of the human heart; and the third, for deliverance from factitious difficulties and self-created impediments. When these prayers are put up universally, with due sincerity of soul and energy of purpose, we shall hear no more of the Church of Rome, or the Church of England, with their distinctive errors and assumptions. Their peculiar claims, at any rate, and, we trust, their common vices, will merge in the prevalence of the church of Christ.

EXPOSITION OF PROFESSOR JACOTOT'S SYSTEM OF

EDUCATION.*

THE first thing to be examined into in considering the pretensions of any new system of education is its harmony with the whole constitution of the beings who are to be subjected to it. Nothing is easier than to discover methods. by which separate portions of the human creature may be brought to a very high degree of perfection, provided other portions are left out of consideration; and a partial system may promise great things, and perform all its promises, without being at all fit for general adoption. Many an idiot with a marvellous memory has been made an idiot by the education of his memory. Many a dyspeptic mathematician would willingly give up some of his scientific attainment, if his dyspepsia would go with it. Many a man, the workings of whose intellect are unusually true, sighs for that

*

A Compendious Exposition of the Principles and Practice of Professor Jacotot's celebrated System of Education. By Joseph Payne. London. 1830,

Epitome Historiæ Sacræ, adapted, by a literal Translation, to Jacotot's Method. By Joseph Payne. London. 1831.

harmony of spirit with God and man of which he has been deprived by being taught to pursue means as ends. It is quite as possible to make a child a prodigy of philosophy or learning at fifteen (at the risk of sending him out of the world at that age) as it is to make an infant twice the average size of infants by pouring in as much cream as the digestive organs will bear. The great question is, not

whether these feats may not be achieved, but whether it is desirable that they should be achieved; and before the claims of any new mode of education are investigated, it should be ascertained whether, granting them to be sound in themselves, they are likely to interfere with other claims of greater importance.

Nobody disputes this; and yet what dreadful havoc do we daily see introduced into the constitution of the future man by the neglect of so plain a consideration! So bitter is the heart-ache which compassionate observers feel from witnessing the destruction of some component part or another of the unhappy pupils of new systems, that they are tempted, in contradiction to reason, to conclude that a fortuitous education is the best thing that children can be blessed with, after all. Such a conclusion is monstrous, we allow; but some excuse is to be made for it in the presence of all the immediate pain, and in prospect of all the future harm, caused by that exaggeration of systems already partial and exaggerated which now strikes us wherever we turn our eyes. It is melancholy to see a train of children going out to walk with open lesson books in their hands. It is melancholy to see the trickling tears which mock the parent, while he talks of the primary necessity of interesting children in what they learn. It is melancholy to see the irritability induced by perpetual interrogation, and the dislike to learn caused by the obligation to be always learning. It would be ludicrous, if it were not melancholy, to see little

ones of eight years old drawing maps of the English Constitution, and explaining the relations of the legislative and executive departments, of King, Lords, and Commons, before they have learned any thing of domestic government but what they must detest. It is really not to be wondered at that good-natured people would rather see these victims of system with the rosy face and round eyes of a ploughboy, and as stupid as he, than dwindled in body, and crushed in mind, as they are too often at present seen to be. The prospect is even worse than the present reality. What can come of the method (mistakenly called Pestalozzian) of interrogating children from morning till night, but that the timid will be dismayed and stupified, and the bold made superficial and conceited? Pestalozzi was perfectly right in avoiding the old system, where all was communication on the part of the teacher, and submissive reception on that of the pupil; but he little dreamed of what should be done in his name while he was doing every thing in the name of nature. If we may judge by much that we have seen, there will be, in a few years, an influx on society of conceited halfthinkers, of presumptuous all-knowers, who know nothing. thoroughly, and have been too much habituated to answer questions when the solution was placed within their reach, to think of asking any when a reply is not quite so close at hand. We are far from wishing that the stir about education, through which all this has arisen, had not taken place. We are not so sanguine as to suppose that any reformation of importance can take place without the introduction and occasional prevalence of many errors; and we look for a certain, if not speedy, enlargement of views, and for a better direction of a very laudable zeal than that which has signalized the adoption of the many new systems of which we hear. What we desire is, not the relinquishment of what has been taught us from abroad, but its further prosecution;

not a return to the Eton grammar, on the one hand, or chance, on the other, but that details should not be pursued to the exclusion of principles; that the great principle of education should be a regard to the greatest ultimate happiness of the pupil; and that the operation of this principle should be determined by the facts of the pupil's own constitution, as well as by those of his location. This is professed to be the design of every system of education that is offered to notice; but we must acknowledge that we have found it pure and complete only in the quiet administration of parents who make their own good sense their chief guide, and who, while learning from every system, profess none.

Before science had driven chance from the conceptions, and almost from the vocabulary, of wise people, it was perfectly natural that an education of fortuitous influences should be supposed sometimes a very happy, and sometimes a very harmless thing. But now that it is known to a certainty that there is no such thing as chance, and that a continually progressive power is given to the human will (in proportion to the enlargement of human knowledge) over all the agents whose nature can be discerned, it seems as barbarous a proceeding to leave a child to be educated by nature, as to leave it in the woods to be bred up by savages. Man has been learning to modify the influences to which his offspring are exposed. Man is convinced that in course of time he will be able to do this so completely, that, having acquainted. himself with the primary conditions of his children's being, he will be able to make them what he chooses and, by means of the coöperation of a sufficient number of parents, to place the offspring of all in an atmosphere of virtue and wisdom by which their being shall be nourished up to a perfection we may conceive of, but must wait long to witness. We are now somewhere between the extremes of a fortuitous education and a perfectly conducted one. We are bustling and

striving after some special methods in which we are apt to imagine resides general efficacy. We are so eagerly exerting our influence in some particular modes of operation, that we forget our equal responsibility in others. What good principles we have laid hold of, we do not carry out far enough; what specific processes we have found to be good, we are apt to apply too pertinaciously and too generally. Health is not yet, as it may be centuries hence, a matter of course; morals cannot be taught merely by exercising the intellect, nor science by administering to the affections. We make our pupils learned at the expense of their nerves, and pious while we neglect their understandings; and yet exercise and diet are as much under our control as religious influences, and the operations of the reasoning faculty as much as either.

Careful as we should be, therefore, in adopting any new systems of education, our proneness to the partial cultivation of our pupils should make us doubly watchful of those systems which relate only to particular departments of education. Among these is the system of Jacotot, which has nothing to do with physical or moral development, though it advances extraordinary pretensions as far as the intellect is concerned. Now, before we examine these pretensions, we must express our doubts whether this system can by any good management on the part of the teacher be pursued by the pupil with that relish,- whether it can ensure to him those encouragements and rewards which are essential to the healthful prosecution of any study, and to its beneficial moral effects. Of any but the intellectual results of these methods we know nothing; but we feel pretty sure that we could not in childhood have gone through such wearisome labor as is here prescribed without losing more in one way than we could gain in another.

"The Universal Instruction has but one route. The pupil is required to commit to memory the first six books of Telema