Those critics who know the difficulties of the problem with which the author has had to deal— who are acquainted with the many speculations that have been advanced as to the seat and sources of the intellectual and other pleasures of our nature, will readily discern that the principles here enunciated have not been "decanted" out of previous æsthetic treatises, but are peculiar to the present work, and spring-naturally, it is hoped -from the idiosyncrasy of the characters enunciating them. Again, it is but fair to enforce that the views here given as to the means by which labor is made pleasant have sprung out of the author's previous investigations rather than his readings, and so, indeed, has that part of the book which seeks to impress the reader with a livelier sense of the claims of the luckless, and even the criminal, to our respect and earnest consideration. Principles, in fine, that have cost the author a life to acquire, are often expressed in a chapter, and expressed, it is hoped, sufficiently in keeping with the current of the story to render it difficult for the reader to detect where the function of dramatizing ends and that of propounding begins.

The "jail proper" described in this book is hardly the jail proper belonging to little Benjamin Franklin's time.

Nor has the deviation from historic propriety been made unadvisedly. It is generally as idle as it is morbid to paint past horrors. To have set forth the atrocities and iniquities practiced in the

British jails a century and a half ago would have been following in the track of the pernicious French school of literature, where every thing is sacrificed to melodramatic intensity, and which is forever striving to excite a spasm rather than gratify a taste.

The genius of true English landscape painting, on the contrary, is "repose;" and the genius of modern English poetry is "repose" too—a kind of Sabbath feeling which turns the heart from the grossnesses and vanities of human life, and lets the work-day spirit loose among the quiet, shady, and healthful beauties of nature. The intense school and the repose school are the two far-distant extremes of all art, and they differ as much from each other as the sweet refreshment of an evening by one's own fireside does from the heated stimulus of a tavern debauch.

For these artistic reasons, then, the dead bones of the old jail iniquities and cruelties have not been disinterred and set up as a bugaboo here. Such a picture might have been true to the time, but mere literal truth is a poor thing after all. Why, Gustave le Gray's wonderful photograph of the Sunlight on the Sea, that is hanging before our eyes as we write, is as true as "Mangnall's Questions ;" and yet what a picturesque barbarism, and even falsity it is! It no more renders what only human genius can seize and paint-the expression, the feeling, the soul of such a scene— than the camera obscura can fac-simile the human

eye in a portrait, or give us the faintest glimmer of the high Vandyke quality-the profound thinking, talking pupils of that grand old countenance in our National Gallery.

But the real object which the author of this book had in view was to wake not only his boy hero up to a sense of duty, but other boys also, and to let them know (even without doing any great violence to the natural truth of things) what prison iniquities are still daily wrought in the land in which we live. The jail proper of the present story (though the scene is laid in British America before the declaration of Independence, and dates a century and a half back) is a mere transcript of a well-known jail now standing in the first city in the world in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty. The details given here are the bare literalities noted by the author only a few months back, and printed in his account of the metropolitan prisons in that wretched fragment of a well-meant scheme, the "Great World of London." There, if the skeptic needs proof, he can get chapter and verse, and learn that many of the facts here given were recorded in the presence of some of the visiting justices themselves. Jails may have been bad a hundred years ago, but this plague-spot of the first city in the world seems to the author worse than all, because it still goes on after Howard's labors-after Brougham's reforms-after Sheriff Watson's fine industrial schools; yes, there it stands, giving the

lie to all our May-day meetings, our ragged schools, our city missions, and pretended love of the destitute, the weak, and the suffering. We no longer wonder that the atrocities of the French Bastille roused the Parisian people to rush off in a body and tumble the old prison-citadel down into a heap of ruins; and if Tothill Fields lay across the Channel, the same indignant outrage might perhaps be again enacted. But here, good easy citizens as we are, we pay our poor-rates; we call ourselves miserable sinners, in a loud voice, once a week, from a cosy pew; our "good lady" belongs to a district visiting society, and distributes tracts in the back slums; we put our check into the plate, after a bottle or two of port, at a charity dinner; and, this done, we are self

content.

We once passed a quiet half hour with Mr. Calcraft, the hangman, and in the course of the conversation he alluded to Mrs. Calcraft! The words no sooner fell upon the ear than a world of wonder filled the brain. Even he, then, had somebody to care about him. There was somebody to hug and caress him before he left his home in that scratch wig and fur cap in which we saw him come disguised to Newgate (for the "roughs" had threatened to shoot him), and carrying that small ominous satchel basket, at two in the morning, on the day of Bousfield's execution.

The wretched lads in Tothill Fields prison are worse off than Calcraft himself. They have nobody in the world to care about them.

Nobody! Yet, stay, we forget; there is this same Calcraft to look after a good many of them.

In fine-to drop the author and speak in propriá personá-I have attempted to write a book which, while it treated of some subject that a boy would be likely to attend to, should at the same time admit of enunciating such principles as I wished my own boy, and other boys as good, and as honest, and earnest as he, to carry with them through life; and yet I have striven, while writing it, to do no positive violence to truth either in the love of one's art or in the heat of one's "purpose." In plain English, I have sought to be consistent to nature-true to the spirit, perhaps, rather than the letter of things-even though I had a peculiar scheme to work out. And now, such as it is, I give the present volume to the youth of the time, in the hope that it may serve them for what I myself felt the want of more than any thing after leaving Westminster School, as a young man crammed to the tip of one's tongue with Latin and Greek and nothing else, viz., for something like a guide to what Uncle Ben calls "the right road through life."

HY. M.*