the life a fraudulent philosopher; for is not sham wisdom a fraud, most seeming sapient Mr Carlyle !

Shocked at the paucity of heroes in these degenerate days, Mr Carlyle betakes himself to a scrutiny of jails, in the expectation, we suppose, of finding within the realms of incarcerated rascaldom, some persecuted worthies whom the world should bow the worshipping knee to. But here our philosopher is doomed to disappointment. There is not enough of reality in bolts and bars to satisfy the cravings of our philosopher, who sees nothing but shams in the penetralia of a model prison. Whether the case be so or not, cannot possibly be collected from Mr Carlyle's account; for everything he beholds is so distorted by his vague grotesqueness of description, that we can no more trust to the truth of his details, than to the vraisemblance of Punch's portraits, executed by that eccentric artist, Mr Doyle. But the philosophical peerer into prisons must exhibit his own pictures—

"Several months ago, some friends took me with them to see one of the London prisons—a prison of the exemplary or model kind. An immense circuit of buildings, cut out, girt with a high ring wall, from the lanes and streets of the quarter, which is a dim and crowded one. Gateway as to a fortified place; then a spacious court, like the square of a city; broad staircases, passages to interior courts; fronts of stately architecture all round. It lodges some thousand or twelve hundred prisoners, besides the officers of the establishment. Surely one of the most perfect buildings within the compass of London. We looked at the apartments, sleeping-cells, dining-rooms, working-rooms, general courts or special and private excellent all, the ne plus ultra of human care and ingenuity; in my life I never saw so clean a building; probably no Duke in England lives in a mansion of such perfect and thorough cleanness.

"The bread, the cocoa, soup, meat, all the various sorts of food, in their respective cooking places, we tasted; found them of excellence superlative. The prisoners sat at work, light work, picking oakum, and the like, in airy apartments with glass roofs, of agreeable temperature and perfect ventilation; silent, or at least conversing only by secret signs: others were out, taking their hour of promenade in clean flagged courts: methodic composure, cleanliness, peace, substantial, wholesome comfort reigned everywhere

supreme.

The women in other apartments, some notable murder

esses among them, all in the like state of methodic composure and substantial wholesome comfort, sat sewing; in long ranges of washhouses, drying-houses, and whatever pertains to the getting up of clean linen, were certain others, with all conceivable mechanical furtherances, not too arduously working. The notable murderesses were, though with great precautions of privacy, pointed out to us; and we were requested not to look openly at them, or seem to notice them at all, as it was found to 'cherish their vanity,' when visitors looked at them. Schools, too, were there; intelligent teachers of both sexes, studiously instructing the still ignorant of these thieves."

The next edifying sketches are of two Chartist celebrities, one of whom turns out to be an old acquaintance of Carlyle in mesmeric matters, perhaps at a Chelsea soiree, but now transferred to conscious captivity :

"From an inner upper room or gallery, we looked down into a range of private courts, where certain Chartist Notabilities were undergoing their term. Chartist Notability First struck me very much I had seen him about a year before, by involuntary accident and much to my disgust, magnetising a silly young person; and had noted well the unlovely voracious look of him, his thick oily skin, his heavy dull-burning eyes, his greedy mouth, the dusky potent insatiable animalism that looked out of every feature of him; a fellow adequate to animal-magnetise most things, I did suppose; and here was the post I now found him arrived at. Next neighbour to him was Notability Second, a philosophic or literary Chartist; walking rapidly to and fro in his private court, a clean high-walled place; the world and its cares quite excluded, for some months to come: master of his own time and spiritual resources to, as I supposed, a really enviable extent. What, 'literary man' to an equal extent! I fancied I, for my own part, so left with paper and ink, and all taxes and botherations shut out out from me, could have written such a Book as no reader will ever get of me. Never, O reader, never here in a mere house with taxes and botherations. Here, alas, one has to snatch one's poor Book, bit by bit, as from a conflagration; and to think and live, comparatively, as if the house were not one's own, but mainly the world's and the devil's. Notability Second might have filled one with envy."

Mr Carlyle's preference for prison authorship, untaxed and un

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 “ 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"

66

sea-green

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 a 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