XVI. Look upon the sleeping infant, lift, ye wise, your high doxology! And prepares the joys which follow, When the awakened world shall blush beneath the full blaze of Apollo. XVII. In thy cradle, O my country, when thy baby-life was sleeping, When the sibilant brood assailed thee, basilisk and amphisbena, With thy young arms thou didst crush them, like the strong son of Alemena. When their venomous spires voluminous rolled around thee, thou didst seize them, And with sudden grasp resistless like the soft clay thou didst squeeze them; Thou hast fought, and art victorious; on thy laurels thou repairest Now thy strength; thou needest rest to heal the bleeding wounds thou bearest. And to smite the sheer black cliff his scourge the god of waves is lifting. XX. Like an old and sickly lion when its strength is all departed Turkey roars. Up, Greek, and seize the club of Hercules mighty-hearted, When the Cross subdued the nations, planted in the East victorious. It were a waste of time to criticise in detail the faults of this poem; but the conception is good; and were the tone considerably subdued in some parts the effect would be much increased. In favourable contrast with the high rhetorical swell of the Panhellenics, stands the plaintive simplicity of the following little poem by Alexander Ypsilante, the ill-starred and crude origina tor of the first movement of the Greek revolution in Moldavia. The little bird represents, of course, the condition and feelings of a Greek in Europe without a Greece: THE BIRD'S LAMENT. Where dost thou go? Seekest thou rest Near in thy nest, Poor little bird? No nest have I; I seek and I find I had a country when I was young; As I poured my song The white-flowered myrtle trees among I sat on the tree, I sang late and early, I had a mate, and I loved her dearly, Down came a hawk with swift swoop from the regular training in the living speech of sky, And tore my joy from before mine eye; And spoiled my rest, And robbed my nest, Since then, cheerless and hopeless I roam, With weary wing, and song so weary, Till I find a home Where no wing of the weary is stirred; With the poor little innocent bird. Greece from the voice of living Greeks. Chamber-scholars, of course, Oxonians, and other prim gentlemen of the bookish sort, will not admire the suggestion much; but we know what we are talking about: Nature is stronger than Oxonians, and will certainly beat them if she gets fair play, which she sometimes may, even in Oxford. Let our Scottish students try for themselves the natural plan of speaking and hearing the living tongue, and leave the fellowship-hunters of the south to cram their Gradus, and finger their quantities sedulously, according to the orthodox old routine. Two hundred pounds a-year will scarcely cover a course of academical study at Cambridge; fifty pounds We have thus completed a rapid bird's- will do the whole business amply at Athens. eye view of the nature and character of the This is a consideration which will, no doubt, Neo-Hellenic language, and the principal have its due weight with a Scotch mind; productions of its nascent literature. We not to mention the daily sight of the actual have only one remark to make in conclu- Acropolis, and the inspiring atmosphere of sion, and it is a remark of a practical nature, such accomplished Hellenists as Professor and deserving to be seriously considered by Rangabe, and our countryman George our schoolmasters, and others concerned in Finlay. the education of youth. So long as Greek is the language of the New Testament and of Homer, and the armory also from which we draw the whole formidable array of the nomenclature of modern science, it will always form an important element in the education of a nation so Christian and so conservative as Great Britain. If so, 'twere well that those who learn it should do so in the most expeditious way; and an expedi tious way it certainly is not to learn as a dead language, by a system of mere rules and abstractions, what, in fact, is as much a living form of speech, as the English language itself, propagated from the days of Father Chaucer until now. All who have made the experiment know that a living language, even the most difficult, such as German, can be learned in the country where it is spoken, fluently and thoroughly, in a tenth part of the time necessary to master the same tongue by the common appliances of grammar, dictionary, and ex ART. VI.-1. On the Stearic Candle Manu facture. By G. F. WILSON, Esq., Managing Director of Price's Patent Candle Company. (Third Extra Lecture delivered before the Society of Arts.) Third Edition. London. 2. 3. A Visit to Price's Patent Candle Com pany's Works. Reprinted from the "Illustrated London News," with additional Engravings. Special Report by the Directors to the Proprietors of Price's Patent Candle Company, respecting that part of the Proceedings of the Annual General Meeting of the Company, 24th March 1852, which has reference to the Educational, Moral, and Religious charge to be taken by the Company over the persons (and especially the young persons) in its Employment, &c. (Pp. 50.) ercise book, used as our classical teachers of 4. Report of Meeting of the Directors of the dead languages are in the habit of using 7. Price's Candle Company, held on the 2d Mr. J. P. Wilson's Letter" to the Men The same to the Boys, 4th August 1851. (Pp. 10.) The same to the same, Easter-Day, 1852. The same to his Fellow-members of the The same "to the Workpeople of Price's Patent Candle Company," 16th Dec. 1852. | Mr. Gwynne was at work in another part (Pp. 36.) Gwynne with an air-pump. Steam, however, being found more available than air, the experiIn the year 1830, we are told in the menters combined their forces, and in 1843 pamphlet first enumerated, a patent of Mr. took out two patents for improvements, Soames' for separating cocoa-nut oil into its under which the Company still works. solid and liquid parts was sold to Mr. Wil- Formed thus, as a commercial establishliam Wilson and Mr. Lancaster, who, trad-ment, by Mr. William Wilson, the Coming under the name of E. Price & Co., (this pany owed its first decided industrial success E. Price, now of world-wide reputation, to Mr. James Wilson, as the inventor of the being so far as we can discover an alto- composite candle; its great development to gether mythical personage,) brought it into the distilling processes struck out by Mr. operation the same year. They established Gwynne, first carried out on a large scale extensive crushing mills in Ceylon, to sepa- and perfected by Mr. George Wilson. It rate the oil from the kernel of the cocoa-nut, is not often that these Wilsons allow one and cocoa-nut plantations to supply these any opportunity of finding how they do their. mills, (now spreading over more than 1000 work, however evident the work may be acres of land,) and perfected and improved when done. Now and then, however, they Mr. Soames' process. Many of us may re- may be found peaching against one another, collect these "cocoa-nut candles," less foul- as when Mr. James Wilson, in the letter to smelling indeed than tallow, but greasy and the Directors of 4th Nov. 1852, lets drop snuffy, and deservedly superseded by better these interesting details as to the introducmaterials. Ten years elapsed, and in 1840 tion of the distilling processes, in which he Mr. J. P. Wilson, (one of the sons of Mr. "had no hand," but which made "the comWilliam Wilson,) experimenting for cheap plete revolution" in the trade, and were self-snuffing illumination-candles at the time" the source of all the Company's prosper. of the Queen's wedding, hit upon a combi- ity." When his brother George and Mr. nation of cocoa-nut stearine with stearic acid, (one of the inflammable acids of tallow,) which would give candles saleable at a shilling a lb., and to burn without snuffing, in fact, the common "composite candles" of our shops. In the same year, a patent was taken out by Mr. Gwynne, now a large shareholder in Price's Company, for distilling fatty bodies in a vacuum apparatus, and also for distilling fatty acids exposed to atmospheric pressure. Following this hint, Edward Price & Co. (who also took a license Even my father, the only managing partunder Mr. Gwynne's patent,) in 1842 took ner of the business, was, he authorizes me to out a patent in the name of Mr. W. C. Jones, say, a great check upon the introduction of disa working chemist, in their employment, for tillation, yielding only with difficulty to my distilling cocoa-nut oil and its acids, and brother George's determination to carry it out, converting them into a neutral substance by grudging, on account of the supposed hopelessdistilling them after combination with lime. assistant, Mr. Jones, who was helping him. And ness of any good result, even the salary of the Under different parts of this patent, beauti-I was not clear myself of the blame of checking ful candles were made; but some on being it, for I kept writing from India, where I was extinguished gave out a choking vapour, collecting cocoa-nut oil at the time, about the whilst the loss of material in the manufac- great outlay in plant which would be required, ture of others was excessive. During exand my inability to see where it was to come from." periments connected with this patent Mr. G. F. Wilson (another son of Mr. Wm. Wilson) and Mr. Jones first tried using vapour of water to exclude the air from the apparatus during distillation. In 1842, E. Price & Co. took out a patent in the names of the two last-named gentlemen, the principal claims of which were the distillation of fats previously acted upon by sulphuric acid, or by nitrous gases. Whilst Mr. George Wilson and Mr. Jones were experimenting upon this patent in one part of the works, "Were working distillation into practical shape, the experiments being costly, and the first outlays in plant, long before any commercial results could appear from them, very much more so, all in the place were shaking their heads, and, as far as they could with propriety, giv ing kind warnings against such unbusiness-like and visionary proceedings, and wishing to themof the place, and that those in charge of it would selves that all new-fangled plans were kept out be content to go on steadily like other people.. In 1844 then, Price & Co. began working on the large scale under the distilling processes, with a still holding a charge of about two tons. In 1847" Price's Patent Candle Company" was incorporated. On the 1st October, 1849, it got possession of Mr. Child's night-light trade, then carried on at Brompton, but which was transferred to Vauxhall in 1850, while the business of the Albert night-lights, previously carried on at Belmont, was taken over with it to the arches of the South-Western Railway, of mation, as it was told to one of the meetings which fifteen are now rented by the Compa- by a shareholder, it was remarked of it that ny, at no very moderate figure. The it was "too strong of the Wilsons." The Company has now, the "Illustrated London speaker, Mr. Starey, who described himself News" tells us, a paid-up capital of nearly as "one of the largest original shareholders," half a million sterling, employs above 700 and "the very largest customer" for the hands, (nearer 1000 we believe, at the date commodities of the Company, had not been of this article,) besides steam and hydraulic of that opinion; for it was the fact that both power; consumes upwards of 4000 tons of the managing Directors were Wilsons, and palm and cocoa-nut oil per annum, and has his personal confidence in them as Wilsons, works at Belmont extending over nearly that first induced him to become either two acres, with large branch works at Bat- shareholder or customer. As respects one tersea, and another factory about to be start of these managing Directors, Mr. George ed at Liverpool. Palm-oil is now the Wilson, we trust that Mr. Starey's confidence material mainly used, mixed with cocoa-nut has been sufficiently justified to our readers for some kinds of lights. Liverpool being in a commercial point of view; perhaps the chief port of importation for palm-oil, hardly less so even as respects the other, and a large portion of the custom of the firm Mr. James Wilson. Still, the name of being from Lancashire, Yorkshire, and the "George" has been more prominent in the northern counties, a heavy amount of double commercial history. In the moral history carriage, of the raw material first, and then which we are opening, the order is reversed, of the manufactured article, will be saved and it is the name of "James" which espeby the new factory. Our readers hardly cially strikes the eye, though indeed married need to be reminded that the trade in palm- almost inseparably still with George's, espeoil on the African coast is the chief economi- cially at the first. cal antidote to the slave trade at the present The said moral history, nevertheless, of day. Some interesting details on this head Price's Patent Candle Company, is one are appended to Mr. George Wilson's lec- which is not yet fully before the world, and ture, and a showy placard, to be seen at which perhaps will never be, unless "brother many railway stations, pictorially sets forth George" should by way of retaliation take the fact. to "peaching" against "brother James." So much for the commercial history of This is the way in which it opens. (Educathe Company, so far as it can be gleaned tional Report, No. 3, on the list above, p. from the materials before us. We wish, 4.): indeed, that we had time and skill to con"The schools began in a very humble way, duct the reader over some portion at least by half-a-dozen of our boys hiding themselves of the establishment, to the school-rooms behind a bench two or three times a week, after above and below, with their outlook upon they had done their day's work and had their the busy river; to the rooms where the tea, to practice writing on scraps of paper more interesting processes of manufacture worn-out pens begged from the counting-house. are carried on, and above all, to that pleas- The foreman of their department encouraged ant night-light building, full of nimble active them, and, as they persevered, and were joined by others of the boys, he begged that some hands and clean cheerful faces,—of girls on rough movable desks might be made for them. the one side, of boys on the other. WonMy brother (i. e. George,) encouraged derful, it is, to see the little mortar-cases them with some books as prizes, and many who filled to the brim with the liquid grease with- had been very backward improved much in out ever a drop being spilt, and that in far reading and writing. The fact of the whole less time than we can tell it. Wonderful thing being the work of the boys themselves, it is, to see the rapid motions of the young we carefully abstained from interfering in it, seemed to form so large a part of its value that wick-plaiters. Nay, one cannot help feeling further than by these presents of books for that piece-work has here attained its last prizes, and of copy-books, spelling-books, and legitimate effects, as an industrial stimulant; Testaments, and by my being (but not till long that the activity it produces is all but fever-after the commencement, and after being much ish. But still, when work has ceased, and pressed and being assured that it would cause one sees the merry girls sweep in their play from one end of the long iron-roofed shed to the other, one sees that nothing is yet overdone. How this is, can be understood only from the moral history of the establishment, which is what we have now to turn to. When the Company was in course of for with no restraint) always present at the school meetings to give them the sanction of authority, but taking no more active part than hearing the most backward boys their spelling." Now this may be a fair account of the beginning of the Belmont schools, (even if not the first beginning,) but nothing more. There is evidently a vast deal untold. How lar, but that of many here, for happily we are many, and increasing in number, who are set in the good work will have been owing to this very upon doing them good. Any share I may have personal influence, though by books only, exercised upon my mind by its contact with that of a moral and intellectual superior. It will have been owing to all but unqualified veneration and love for the character of DR. ARNOLD, awakening in minded earnestness of purpose, and a hope to do so me a great longing to resemble him in singlein some faint degree." came it that these boys had the idea of edu-minds of the boys when brought into contact cating themselves? How did they come to with them. I do not mean my own in particubeg pens from the counting-house? Wornout though they might be, it is not every counting-house clerk who would give out pens to the greasy young candle-makers. .... How comes it that the foreman encouraged them, and begged desks for them? Education is not yet, according to trade-notions, a foreman's concern. How comes it that "brother George" was so ready with his prize-books? it is not every employer who would even be told of the dirty boys in his employ trying to teach So the Belmont Factory is spiritually but themselves writing, or who would do any- an off-shoot from Rugby School; its managers thing but laugh at the notion. . . . . How and foremen a sort of manufacturing "sixth comes it finally that both "brother George" form;" James Wilson only a posthumous, and "brother James" should be "pressed" but long ere this, no doubt, a dearly loved to be present at the school-meetings, and pupil of Thomas Arnold. Thus have been should be "always" so when they had once answered (nor, we trust, thus alone,) those attended, and should be found at last-not intense cravings of that noble spirit for the looking after the smartest boys in the school improvement of the working populationto instruct them in some special branch of for the bringing out of the worth and value learning, but simply "hearing the most back of the manufacturer's office-which promptward boys their spelling?" Look these ed so many letters to the "Sheffield Iris," things straight in the face, and the feeling and to private friends. There is not even will dawn on you that they belong to quite to that deep sense of the communion of another region than that of ordinary trade- saints-to that longing for its more real and ideas; that underneath the brief account we habitual acknowledgment, so marked in have quoted there lies a whole history of earnest benevolence on the part of the employers, of tentative efforts to improve the condition of the employed, to win their confidence, to make them fitter for earth and heaven,-efforts perhaps partly misdirected. perhaps sometimes wholly unsuccessful, perhaps too early successful at other times, but of which we see only the blossoming into fruitful flower, not the chequered and anxious growth. Perhaps, if we knew all, we should hear of some very early begin ning, before that winter of 1848, when, the boys having increased from half-a-dozen to thirty, their first school-room was made. Perhaps it might be found to go back to before James Wilson's journey to India, coincident in time with the distilling experiments of George Wilson. Perhaps we might dig out some story of an early and hopeful worker who afterwards disappointed all hopes. But what boots it? All this would be but outer detail. The root of the matter lies in Mr. Starey's words :-the management of the Company was "too strong of the Wilsons" to be an every-day trade-concern. Let us first hear what Mr. James Wilson tells as to the secret of their success: "If we should ever happily attain to great success here, it will not be by any plans or systems, but only by the personal influence of those whose minds are of a cast to benefit the Arnold, which do not come out in those words of Mr. Wilson, as to the "personal influence exercised upon his mind "by its contact with that of a moral and intellectual superior," whom, we believe, it was never his lot to see in the flesh. Nor is he the only one who, without seeing, has yet felt that "personal influence." Mr. Wilson rightly disclaims having any plans or systems. Accordingly we shall not go into the detail of what has sprung up out of that first school of half-a-dozen boys, hiding themselves behind a bench-of how the evening school was followed by a dayschool-how tea-parties in the school-room were set up as a counter-attraction to Camberwell and Greenwich fairs-how the cholera of 1849 closed the school, and sent the scholars to learn cricket in Battersea fields— how gardening and cricket ran for a time as it were a race together, and cricket beathow (without a metaphor) matches were got up between the men and the boys, and the school gave the "factory a glorious drubbing, although they laughed at our impudence in challenging them;" and then letter W stood against the alphabet, and " poor letter W looked very small when he came out of it"-how summer excursions Herne Bay another, to Farnham a third, to were set on foot, to Guildford one year, to Eton and Windsor this year-how, meanwhile, the acquiring of Child's night-light |