which every one is desirous, that the worship is offered. The honours paid to mere aristocracy are like a pompous inscription over a dry pump; compared with which, Rothschildolatry is a return to simple nature.

EDUCATION.

THE great error of all systems of education is that they are systems;-schemes built upon moral theories, instead of developements of physiological facts; they are the result of a neglect of elements which are indestructible, in the attempt to establish doctrines which are hypothetical. Even Pestalozzi's system has this radical defect. His doctrine of "la foi et l'amour," which he has taken for its basis, or "that which children feel for their parents," is to me unintelligible; for schoolmasters are not, and cannot be, parents; and his rejection of emulation, as a germ of dangerous passions,* is utterly unphilosophical. Until Nature ceases to give passions, man must use them. The lever of all action is motive.

* He calls ambition " la queue de Buonaparte."

TEMPERAMENT.

ALL character, and much of conduct, is a mere affair of temperament. Early association will do something in forming opinions; precepts may modify and example influence; but nothing will give sensibility, where nature has denied it. Something may be effected by the friend or the physician; and caution and calomel may tell, in the long run. Nero, perhaps, might have been bled down to a maudlin Methodist; but returning health would have raised him to the zeal of a St. Dominick; and on a perfect convalescence, he would have ceased to cant, and begun to burn. In General Count P. de Ségur's beautiful work, in which the story of a campaign is given, with all the charm of a romance, and all the dignity of an epic, the author accounts for the Russian war, and the headlong precipitation with which it was conducted, on the simple principle of a latent malady "in the world's great master," which sharpened his passions, and urged him to his ruin; "an acrid humour which reigned in his blood, which he considered as the cause of his irascibility, but without which," said Napoleon himself, "there is no gaining battles." "Which of us," adds the author, "has penetrated sufficiently into the human organization to affirm, that this hidden vice was not one of the causes of that restless activity, which hurried on events, and occasioned at once his grandeur and his fall?"

How these French soldiers write! Bred in the "tented field," where have they acquired the style so

finely fitted to their subject, and the philosophy that belongs to their age! Who are the historians of the last thirty years, of the greatest events that ever shook the governments of the earth to their centre?-not the "hommes de lettres" of France,not her académiciens,-nor her ex-ministers and statesmen," rompus et corrompus," nor her professed authors; they are the gallant soldiers who witnessed the events they so eloquently describe, and who call on contemporary testimony to corroborate their statements. Ségur, Rovigo, Foi, Rapp, Dumas, Montholon, De Rocca, &c. &c.-these are the historiographers of modern France, and well worth Racine, and all the other bland and laudatory chroniclers of church and state, who wrote under the surveillance of the Maintenons, the Montespans, and their complaisant ministers, or influential valets and femmes de chambre.

INFANT BAPTISM.

MANY Suppose that the practice of infant baptism is derived from a Hebrew rite; but the oriental Christians, by whom baptism was first adopted, confined that ceremony to adults. It seems probable that the modern usage was introduced into the western church, in imitation of the lustration of the Romans; a ceremony performed, according to Macrobius, on the ninth day after birth with males, and on the eighth with females.*

* Saturnalia, I. 16.

LOGIC OF FINE WRITERS.

Chateaubriand, speaking of the variety and extent of modern discoveries, observes "Le Génie de l'homme est véritablement trop grand pour sa petite habitation; il faut en conclure qu'il est destiné à une plus haute demeure."*

Voyage en Italie et en Amérique.

THIS is a good specimen of the logic of "fine writing," "plenty of eloquence, and little wisdom." What a sweeping conclusion from one little word (trop)! Man is too great for this world, and therefore he belongs to another! Never was an oratorical exaggeration worse applied. Amidst all the magnificent results of human ingenuity, which have thus powerfully excited the susceptible imagination of the French academician, want, and disease, and ignorance are still the especial characteristics of the species. No where are the essentials of good government generally understood; still less so the art of maintaining public liberty, when once acquired. No where is morality independent of the executioner, -no where is life maintained by the great bulk of the community at a less expense, than that of constant, unremitting labour. Look at that half-starved moving mass of rags, by courtesy called an Irish peasant; reflect upon his helpless incapacity, his physical destitution, his moral annihilation! Yet is he the subject of an empire, in which all the powers

"The genius of man is too great for his little habitation; we must, then, conclude that he is destined to a more elevated existence."

of the species are carried to the highest point of developement, to which man has ever reached. Might we not equally conclude, from this spectacle, that the human animal is so ill adapted to his mundane existence, that he must be intended for another? Stripped of all exaggeration, the adaptation of our intellectual powers to our necessities, though exceedingly imperfect, is still abundantly sufficient to carry conviction, that the earth is the sojourn of man's especial destiny: whether, with Chateaubriand, we are to jump to a conclusion, and say, "therefore he is destined to no other," I leave to the consideration of those who have no better argument for determining their faith.

PHILOSOPHY.

"Donner à l'oubli le passé,
Le présent à l'indifférence,
Et, pour vivre débarrassé,
L'avenir, à la Providence."*

WHAT excellent advice, if it were in every one's power to adopt it: but the colour of a man's philosophy is, after all, no more at his own disposal, than the colour of his eyebrows. Both depend upon the same cause, the temperament of the subject. The stoics and the epicureans have been thought to differ only in words; and, as far as mere reason is concerned, an accurate definition would force agree.

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Give the past to oblivion, the present to indifference; and, to live exempt from all care, leave the future to Providence,”