bothered, almost inclines us to wish that he might be favoured with the seclusion he so much values, if he could be immured into rational book-making; but we opine that, like Shakespear's Lucio, he "had as lief have the foppery of freedom, as the morality of imprisonment."

Mr Carlyle proceeds to delineate the governor of the enviable abode, and the difficulties to which he is subjected by what the writer holds to be the false and erroneous views of the magistrateemployers :

"The Captain of the place, a gentleman of ancient Military or Royal-Navy habits, was one of the most perfect governors: professionally and by nature zealous for cleanliness, punctuality, good order of every kind; a humane heart and yet a strong one; soft of speech and manner, yet with an inflexible rigour of command, so far as his limits went; 'iron hand in a velvet glove,' as Napoleon defined it. A man of real worth, challenging at once love and respect; the light of those mild bright eyes, seemed to permeat the place as with an all-pervading vigilance, and kindly yet victorious illumination; in the soft definite voice it was as if Nature herself were promulgating her orders, gentlest, mildest orders, which, however, in the end, there would be no disobeying, which in the end there would be no living without fulfilment of. A true 'aristos' and commander of men. A man worthy to have commanded and guided forward, in good ways, twelve hundred of the best common people in London or the world: he was here, for many years past, giving all his care and faculty to command, and guide forward in such ways as there were, twelve hundred of the worst. I looked with considerable admiration on this gentleman; and with considerable astonishment, the reverse of admiration, on the work he had here been set upon.

"This excellent Captain was too old a Commander to complain of anything; indeed, he struggled visibly the other way, to find in his own mind that all here was best; but I could sufficiently discern that, in his natural instincts, if not mounting up to the region of his thoughts, there was a continual protest going on against much of it; that nature and all his inarticulate persuasion (however much forbidden to articulate itself) taught him the futility and unfeasibility of the system followed here. The Visiting Magistrates, he gently regretted rather than complained, had lately taken his tread-wheel from him, men were just now pulling it

down; and how he was henceforth to enforce discipline on these bad subjects, was much a difficulty with him. They cared for nothing but the tread-wheel, and for having their rations cut short:' of the two sole penalties, hard work and occasional hunger, there remained now only one, and that by no means the better one, as he thought. The 'sympathy' of visitors, too, their 'pity' for his interesting scoundrel-subjects, though he tried to like it, was evidently no joy to this practical mind. Pity, yes :-but pity for the scoundrel-species? For those who will not have pity on themselves, and will force the Universe and the Laws of Nature to have no 'pity' on them? Meseems I could discover fitter objects of pity."

It appears probable, from the allusion to the "victorious illumination" of the super-excellent Governor's "mild bright eyes,” that he will be popped into the next list of Carlyle's demi-gods; so his visit in search of prison picturesque was not wholly unproductive of results. The stiff, naval hero; the iron-handed, velvet-gloved ruler of rascality, will hardly know himself in the sage Carlyle's highly-coloured pages; and his meddling magistrates, if they read Latter-day pamphlets, may trouble the good governor more than

ever.

The next quotation we shall venture upon, is a somewhat vituperative paragraph, in which Mr Carlyle inveighs very angrily against the new system of reclaiming felons, by "the method of love," instead of the sterner attentions involved in the movements of the tread-wheel. We confess we are a little puzzled at Mr Carlyle's vehement ire against model-prison delinquents, when we call to mind the urbanity and compassion which he bestows on some monstrous miscreants of the First French revolution, whom he frequently apostrophises in the gentlest terms, such as "O my brothers;" mistaken sons of Adam," and so forth, and censures the "hysterical hatred" of Danton, Marat, and even of “sea-green Robespierre." Why the French wholesale murderers should be exalted into brotherhood, and the English felonry should be so hardly dealt with, as Mr Carlyle and his "gods" would appoint, is perplexing enough; but Mr Carlyle is unrelenting towards British malefactors, and shews himself " as obstinate as an allegory on the banks of the Nile".

Hopeless for evermore such a project. These abject, ape, wolf, ox, imp, and other diabolic-animal specimens of humanity,

who of the very gods could ever have commanded them by love? A collar round the neck, and a cartwhip flourished over the back; these, in a just and steady humane hand, were what the gods would have appointed them; and now when, by long misconduct and neglect, they had sworn themselves into the Devil's regiments of the line, and got the seal of Chaos impressed on their visage, it was very doubtful whether even these would be of avail for the unfortunate commander of Twelve-hundred men! By 'love,' without hope except of peaceably teasing oakum, or fear except of temporary loss of dinner, he was to guide these men, and wisely constrain them,-whitherward? Nowhither: that was his goal, if you will think well of it; that was a second fundamental falsity in his problem. False in the warp and false in the woof, thought one of us; about as false a problem as any I have seen a good man set upon lately! To guide scoundrels by love;' that is a false woof, I take it, a method that will not hold together; hardly for the flower of men will love alone do; and for the sediment and scoundrelism of men it has not even a chance to do. And then to guide any class of men, scoundrel or other, Nowhither, which was this poor Captain's problem, in this Prison with oakum for its one element of hope or outlook, how can that prosper by 'love' or by any conceivable method? That is a warp wholly false. Out of which false warp, or originally false condition to start from, combined and daily woven into by your false woof, or methods of 'love' and suchlike, there arises for our poor Captain the falsest of problems, and for a man of his faculty the unfairest of situations. His problem was, not to command good men to do something, but bad men to do (with superficial disguises) nothing."

Now, however unhandy the poor Captain may be in the solution of jail problems, it is plain that he is not likely to get any help from Mr Carlyle, who has as much of the "seal of chaos impressed" on his writings as these "Devil's regiments of the line" can possibly exhibit on their sin-scarred visages. What Mr Carlyle would recommend in lieu of all existing modes of reformation, we must catch, if we can, from such pellucid statements as the following

"My clear opinion farther is, we had better quit the Scoundrel province of Reform; better close that under hatches, in some rapid, summary manner, and go elsewhither with our Reform efforts.

N

The whole world, for want of Reform, is drowning and sinking; threatening to swamp itself into a Stygian quagmire, uninhabitable by any noble minded man. Let us to the wellheads, I say;

to the chief fountain of these waters of bitterness, and there strike home and dig! To puddle in the embouchures and drowned outskirts, and ulterior and ultimate issues and cloacas of the affair; what profit can there be in that? Nothing to be saved there; nothing to be fished-up there, except, with endless peril and spread of pestilence, a miscellany of broken waifs and dead dogs! In the name of Heaven, quit that."

All that we can collect from this brilliant, philanthropic effusion, is the decided inclination of Mr Carlyle, the apostle of the new gospel, to destroy mankind, forasmuch as nothing, it seems can be done for their improvement. "To this complexion are we come at last," under such august auspices as "clear opinions" from Hero-worshipping Carlyle. But we read in a book which Mr Carlyle would do well to search, of One who sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved: but we may as well stop short; for we are barred from all access to those who, like Mr Carlyle, preach a religion of their own concoction; a religion from which grace, mercy, hope are emphatically excluded.

and

In the following passage, with which we shall conclude our extracts, Mr Carlyle takes the field against the whole army of what he deems to be pseudo-philanthropists; whom he dispatches after the ensuing exterminatory fashion

"Howard abated the Jail-fever; but it seems to me he has been the innocent cause of a far more distressing fever which rages high just now; what we may call the Benevolent Platform Fever. Howard is to be regarded as the unlucky fountain of that tumultuous frothy ocean-tide of benevolent sentimentality, abolition of punishment,' all absorbing prison-discipline,' and general morbid sympathy, instead of hearty hatred for scoundrels; which is threatening to drown human society as in deluges, and leave, instead of an 'edifice of society, fit for the habitation of men, a continent of fetid ooze, inhabitable only by mud-gods and creatures that walk upon their belly. Few things more distress a thinking

soul at this time.

"Most sick am I, O friends, of this sugary disastrous jargon of philanthropy, the reign of love, new era of universal brotherhood,

and not Paradise to the well-deserving, but Paradise to All-andsundry, which possesses the benighted minds of men and women in our day. My friends, I think you are much mistaken about paradise! No Paradise for anybody; he that cannot do without Paradise, go his ways;' suppose you tried that for a while! I reckon that the safer version.-Unhappy sugary brethren; this is all untrue, this other; contrary to the fact; not a tatter of it will hang together in the wind and weather of fact. In brotherhood with the base and foolish, I, for one, do not mean to live. Not in brotherhood with them was life hitherto worth much to me; in pity, in hope not yet quite swallowed of disgust,-otherwise in enmity that must last through eternity, in unappeasable aversion, shall I have to live with these! Brotherhood? No, be the thought far from me. They are Adam's children,—alas yes, I well remember that, and never shall forget it; hence this rage and But they have gone over to the dragons; they have quitted the Father's house, and set up with the Old Serpent; till they return, how can they be brothers? They are enemies, deadly to themselves and to me and to you, till then; till then, while hope yet lasts, I will treat them as brothers fallen insane ;—when hope has ended, with tears grown sacred and wrath grown sacred, I will cut them off in the name of God! It is at my peril, if I do not. With the servant of Satan I dare not continue in partnership. Him I must put away, resolutely and for ever; 'lest,' as it is written, I become partaker of his plagues.' ... You would have saved the Sarawak Pirates, then? The Almighty Maker is wroth that the Sarawak cutthroats, with their poisoned spears, are away? What must his wrath be that the Thirtythousand Needle-women are still here, and the question 'prevenient grace' not yet settled! O my friends, in sad earnest, sad and deadly earnest, there much needs that God would mend all this, and that we should help him to mend it."

sorrow.

We are neither pleased nor displeased with platform oratory, of which, however, Mr Carlyle knows not the secret springs. Philanthropic projects cannot, in these utilitarian days, be started or supported without money; and platform exhibitions of eloquence are as needful to sustain the schemes of benevolence which are hourly broached, as the votes of army estimates are required for the sinews of war. Mr Carlyle is little aware how the exchequer of charity, as it is called, is replenished by means of platform