child are about good and naughty little boys and girls. This is the pleasure of sympathy. But as their powers expand, as the simple process of reading becomes mechanical, another class of books is opened to them; such as in no wise directly concern children, but which tell of the perils and adventures, the thoughts and feelings, the joys and sorrows of manhood, which reveal to them something of what life is. The moment when a child first sees this new world opening before it, is indeed an enchanting one, full of such intense delight, such consciousness of awakening powers, that it may be regarded as a turning-point of existence. All must, more or less, keenly remember this period in their own lives, and perhaps will be able to point out some particular book-containing, it may be, a picture of romantic or adventurous life,-and read at this critical period of their youth with such full apprehension and sympathy, that it seems as it were to have influenced their whole subsequent current of thought, and set it in one fixed direction from that time forward. No actual insight into society can produce this effect. Much intercourse with the world at a very early age has, indeed, a precisely contrary effect, and dwarfs the imagination instead of expanding it. A child cannot comprehend the busy scene it finds itself in, and in ineffectual attempts to exercise an immature judgment on objects beyond its reach, ceases to exert those powers which properly belong to its age. The least injury that can be expected from introducing children early into what is conventionally called the world, is this intellectual blight: their moral nature may be far more fatally injured. A boy of ten may be blásé; there may be nothing new left for him to see, no scene of society with which, in his own poor way, he may not be familiar. The children of Paris have been described, we trust by a prejudiced pen, as having all this air of premature experience, and already wearing a look of weariness and satiety; and that from living always in public, and in a whirl of

amusement.

No books can have quite this ill effect; bad or injudicious ones may taint a young imagination, or awaken pride and vanity in all their evil forms, a course of fashionable novels could hardly fail of involving this consequence; but though childhood, by this means, ceases to be amiable, it is still there; fancy is not destroyed; hope, at least, is left. What incalculable extent of moral evil a perfectly promiscuous course of reading may produce on some minds, is of course beyond all human calculation; or how deeply and permanently the imagination may be affected. It is such considerations make us feel the value of a series of books adapted for this stage of childhood; books that will instruct and enlarge the mind, and amuse the fancy; which

will introduce them to distinguished past and living authors of our own and other countries; and all carefully freed, not only from what is directly harmful, but also from such topics as children had best, for the present, remain ignorant of.

This is not really a reading age; the world is busier than ever, and people say, when they grow up and live in it, that they have no leisure. Let our children, then, make good use of the peaceful golden time, and read with such earnestness in youth that the habit may abide with them through life; or even if then they follow the world's fashion, and so are thrown back upon the labours of their childhood, they may have stored up something worth knowing at that age when men learn easiest and remember longest.

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290

ART. II. First Impressions of England and its People. By HUGH MILLER. London: Johnstone. 1847.

THIS is a volume which ranks very decidedly above the ephemeral swarm of tours which the sunshine of the summer holidays annually gives birth to, and is worthy of occupying our attention by itself, instead of being despatched in the batch with others of the same genus. The writer is no ordinary observer, and what he thinks worth telling, is pretty sure to be worth hearing. We will not say that there are no superfluous pages in the volume, or that there are no signs of writing to make book; but we are able to say that there is less of book-making, and more appearance of the genuine minutes of an active and acute mind, than it is often our good fortune to find in a traveller's volume. We have not, indeed, the lurid brilliance of 'Eothen,' or the substantial knowledge of The Crescent and the Cross;' but we have a considerable variety of original remark on familiar subjects--on English character and common life;-good descriptions of well-known scenery ;-and some welltold rambles to places (like The Leasowes and Hagley) not generally visited.

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The author, Mr. Hugh Miller, of Cromarty, and now, we believe, editor of a leading Edinburgh weekly paper, is well known to our readers north of the Tweed by a previous work, The Old Red Sandstone,' by which he earned the just reputation not only of a pleasing writer on geology, but of having, by his original researches, done much to establish the existence of vertebrate animals in that formation. He is, throughout, the self-taught Scotchman, and the merits and the faults of this volume are to be referred to one or other of these two qualifications. For it is a positive qualification for observation of English life and scenery to have been born and reared in Scotland, and to be crossing, like Mr. Miller, the Border for the first time. Only a Scotchman or an American would observe fine shades of national character, which, from their very familiarity, escape the native; while the Scotchman is less liable than the American to fall into those blunders on every day matters, and that continual misconception, which pervade all foreigners' views of this country. From Washington Irving or Mr. Miller, we may gain a fresh light to see ourselves in; from a German tourist, such as Raumer or Kohl, we can but learn what Germans think of us-we get light on the German, not the English mind, and our principal amusement in reading

them must be, we should think, in tracing the sources of their mistakes to their national prejudices. It is the German in England that we study, not England by help of the German. As for French tours, they are so supremely ridiculous that the less said of them the better. German pedantry and French egotism are equally fatal to the exercise of that delicate tact, which, dismissing from view broad national characteristics, as well as notable singularities, can fix and describe those minuter general traits, the observation and comparison of which alone can give the knowledge of national character which is worth having. The observer should be habituated to a system of things sufficiently different to produce the effect of contrast, and to have something with which to compare what he sees; and sufficiently similar to prevent his attention from being arrested by the obvious and prominent features of the new country. An instance of what we mean is supplied by what is remarked by Mr. Miller, that so much of the cockney literature is of a rural character. It is the force of contrast that enables the Londoner to find redolent of poetry mere hedge-side nature, a lane, a field, the most common-place brook, the most every day daisy and primrose. Because of the different scenes among which he has to live it is that the London poet prizes beauties so trivial and down-trodden that they escape the notice of even the poet that lives among them.

It may, perhaps, create surprise, to find so much stress being laid on the difference between the English and Scotch character. It may be thought that now that Edinburgh is within sixteen hours of London, and that the intercourse is so unlimited, that no difference of importance now exists, beyond a few peculiarities, not enough to constitute a national distinction, or more than is to be found in almost every county of England. But if we conceive sufficiently the spirit of enmity and hatred which for so many centuries kept the two people apart, a rampart far more impregnable than Hadrian's wall, we shall understand how different their case is from that of any portion of England, and how much must be required, even after the feud is forgotten, to obliterate the distinctive marks it originated. The relations of Scotland towards England, as compared with that of any distant country towards the metropolitan centre, may be said to be this. There is a common type of character and manners in the middle class in this country, which is most fully realized in those parts of it in which there is most general admixture in education and in after life, and therefore in the capital, or rather,―for continued residence in London superinduces its own peculiarities,-in that class who, resident in the large towns of the metropolitan counties have the most main

tained intercourse with London, and with each other. Towards this central and circulating heart, the more languid life of the remoter districts is continually flowing; and so far as each member comes short of the common type, it is from having been insufficiently penetrated by the vital fluid, and a defect in becoming assimilated to the whole mass. Provincial peculiarities are thus defects-incomplete specimens of the genus to which they belong. National characteristics are the properties of the species found most perfect in those individuals who approach nearest to the national type. In Scotland we find, what we do not find in any English county, a different set of ideas, habits, manners, rules of society and of trade, language, and law, as the standard and type towards which character tends. This may be illustrated by what Mr. Miller has observed, (p. 234,) that every six or eight square miles of area in Great Britain, nay, every town or village, has its own distinguishing intonations, phrases, modes of pronunciation; in short, its own style of speaking the common language. In workmen's barracks, where parties of mechanics gathered from all parts of the country spend the greater part of a twelvemonth together, he has detected these colloquial peculiarities in the forming. Al these peculiarities of phrase and pronunciation are defects, departures from the normal standard of pure English. But Lowland Scotch is a distinct and substantial dialect, and yet the varieties with which it is spoken, from Galloway to Aberdeen, gravitate round a common type, like the different shades which Herodotus distinguished in the Ionic of the Asiatic Ionians. It is well known that English is spoken most purely in the Highlands, in Inverness for example, and for the obvious reason that they have learnt it as a foreign dialect; it is the book-taught language of an educated people of whom Gaelic is the mother tongue. It is the same with the adoption of English habits by the educated classes; so far as they have done so, they have denationalized themselves by adopting those of another nation, in the place of the old Scotch model,-more akin to the French than to the English, not improved provincial angularity into the metropolitan polish.

While on this subject, we may collect from different parts of the volume observations on the contrasts presented by the two countries. And first, the physical differences of the two populations.

'I had entered a considerable way into England ere I was struck by the peculiarities of the English face and figure. There is no such palpable difference between the borderers of Northumberland and those of Roxburghshire. But as the traveller advances towards the midland counties, the English cast of person and countenance becomes very apparent. The