on the throne, he ardently wished for peace; that with respect to the conditions, he had done all that it was in his power to do, and was not at liberty to alter anything essential in them; that he wanted great dispatch, because, on opening his parliament, he was obliged to announce positively either peace or war; that he saw, with the greatest pleasure, that on the part of my court I raised no difficulty; that, if any more distant court" (alluding probably to Spain) "attempted to fetter ours, he hoped that the King would prevent a delay which would defeat the whole; that I was enough acquainted with the constitution of his country, to know that he informed me of what was true; and that he begged me to render an account to the King of his intentions and his circumstances. He pronounced all this with some embarrassment, but with candor, and with the air of a man who was much impressed with what he was saying. I even perceived that, in speaking to me of the constitution of his country, and of the restraint which it imposes on his operations, his embarrassment increased; he coloured, and appeared to feel inwardly mortified. It is useless to tell you what answer I made, &c. I mingled with all this the praise of his present ministry, which seemed to give great pleasure to Lord Egremont; who, I think, is more attached to his place than the great nobles of England commonly are; and I assured him that the Duke of Bedford would find in our ministers an entire correspondence of sentiments, principles, and proceedings. It was then that the King drew the most flattering portrait, and in truth the most complete likeness, of yourself and the Duke de Choiseul. The detail of it I shall spare to your modesty but it is proper for you to be told that His Britannic Majesty knows and feels perfectly the worth of you both; he said that he was charmed with the nobleness and the rectitude which you had shewn in the negotiation; that you were both real noblemen; and that great Kings ought ever to be thus served. He added expressions very gracious towards his present ministry, and others towards me; and the audience ended with fresh declarations of the desire which he feels to be cordially and indissolubly united with our King.”

The Duke frequently expresses his perfect satisfaction in the sincerity of His Britannic Majesty's wishes for peace; which he considers as the only method of emancipating him from the aristocracy, and establishing on lasting foundations the authority of Lord Bute. The letters should by no means escape the attention of our future historians; and they will of course be still more valuable, when accompanied by the contemporaneous official communications made to the French ministry.

In the fourth and last division of these works, we have nine dramatic pieces; which were hastily written in order to be produced at various fetes, and which contributed largely, we have no doubt, to the innocent amusement of the party, though they are by much too slight and temporary to add any lustre to the literary character of the author. One of them

is called "La Revanche du Duc de Nivernois:" but the only one, which afforded us much amusement, should be called "La Revanche des François," since it avenges the cause of the numerous class of Frenchmen whom we ridicule on our stage for speaking their own language, by exhibiting a "milord Anglais" absurdly deficient in the proper pronunciation of the French. Our countrymen might derive from it some good hints of the vices which most easily beset them in attempting French dialogue.

ART XII. Allgemeine Pädagogik, &c.; i e. A General Theory of Education. By J F. HERBART, Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Göttingen. 8vo. pp. 482. Göttingen.

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has of late years been often remarked among us that, if the number of our publications on the subject of Education might serve as a just measure of the attention bestowed on the rising generation, and of the zeal with which their improvement is sought, it would be natural and allowable to look for a rapid progress towards perfection in every public and private seminary for the propagation of knowJege and virtue among our youth. Reasoning on the same ground, what ought we not to expect from our German neighbours; since, for some time past, every Leipzig fair has produced new systems of education, and hundreds of volumes for the use of children and their instructors! Though, however, we evidently cannot allege that a necessary connection subsists between the literature of any certain branch of human attainment and the application of it in actual life, yet the prevailing sentiments of respectable writers. of an age or country, on so important a topic as education, must be highly deserving of our attention, as peculiarly qualified to cast some light on the characteristic features of that period or nation. We do not, therefore, deem it necessary to apologize to our readers, for prefacing our account of Professor HERBART's System of Education, with a short statement of the principal changes which have taken place in the prevailing ideas on this subject in Germany, during the last century; and for specifying the names of those, to whom their countrymen consider themselves as peculiarly indebted for an improved mode of promoting the welfare and virtue of their offspring. The limits of this article do not permit us to extend our observations to what is usually called the education of the people, and the arrangements made in a great part of Germany for its amelioration; though this branch of the inquiry would be peculiarly worthy of discussion.

Since the time of the ecclesiastical reformation commenced by Luther and Calvin, of which a reform in the schools and in the mode of public and private instruction was an immediate and necessary consequence, few changes had taken place till towards the commencement of the eighteenth century. The public schools continued till then to be conducted in the monastic spirit of the preceding ages, and education as a science may be said to have not yet existed. A poor pittance of Greek and Latin, acquired at a great expence of time and by the exertion of memory alone, under the influence of a barbarous discipline, was the principal result of the liberal education of the age. Private tutors imitated the example of schools, and scarcely considered it as necessary to possess any other knowlege than that which enabled them to translate, to parse, and to scan the poets of Greece and Rom.

In the year 1695, Augustus Herman Francke, Professor in the newly-founded university of Halle in Saxony, established a free school; with which he soon afterward united an institution for the education of children in the higher classes of society, and a seminary for school-masters and private tutors. Though the theory of education was little regarded in that establishment, its influence became very extensive, because it opened to the student a wide field of observation, and contributed to propagate the conviction that to educate required considerably more than a capacity for commanding, and for hearing a few lessons. As piety had suggested the first idea of the institution to its founder, this became also its most characteristic feature; which it communicated, through the great number of young men who were prepared in it for their future employments, to public and private instruction in a great part of Germany. That piety was, however, too much mingled with mysticism, and undervalued solid knowlege and intellectual improvement; and though education assumed a new character, its views were not enlarged nor its principles better understood. Greater influence of this kind must be ascribed to the writings of some foreign philosophers; particularly Locke's treatise on the Human Understanding, and afterward Rousa's Emile. The undeniable though the often slighted merit of the latter work is, that it presents a consistent whole according to a principle laid down at the outset; and in this respect, notwithstanding its absurdities and extravagancies, it is not perhaps surpassed by any other book on the same subject. After having been frequently misapplied and ridiculously followed, it served to produce a conviction of the necessity of bringing harmony andystem into all endeavours to form the minds and hearts of youth; and it excited at the same time a much greater atten

tion than had before been allotted to the gradual progress of the human mind, and the necessary care in adapting the mea sures of instruction to the abilities of the learner. Education now began to assume a scientific form, but was full of excentricities, and too much inclined to the sentimental.

A most important period in the pedagogical science and art in Germany commenced soon after the middle of the last century; when J. B. Basedow pointed out to his countrymen the perverse and unnatural course which till then had been pursued, and promised a total reform. Both his writings and his instructions of future teachers of youth, in an establishment formed for that purpose at Dessau, principally tended to extend the limited sphere within which the education of children had been confined, and to abridge the useless labour imposed on them in the acquisition of knowlege. The novelty of several of his ideas, and the expectation of performing wonders by the application of them, led him and many of his followers to the opposite extreme from the errors which they wished to avoid, and brought on the practice of trifling with instruction, and distracting the attention of young persons by the great variety of subjects which were laid before them. The learned languages were now too generally set aside, and the knowlege of their grammar was considered as an unnecessary incumbrance. The salutary effects of Basedow's exertions, however, overbalanced these temporary injuries. Public attention was directed to this most important subject, reflection was invited, and men of decided talents devoted them with indefatigable industry to inquiries and experiments tending to the improvement of their younger brethren. Psychology was studied with a particular view to education, many of the errors of Basedow and his first pupils were gradually corrected by experience, and the safe middle path was discovered and preferred.

In a work which appeared between the years 1786 and 1790 by M. Campe and others, under the title of Revision of the State of Education, &c. in 16 volumes, was given the result of the principal inquiries and experiments on this subject, up to the period of its publication. In the mean time, the philosophical system of Kant had acquired many friends, and extended its influence to all the sciences. The mania for new modelling every branch of scientific knowlege did not spare that of tuition; and almost all the philosophical systems, which within the last twenty years have succeeded each other so rapidly in Germany, have claimed the peculiar merit of bestowing new improvements on the theory of education, and establishing it on more solid principles than it had ever before

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possessed. One of the principal objects of inquiry has been the fundamental principle on which this system ought to be founded. The modern German philosophers reject the pursuit of happiness as the proper principle of moral philosophy: they therefore agree in not admitting it to become, even in the most extensive and most refined sense, the leading idea in the instruction of youth, and have usually substituted either that of perfection or that of moral excellence. Those who take no side in the contest will probably say that the difference lies rather in the words than the thing itself, and that the youth of Germany have not gained by the numerous publications which have been written on that subject.

It appears, however, that the desire of educating according to a certain system of metaphysics is now abated, and that the contending parties have become more willing to permit education to be neutral. Its good genius will have reason to rejoice when the new language, which has been introduced by the German philo sophers, no longer obscures publications which, above all others, ought to possess the merit of clearness and extensive adaptation. German literature contains, perhaps, as rich a fund of excel lent materials for the improvement of modes of instruction, as that of any other nation; and more pains have been taken by the literati of that country to arrange and compare them than by those of either France or England. It also deserves to be mentioned that, in all the principal German universities, education forms one of the topics on which lectures are constantly given; and that in many parts establishments are formed, which are supported by the respective governments, for training school-masters for the different classes of society; among which that of Hanover, heretofore liberally patronized by His Majesty, was particularly distinguished, We mention these facts without drawing from them a conclusion concerning the actual state of practical education in Germany.

Among the most modern German works on this subject, which have met with decided approbation, that of Dr. Niemeyer, under the title of Principles of Education and Instruction, deserves honorable distinction; since it unites theory with practical advice, without any mixture of useless speculation, and proceeds from a man of very solid learning and an elegant and li beral mind. Within the last ten or twelve years, also, the ingenious mode of instruction invented by M. Pestalozzi, which has excited much attention in France, Denmark, and Sweden, has found many friends and advocates in Germany, and seems to be still gaining ground.

After this long, though we hope not useless, preamble, we must proceed to state our opinion of Professor HERBART's work,