledge of some useful trade, during the period of his detention; and that, when he is again thrown upon society, such funds shall be supplied as shall give him the time and means of fixing himself in some honest course of life.

With this subject M. Frégier concludes his treatise. Differing from him on many points, compelled to smile at some passages, and to express our reprobation of others, the final impression which his pages have produced upon us is one of respect and gratitude.

ART. II.-The ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA; or Dictionary of Arts, Science, and General Literature. SEVENTH EDITION, with Preliminary Dissertations, &c. &c. Edited by Macvey Napier, Esq., F.R.S. Edinburgh.. 1842. 21 Vols.

4to.

THE

HE task of analysis and appreciation would have been overwhelming, had this vast work been submitted to our judgment in the fulness of its stature, and in the maturity of its age: but we have had the advantage of being familiar with it from an early period of its existence; and trust, therefore, that our readers will not deem us presumptuous if, in giving them an account of its rise and progress, we at the same time venture to pronounce a judgment upon its general merits, and even upon some of the most remarkable articles which its pages now contain.

Although we might naturally have expected that dictionaries explanatory of words would give rise to dictionaries explanatory of ideas, and descriptive of the things which these words represent, yet such a transition was not the first step which was taken in the composition of encyclopædias. Systematic digests of literature and science appeared under the name of encyclopædias long before the alphabet was employed as the principle of the arrangement. The Arabian Encyclopædia of Alfarabius, of which the MS. exists in the Escurial, and the more modern one of Professor Alstedius of Weissenbourg (2 vols. folio, 1630), are examples of this method of systematising knowledge.

The first Dictionary of the arts and sciences was the Lexicon Technicum' of Dr. Harris, which was published in two folio volumes, the first in 1706, the second in 1710; but its limitation

almost