religion alone that we can look for true morality, he then recommends the general diffusion of knowledge among all classes of the people, and afterward says: In proportion as the structure of government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened.

By the enlightening of public opinion, the Father of his Country surely did not mean the education of children in the rudiments of learning. It was to the education of men, in their duties as members of the body politic. It was to teach them to think, and judge, and act, for themselves, that they might rightly use their privileges as freemen, and not ignorantly or heedlessly abuse those blessings which were bought by the blood of revolutionary patriots. The learning taught in the schools, and the education of books, are beneficial in their place; yet these are not indispensable to a man's enlightened discharge of his duties as a citizen. A strong-minded, sound-judging man, educated by observation and thought, and deeply interested in his country's welfare, though he may be so unskilled in schoolboy acquirements as to be unable to write his own name, or even read that of his chosen candidate, is yet far more capable of rightly using his privilege of voting, than the graduate of a college, who has circumnavigated the whole circle of the sciences, and is familiar with every written language, but who has never spent a thought upon the government of his country, or upon the requisite qualifications of its officers. The education of children is now becoming a subject of great and engrossing interest, and it is a noble cause for exertion. This is planting for the good of the coming generation; but cannot something also be done for the present? Is not the moral improvement of those who are now men and women, fathers and mothers, as binding on the lover of his country, and his kind, as that of children who are to become these in future? Surely it must be. Even the cause of education would prosper more successfully, if the duty of enlightening the opinions of the parents received its due share of attention. Parental example and authority are powerful instruments in elevating or debasing the character of a child. And all efforts to benefit mankind should begin in the family circle, for here is the fountain-head of good and of evil. Contrast the influence of a teacher, however competent by his knowledge and wisdom, or venerated for his piety and benevolence, with that of the parent, the brothers and sisters. The few precepts given, and the few hours spent in a school, are but feeble restraints in checking the vicious tendencies wrought by the example of home, and fostered by its powerful and pervading influences.

Let the patriot, the philanthropist, and the Christian, think of these things. Let them follow the example of those whom they must unite to oppose, in their perseverance, their activity, and their untiring effort. Let them enlist the press in their cause, and give the people line upon line, and precept upon precept-leading them gradually and pleasantly onward in the knowledge of their various duties. And surely the advantage of oral instruction and public addresses should not be left wholly in the possession of their opponents. Then let those who have studied human nature, and who are friendly to the true interests of their fellow creatures, search out and reflect upon

the best plans for enlightening public opinion, and diligently pursue those most suitable for promoting the desired end. To such, we take the liberty of suggesting a plan which was found eminently useful in a period strikingly similar, in many respects, to our own. Then as now, there were disaffection and rebellion against the laws, and murmurings and threatenings, riots and tumults, among the people, from the scarcity and high prices of provisions. There was also an active dissemination of infidel and disorganizing doctrines, written in a style to attract the poor, sold at low prices, and disseminated with incredible industry. This plan was, to fight these venders of anarchy and atheism with their own weapons,' and to establish by subscription, a kind of periodical issue of tracts, called 'The Cheap Repository,' in which three separate publications were produced every month, consisting of stories, ballads, and Sunday readings, written in a lively and popular manner, by way of counteraction to the poison continually flowing through the channel of vulgar, licentious, and seditious publications.'

The design succeeded beyond the most sanguine expectations of its projector and principal writer.* Two millions of these publications were sold in the first year; and the good effects said to have proceeded from these tracts, would be almost beyond belief, were they not recorded in the letters of Bishop Porteus, and other equally celebrated characters of the time. Of one ballad called 'The Riot,' it is stated that it prevented a mob among the colliers near Bath, in which the mills were to be attacked, and the flour seized. And it is related of the Village Politics,'' that it flew, with a rapidity which may appear incredible to those whose memories do not reach back to that period, into every part of the kingdom. Many thousands were sent by government to Scotland and Ireland. Numerous patriotic persons printed large editions, at their own expense, and in London alone many hundred thousands were soon circulated.' And this little publication is said to have wielded at will' the fierce democracy of England,' and to have tamed the tide of misguided opinion. And many persons of the soundest judgment went so far as to affirm, that it had essentially contributed, under Providence, to prevent a revolution.'

Although we are not so sanguine as to expect that any single publication would have the effect in 'wielding at will' an American populace, yet we are confident that much good might be wrought upon the public mind, by the circulation of tracts written to suit the times and the people, and illustrating, in a popular and attractive manner, the dangerous tendency of these frequent risings against law and good order, pointing out the mischiefs of disorganizing and infidel doctrines, and exciting a desire to be faithful as Christians, husbands, fathers, and patriots. To bring forward any effectual result, there must be combined, constant, and long-continued effort; there must be unwearied perseverance, and untiring activity. We have made the suggestion, and leave it in the hands of those who love their country and their countrymen, and are willing to labor in the good cause of enlightening public opinion.

Miss HANNAH MORE.

These are thy trophies, and thou bend'st thine arch,
The sign of triumph, in a seven-fold twine,
Where the spent storm is hasting on its march;
And there the glories of thy light combine,

And form with perfect curve a lifted line,

Striding the earth and air: man looks and tells
How Peace and Mercy in its beauty shine,
And how the heavenly messenger impels

Her glad wings on the path, that thus in ether swells.

THE POETRY OF MOTION.

Ir is certainly not amiss, that Gray places the dance among the earliest offspring of harmony and beauty. The Talmudists, indeed, will have it, that Adam, in the transport which the first sight of Eve gave him, fell into a jig or rigadoon. So, at least, we have somewhere read though certainly not in the Talmud itself, we confess. But the story smells strongly of that system of legends, which makes our great progenitor to have been, intuitively, acquainted with all the sciences, and the inventor of all the arts. In the same manner, he has been averred to have formed the alphabetic signs first, A (broad) out of the exclamation of delight which escaped him, when he awoke from his dream, and found Eve at his side then the thinner vowel, E, from her interjection, when he clasped her in his arms then the still slenderer I, from the first squall with which Cain (his eldestborn) saluted the light - then the melancholy O, when Abel perished, all for the want of having a head as cudgel-proof as an Irishman's; and so on, of the rest. But, as to the dance, this Rabbinical history is suspicious. For though the earliest step of many young quadrupeds as the lambkin, the fawn, the pig and the calf* -seems to be a sort of native and voluntary tripudium, or saltation, yet dancing comes, with them, in this order, because they are incapable of music, the true source of that art, in its human guises. It is perhaps Prior's system, which best explains the origin of the dance. According to it, the soul, entering its future machine at the toes, displays its first movements in the kicking which agitates those parts. Afterward, it mounts into the legs and arms; between which, during the whole sojourn that it makes in them, there is so close and active a sympathy, that the latter cannot touch a tabor or a fiddle, but the former begin to leap and frisk.

Indeed, of dancing, in those grave old days, when men lived a thousand years, and life was a matter as much more serious as it was longer than now, we hear nothing. It is not set down among the inventions of that cunning artisan, the antediluvian blacksmith, TubalCain. There is, to be sure, difficulty in supposing that any fresh species of wickedness is now permitted, which was unpractised at the time when heaven found it necessary to re-purify all mundane things, by a somewhat profound baptization. At any rate, we hear nothing of dancing-masters before the Flood: and from the fact, that Noah is

GRAY illustrates this:

'New-born flocks, in rustic dance,
Frisking ply their feeble feet.'

not said to have danced, even when he was tipsy, we are in a manner forced to conclude that this was not among the patriarch's accomplishments. Nevertheless, it is true again, that, as Learning is equally serviceable at explaining every thing, and straightway confounding whatever it explains, we must add that the invention of Wine has been held (see Bryant and others) to establish the identity of Noah with Bacchus; of whose worship dancing and theatric entertainments of all sorts were every where a main part.

Having thus, as to all higher authorities, tied the matter up into a very knotty doubt, we may now properly go on to say, that Lucian is of opinion that dancing goes back to the very birth-day of the creation. It was born, he thinks, with love itself; and the measured movement of the stars, their harmonious and balanced progression, their complex yet regular advance and retreat to that mighty tune which the spheres struck up, when the planets were first set in their orbs, was the beginning of the Ballet. Upon the same idea, Andreini, by a still bolder metaphor, in that poem on the Creation, which some have imagined to be the origin of Paradise Lost, makes the rainbow the great original fiddle-stick, that, with a flourish across the vast instrument of the constellations, sent the whole host of the skies a-reeling off, in that waltz which they have danced ever since. Certain it is, that astronomy and dancing were originally the same art. The Chaldean shepherds, who first observed the stars, are known to have imitated their movements in a solemn dance; by which, as with a sort of living orrery, they taught their pupils the celestial motions. From them, the science was transmitted, by the same means, to the Egyptians; who retained the astronomic quadrille, till, in the decline of their learning, both dancing and mathematics were extinguished together. Since then, broken from that early connexion in which art reflects such light upon art, the two sciences have, unhappily, been so far divorced as to become, in vulgar apprehension, the very antipodes of each other; and both have so declined, that philosophers now rarely excel in the dance, and dancing-masters are but seldom adepts in astronomy.*

In Grecian fable, a like reverence for the dance attributed to it the same celestial origin. That respectable lady, Cybele, the common grandmother of the gods, is supposed to have been its foundress, upon occasion of the birth of Jupiter; whose infant cries were kept from reaching the ears of his child-devouring sire, the good Saturn, by means of the noisy dances of the Corybantes, the attendants and priests of the Bona Dea. The dance itself was a warlike one, of the Pyrrhic sort; and was trod to the sound of pipes, drums and fifes; the performers brandishing swords and javelins; with which, in the evolutions of the measure, they smote, in cadence, upon each others' bucklers; imitating the whole disorder, fury, and clangour of a battle.

Saved by this feminine device, the king of gods could scarcely fail, when he grew up to man's estate, to hold dancing in high esteem, and assiduously to practice it. He is accordingly spoken of, by more than one of the poets, as performing, featly enough, in the assemblies

* It is singular that Mrs. SOMERVILLE, in her Connexion of the Physical Sciences,' has totally overlooked this remarkable relationship.