her because of her temper. She was like a wild beast when angry, and when she had one of her angry fits the daughter of the house was afraid of sleeping without locking her door. Sometimes she would

have a fit of doing nothing for a whole day. Except for her temper they liked her. They have seen her once since she left. She came with a girl, who was, she said, an old school companion. The girls were going to Kew for the day with a man. P. N. said he was her friend's father, but he was very well dressed, and did not look at all like a man who would have had a daughter at a pauper school. The master and mistress don't believe that he was the father of P. N.'s friend, and did not like the look of it altogether. They have not heard of her since; but she has been once to the school since then, and said she was waitress at an eating-house. Other girls, who knew her in school, report that P. N. and another girl were living together, and had been seen sitting on a doorstep in the east of London. On being questioned by their old companions they said their husbands were in Switzerland, but they wore no wedding rings, and the informants do not think they were married.'

4. Those girls who are classed by Mrs. Senior and her assistants as unsatisfactory,' and whom most people would regard as failures, at any rate when viewed as the outcome of a system designed to train them for domestic service, Mr. Tufnell will in nowise admit to be such; though it is difficult to see how girls of whom the reports are of the following kind can be reckoned as successful specimens of training: (1.) A 'pilferer, untruthful, idle, incorrigibly dirty in habits. Can scrub a floor, but has no other accomplishment.' (2.) Very < dishonest and dirty. Mistress (a kind person) keeps her because she cannot give her a character." (3.) Dishonest, untruthful, very sullen, very bad as regards housework. Very dirty in all her habits.' (N.B. The girls in these three cases had been at school respectively from infancy, for seven years and for eight years.) Mr. Tufnell, in dealing with the first table, not only classes girls of this order with those doing well, but even rejects all those classed as 'bad,' with the exception of four who are stated positively to have fallen, and two of the three who are in Reformatories. He will not admit into the calculation either the eight who are said to have probably fallen, or the one in a Reformatory who had been only three weeks in school. Thus, having eliminated the 188 unsatisfactory, and reduced by his very simple and summary process the 78 bad to 6, he arrives at rather less than one per cent. of failures! His successes, therefore, include girls of whom the characters read after the following fashion:

'IN SCHOOL FROM A CHILD.

'Dishonest; untruthful; very sullen. Very clean, but very slow as

regards housework; knew nothing about it but scrubbing when she Dismissed for stealing. Stole a sovereign first, and was for

came.

given, but afterwards took some half-crowns.

'IN SCHOOL 6 OR 7 YEARS.

Honest, but sullen, obstinate, rebellious, and untruthful. Mistress had a great deal of trouble with the girl, hoping she might improve, but she got so defiant at last, that she was obliged to dismiss her. Mistress has heard since from the girl's sister that she is doing very badly.'

Well may Mr. Tufnell, if he regard these as successful results of training-to quote his own words-' defy Mrs. Senior and all her anonymous delegates to prove by any reliable 'evidence that more than 4 per cent. of children trained ' in district schools ever fail when in the world to gain an 'honest and independent livelihood.'

We have now made it abundantly clear what manner of result is actually attained by these schools in training girls to be fit members of the community, and what a lamentable state of things is revealed by Mrs. Senior's investigations. We do not shut our eyes to the fact that the material is bad; but what is borne in upon us with irresistible conviction is that the system does not deal properly with the material. The children in pauper schools all over the country are characterised by the same defects: smallness of stature, sullenness and obstinacy of disposition, and apathy of mind. That is to say, wherever they are brought together in vast herds, these defects at once appear. That this is the result of an unnatural and artificial mode of life, and not of any taint in the pauper blood,' is proved by the fact that the same children when placed under the healthy conditions of boarding-out get rosy of cheek, shoot up in stature, and in a short time, losing all characteristics of the workhouse child,' are indistinguishable from the children of the ordinary labourer. In proportion as they are separated, in proportion as they are able to receive individual treatment, and are placed in natural conditions, in that proportion do they prosper and flourish.

We cannot look upon the boarding-out system with quite so much confidence and enthusiasm as Mrs. Senior and her assistants have expressed in their reports, and we are not insensible to the difficulties of either course. There is the difficulty of dealing with no less than 50,000 children, who are deprived of their natural guardians and are thrown upon the compassion of strangers. There is the difficulty of finding suitable persons and places for the education of this vast population of outcasts, and the danger that those who are induced to under

take this arduous duty may end by converting it into a speculation. We have not forgotten the abuses which childfarming had led to thirty years ago, before those establishments were reformed by Dr. Kay and Mr. Tufnell. But we think that within moderate limits the boarding-out system may be tried with a good chance of success. It is difficult to see why that which is practised in Scotland, not to mention Ireland, Germany, Russia, or France, should be impossible in England. Even assuming, however, that the difficulties in the way of the adoption of Boarding-out for orphan children are insuperable, Mrs. Senior's suggestion of breaking the large schools up into smaller ones, and of dealing with 'permanents and casuals' in different schools, ought certainly to be adopted. To some extent, as she points out, this might be done whilst retaining the present costly structures, so as to prevent the money spent on them from being entirely thrown away. the children must be dealt with on a different principle. The fact must be looked in the face that industrial and not intellectual training is the primary requirement; and that the children, being mostly of the same class as are dealt with in Reformatories, must receive the same kind of treatment, if we are to hope for success in our endeavours to qualify them for gaining an honest and independent livelihood.

But

ART. V.-The Works of Thomas Love Peacock, including his Novels, Poems, Fugitive Pieces, Criticisms, &c.; with a Preface by the Right Hon. Lord Houghton, a Biographical Notice by his Granddaughter, Edith Nicolls, and Portrait. Edited by HENRY COLE, C.B. In three volumes. London: 1875.

FOURTEEN years ago a novel made its appearance which was

more favourably reviewed than generally read. Moreover, 'Gryll Grange' puzzled the critics, and many of them had the candour to own as much. It set at defiance the received canons of the craft, and was in flat contradiction to the prevailing fashions of the day. Its plot was loose and wild, its incidents were incoherent or extravagant, and its characters anything rather than the commonplace individualities one is in the habit of meeting in everyday life. But it bore upon every page the marks of a vigorous idiosyncrasy; it showed comprehensive acquaintance with men and things, with social theories and political systems, although it regarded them almost invariably through an eccentric medium. It was clear

that the writer had read much and reflected deeply; that the studies of his predilection had been among the classical authors of Greece and Rome, until the cast of his thought had taken its tinge from them, and he had insensibly imbued himself with the very spirit of their literature. A critic by temperament with the gifts of a poet, perhaps his strength lay in satire and irony. But he was absolutely brimming over with humour that was sometimes kindly though often sarcastic. No subject came much amiss to him, though it was plain that he had marked preferences, and it might be assumed that his opinions were as decided as his prejudices. But it was difficult to surmise what his opinions really were, for sometimes when his characters seemed to be delivering his mind and you were submitting your ideas to the dexterity of his arguments, he would turn short upon you with a grave smile and demolish by the breath of another of his mouth-pieces the ingenious structure it had pleased him to rear. It was impossible to say where jest began and earnest ended. You read in constant mistrust lest you might be the victim of a mystification when you least expected one. Nor did deliberate afterthoughts always tend to reassure you, and when you laid down the book the impression was confirmed that it was seldom safe to be sure he was serious. No wonder that the reviewers had a difficulty in dealing with him that the most appreciative of them, for the most part, were inclined to keep to generalities, and heartily recommend a novel they scarcely professed to interpret. Nor was it strange that their recommendations were by no means very universally attended to, for when 'Gryll Grange' was christened a novel, it was launched on the libraries under delusive pretences. The very qualities that attracted men of taste and cultivation were likely to deter the ordinary run of subscribers. It demanded sustained thought and careful reading: to most people it was an effort to enter into its spirit, to many it was an absolute impossibility. In order to enjoy it, your mind had to be always on the stretch, guessing at riddles, seeking out the key to paradoxes, or following the author in subtle processes of reasoning from strange premisses. Many of its readers too must have had an uneasy consciousness that foibles of their own were being reproduced or caricatured for their delectation; while at every page they were unpleasantly convicted of ignorance and inferiority by allusions that were as much Greek to them as the abounding quotations from Aristophanes or Athenæus.

Yet with all its defects from the popular point of view, it was clear that the author of Gryll Grange' could be no novice

either in life or literature. Indeed a reference to the titlepage showed that the book was but one of a series, bearing signs of the marked idiosyncrasy of their writer in a generic eccentricity of title. But most of those that had gone before it had been written in the very beginning of the century; there had been a hiatus in the series, of the better part of an ordinary lifetime, and Headlong Hall,'Crochet Castle,' and Nightmare Abbey' had scarcely been heard of by the present generation. Mr. Peacock had lived long enough to have some depressing experience of the ephemeral nature of literary fame, for he might undoubtedly have flattered himself, at one time, that he had made a mark in the literary world. Those earlier writings of his had won respectful consideration from thinkers who cared nothing for the productions of the Minerva Press, and gentlemen whose ideas he abused most heartily had heaped coals of fire on him by being lavish of their praise. Nay, a firm of enterprising publishers had thought his books contained sufficient promise of popularity to make it worth while reprinting them in collected shape as one of the volumes of the Standard Library of Fiction. We do not know, however, that the reprint did much to redeem either the works or the memory of their author from the oblivion to which time seemed surely consigning them; and Gryll Grange' threatened to go the way of its predecessors, without having revived any permanent interest in them. With a very hearty admiration for Mr. Peacock, we can scarcely profess to be surprised at this. He chose deliberately to follow out his bent, inclining to qualify for a visitor to his own Crochet Castle.' He was as uncompromising in his mannerisms as in his opinions, and he wrote with almost defiant independence for the few rather than the many. He paid the inevitable penalty in suffering from the neglect he may be said to have courted; yet the better you know him the more thoroughly you appreciate him, and to know him even fairly well, you should be conversant with the whole series of his writings. We know no works that gain so greatly by being studied in their chronological order, or lose more by being taken separately. We use the word studied ' advisedly. To get to the bottom of his mind, he must be read in constant reference to parallel passages that occur in his writings passim, as well as to the previous conversations in which he has been originating and developing his ideas. There can be no doubt, then, that his present editors have judged wisely in publishing this complete edition of his works. It gives him precisely the artificial help he needed towards obtaining the limited appreciation he would have coveted, and men of humour