Dissenting chapel-for the idea of a poacher entering the parish church, where the clergyman is also a magistrate, is out of the question -he heard words which awoke within him feelings and aspirations to which he had been hitherto a stranger. As usual, no sooner had the Christian light streamed upon his mind, than the desire to improve his mental and physical condition was also felt. Journeying to a large manufactory at a considerable distance, he obtained employment, but, from his want of education, of course, it was of the most common and worst paid kind. Acting upon the advice of a friend, he attended a self-improvement society connected with the factory, patiently bore gibes and jokes from the workmen, levelled at his country awkwardness, speedily acquired the arts of reading and writing, and a sufficient knowledge of figures to enable him correctly to keep ordinary accounts. He is at this moment a man of superior intelligence, and superintendent of that department of the factory in whose commonest labours he was first employed as an act of kindness. Unquestionably this is substantially the history of many workmen in manufacturing towns. There is an object before them. Laudable ambition is called into exercise. They may rise. In the agricultural districts there is no such object; there is nothing to excite the mind, no prize in the distance. The labourer sees nothing for his children, but a repetition of his own weary lot, enlisting in the army, or the workhouse; yes, there is another alternative-transportation for crimes against society-crimes, as we have said before, connected with ignorance, but caused, we thoroughly believe, by want, hunger, desperation, all irritated and maddened by jealousy of the abundance around them, and intense hatred of the odious workhouse standing beside them. This is a melancholy state of things; and whilst advocating the importance of a sound education, dissociated from civil or secular conditions, which may in subsequent life trammel the understanding, and interfere with the exercise of free and independent thought, we would especially suggest to the great landed proprietors, the wisdom, the policy, and the duty of increasing the physical comfort and the pay of agricultural labourers. Two things are sufficiently known to the public, which, when presented side by side, are apt to create suspicion. These two things are-first, the fact that the aristocracy are interested in the maintenance of the army; and second, that, if farm-labourers were better fed and better housed, the recruiting serjeant would not find them such an easy prey to his allurements. Right or wrong, thinking men will form a theory upon the awkward juxtaposition of these things. We would have our nobles to be, like Cæsar's wife, beyond suspicion.

We shall not forget the fact that the country has produced some men of profound judgment, and great acquirements; and that some of the obscure hamlets of England and Scotland are immortalised as the birthplace of genius; but our object throughout has been to describe the condition of the working classes of fields and factories; and genius comes not under the classification. It knows no common category. It is amenable to no law. It is a thing by itself. Education makes it not. Scholastic rules aid not its development. It submits to no pruning and binding. It would flourish upon a rock better, perhaps, than in rich soil. To national universities it pays no homage. For aught it cares, endowed foundations may remove to the mountains of the moon.

No

patron's hand places it within sight of the professor's chair. No patrician smile paves its way over the desert of life. No hereditary wealth constructs for it a golden ladder on which to climb to the high places of philosophy. It is generally cradled on the rough places of the wilderness, and braced by exposure to the storms of life, whilst it has learned patience by experience, endurance by privation, the art of triumph by repeated wrestlings, and the secret of combining modesty with the glory of success by anticipating the future and communing with the skies. Senators must legislate, teachers must educate, reformers must toil, for the good of the great community, but genius will lift up its head to heaven, and send out its fame to the ends of the earth in majestic independence of them all, whether it bud into immortal being by the side of the green hedge in the field, or under the brick wall of the smoke-blackened factory.

THE MUMMELSEE.

FROM THE GERMAN OF SCHNETZLER.

The Mummel lake is a gloomy lake;
On its dark bosom fair lilies blow,-
And when the gentle breezes wake

They wave their white coronals to and fro;
But aye, as the bright and full-orbed moon

Looks down on those waters at night's deep noon,
From the pale gleaming lilies a maiden band
Spring lightly to the narrow strand.

The night-wind moans, and the tall reeds sigh:
Sad is the music those minstrels make

To the Lily-maids, who go sweeping by,
In mazy dance, o'er the moonlit lake,

With their pale white faces, and robes so white,
Hither and thither careering light,—

Till their bloodless cheeks and their brows of snow
Seem as if flush'd with a rosy glow.

The tall reeds shake; the winds are awake-
Through the pine-trees they are piping shrill;
The moon's in the track of the hurrying rack,
And the cloud-shadows course o'er the hill;
And hither and thither, with wilder glee,
The Lily-maids dance to night's minstrelsy.
The dark lake gleams 'neath their twinkling feet,
And its billows leap up their sport to greet.

The morning wakes; a red streak breaks
Through the skirts of the lasting night:
Uprises now, with sedge-crown'd brow,
And beard as the snow-drift white,

A hoary form, through the yawning rift

Of the groaning lake, who, with hand uplift,

Shouts " Home, maidens, home! Your sport leave o'er!

Back! back to your lily beds once more!"

The dance is hush'd. No longer flush'd,
But pale as at first, the Lily-maids stand.

"Away! away! we scent the day!

Our father calls!" scream the sister-band.

The mists have uprisen from lake and from stream;

The valleys are touch'd with day's golden beam;

And the water-lilies all calmly rest

On the glowing Mummelsee's silent breast.

G. G. C.

NATURAL HISTORY OF THE IDLER.

PART II.

FORTUNATELY for us, we are placed at neither extremity of society. We belong to the intermediate ranks. We are comprised in those extensive and important classes usually denominated the industrial, or working classes. We are quite disposed to depart somewhat from conventional usage, and to consider this designation as comprehending more than artisans, mechanics, labourers, and handicraftsmen of all varieties. We include under it the tradesman, the merchant, the manufacturer, and also those known as "professional men." All these together form the great community of labourers. They are the producers-the working-bees of the vast hive of men. Connected as we are, then, with these, the most worthy, useful, and honourable classes of society, we may reasonably be expected to have a better acquaintance with them than with the higher or the lower class. Their social life is participated by us. We are sharers in their sympathies, their cares, their toils. We are identified with their interests, enter into their projects, witness their daily habits, and are exposed to the same influences, beneficial or pernicious. We shall therefore endeavour to illustrate the consequences of indolence, as discoverable among these grades. They cannot, as a class, like those we have depicted, be included in the genus "Idler." The very name by which they are distinguished imports the contrary. Individual specimens of the aforesaid creature are, however, to be found among them. A few of these we shall describe.

'Tis the lot of many to serve. As apprentices or journey men, milloperatives or domestic servants, they are subordinate-subject to the dictation of superiors-bound to heed the will of mistresses and masters. The supply of daily bread, and of all necessaries, for themselves and households, depends upon their industry in the work of their vocation. Want and misery, the upbraidings of the wife, and the cries of starving children, are the bitter requital for neglect of duty. The slothful and careless workman speedily forfeits the esteem of his employer. His situation becomes one of precarious tenure. His pocket and cupboard are but sparely furnished. In person and home, in character and station, in his "basket and his store," in his "coming in" and his "going out," his vicious habits are "cursing, vexation, and rebuke, upon him." If the case be a bad one-if he be far gone in idleness-he soon lapses into the state of those sketched in a previous part of our essay: he loses social caste. While he maintains this course, a damaged reputation (no light evil to a working man), penury, beggary, or crime, inevitably await him. Ere long

"He is steep'd in poverty up to the chin,
And time elopes with all golden hopes,

And even with those of pewter and tin."

The just claims of the helpless little ones who unfortunately owe their being to him, and are naturally looking to him for care and sustenance,

he guiltily disregards. His whole domestic fortunes are reduced to absolute bankruptcy. All supplies fail.

"He has no credit, no cash! no cold mutton to hash!

No bread-not even potatoes to mash!

No coal in the cellar, no beer in the bin

No prospect in life worth a minnikin pin !”

His family must shortly take to the road, or be taken to the union-a consummation most devoutly deprecated by every man who has a spark of honest, independent, and right manly feeling left. Who has not read the biography of the idler in Hogarth's series of inimitable pictures? His speaking canvass, in tones of earnest truth, narrate the career of the Idle Apprentice," and tell how "the way of the slothful is a

hedge of thorns."

How great a nuisance in a house is a servant who will afflict himself or herself with no more exertion than necessity renders imperative! The movements of a drone are an annoyance to behold. We don't like to see persons moving about as if their feet were like those of the image in the king of Babylon's dream-a compound of clay and iron, heavy materials, burdensome and inelastic. A servant like a mass of putty, or a statue in lead, ministers neither to the dulce nor the utile of domestic experience. The most equal-tempered "governor" will at last be enraged. A loitering messenger, who will while away half a day in executing an hour's errand, and a lazy workman, who makes a ten minutes' job furnish him occupation for an hour, sorely test one's powers of endurance. In fact, only a forbearance verging on a discreditable easiness, or an utterly indulgent indifference, would grant them toleration at all. "As vinegar to the teeth," says an ancient writer," and as smoke to the eyes, so is the sluggard to them that sent him," or in any other way employed him.

But masters may be indolent as well as servants-the employers as well as the employed. We all know the old adage, "The master's eye does more work than both his hands." If he be remiss in overlooking and directing, his interests suffer. The lands of a slothful farmer, e. g., will indicate the habits of their supposed cultivator. Their appearance will report to observers his negligence. Hedges unchecked in their growth, soil soaking with wet, homesteads covered profusely with litter, gaps in the fences, allowing free ingress and regress to all sorts of live stock-these are some of the more prominent features of the scene, and their testimony is unmistakeable. "I went by the field of the slothful," says the sage Hebrew monarch, who was a shrewd observer of human life, and withal an inspired moralist, "and by the vineyard of the man void of understanding; and, lo! it was all grown over with thorns, and nettles had covered the face thereof, and the stone wall thereof was broken down. Then I saw and considered it well; I looked upon it, and received instruction." There is much taught in the picture: let us be wise to learn its lessons. "Yet a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep: so shall thy poverty come as one that travelleth"-unperceived its approach, and unexpected its arrival,and "thy want as an armed man"-its onslaught irresistible and triumphant. These words intimate the sentiments and portray the habits of

the sluggard. When roused, and urged to action, he pleads for a "little more sleep,"-only a "little;" but his slumber, short as it seems to him -harmless indulgence, as he fancies-will bring him to destitution. Bed-"delicious bed"-is his favourite place. He would live and "die in his nest." Never does he feel himself so much at home, as when between the blankets. He will sleep, though the grim visage of poverty is gazing on him through the curtains. When he can shut out the busy, active world, plunge his soul into oblivionising slumbers, lose, for a while, the very consciousness of being, then is he as he delights to be. To be located upon the feathers, his whole nature bathed and saturated with the poppy-dews of sleep-to be buried in profound repose-a state the nearest approach to non-existence of which we are aware-appears to him the very acme, the consummation, the climax of felicity! Many hours will he lie in a state of half-dreamy listlessness, dosing away "the moments of too brief a life." Loath to arise when the day has already far advanced-supplementing his protracted night by an afternoon's siesta-as the evening shades descend, he is ready again for retirement, and he hastes to lose himself in the bliss of somnolency. In fact, he is never properly "wide awake." He entered upon life with his eyes shut, and he seems never yet to have summoned sufficient resolution to get them fairly open. A slumbering infant we look upon admiringly. There is much of loveliness about it-so calm, and deathlike, and still, and yet so warm, and smiling, and beauteous!

"A child that bids the world good-night

In downright earnest, and cuts it quite-
A cherub no art can copy!

'Tis a perfect picture, to see him lie,
As if he had supp'd on dormouse pie
(An ancient classical dish by the by),
With a sauce of syrup of poppy."

But the appearance of a self-indulgent, indolent, obese adult is, in our eyes, anything but poetical. The only sentiments it inspires are, contempt for the imbecility, indignation at the heedlessness, and grief at the criminal extravagance which such a scene evinces.

The operation of this evil might be shown under a hundred different circumstances. Every walk of life would supply us with illustrations. We select only those which your own observation may verify. How does idleness blight the fortunes of the tradesman! Delighting in jovial companionship, or in field-recreations-renouncing the counter for the bar-room, and the ledger in the office for the ledger on the turf-more diligent in open-air sports than in the shop or warehouse-he need not wonder that his reputation suffers, and his custom dwindles, and his cash diminishes. The ebb-tide of his fortunes is strongly bearing him off. It may be an interesting operation to beguile heedless fishes into the seizure of an impaled grub or a sham-fly, and then, by a forcible abstraction, to remove them from their native element; and it may be a highly rational and expedient method of destroying the larger vermin, to chase them for miles at the risk of your own neck and your horse's worth; and it may be consistent with a sound morality to participate in the customs, pastimes, and conversation of the tavern-company; but