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"jeu de paume" of the days of the Grand Monarque. But the inability of so shrewd and intelligent an observer, as the foreign spectator with whom we have to do at present, to comprehend the real points of the game, is an additional testimony to its entirely English character. The Etonian's mamma, who, as he relates with a sort of quiet wonder, sat for five hours on two days successively on a bench under a hot sun, to watch the match between her son's eleven and Harrow, would have given a much better account of the game. The admiring visitor does not pretend, as he observes, to go into the details of a game which has thirtyeight rules; but he endeavours to give his French readers some general idea of the thing, which may suffice for unprofessional lookerson. It is unnecessary to say that the idea is very general indeed. The "consecrated" ground'on which the "barrières" are erected, and where the courses" take place, are a thoroughly French version of the affair. The "ten fieldsmen precipitating themselves in pursuit of the ball when struck" would be ludicrous enough to a cricketer's imagination, if the thought of the probable consequences were not too horrible. Even such headlong zeal on the part of two fieldsmen only, with their eye on the same ball, has resulted, before now, in a collision entailing the loss of half-a-dozen front teeth and other disfigurements. It was unnecessary to exaggerate the perils of a game which, as our author observes, has its dangers; and if the fieldsmen at Lynmere conducted themselves after this headlong fashion when he was watching them, we can quite understand his surprise that, when the day concludes with the inevitable English dinner, men who had spent the whole day "in running, striking, and receiving blows from the ball to the bruising of their limbs" (and precipitating themselves against each other) should still show themselves disposed to

drink toasts and make speeches for the rest of the evening. The conversation which he has with the parish schoolmaster, an enthusiastic cricketer, is good in its way :

"I hope you have enjoyed the day?' said he to me. You have had an opportunity of seeing what cricket is. It's a noble game, is it not?'

"Yes,' said I, 'it is a fine exercise; and I think highly of those amusements which bring all classes together under the influence of a common feeling.'

"It is not only that,' replied the excellent man: 'but nothing moralises men like cricket.'

"How?' said I, rather astonished to hear him take such high ground.

"Look here,' he replied; 'a good cricketer is bound to be sober and not frequent the public-house, to accustom himself to obey, to exercise restraint upon himself; besides, he is obliged to have a great deal of patience, a great deal of activity; and to receive those blows of the ball without shrinking, requires, I assure you, some degree of

courage.

We suspect that these remarks belong of right at least as much to the French philosopher as to the English national schoolmaster; but they bring forward in an amusing way the tendency of one-ideaed philanthropists, which the author elsewhere notices, to attribute to their own favourite hobby the only possible moral regeneration of society:

"Every Englishman who is enthusiastic in any particular cause never fails to see in that the greatness and the glory of his country; and in this he is quite serious. In this way I have heard the game of cricket held up to admiration

as one of the noblest institutions of

England, an institution which insures to the country not only an athletic, but an orderly and moral population. I have

seen the time when the same honour was ascribed to horse-racing; but since this sport has crossed the Channel, and it has been found by experience that it does not always preserve a country from revolutions and coups d'état, it has lost something of its prestige in England."

There is always some moral panacea in the course of advertisement, like a quack medicine, to cure all diseases: mechanics' institutes, cheap literature, itinerant lecturers, monster music classes,

have all had their turn; and just at present the 'Saturday Review' seems to consider that the salvation of England depends upon the revival of prize-fighting.

We cannot follow the writer into all the details of village institutions and village politics, which are sketched with excellent taste and great correctness. It will be quite worth while for the foreigner who wants to get a fair notion of what goes on here in the country-or indeed for the English reader who likes to see what he knows already put into a pleasant form, all the more amusing because the familiar terms look odd in French-to go with our French friend to the annual dinner of "Le Club des Odd-Fellows," with its accompaniment " de speechs, de hurrahs, et de toasts "-without which, he observes, no English festival can take place; to accompany him in his "Visite au Workhouse," subscribe with him to the "Club de Charbon," or, better still, sit with him in the village Sunday-school, even if we cannot take the special interest which he did (for his own private reasons) in "le classe de Miss Mary." Very pleasant is the picture-not overdrawn, though certainly taken in its most sunshiny aspect of the charitable intercourse in a well-ordered country village between rich and poor. One form, indeed, there is of modern educational philanthropy which the writer notices, of the success of which we confess to have our doubts. The good ladies of Lynmere set up an Ecole managère" -a school of domestic management, we suppose we may call it where the village girls were to learn cooking and other good works. Now a school of cookery, admirable as it is in theory-the amount of ignorance on that subject throughout every county in England being blacker than ever was figured in educational maps - presents considerable difficulties in actual working. To learn to cook, it is necessary to have food upon which to practise. Final success, in that

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art as in others, can only be the result of a series of experimental failures. And here was the grand stumbling-block which presented itself, in the case of a cooking-school set up with the very best intentions, under distinguished patronage, in a country village within our own knowledge. Some half-dozen girls, who had left school and were candidates for domestic service, were caught and committed to the care and instruction of an experienced matron; not without some murmuring on the part of village mothers, who considered such apprenticeship a waste of time, all girls, in their opinion, being born cooks. From this culinary college the neighbouring families were to be in course of time supplied with graduates. Great were the expectations formed by the managers, and by the credulous portion of the public. There were to be no more tough beef-steaks, no more grumbling masters and scolding mistresses, no more indigestion. But this admirable undertaking split upon a rock which its originators had not foreseen. It had been proposed that the village families should in turn send dishes to be operated upon by the pupils; but the English village mind is not given to experiments, culinary or other, and preferred boiling its mutton one day and eating it cold the next. Then the bachelor curate, who had a semi-official connection with the new establishment, reading prayers there as "chaplain and visitor," who was presumed to have a healthy appetite, and was known to have complained of the eternal mutton-chops provided by his landlady, was requested to undergo a series of little dinners cooked for him gratis. The bashful Oxonian found it impossible to resist the lady patronesses' invitation, and consented-for the good of the institution. But it ended in the loss to the parish of a very excellent working parson. For a few weeks, the experimental ragouts and curries sent in to his lodgings

had at least the advantage of being a change; but as the presiding matron gradually struck out a bolder line, and fed him with the more ambitious efforts of her scholars, it became too much even for clerical patience, and he resigned his cure. Out of delicacy to the ladies' committee, he gave out that it was "the Dissenters;" but all his intimate friends knew that it was the cooking-school.

The Rector of Lynmere is a Mr Leslie a clergyman of the refined and intellectual type, intended, probably, as an artistic contrast to Mr Norris in his cricket flannels. He is, we are expressly told, "an aristocrat"—indeed, a nephew of the Countess aforesaid. He is reserved, nervous, and diffident, although earnest and single-hearted. The vulgar insolence of the Baptists at the vestry-meetings is gall and wormwood to him; and he suffers scarcely less under the fussy interference of a Madam Woodlands, one of the parish notables, of Low-Church views and energetic benevolence, who patronises the church and the rector, and holds him virtually responsible for all the petty offences and indecorums which disturb the propriety of the village. This lady is very slightly sketched, but the outline can be filled up from many a parish clergyman's mental notebook. We do not wonder that Mr Leslie, with his shrinking sensibilities, had as great a horror of her as of Mr Say, the Nonconformist agitator, who led the attack at the church-rate meetings. Only we would remark, that if the author thinks that the unfitness of the Rector of Lynmere to contend with a body of political Dissenters, or his want of tact in dealing with so very excellent and troublesome a parishioner as Mrs Woodlands, is at all explained by his being aristocrat," he is encouraging them in a very common and very unfortunate mistake. It is true that it is not pleasant for a man of cultivated mind and refined tastes, be he priest or layman, to be brought

an

into contact with opponents whose nature and feelings, and the manner in which they express those feelings, are rude and vulgar; but if he possess, in addition to his refinement and cultivation, good sound sense, a moderate amount of tact, and, above all, good temper, he will find, in the fact of his being "a gentleman," an immense weight of advantage over his antagonists. We remember to have seen protests, in the writings of a modern school of English Churchmen, against what they are pleased to term "the gentleman heresy;" representing it as dangerous to the best interests of both priests and people, that the former should attempt to combine with their sacred office the manners, the habits, and the social position of the gentleman. Without entering here into the serious question whether a special clerical caste, as it were, standing between the lower ranks and the higher of the laity, distinct from both, and having its separate habits and position, is a desirable institution to recommend; without discussing the other equally important question, whether the aristocracy of a Christian nation have not also their religious needs, and whether these also have not a right to be consulted, and whether they will bear to be handed over to a priesthood which, if not plebeian itself, is to have at least no common interests or feelings with the higher classes-a question, this latter, to which history will give us a pretty decided answer;it is quite enough to say that the working classes themselves would be the foremost to demand-if the case were put before them fairly— that the ministers of religion should be "gentlemen" in every sense of the word. They will listen, no doubt, with gaping mouths and open ears, to a flow of rhodomontade declamation from an uneducated preacher: an inspired tinker will fill a chapel or a village green, while the quiet rector goes through the service to a half-empty church. But inspired tinkers are rare in any

a

age; and it is not excitement or declamation which go to form the really religious life of England. This-which we must not be supposed to confine within the limits of any Church establishment-depends for its support on sources that lie deeper and quieter than these. In trouble, in sickness, in temptation, these things miserably fail. And the dealing of " a gentleman" with these cases gentleman in manners, in thoughts, in feeling, in respect for the feelings of others-is as distinct in kind and in effect, as the firm but delicate handling of the educated surgeon (who goes to the bottom of the matter nevertheless) differs from the well-meant but bungling axeand-cautery system of our forefathers. The poor understand this well. They know a gentleman, and respect him; and they will excuse in their parish minister the absence of some other very desirable qualities sooner than this. The structure of English society must change -its gentry must forfeit their character as a body, as they never have done yet-before this feeling can change. When you officer your regiments from any other class than their natural superiors, then you may begin to officer your national Church with a plebeian clergy.

There is another point connected with the legitimate influence of the higher classes on which the writer speaks, we fear, either from a theory of what ought to be, or from some very exceptional cases :

"The offices of magistrate, of poor-law guardian, or even of churchwarden, are so many modes of honourable employ. ment offered to those who feel in themselves some capacity for business and some wish to be useful. It will be understood that a considerable number of gentlemen of independent income, retired tradesmen, and officers not employed on service, having thus before them the prospect of a useful and active life, gather round an English village, instead of remaining buried in the great towns, as too often is the case in our own country."

We fear the foreign reader will

be mistaken if he understands anything of the sort. The county magistracy offers, without doubt, a position both honourable and useful; but it is seldom open to the classes mentioned. We do not say that the offices of parish guardian and churchwarden are highly attractive objects of ambition ; but we do think that in good hands they might become very different from what they are; immense benefit would result in every way to many country parishes, if men of the class whom the writer represents as filling them would more often be induced to do so, instead of avoiding them as troublesome and ungrateful offices, and leaving them to be claimed by the demagogues and busybodies of the district. It may not be pleasant for a gentleman to put himself in competition for an office of this kind; but it may be his duty to do so. The reproach which the writer addresses to the higher classes in France is only too applicable to those in England also:

"If all those whose education, whose intelligence, whose habits of more ele vated life, give them that authority which constitutes a true aristocracy, would but make use of their high position to exercise an influence for good upon public matters-if only the honest and sensible party in our country would shake off its apathy and fulfil all the duties of citi

zens-our institutions would have a life and power which at present are too often wanting.'

True words for the conservative spirit both in the English Church and in the English nation to lay to heart; for, so long as education and refinement are too nice to stain themselves with the public dust of the arena, they have no right to complain if candidates, less able but less scrupulous, parade them

selves as victors.

If our neighbours over the water read (as we hope many of them will) these little sketches of an English village, drawn in their own language, if not by one of themselves, yet by one who is evidently no stranger to their national sym

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It has sometimes been suspected that, in the noble delineation of the Roman character ascribed to Anchises in the sixth book of the 'Eneid,' Virgil was induced, by unworthy motives, to depreciate unduly the oratory of his countrymen as compared with that of the Greeks; and undoubtedly the inferiority of Cicero to Demosthenes, as a mere forensic pleader, is not so clear or decided as to demand imperatively from a Latin poet the admission there unreservedly made by the blunt and almost prosaic expression, Orabunt causas melius." Possibly, however, it was the poet's true object, by yielding the most liberal concessions on other points, to enforce the more strongly his emphatic assertion, not merely of the superiority of the Romans in the arts of ordinary government, but of their exclusive or peculiar possession of the powers and faculties fitted for attaining and preserving a mighty empire. It is certain that he has justly and vividly described the great characteristic of that people, and the chief source and secret of their influence in the history of the world, when he makes the patriarch exclaim,

"Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento;

Hæ tibi erunt artes."

In aid of the high moral and intellectual qualities which led to their success as the conquerors and rulers of the world, it is most material to notice the structure and genius of the language in which the Roman people expressed and embodied their political, legislative, and judicial determinations. Every national language is more or less the reflex of the national mind; and in no instance is this correspondence more conspicuous than in the case we are now considering.

The Latin language is inferior to the Greek in subtlety and refinement of expression, and is therefore far less adapted for metaphysical speculation or poetical grace-for analysing the nicer diversities of thought, or distinguishing the minuter shades of passion; but in the enunciation of ethical truths and of judicial maxims, it possesses a clearness, force, and majesty, to which no other form of speech can approach. The great foundations of law are good morals and good sense, and these, however simple