draw them into admissions which would justify further proceedings. They kept their own counsel, however, and succeeded at last in persuading even Feyzul to believe that they were what they represented themselves to be-doctors desirous of practising their art, and earning a livelihood in the Nejed capital. And thus they were enabled to spend fifty days in the place.

We must refer our readers to the work itself for the story of that sojourn. It is one of the most interesting and best told tales which we have of late years encountered. The narrator takes advantage of all that he sees and hears to digress into historical and legendary matters, which are exceedingly curious, and his description of Nejedean manners and habits of thought is masterly. We see the groups which he paints as distinctly as if we were in their bodily presence and heard them talk. The portraitures of old Feyzul himself, in particular, and of his sons, Abd-Allah and Sa-ood, and of Mahmood, the prime minister, are admirable. But we cannot venture to touch these, nor to accompany our Doctor in his visits, professional and social, to the households of the lesser aristocracy. Enough is done when we say that the whole subject is handled with extraordinary skill, and that the effect is as enduring as it is picturesque.

The time came at last for our travellers to depart, and they heard to their dismay that there was no intention in high places to let them go. Threats were first tried, then offers of house, garden, and a wife for Mr Palgrave, which, however, he declined. Their flight-for a flight it was-took place at last, with the help of their tried friend Aboo-Eysa, and they plunged into the desert which divides Nejed from Uasa. Not without suffering and some danger they reached Hof-hoof, the capital of the latter province, where they became the favoured guests of their enlightened guide, and spent some time

most agreeably. There Mr Palgrave found himself among a people far advanced in civilisation and the customs which are induced by it beyond the dwellers either in Hayel or Riad. Their speech is, indeed, less pure, but their intellects are sharper, and their habits of life proportionately more free, without being more vicious. In all classes a settled hatred of the rigidly Wahabee rule in matters of religion, not less than in civil government, prevails.

"At Hof-hoof, for the first time in Arabia, though not for the last, I heard the emphatic summing-up of anti-Mohammedan feeling, in the words 'Baghadna Alla wa'l Islam,' literally, hatred to Allah and Islam,' equivalent to our 'down with' or 'death to,' coupled with the no less emphatic T-foo'ala Muslimeen (in plain meen (in plain English, 'd-n the Muslems), phrases pronounced from between the set teeth, and accompanied with no less meaning gestures. . . . Meanwhile, lavish praise was given to the good order and prosperity of Bombay and Kurrachee, both of which towns many of our hosts had visited-a praise intermingled with comparisons far from advantageous to Wahabee and Turkish rule."

It will not after this surprise our readers to hear that on a revolt, at no great distance of time, from the hated rule, Mr Palgrave reckons ; and that he reckons, besides, on its extending far beyond the limits of the province of which he is immediately speaking.

"Frequently under cover of night, and in houses out of the way, or round Aboo-Eysa's ever-blazing hearth, were held meetings of the old chiefs and their partisans. I was twice present at such in the character of a seemingly casual guest; and in these assemblies I learned how widespread are the ramifications of the anti-Wahabee conspiracy, or rather confederacy. Hasa and Oman form its main force; Telal-ebn Rashud, and all who sympathise with him throughout Shomer, are ready to co-operate in the Hareek and Sedeyr; in Kaseem, threenumerous partisans exist in fourths of the population welcome the project. The Bedouins participate in the movement with hardly any, if any, exceptions."

work;

Our traveller's next stage was

to Kalief, whence he took ship, and, touching at various ports, crossed the Persian Gulf to Linja. It belongs, with a stretch of coast extending as far as Djask in Beloochistan, to Oman, and affords our author an opportunity, of which he takes advantage, to give an historical, geographical, and social history of the entire province. We use the term province because Oman pays a small tribute to the sovereign of Nejed, though, in point of fact, the Sultan of Oman may be described as an independent prince; and the system of government appears to be as liberal as that of the Wahabees is the reverse. The city abounds with negroes, slaves on their first arrival, but after a time, for the most part, set free. By these almost all the rural labour of the land is

performed; and they are as insolent and sensual here as elsewhere. Mr Palgrave delivers himself like a man of sense on the subject of England's generous but ill-directed exertions to put down the slavetrade; and we recommend his statements to the grave consideration of such as now sit in the chairs of Wilberforce and Clarkson.

Here, then, we take our leave of Mr Palgrave, thanking him again for the instruction, as well as the entertainment, which he has afforded us.

We should wish success likewise to the object of his journey, if we knew exactly what that was, and were satisfied of its compatibility with interests which have the strongest claims upon us. But being in the dark in regard to these matters, we must be guarded on that head.

A POOR invalid was found lamenting that Providence had given her no daughter to nurse her. "Perhaps," said her visitor, in the hope to reconcile her to things as they were- "perhaps if you had had a daughter she would have married." Oh no! she wouldn't," was the reply; "I should have brought her up different." "How is it," inquired a very superior woman, "that Mr So-and-so's children are all so short? I thought they had been carefully educated." "You may not be able," writes the author of a prize essay on Sunday-schools -"you may not be able to train up an apostle, but you may prevent one becoming a Judas. Had Mohammed, when a child, been placed under the care of a faithful Sabbathschool teacher, who can believe he would ever have been what he did become?" These are cases more or less extreme of what we mean by the temper of the Educator. The poor woman felt in herself the

power to suppress the most natural leanings and instincts; the lady believed she knew the training which could add inches if not cubits to the stature; the author regards Sundayschools under her system as a match, but also the only match, for all the powers of evil.

We would divide teachers and trainers into those who bow to human nature, and those who feel themselves equal, single-handed, to defy it; into those who only seek to direct and guide, and those who profess to "form" and "mould;" into those who regard certain innate leanings as master-tendencies not to be put down, and those who view the infant mind simply as so much plastic material to be wrought into any shape a cunning manipulator shall decide upon; and, finally, into those who would not, if they could, take the sole responsibility of their charge, and are thankful for external aids, and those who demand, as a first essential to their

system, absolute undisturbed possession. For the tutor and schoolmaster, however zealous in their calling, submit to a partnership, and leave much in other hands, as thinking them better hands; but an Educator, with due characteristic reliance on himself, when he sees a child, longs to take it from all existing influences-this is indeed the sine qua non. Give him the rough block and his own undisputed sway, and he will make a man of it; if he fails, it is because his system has been tampered with; he never owns to a mistake. The Educator is often, we may say generally, a very clever man; indeed the people who make the gravest, most deliberate errors in education, are often more than clever, they have genius and a work to do in the world; but they are possessed by an overweening selfopinion. Sweeping reformers, for example, though it may be the reformers of grave abuses, will, we believe, always blunder in education, if by ill-luck they take up the subject. These vehement characters, always employed in infusing new truths, acquire a profound contempt for the world's experience: it is no argument with them that mankind have hitherto acted on the plan they controvert; they are so accustomed, nay, necessitated by their position, to think themselves right and other people wrong, that the notion practically becomes part of them, and they sustain a shock and an injury when it is attempted to turn tables upon them. With them nothing is time-honoured or unassailable, and they are sustained by a faith in their power to set things right, which encourages them to attempt the most fundamental changes, and which renders a calm study of human nature a pursuit altogether out of their line, if not beneath their attention. Whether we grant them the title or not, all speculatists are reformers in their own eyes, and possessed, like them, with a remedy for every human error and misfortune; and

this is another distinction between the two classes we have indicated— the ordinary teacher believes his office to be one among many of equal importance; the Educator, as such, holds his system the universal panacea, and the one subject which should hold the attention and influence the actions of mankind. Thus Madame Roland, while yet a girl, professes to regard marriage solely as affording her an opportunity of educating. We quote the whole passage for its exquisite priggishness:- "I see in marriage," she writes to her friend, "many cares which seem to be only compensated by the pleasure of giving to society useful members. The pleasure, I think, outweighs the cares; but to enjoy it I must find some one who holds the same opinion, and who, moreover, possesses the ability to bring up his children worthily. In regard to a husband, I must look out as a man would do who, knowing the value of a good tutor, feels himself incapable of acting the part of one. I feel the necessity of a helpmate gifted with a superior mind, who can supply all that is wanting in me to educate my children as I could wish."

It will be seen that we do not sympathise with the school or schools who thus regard education as their specialty. Still men ought to be lenient to didactic yearnings. Teaching is so repugnant to the majority of men,-they are so helpless in their feeble spasmodic efforts at training and instruction-that they must feel respect for all who accept a task thus uncongenial, or it may be hateful, to themselves as their calling, until they see grave cause for mistrust. It is no merit in most of us to allow a child's natural bent fair-play, and to let who will give a helping hand; to have no system, or to frame our system on the convenience of letting things take the obvious course. The Educator's wilfulness is among the nobler class of errors; even the more arrogant have their place in the scheme of

things, as counteracting from time to time the world's laisser aller, and asserting theory and an ideal which mere common sense is so apt to forget and ignore in its habit of accepting things as they stand, with no other notion but of making the best of them. Moreover, with the most resolute intentions against sermonising, theorising, and dictation, nobody can take pen in hand on the subject of education without at intervals joining the fraternity we would indicate. It is of no use to declare beforehand against rules, and to appeal to experience as the sole arbiter; the writer is run away with against his will into declamation, assertion, pedantry, and truism. The contempt of others' theories which sounded so practical, only introduces some pet theory of his own. We do not blame him; we only find it inseparable from the impulse to indulge the world with some cherished conclusions on this subject. And it is a subject on which so many plausible things can be said, that not only the writer is satisfied with his argument and his proofs, but the reader is convinced too, so long as he confines his attention to the page before him, and does not awake to his own personal experience; and then ten to one he will find some confusion, if not some flat contradiction to what seems so self-evident on paper. Thus, if there is one thing more than another that writers on education are agreed upon, it is the necessity for firmness in a mother; their talk is enough to frighten timid feminine conscientiousness out of its wits; firmness of every shade, from severe firmness to mild determination in carrying her point, is the first requisite, the one indispensable condition of success. We own it seems as if it ought to be, and we are half afraid to dispute it; but is it true really? Is maternal weakness-showing itself in indulgence and infirmity of will-so fatal an error, so universally fatal, as we are told it is, till we almost feel that it ought to

be? From the old Lady Balcarras, with whom it was a word and a blow in promptest succession from the mother of the Wesleys, who had her children in such subjection that she taught even her infants to cry softly when they were whipped, and, shutting herself up in the schoolroom with each child on the completion of its fifth year, compelled it to learn the alphabet perfectly in six hours; to the tender mother quoted by Miss Sewell, who never spoke twice" to her children-the power of enforcing instantaneous obedience is put forward as the first duty in a mother, and results are adduced in confirmation. The children in all these cases honoured their parents and did their training honour-or rather those did who inherited their mother's temperament, the failures of whom there are generally more than one not counting. The fact is, all these women were firm by nature; but can no women make good mothers who are of another constitution? We see in real life mothers constitutionally impeded from being firm after the pattern of any example in books. All women can't have a strong will, and therefore they cannot put on a firm manner, which is absolutely necessary to enforce firm words; and therefore they have often to speak twice. Well, of course, such a mother has trouble that the others have not; but if she were to obey the books against her nature, might it not be a strained unnatural performance, and might not the children miss some lessons in learning others? Parents have an art no books can impart, and it goes far to nullify all that books can teach. By it a look or a tone does more than a spoken command, and establishes an understanding which set phrases and a rule ostentatiously in operation never do. The mother must not indeed yield to her nature merely to save herself trouble; she must work, and persevere. But if a woman is really fair,

impartial, and self-denying, we see that she may be what is called weak in action, infirm of purpose up to a point, and it does not do the children harm; a system that is according to her nature has to all appearance answered better than if she had done violence to it and shown herself to her children in a forced unreal aspect. Children by an instinct know their mother's disposition, though they are profoundly ignorant of possessing this knowledge, and she must rule through making the best of what she is. A little boy having been gently reproved by the mildest of mothers, and afterwards spoken to very kindly by her, exclaimed, with a forgiving air, "Well, you are a good mamma, after all." This speech would make a very indifferent figure in a book on education; but, in fact, these easy terms have ended in a willing obedience, a clinging to direction, on the son's part such as we never see where the duty was harshly, or even pedantically, enforced in childhood. All the infinite varieties of character, if actuated by conscience and a love of what is pure and right, have their influence for good. Nor can it be decided what in all cases is best; this must depend on the temper to be wrought upon, and that subtle affinity that exists between the mother and her child.

We are not disputing the duty of enforcing obedience, but we notice the general tone upon it as one instance among many, in which all teachers on education, in their study of abstract principles and their laying down of cause and effect, seem alike to ignore the niceties, irregularities, and compensations of nature. They say what in one sense is a truism-they say what we should expect to come true, but they do not paint the state of things that we see; and this is a feature in common with all Educators who start from what ought to be, or what is assumed to be, and not from what is. They all learn

to prefer their own manageable fancy to the perplexing truth. Thus one could hardly meet with men more utterly at variance in their views of life than Richard Lovel Edgeworth and John Wesley, but, as educators, they were alike influenced by a faith in themselves and their own theories which no experience could shake; they both would have nothing to do with the existing state of things, and both made the success of their system to depend on removal from all other influences. John Wesley was the great preacher of human depravity, while Mr Edgeworth and his distinguished daughter maintain a directly contrary opinion in these words :-"Falsehood, caprice, dishonesty, obstinacy, revenge, and all the train of vices which are the consequences of mistaken or neglected education, which are learned by bad example, and which are not inspired by nature, need scarcely be known to children whose minds have from their infancy been happily regulated. Such children should be sedulously kept from contagion; their minds are untainted; they are safe in that species of ignorance which alone can deserve the name of bliss;" but Wesley is quite as strong as the believer in inherent virtue on the evils of any free intercourse with others; it was his creed, too, that all our faults were caught by contagion. He goes even farther, and is as jealous of interference as though Providence had not instituted the parental relation. In his model school he forbade all association with other children, and would receive no boy whose parents did not pledge themselves not to take him from school, no not for a day, till they took him for good and all, on the principle that thus alone could his system have a fair trial. And while he cannot echo Mr Edgeworth's comfortable complacency on the success of his plans, and has to acknowledge that, after expelling some boys as incorrigible, those that