numerous than before, and continually increasing; the pecuniary saving of a household of working-people over that of a crowd of helpless beings raving in a state of coercion was very great; and of the difference in the comfort of each and all under the two systems, there can, of course, be no doubt. The Hanwell Asylum was not, even at first, the only one in which the humane and efficacious new method of treating insanity was practised; but, as the metropolitan asylum, built at this date, it was the most conspicuous, as were the merits of Dr. and Mrs. Ellis, from their having been many years engaged and successful in the noble task of their lives. Drainage. We find during this period much improvement going on in drainage and enclosure of land, and extension of waterworks. The Ewbank drainage, by which 9000 acres of land in Cardiganshire were reclaimed for cultivation, was completed in 1828, with its embankments, cuts, three miles of road, and stone bridge.1 In a small insular territory, the addition of 9000 acres to its area of cultivation is not an insignificant circumstance. At the same date we find an achievement of somewhat the same kind notified in the records of the year, in those capital letters which indicate the last degree of astonishment. Chat Moss, lying in the line of the Manchester and Liverpool Railway, was under treatment for the formation of the line; and, we are told, that "horses with loaded wagons, each weighing five tons, are constantly moving over those parts of the moss which originally would scarcely bear a person walking over it." The marvels of this first great English railway were opening upon the world by degrees. This solidifying of Chat Railway. Moss was enough at first. Next, we find that two locomotives were put to use on the works, to draw the marl and rock from the excavations, at a saving of nearly 50l. a month in one case, and more in the other. But the highest astonishment of all was experienced on occasion of the race of locomotives on the line, for a prize of 5007., when "the Rocket actually accomplished one mile in one minute and twenty seconds; being at the rate of forty-five miles an hour."2 If men had been told at even that late date at what speed our Queen would be travelling twenty years later, they would have been as truly amazed as our greatgrandfathers could have been at the notion of travelling from London to Edinburgh in a day. It is very interesting to observe how strong was the exultation, twenty years ago, when any improvement in road-making turned up; how anxious men were to publish new facts about the best methods of skirting hills, managing differences of level, and connecting the substructure and 1 Companion to the Almanac, 1830, p. 253. 2 Companion to the Almanac, 1830, p. 251. superstructure of the mail-roads, so as to facilitate to the utmost the passage of the mails. We find earnest declarations of the increase of postal correspondence, of the evils of delay, and of the benefits of rapid communication between distant places. These notices seem to us now clear indications of the approach of the railway age; but no one then knew it. What these complaints and declarations and desultory toils indicated, we can now recognize, but our fathers- except a philosopher here and there could not then foresee. Nor shall we perhaps learn philosophy from the lesson, nor perceive that every urgent want, every object of restless popular search, foreshows a change by which the want will be met, and the search rewarded. As men were anxiously and restlessly mending their old roads up to the very time of the opening of the great first English railway, so may we be complaining and toiling about some inadequate. arrangement which needs superseding, while on the verge of the disclosure of the supersession. It would save us much anxiety and some wrath, and render us reasonable in our discontents, if we could bear this in mind as often as we come into collision with social difficulties, whether they be mechanical or political; for social difficulties of both orders come under the same law of remedy. In 1828, a committee of the professors of the University of Reading for Edinburgh were employed on a very interesting serthe blind. vice, — witnessing how, by means of a special method of printing, the blind "were able to read with their fingers as quickly, or nearly so, as we could suppose them to do with their sight in ordinary circumstances.” 1 Since that time, the method of printing for the blind by raised letters, to be traced with the fingers, has been much extended; and embossed maps are largely brought into use, to teach them geography. The question of the existence of a faculty by which space could be apprehended and reasoned about, without any aid from the sense of sight, was proved by the case of Dr. Saunderson; and it is very interesting to watch its working in children who have never seen light, when they learn geography by means of these embossed maps. And the printing of books for their use has been facilitated from year to year, till now the number of books to which they have access is greatly increased, and their cost much diminished. The honor of the invention, in the form under notice, was assigned to Mr. Gall, by the committee of Edinburgh professors; and it is an honor greater than it is in the power of princes to bestow. Before this time, the public had become aware of Sir W. Scott's claim to the undivided authorship of the Waverley Novels. In 1827, the copyrights of the novels, from Scott's novels. 1 Edinburgh paper, April, 1828. 1 "Waverley" to "Quentin Durward," with those of some of the poems, were sold by auction, and bid for as if the successive editions of these wondrous works had not already overspread the civilized world. After the unparalleled issue which had amazed the book-trade for so many years, the competition for the property was yet keen: the whole were purchased by Mr. Cadell for 8,500%.; and he made them produce upwards of 200,0007. What would the novelists of a century before what will the novelists of a century hence, if such an order of writers then exists think of this fact? Genius of a high quality finds or makes its own time and place; but still the unbounded popularity of Scott as a novelist seems to indicate some peculiar fitness in the public mind for the pleasure of narrative fiction in his day. And it might be so; for his day lay between the period of excitement belonging to the war, and that later one of the vast expansion of the taste for physical science, under which the general middleclass public purchases five copies of an expensive work on geology for one of the most popular novels of the time. Certain evidences, scattered through later years, seem to show, that, while the study of physical science has spread widely and rapidly among both the middle and lower classes of our society, the taste for fiction has, in a great degree, gone down to the lower. Perhaps the novel-reading achieved by the middle classes during Scott's career was enough for a whole century; and in sixty years hence the passion may revive. To those, however, who regard the changes occurring in the office and value of literature, this appears hardly probable. However that may be, the world will scarcely see again, in our time, a payment of above 80007. for any amount of copyright of narrative fiction. festival. A great festival was held at Stratford-upon-Avon in April, 1827, on Shakspeare's birthday, and the two following Shakspeare days, from the 23d to the 25th inclusive.2 There was a procession of Shakspeare characters, music, a chanting of his epitaph at the church, banquets, rustic sports, and a masquerade, chiefly of Shakspeare characters. Such festivals commemorating neither political nor warlike achievement, but something better than either are good for a nation, and themselves worthy of commemoration in its history. Actors. Some old favorites of the drama, or rather of the stage, went out during this period; and some new ones came in. Fawcett retired, after having amused and interested the crowd of his admirers for thirty-nine years; and Grimaldi, the unequalled clown, took his farewell in a prodigious last pantomime. There was something unusually pathetic in his 1 Annual Register, 1827, Chron. p. 200. retirement, however, sad as are always the farewells of favorite actors.1 He was prematurely worn out. As he said that night, he was like vaulting ambition, he had overleaped himself. He was not yet eight-and-forty; but he was sinking fast. "I now," he said, "stand worse on my legs than I used to do on my head." This was a melancholy close of the merriment of Grimaldi's night and of his career. But there is seldom or never an absence of favorites in the play-going world. While, according to Lord Eldon, the sun of England was about to set for ever; while a Catholic demagogue was trying to force his way into Parliament, to the utter destruction of Church and State, and every thing else, Lord Eldon 2 thus writes: "Amidst all our political difficulties and miseries, the generality of folks here direct their attention to nothing but meditations and controversies about the face and figure and voice of the new lady who is come over here to excite raptures and encores at the opera house, namely, Mademoiselle Sontag. Hardly any other subject is touched upon in conversation, and all the attention due Sontag. to Church and State is withdrawn from both, and bestowed on this same Mademoiselle Sontag. Her face is somewhat too square for a beauty, and this sad circumstance distresses the body of fashionables extremely." Mademoiselle Sontag did not stay very long; and her birdlike Fanny warblings were forgotten in the higher interest of the Kemble. appearance of another Kemble the next year. The young Fanny Kemble, then only eighteen, came forward in October, 1829, under circumstances which secured to her beforehand the sympathy of the public, as her name insured for her a due appreciation of her great talents. She came forward to retrieve her father's affairs, and those of Covent Garden Theatre; and her success was splendid. For two or three seasons, she was the rage. There were always those who, true to art, and loyal to Mrs. Siddons, saw that her niece's extraordinary popularity could not last, unsustained as it was by the long study, experience, and discipline- to say nothing of the unrivalled geniusof Mrs. Siddons; but the appearance of the young actress was a high treat, though a temporary one, to the London public. She went to America, and married there; and subsequent appearances in England have not revived the enthusiasm which her first efforts excited. The dramatic world is not more sure of a constant succession of enthusiasms than the religious. It is at this time, in 1828, that we first hear of that extraordinary man who was soon to turn so many heads; the greater number by a passing excite2 Life of Lord Eldon, iii. 46. 1 Annual Register, 1828, Chron. p. 85. 3 Annual Register, 1829, Chron. p. 170. ment, and not a few by actually crazing them. The way in which we first hear of the Rev. Edward Irving is Irving. characteristic. It was by the fall of a church in 2 Kirkcaldy, from the overcrowding of the people to hear him.' The gallery fell, and brought down much ruin with it. Twentyeight persons were killed on the spot, and one hundred and fifty more or less injured. Among the killed were three young daughters of a widowed mother, who never more lifted up her head, and was laid by their side in a few weeks. What Irving was as a sign of the times, we shall have occasion to see hereafter; for, for seven years from this date, and especially during the first half of that period, he was conspicuous in the public eye, and doing what he could, under a notion of duty, to intoxicate the national mind. What he had been, up to the first burst of his fame, we know through the testimony of one who understood him well: "What the Scottish uncelebrated Irving was, they that have only seen the London celebrated — and distorted one can never know. His was the freest, brotherliest, bravest human soul mine ever came in contact with. I call him, on the whole, the best man I have ever, after trial enough, found in the world, or now hope to find. The first time I saw Irving was six and twenty years ago, in his native town, Annan. He was fresh from Edinburgh with college prizes, high character, and promise. He had come to see our schoolmaster, who had also been his. We heard of famed professors, of high matters classical, mathematical, a whole wonder-land of knowledge; nothing but joy, health, hopefulness without end, looked out from the blooming young man. It was in 1809 that he was this "blooming young man. The rest of the picture what he was just before his death at the age of forty-two-we shall see but too soon. These were times when some such man as Edward Irving was pretty sure to rise up; times certain to excite and to be- Religious tray any such man who might exist within our borders. parties. The religious world was in an extraordinary state of confusion, with regard both to opinion and conscience. The High-Church party was becoming more and more disgusted with the appeals of the day to the vulgar "Protestantism" of the mob, while it was no less alarmed at the concessions made to the popular will on both civil and ecclesiastical matters. The most earnest members of this party were already looking towards each other, and establishing that sort of union which was immediately to cast discredit on the hitherto honored name of Protestantism, and very soon to originate the "Tracts for the Times." This party had lost its trust in the Crown: it had no sympathy with Parliament, and 1 Annual Register, 1828, Chron. p. 75. 2 Carlyle's Miscellanies, iv. 81, 82. |