are far below the Essays in point of merit and of style. "The * Squire's Pew, however, is a delightful little poem: the sentiment is trite as the moral of a gravestone, but it has seldom been more simply and more beautifully set. • Recreation' is not well managed : a young lady who had participated in such amusement, would not so have narrated it. "A town' is a very lively descriptive sketch. But we think that by far the finest thing in the volume is the, second portrait of the Pair.' It is marked with all the minute accuracy and life of Wilkie's paintings. Wordsworth himself has nothing finer.

• Down a close street, whose darksome shops display,
Old clothes and iron on both sides the way;
Loathsome and wretched, whence the eye in pain,
Averted turns, nor seeks to view again;
Where lowest dregs of human nature dwell,
More loathsome than the rags and rust they sell;-
A pale mechanic rents an attic floor;
By many a shatter'd stair you gain the door;
"T'is one poor room, whose blacken'd walls are hung
With dust that settled there when he was young.
The rusty grate two massy bricks displays,
To fill the sides and make a frugal blaze.
The door unhing'd, the window patch'd and broke;
The panes obscur’d by half a century's smoke :
There stands the bench at which his life is spent;
Worn, groov'd, and bor'd, and worm-devour'd, and bent :
Where daily undisturb'd by foes or friends,
In one unvaried attitude he bends.
His tools, long practis’d, seem to understand
Scarce less their functions, than his own right hand.
With these he drives his craft with patient skill;
Year after year would find him at it still ;
The noisy world around is changing all,
War follows peace, and kingdoms rise and fall;
France rages now, and Spain, and now the Turk;
Now victory sounds ;-- but there he sits at work!
A man might see him so, then bid adieu,-
Make a long voyage to China or Peru;
There traffic, settle, build; at length might come,
Alter'd, and old, and weather-beaten home,
And find him on the same square foot of floor,
On which he left him twenty years before.

- The self same bench, and attitude, and stbol,
The same quick movement of his cunning tool;
The
very

distance 'twixt his knees and chin,
As though he had but stepp'd just out and in.

• Such is his fate-and yet you might descry
A latent spark of meaning in his eye.
- That crowded shelf beside his bench, contains
One old, worn, volume that employs his brains :

:

C

With algebraic lore its page is spread,
Where a and b contend with x and z:
Sold by some student from an Oxford hall,
-Bought by the pound upon a broker's stall.
On this it is his sole delight to pore,
Early and late, when working time is v'er :
But oft he stops, bewilder'd and perplex'd,
At some hard problem in the learned text;
Pressing his hand upon his puzzled brain,
At what the dullest school-boy could explais.

• From needful sleep the precious hour he saves,
To give his thirsty mind the stream it craves :
There, with his slender rush beside him plac'd,
He drinks the knowledge in with greedy haste.
At early morning, wheu the frosty air
Brightens Orion and the northern Bear,
His distant window mid the dusky row,
Shews a dim light to passenger below.
-A light more dim is flashing on his mind,
That shows its darkness, and its views conin'd.
Had science shone around his early days,
How had his soul expanded in the blaze!
But penury bound hin, and his mind in vain
Struggles and writhes beneath her iron chair.
- At length the taper fades, and distant cry
Of early sweep bespeaks the morning nigh:
Slowly it breaks, and that rejoicing ray,
That wakes the healthful country into day,
Tips the green hills, slants o'er the level plain,
Reddens the pool, and stream, and cottage pane,
And field, and garden, park, and stately hall,
Now darts obliquely on his wretched wall.
He knows the wonied signal; shuts his book,
Slowly consigns it to its dusty nook;
Looks out awhile, with fixt and absent stare,
On crowded roofs. seen tirough the foggy air;
-Stirs up the embers, takes his sickly draught,

Sighis at his fortunes, and resumes his craft.' pp. 134–9. Usefulness bas evidently been the Author's principal design in tbese Essays, and their excellent tendency will ensure her ample reward. We have seldom met with a volume of poetry, that bore more strikingly the impress of native thought, or that supplied the mind more richly with materials for deep reflection. It is evident from the last extract, that Miss Taylor can achieve, as a poet, something of a still bigher cast than even these Essays in Rhymne.

277

Art. VI. 1. Commentaries on some of the most important Diseases of

Children. By John Clarke, M.D. &c. &c. Part the first. royal 8vo.

pp. 198. Longman and Co. 1815. 2. De l'Education physique de l'Homme ; par M. Friedlander. D.M.

&c. &c. à Paris, chez Treutal et Würtz. 1815. pp. 496. HO W to lesson the sum of physical evil incident to the state

of infancy, is one of the most important problems that can exercise the public mind. That a fourth part of the human race' should die in the first or second year after birth, would appear, as far as we are at all competent to judge of huinan affairs, to be inconsistent with the laws and destinies of our being. At all eyents it is as plain a duty devolving upon man to aiin at the diminution of this, as of any other ill to which be is beir: and such diminution,- let us hail the fact with exciting satisfaction-has already commenced. We have recently

, witnessed a happy reformation in the management of young children. The good sense of mothers has at length protested against the nonsense and tyranny of nurses and nurseries, and the effects of such protest are more or less visible in the countenance and limbs of alınost every child we meet.

As it is then in the power of mothers to do so much, it is of consequence that every facility should be given, and every impediment should be removed to the exercise of their tender duties; and although the most correct precepts for the rearing of children are to be found in nature and instinct, it is necessary, especially in the present artificial state of society, not indeed to impose ordinances for blind and implicit obedience, but to point out rules for the guidance of maternal solicitude: and such are, in part, the professed objects of the books the title pages of whica are copied at the head of the present article. Taking these treatises as a text, and occasionally referring to their contents, we shall now proceed to our own brief“ commentary” on some of the most important circumstances connected with the economy and maladies of infancy.

Before we proceed to do so we would in the first place join with some of our respectable contenporaries, in lamenting the fact and cautioning against the consequences, of conti':ental emigration. It is mortifying to refleci that just at the time when the gooil sense of English mothers had been freed from

* Dr. Friedlander presents to his readers a table extracted from the register of the Lying-in Hospital in London, from which it appears that even in this public charity, there has recentiy been a very remarkable diminution in the number of casualties to sying-in women and new-born children; which this candid writer very justly attributes to an improved management of the concerns of the house, in consequence of more correct notions having come to prevail.

the shackles which had hitherto obstructed their domestic duiies--it is painful, we say, to reflect that another source is opened for more than possible mischief, from the contact and contamination of French manners. It was actually becoming fashionable to be domestic and motherly; but are we not now at the very best likely to lose the little ground we had gained, rather than to make further advances in the right course; for although the political influence of France upon other nations has been recently so materially diminished, its ascendency as the arbiter of customs and regulator of minners will we fear continue to be acknowledged. We would not be unjustly national, nor are we, we hope so, in beseeching parents to stay at home, and in the bosom of their families bear the burden of the day, rather than rove abroad and take all the consequences of gallicizing their offspring, nay, of actually being the fathers and mothers of French children, merely because in France, music, and drawing, and dancing masters, can be procured at half the English price. Parents, we will allow, may be as competent to doing justice to their children in one part of the world as in another, and we are glad to be able to say that in the Metropolis of France, a very able and excellent publication bas recently appeared, on the physical and moral culture of man from his earliest infancy to years of maturity;* and we have no doubt that in every part and province of that fine country, there may be found females who might serve as models even for some English mothers; but it is the general feeling respecting what should constitute an accomplished woman, the standard of which we dread may become materially altered by the present rage for emigration and foreign settlements. We are, it is to be feared, preaching in the desert ; but whether men will hear and forbear, or not, the duty of the attempt to convince is equally imperative.

• C'est avec la grossesse que commencent proprement les soins de la mère'. Females should begin to act the part of mothers the moment they find that they are to be so. They must now at any rate forego the allurements of dissipation, and they must be equally careful not to give way to an indolent, sedentary disposition. Regular and temperate exercise is absolutely requisite for the well-being both of parent and offspring, and we believe that much mischief often accrues to each from a negligence respecting this demand of nature. It will be well too for both mother and child, that as little attention as possible be given to those volumes of marvellous histories, which every nurse has ready to pour into the ears of the uniniti

* Not however written by a Frenchman, we would say, were we not fearful of displaying rather too much of anti-gallican prejudice. Such however is the fact; and we are surprised at the mastery which the Author of the work alluded to, and the title of which heads the piesent article, appears to have acquired over a foreign language.

ated, respecting marks and monstrosities, the consequences of desires and of apprehensive impressions. It would, we feel, be a hopeless task to attempt to convince even the present generation that all these things are merely ideal and visionary, and without support from either physiology or fact; but it may be proper to say that their number every day lesgens, as the female mind becomes emancipated from the marvels and mysteries of nursery lore. We shall stop to quote a sentence or two bearing upon this parctiular from the work of Mr. Friedlander.

• The celebrated professor Chaussier made particular observations during five years, of the number of deformities which occurred in the hospice de la Maternité, into which institution females are admitted under circumstances calculated to expose them to having children marked and deformed; and even in this hospital, out of twenty-threethousand one-hundred and pinety-three births, there were only onehundred and thirty-two, that had any marks of defect.' And let the reader be particular to notice the nature of these defects.

• Thirty-seven,' (Chaussier goes on to say) had lame or tortuous feet, the most common of all accidents, and without doubt occa. sioned, as indeed the greatest part of the others, by the mothers having endeavoured by tight lacing to conceal their pregnancy. Out of thirty-four infants, (the Professor continues,) who had any malconformation of the head or the back, there was not to be found a single instance of actual resemblance to beings, about which so much talk was wont to be made in former times of superstition and fancy.'. p. 15.

We have thought proper to advert to this particular in this place, because it hias been our fate to have witnessed much uneasiness during the whole period of pregnancy, arising out of this source of unfounded apprehension. Now, as it is scarcely possible for females to walk the streets of a great city without being subject to witness all kinds and degrees of mutilations and deformities, were the theory correct upon which the doctrine of maternal marks is founded, every child that is born into the world ought to have some palpable and prominent error of shape or structure. But we have just protested against going

into the arguments or facts of the case, further than to caution • anxious females against permitting themselves to become the

dupes of mere fancy and invention on the part of others, and thus injuring both themselves and their offspring by suffering the apprehension to affect their health and comfort.

We shall not enlarge on the subject of pregnancy. We must however protest against a too liberal and indiscriminate employ. ment of evacuants and of lowering measures, in order to obviate some temporary and partial inconveniences arising out of the state alluded to. Such expedients it is true are in some cases absolutely necessary; but even this necessity might for