mass

created; and the great instrument in the work is the moral discipline of a religious education. Every patriot is a soldier; and the Greek poet shewed himself a statesman, when he affirmed a living fortification to be of all ramparts the most impregnable. We think that a warning cry comes from this steeple of 1845 years; and that a mournful recollection of national opportunities of improvement neglected and lost, may be heard intermingled with the joyous chimes that welcome the stranger. It is never too late to improve. Let the exhortation of Chalmers be remembered. Let the streets, and lanes, and those deep intricacies that teem with human life, be explored and cleansed; let that " which is so dense of mind, and therefore so dense of immortality, be penetrated in the length and breadth of it." Bolingbroke remarked, in reference to his plan for a general history of Europe, that every man ought to feel himself bound to give an account even of his leisure; and in the midst of solitude, to be of some use to society. We hope that the lesson will not be forgotten by any of our readers. The slightest effort in a good cause will not be without some profit. The spare minutes of a year are sure labourers, if they be kept to their work. They can throw down and build up; they can dig, or they can empty. Despise not their stature or their strength. There is a tradition in Barbary, that the sea was once entirely absorbed and swallowed by ants.

A determination to do good wherever, whenever, and however we can, will be an excellent step in the right direction. It will be one of the most harmonious chimes for the new year; · nay, it will help to make the steeple of time musical in our praise; thus celebrating the sacred marriage of meditation and activity, of theory and practice. Wordsworth has sung with truth, if not with his usual eloquence :

"Farewell, farewell the heart that lives alone,

Housed in a dream, at distance from

the kind!

Such happiness, wherever it be known, Is to be pitied, for 't is surely blind."

The absolute abstraction of thought

from ourselves, which the noble and misguided Algernon Sidney admired and cherished, is one of the rare achievements of valorous discipline and triumphant self-denial. The multitude shut out their brethren by a high wall of partition, and enjoy themselves leisurely upon the sunny side; others, on the contrary, sit shivering on the shady side, and refuse, with all the indignation of martyrdom, a glimpse of the sun. And

here we have the voluptuary, and there the ascetic. Cannot the wall be broken down, so as to admit the air and the heat at the same time? so as to make men what Coleridge says St. Paul was-Christians and gentlemen? The father of Philip Sidney thought so, when he admonished him: "Give yourself to be merry, for you degenerate from your father, if you find not yourself most able in wit and body to do any thing when you be most merry." And again, "Study, and endeavour yourself to be virtuously occupied." There is only one method of achieving this object, according to the last publication of Mr. Newman, "It is in vain to look out for missionaries for China or Africa, or evangelists for our great towns, or Christian attendants on the sick, or teachers of the ignorant, on such a scale of numbers as the need requires, without the doctrine of Purgatory; for thus the sins of youth are turned to account by the profitable penance of manhood; and terrors, which the philosopher scorns in the individual, become the benefactors and earn the gratitude of nations." This is a comfortable encouragement to the National Society and the Bishop of London's lay-readers. They will accomplish nothing without a fraud; and all their offices and institutions will be of no avail without a Fireassurance! Alas! no chimes, we hope, from Time's venerable tower, will welcome this pestilent doctrine into the fair domains of the year that is coming. At least if chimes there be, they shall not be ours. The dismal howl of a false tradition shall never terrify us from its twilight cave of antiquity. We listen to its voice as to the melancholy roar of the Virgilian gate-keeper. We know where to gather the golden bough that shall ensure a safe and happy

"Locos lætos et amœna vireta Fortunatorum nemorum, sedesque beatas."

These, then, are some of our chimes for the new year. Other bells may ring a livelier peal, but, we think, not a truer one. In all chiming there is sadness, but sadness that only sweetens the joy. The wind and the rain endear the fireside, and May herself looks lovelier for the winter cloak she throws off. "Still I live here," wrote Johnson, "by my own self, and have had of late very bad nights; but then, I have had a pig to dinner, which Mr. Perkins gave me. Thus life is chequered." Let it be so with ours.

We have led our readers into the steeple of time, that they may behold the country behind and before them. The road has taken a new turn, but it will lead through scenery very similar to the former. It may be a wise rule to keep as much as possible in the middle of it, for it will not be forgotten that two roads run nearly parallel, and seem occasionally to intersect each other. Experience, however, has set up sufficient hand-posts to guide the traveller. But a cautious eye is neces

sary.

"The swerving of a step may be so slight as to be scarcely observed, yet a wide angle may at length result from successive inconsiderable flexions." For some of us there may be more than one sepulchre in the Arcadia that is opening upon the eye. Perhaps, even the beaten path may be obliterated by some descending water-flood of difficulty or trial. And if the land become a stormy sea, it matters nothing.

"Oh, blindness to the future! kindly given,

That each may fill the circle mark'd by Heaven."

Whatever may be the cold and hunger of the disconsolate heart, it shall be satisfied and warmed. We read of those who had toiled all night, that " as soon as they were come to land, they saw a fire of coals there, and fish laid thereon, and bread." It was a lonely shore; yet an unexpected fire cheered, and a strange Visitor illuminated it. If there be any truth in the chimes of ages, it shall be so with us. The night of the present may be toilsome, and dark, and unprofitable; but a clear fire burns, and a rich repast is spread upon the tranquil shore of the future. Happy for us if we leave behind us this brief epitaph,

"Proved by the ends of being, to have been."

We are inclined to believe that attention has never yet been turned, as it might be, to one of the most important questions which can exercise the mind of a thinking man. Crime prevails on all sides of us: and the circumstances attending its commission and its consequences, as they affect both the guilty and the innocent, are set forth in every newspaper that comes into our hands; but to trace back each offence to its remote causes, to follow the trail from step to step, till we reach the first faint outlines of the path, by pursuing which the individual has won for himself a frightful notoriety, no one worthy to be accounted a philosopher has ever, as far as we are aware, attempted. The Christian moralist, it is true, finds a direct and easy solution to all difficulties. He quotes the words of Holy Writ; and, assuring us that "the heart of man is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked," he flatters himself that in the besetting corruption of human nature the source of all the outrages upon right and decency that shock our moral sense is to be found. We have no desire to enter into controversy with him. Believing, as firmly as he does, that the Bible is the word of God, we believe also that there is no living man who can assert with truth that he is free from many movements to evil. But crime and moral evil are very different things; and though the one may be shewn to be in many instances the excess of the other, it is a lame order of reasoning which would, therefore, lead to the conclusion that both are, through the operation of the same causes, to be accounted for.

Again, there are persons in the world, acute and clever men in their way, who tell us that vice and virtue are mere accidents, because, in point of fact, they are the results of physical organisation. Dr. Combe will manipulate a head, and pronounce, when he is done with it, that the wearer cannot, unless restrained by an influence that is irresistible,

escape from the commission of some hideous crime. And here again, though ourselves no believers in phrenology, we should be slow to pronounce that Dr. Combe is absolutely in error. The heads of some

of the most remarkable criminals which the last half century has produced have undergone, if we are not mistaken, phrenological examination; and the results were, in every instance, such as to confirm, to a certain extent, Dr. Combe's theory. But Dr. Combe's theory no more touches the root of the difficulty, than it is laid bare by the more comprehensive assumption of the Christlan reasoner. It may be that men's passions, when indulged to excess, work upon the surface of their skulls as the habitual exercise of the arm or the leg enlarges the muscles of the limb. But the question still remains, "What in the beginning led to such excessive indulgence ?" and how came the man, seeking his own gratification throughout, to brace himself up to the perpetration of some deed, the discovery of which must, as he feels all along, lead to his irretrievable ruin? We confess that, be the doctrine of the phrenologist in other respects as rational as it may, in this it fails to supply the information that we seek. It deals with effects, whereas we desire to become acquainted with causes; for it is only by laying these bare to the perception and the right understanding of mankind, that we can hope to put society upon the way of training its members so that crime, if it do not absolutely cease, shall at least become less frequent than it has heretofore been in the world. Of course our reasoning is not to be understood as applicable to men in a mere state of nature. The savage has no right perception of the difference between good and evil. An arbitrary code of his own he every where possesses, of which the particular enactments not unfrequently contradict the prejudices of his more civilised brother.

But of him we do not desire to take any account. If we deal with him at all, it ought to be entertaining a constant desire to reclaim him; to teach him our arts, to communicate to him our feelings, and to lead him forward to perceive and rightly to appreciate what is in itself good. Till we shall have done this, he is no fit subject for our study; and as neither the means nor the opportunity of accomplishing so great an end happen at this moment to be accessible to us, we will, with our reader's leave, pass him by, and look exclusively to the condition of persons who, being born in a Christian land, have, at least in theory, the wisest of all moral rules to guide them we mean the volume of the New Testament.

And here it may be necessary to explain at the outset what we mean by the term crime, as contradistinguished from moral evil; for it is a great mistake to suppose that the one is necessary to, and in all cases the consummation and perfection of the other. Crime, according to our present theory, is an offence, not so much against the eternal law of right, as against society; the maintenance of which, to any useful purpose, depends upon the exemption which is secured to each of its members separately against a certain class of outrages. To take away the life of our fellow man, for example, except in defence of our own, is crime. To appropriate to our own use goods or money that belong to another, is crime also. Perjury in a court of law is likewise crime; for it impedes, and may render impracticable, the due administration of justice. Forgery, swindling, and the whole category of frauds come under the same head; they are attacks upon property. In like manner we must include adultery in our list of crimes, at least in cases where a married woman is concerned; because its consequences may be, and often are, that a spurious offspring is imposed upon a family, to the manifest violation of the rights of those who are by such means deprived of the whole or a portion of the fortune which would have otherwise come to them. On the other hand, we do not account either the promiscuous intercourse of the sexes, or habits of untruth, or drunkenness, or dissolute talk, as

crimes. The moral guilt of all of them is great; indeed it sometimes happens that, when tried by a higher standard than that of society's requirements, the guilt of the mere sinner will prove to be greater than that of a criminal of the first class; but, for obvious reasons, there would be neither wisdom nor justice in awarding to such offences the sort of punishment that waits upon crime. Take a case which has often occurred, and may be expected often to occur again. A man, upright in his transactions with his fellow men, who has heretofore enjoyed an irreproachable reputation, discovers that his wife or daughter has been seduced. He broods over the wrong perhaps many days, and at last falls in with the scoundrel who has blighted his domestic peace, and kills him. He is arrested, thrown into prison, tried, and, it may be, hanged for murder ; whereas the miscreant to whom is owing the desolate and degraded condition of a whole family would have escaped scot free, had not the criminal taken the law into his own hands. Which of the two was morally the more guilty?

Crime and moral evil may be cognate the one to the other, but there is no necessary connexion between them. The former may originate in the pressure of absolute want, or in the mere lack of self-control under sudden and violent excitement; in either of which cases its reality is compatible with a very slight amount of moral depravity. The latter is invariably the result of an ill-regulated education; which, though it may have stored the memory with knowledge, and stimulated both the imagination and the reasoning faculty, has failed to teach that, in order to form the character, selfcontrol in matters of small as well as of great importance, and the habit of repressing and thwarting our own wishes, even when the object desired may in itself be innocent, are absolutely necessary. The criminal is often as much entitled to our pity as to our censure. The sinner (for we must borrow a word from the theologian, though we desire to be understood as treating our subject more as a matter of moral science than of religion) deserves at all times our unmitigated abhorrence. His one

moving principle is selfishness. At the same time we believe it will be found upon inquiry, that the darkest crimes which stain the annals of guilt have all come out of habitual surrender of the will to the enticements of moral evil; and that one offence in particular has in every age been more prolific in these than all other offences put together.

We are no ascetics; neither do we profess to be of the number of those who charge it as an imperfection against Nature's laws, that she has implanted in the breasts of the opposite sexes a strong desire to come together. The sentiment or passion to which we allude, and which leads to marriage and the propagation of the species, is not only innocent in itself, but praiseworthy. Out of it arise some of the noblest traits that adorn the human character; — disinterestedness, self-denial, the devotion of one will to another; and it is the undoubted source of all those pure and holy affections on the comparative strength or weakness of which civilisation may, in a great measure, be said to depend. But it must, to produce these happy results, be guided and controlled by an influence more potent than itself; for if it once establish an ascendancy over the mind particularly in youth, which is most open to its insidious advances the whole moral being of the man becomes vitiated. No matter with what quickness of parts the sensualist is gifted. He may or may not exercise his intellectual faculties as he grows up, but it will never be in the prosecution of a noble or righteous purpose; and should he chance to be of a dull capacity, then is it difficult to put a limit to the degree of degradation to which he may ultimately fall; for there is positively no crime of which the unimaginative slave of lust may not be led into the commission, not hurriedly but deliberately, and, as it would seem, in perfect freedom from the checks of remorse.

A remarkable instance of this sort was brought to light in this country something less than a hundred years ago, of which, because it seems fully to illustrate the theory that we are now broaching, we shall proceed to give an account.

Butterly Manor-an old-fashioned

house, beset with gable-ends and surmounted by high stacks of chimneys-stands, or rather stood, a century ago, in the parish of Partridge, Derbyshire. It was one of a class of mansions which have well-nigh disappeared from this country; not very large, yet having a certain air of respectability about them, of which the dates might be taken any time between the eighth Henry and the accession of the first Charles, and of which we are accustomed, somewhat inaccurately, to speak as Elizabethan. The mansions in question all bear, where they yet survive, a remarkable family likeness one to another. You find in each a rather long front, with a porch about the principal entrance; gables at either flank which face in three separate directions; two rows of leaded windows, all opening as casements; and on the show or parlour side of the house, considerably ornamented; while the materials out of which the whole structure arise never vary. Red brick and oak timber are exclusively employed in the construction of such houses, and they are roofed over with tiles, and almost always stand either at the end of a grass court which divides them from a village, or within a small paddock, which lies chiefly in front, and is cut off from the public road by a thorn hedge.

Butterly Manor, like all other mansions of its class, was long the residence of a family, the head of which holding a place in society distinct from that of the yeoman, scarcely aspired to take his seat on the bench beside the magistrates or squirearchy of the county. Together with the moderate estate that appertained to it, it had been in possession of the Hornes for longer time than can with truth be given to the pedigree of many a family of higher pretensions; and, till the occurrence of events of which it will be our business in the course of the following narrative to speak, there was not one of all its owners but had established for himself a right to the respect of his neighbours by the character for honesty and good conduct, and of liberal hospitality, that appertained to him. But with them we are not now concerned.

It was towards the evening of a