Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 1. No 1, June 1850

The lanceman rash, and then dash on
Among advancing hosts, or flying,
Marking his path with foemen dying.

Now, the morning after, when
The gray light kiss'd the mountain,
And down it, like a fountain,
Freshly, clearly ran – oh, then
The Priest and White Horse rose,
So white they scarce threw shade,
But now no sacrilegious blows
At man nor horse are made.

The eyes profane that yester glared,
Hung'ring for that sacred life,
Were quench'd in yester's fatal strife,
And void of meaning stared.
No lip could mock – no Russian ear
Thanksgiving unto Allah hear,
"To Allah, the deliverer!"
The mountain look'd unchang'd, the plain is red;
Peaceful be the fallen invaders' bed.
Paris. J.F.C.

On Atheism. – "I had rather," says Sir Francis Bacon, "believe all the fables in the Legend, the Talmud, and the Koran, than that this universal frame is without a mind. God never wrought miracles to convince Atheists, because His ordinary works are sufficient to convince them. It is true, that a little philosophy inclineth men's minds to Atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth them back to religion; for while the mind of man looketh upon second causes scattered, it may sometimes rest on them, and go no further; but when it beholdeth the chain of them confederate and linked together, it must needs fly to Providence and Deity."

[From the London Examiner.]

UNSECTARIAN EDUCATION IN ENGLAND

Upon none of the various classes of official men who have been employed for the last twenty years in introducing or extending social and administrative reforms, has a more delicate, invidious, and thankless task devolved, than upon those who have had the charge of the preliminary arrangements for a system of national education.

A growing sense of the importance of this great subject has been slowly manifesting itself since the close of last century. The Edgeworths diffused practical views of individual education. Lancaster demonstrated the possibility, by judicious arrangement, of imparting instruction to great numbers of children at once, and, by thus reducing the cost of education, of rendering it acceptable to the poorest. Before Lancaster entered the field some benevolent persons, among whom Nonconformists were the most numerous and active, had set on foot Sunday schools for the benefit of those whose week-day toil left them no leisure for mental cultivation. The High Church and Tory parties at first very bitterly opposed these Sunday and Lancaster schools; but finding the tide too strong against them, they set up Dr. Bell, as a Churchman, against Lancaster the Dissenter, and organized the National School Society in opposition to the British and Foreign School Society. Controversy, as usual, not only increased the numbers of those who took an interest in the discussion, but rectified and improved public opinion on the matters at issue. The Edinburgh Review took the lead, and for a considerable time kept it, as the champion of unsectarian education; and the wit and wisdom of Sydney Smith did invaluable service in this field.

The result was, that, very gradually, by means of individuals and private associations, opportunities of education were extended to classes who had not previously enjoyed them; improved methods of tuition were introduced; and the good work went on in an imperfect, scrambling, amorphous way till after the passing of the reform bill, and the establishment of the Whigs in power. From this time we have to date the first regular efforts – poor enough at first, lamentably inadequate still, but steadily and progressively increasing – to countenance and extend general education by the government and legislature.

The beginnings were very feeble, as we have said. From 1833 to 1838, £20,000 was annually voted for the promotion of educational purposes, and this paltry sum was administered by the Lords of the Treasury. Since 1839 the annual grant has been administered by the Committee of Council on Education, and its amount has been progressively augmented. From 1839 to 1842 inclusive it was £30,000 per annum; in 1843 and 1844 it was £40,000; £75,000 in 1845; £100,000 in 1846 and in 1847; and in 1848 it was raised to £125,000. The distribution of this grant being intrusted to a committee of council, the president became to a certain extent invested with the character of a Minister of Education. A machinery of government inspectors of schools was organized, and a permanent educational secretary attached to the committee. Not to mention other valuable results, we may add that the establishment of workhouse and factory schools, and the institution of the normal school for training teachers at Kneller Hall, are among the most prominent benefits for which we are indebted to this growing recognition of a care for the extension of general education as one of the duties of government.

When we thus look back on the twenty years since 1830, it can not be denied that a great advance has been made. We have now the rudiments of an educational department of government. The grants annually voted by parliament for educational purposes are still, it must be confessed, unworthily small, when contrasted with the sums freely voted for less essential objects; and the operations of the committee on education have been thwarted, impeded, and obstructed by all kinds of narrow-minded and vexatious opposition. Still we can console ourselves by the reflection that we have got an educational department of government; that the public mind is becoming familiarized with its existence, and convinced of its utility; and that its organization, slowly indeed, but surely, is being extended and perfected.

This was substantially admitted by Mr. Fox in the able speech introducing his supplementary educational plan to the House of Commons; and with the strongest sense of the merits and claims of the government measure, we find ourselves able very heartily to approve of the proposal of Mr. Fox. It would remedy the defects of the existing system with the least possible jar to existing prejudices. With nothing heretofore set on foot for the promotion of educational purposes would it in any way meddle – being addressed simply to the remedy of notorious defects, and for that purpose using and strengthening the machinery at present employed by government. It is on every account desirable that a fair and earnest consideration should be given to the second reading of this bill. It has been mixed up with other educational projects lately set on foot, and not a very correct impression prevails respecting it.

For here we must be allowed to remark, in passing, that of all the caviling and vexatious obstructions which the committee of council have had to encounter, the most ungracious and indefensible appear to have been those offered by advocates of unsectarian education less reasonable and considerate than Mr. Fox. We are not going to challenge any particular respect for the feelings of men in office. It is the well-understood fate of those who undertake reforms to be criticised sharply and unreflectingly; such unsparing treatment helps to harden them for the discharge of unpalatable duties; and even the most captious objections may be suggestive of improved arrangements. But making every allowance on this score, it remains incontrovertible that men entertaining sound abstract views respecting unsectarian education, and the importance of intrusting to the local public a large share in the control of educational institutions, like the members of the Lancashire School Association and others, have not only refused to make due allowance for the obstructions opposed to the committee of council on education by the prepossessions of the general public, but, by assuming an attitude of jealous opposition to it, have materially increased the difficulties with which it has had to labor. These gentlemen think no reform worth having unless it accord precisely with their preconceived notions; and are not in the least contented with getting what they wish, unless they can also have it in the exact way they wish it. Other and even more factious malcontents have been found among a class of very worthy but not very wise persons, who, before government took any charge of education, had exerted themselves to establish Sunday and other schools; and have now allowed the paltry jealousy lest under a new and improved system of general education their own local and congregational importance may be diminished, to drive them into a virulent opposition to any scheme of national education under the auspices or by the instrumentality of government. But all this parenthetically. Our immediate object is to comment upon an opposition experienced in carrying out the scheme of operations which the state of public opinion has compelled government to adopt, coming from the very parties who were most instrumental in forcing that scheme upon it.

The committee of council, finding it impossible, in the face of threatened resistance from various religious bodies, to institute schools by the unaided power of the secular authorities, yielded so far as to enter into arrangements with the existing societies of promoters of schools, with a view to carry out the object through their instrumentality. The correspondence commenced in 1845 under the administration of Sir Robert Peel, and the arrangements were concluded under the ministry of Lord John Russell in 1846. It was agreed that money should be advanced by government to assist in founding and supporting schools in connection with various religious communions, on the conditions that the schools should be open to the supervision of government inspectors (who were, however, to be restrained from all interference "with the religious instruction, or discipline, or management of the schools"), and that certain "management clauses," drawn up in harmony with the religious views of the respective communions, should be adhered to. On these terms arrangements were concluded with the National Society, representing the promoters of Church of England schools; with the British and Foreign School Society; with the Wesleyan body; and with the Free Church of Scotland. A negotiation with the Poor-school Committee of the Roman Catholic Church is still pending.

With the exception of the National Society all the bodies who entered into these arrangements with the Committee of Council have co-operated with it in a frank and fair spirit, and to good purpose. A majority of the National Society, on the other hand, have made vehement efforts to recede from the very arrangements which they themselves had proposed; and have at length concluded a tedious and wrangling attempt to cajole or bully the committee on education to continue their grants, and yet emancipate them from the conditions on which they were made, by passing, on the 11th of December last, a resolution which virtually suspends all co-operation between the society and government. The state of the controversy may be briefly explained.

The "management clauses" relating to Church of England schools are few in number. They relate, first, to the constitution of the managing committee in populous and wealthy districts of towns; second, to the constitution of the committee in towns and villages having not less than a population of five hundred, and a few wealthy and well-educated inhabitants; third, to its constitution in very small parishes, where the residents are all illiterate, or indifferent to education; and, fourth, to its constitution in rural parishes having a population under five hundred, and where, from poverty and ignorance, the number of subscribers is limited to very few persons. There are certain provisions common to all these clauses. The master, mistress, assistant teachers, managers, and electors, must all be bona fide members of the church; the clergyman is ex-officio chairman of the committee, with power to place his curate or curates upon it, and with a casting vote; the superintendence of the religious and moral instruction is vested exclusively in the clergyman, with an appeal to the bishop, whose decision is final; the bishop has a veto on the use of any book, in school hours, which he deems contrary to the doctrines of the church; in matters not relating to religious and moral instruction, an appeal lies to the president of the council, who refers it to one of the inspectors of schools nominated by himself, to another commissioner nominated by the bishop of the diocese, and to a third named by the other two commissioners. It must be kept in mind as bearing on the composition of such commissions, that the concurrence of the archbishop of the province is originally requisite in appointing inspectors of church schools, and that the third commissioner must be a magistrate and member of the church. We now come to the points of difference in these "management clauses." They relate exclusively to the constitution of the local school committees. In the first class of schools, the committee is elected by annual subscribers; in the second, it is nominated by the promoters, and vacancies are supplied by election; in the third it is nominated, as the promotions and vacancies are filled up, by the remaining members, till the bishop may direct the election to be thrown open to subscribers; in the fourth no committee is provided, but the bishop may order one to be nominated by the clergyman from among the subscribers.

The management clauses, thus drawn, were accepted by the National Society. The provisions for appeal, in matters of moral and religious instruction, had been proposed by themselves, and were in a manner forced by them on the committee of council. Let us now look at the claims which the society has since advanced, and on account of the refusal of which it has suspended, if not finally broken off, its alliance with the committee.

The National Society required: 1st, that a free choice among the several clauses be left to the promoters of church schools; 2d, that another court of appeal be provided, in matters not relating to religious and moral instruction; and 3d, that all lay members of school committees shall qualify to serve, by subscribing a declaration not merely to the effect that they are members of the church, but that they have for three years past been communicants. And because demur is made to these demands, the committee of the society have addressed a letter to the committee of council, in which they state that they "deeply regret the resolution finally adopted by the committee of council to exclude from all share in the parliamentary grant for education, those church schools the promoters of which are unwilling to constitute their trust deeds on the model prescribed by their lordships."

It is a minor matter, yet, in connection with considerations to be hereafter alluded to, not unworthy of notice, that this statement is simply untrue. The committee of council have only declined to contribute, in the cases referred to, to the building of schools; they have not absolutely declined to contribute to their support when built. They have refused to give public money to build schools without a guarantee for their proper management; but they have not refused to give public money to support even such schools as withhold the guarantee, so long as they are properly conducted.

The object of the alterations in the management clauses demanded by the National Society is sufficiently obvious. It is asked that a free choice among the several clauses be left to the promoters of church schools. This is a Jesuitical plan for getting rid of the co-operation and control of lay committee-men. The fourth clause would uniformly be chosen, under which no committee is appointed, but the bishop may empower the clergyman to nominate one. It is asked that another court of appeal be provided in matters relating to the appointment, selection, and dismissal of teachers and their assistants. By this means the teachers would be placed, in all matters, secular as well as religious, under the despotic control of the clergy instead of being amenable, in purely secular matters, to a committee principally composed of laymen, with an appeal to lay judges. The third demand also goes to limit the range of lay interference with, and control of church schools. The sole aim of the demands of the National Society, however variously expressed, is to increase the clerical power. Their desire and determination is to invest the clergy with absolute despotic power over all Church of England Schools.

In short, the quarrel fastened by the National Society on the committee on education is but another move of that clerical faction which is resolute to ignore the existence of laymen as part of the church, except in the capacity of mere passing thralls and bondsmen of the clergy. It is a scheme to further their peculiar views. It is another branch of the agitation which preceded and has followed the appeal to the judicial committee of the privy council in the Gorham case. It is a trick to render the church policy and theories of Philpotts omnipotent. The equivocation to evade the arrangement investing a degree of control over church schools in lay contributors to their foundation and support, by insisting upon liberty to choose an inapplicable "management clause," is transparent. So is the factious complaint against the court of appeal provided in secular matters, and the allegation that Nonconformists have no such appeal, when the complainants know that this special arrangement was conceded at their own request. The untrue averment that the committee of council have refused to contribute to the support of schools not adopting the management clauses is in proper keeping with these equivocations. Let us add that the intolerant, almost blasphemous denunciations of the council, and of all who act with it, which some advancers of these falsehoods and equivocations have uttered from the platform, are no more than might have been expected from men so lost to the sense of honesty and shame.

The position of the committee of council on education is, simply and fairly, this: They have yielded to the religious sentiment of an overwhelming majority in the nation, and have consented to the experiment of conducting the secular education of the people by the instrumentality of the various ecclesiastical associations into which the people are divided. But with reference to the church, as to all other communions, they insist upon the laity having a fair voice in the administration of those schools which are in part supplied by the public money, and which have in view secular as well as religious instruction. The clergy of only two communions seek to thwart them in this object, and to arrogate all power over the schools to themselves. The conduct of the ultra-High Church faction in the Anglican establishment we have attempted to make clear. The conduct of the Roman Catholic clergy has been more temperate, but hardly less insincere or invidious. Their poor-school committee declare that their prelates would be unwilling "to accept, were it tendered to them, an appellate jurisdiction over schools in matters purely secular;" but at the same time they claim for their "ecclesiastical authorities" the power of deciding what questions do or do not affect "religion and morals." The committee of the council, on the one hand, are exerting themselves to give effect to the desire of a great majority of the English public, that religious and moral shall be combined with intellectual education; and, on the other, to guard against their compliance with this desire being perverted into an insidious instrument for enabling arrogant priesthoods to set their feet on the necks of the laity.

We challenge for public men thus honorably and usefully discharging important duties a more frank and cordial support than it has yet been their good fortune to obtain. Several ornaments of the church, conspicuous for their learning and moderation – such men as the Bishop of Manchester, Archdeacon Hare, and the Rev. Henry Parr Hamilton – have already borne direct and earnest testimony to the temper and justice, as well as straightforward, honesty of purpose, displayed by the committee of council. It is to be hoped that the laity of the church will now extend to them the requisite support; and that the Nonconformists and educational enthusiasts, who, by their waywardness, have been playing the game of the obscurantist priests, may see the wisdom of altering this very doubtful policy.

[From the London Athenæum.]

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

The great philosophical poet of our age, William Wordsworth, died at Rydal Mount, in Westmoreland – among his native lakes and hills – on the 23d of April, in the eighty-first year of his age. Those who are curious in the accidents of birth and death, observable in the biographies of celebrated men, have thought it worthy of notice that the day of Wordsworth's death was the anniversary of Shakspeare's birth.

William Wordsworth was born at Cockermouth, in Cumberland, on the 7th of April, 1770, and educated at Hawkeshead Grammar School, and at St. John's College, Cambridge. He was designed by his parents for the Church – but poetry and new prospects turned him into another path. His pursuit through life was poetry, and his profession that of Stamp Distributor for the Government in the counties of Cumberland and Westmoreland: to which office he was appointed by the joint interest, as we have heard, of his friend, Sir George Beaumont, and his patron, Lord Lonsdale.

Mr. Wordsworth made his first appearance as a poet in the year 1793, by the publication of a thin quarto volume entitled "An Evening Walk – an Epistle in Verse, addressed to a young Lady from the Lakes of the North of England, by W. Wordsworth, B.A., of St. John's College, Cambridge." Printed at London, and published by Johnson in St. Paul's Church-yard from whose shop seven years before had appeared "The Task" of Cowper. In the same year he published "Descriptive Sketches in Verse, taken during a Pedestrian Tour in the Italian, Grison, Swiss and Savoyard Alps."

What was thought of these poems by a few youthful admirers may be gathered from the account given by Coleridge in his "Biographia Literaria." "During the last year of my residence at Cambridge, 1794, I became acquainted with Mr. Wordsworth's first publication, entitled 'Descriptive Sketches;' and seldom, if ever, was the emergence of an original poetic genius above the literary horizon more evidently announced." The two poets, then personally unknown to each other, first became acquainted in the summer of 1796, at Nether Stowey, in Somersetshire. Coleridge was then in his twenty-fourth year, and Wordsworth in his twenty-sixth. A congeniality of pursuit soon ripened into intimacy; and in September, 1798, the two poets, accompanied by Miss Wordsworth, made a tour in Germany.

Wordsworth's next publication was the first volume of his "Lyrical Ballads," published in the summer of 1798 by Mr. Joseph Cottle, of Bristol, who purchased the copyright for thirty guineas. It made no way with the public, and Cottle was a loser by the bargain. So little, indeed, was thought of the volume, that when Cottle's copyrights were transferred to the Messrs. Longman, the "Lyrical Ballads" was thrown in as a valueless volume, in the mercantile idea of the term. The copyright was afterward returned to Cottle; and by him transferred to the great poet, who lived to see it of real money value in the market of successful publications.

Disappointed but not disheartened by the very indifferent success of his "Lyrical Ballads," years elapsed before Mr. Wordsworth again appeared as a poet. But he was not idle. He was every year maturing his own principles of poetry and making good the remark of Coleridge, that to admire on principle is the only way to imitate without loss of originality. In the very year which witnessed the failure of his "Lyrical Ballads," he wrote his "Peter Bell," the most strongly condemned of all his poems. The publication of this when his name was better known (for he kept it by him till, he says, it nearly survived its minority) brought a shower of contemptuous criticisms on his head.

Wordsworth married in the year 1803 Miss Mary Hutchinson of Penrith, and settled among his beloved Lakes – first at Grasmere, and afterward at Rydal Mount. Southey's subsequent retirement to the same beautiful country, and Coleridge's visits to his brother poets, originated the name of the Lake School of Poetry – "the school of whining and hypochondriacal poets that haunt the Lakes" – by which the opponents of their principles and the admirers of the Edinburgh Review distinguished the three great poets whose names have long been and will still continue to be connected.

Wordsworth's fame increasing, slowly, it is true, but securely, he put forth in 1807 two volumes of his poems. They were reviewed by Byron, then a young man of nineteen, and as yet not even a poet in print, in the Monthly Literary Recreations for the August of that year. "The poems before us," says the reviewer, "are by the author of 'Lyrical Ballads,' a collection which has not undeservedly met with a considerable share of public applause. The characteristics of Mr. Wordsworth's muse are, simple and flowing, though occasionally inharmonious verse, strong and sometimes irresistible appeals to the feelings, with unexceptionable sentiments. Though the present work may not equal his former efforts, many of the poems possess a native elegance, natural and unaffected, totally devoid of the tinsel embellishments and abstract hyperboles of several contemporary sonneteers. 'The Song at the feasting of Brougham Castle,' 'The Seven Sisters,' 'The Affliction of Margaret – , of – ,' possess all the beauties and few of the defects of this writer. The pieces least worthy of the author are those entitled 'Moods of My Own Mind.' We certainly wish these moods had been less frequent." Such is a sample of Byron's criticism – and of the criticising indeed till very recently of a large class of people misled by the caustic notices of the Edinburgh Review, the pungent satires of Byron, and the admirable parody of the poet's occasional style contained in the "Rejected Addresses."

His next publication was "The Excursion, being a portion of The Recluse," printed in quarto in the autumn of 1814. The critics were hard upon it. "This will never do," was the memorable opening of the review in the Edinburgh. Men who thought for themselves thought highly of the poem – but few dared to speak out. Jeffrey boasted wherever he went that he had crushed it in its birth. "He crush 'The Excursion!'" said Southey, "tell him he might as easily crush Skiddaw." What Coleridge often wished, that the first two books of "The Excursion" had been published separately under the name of "The Deserted Cottage" was a happy idea – and one, if it had been carried into execution, that would have removed many of the trivial objections made at the time to its unfinished character.

While "The Excursion" was still dividing the critics much in the same way that Davenant's "Gondibert" divided them in the reign of Charles the Second, "Peter Bell" appeared, to throw among them yet greater difference of opinion. The author was evidently aware that the poem, from the novelty of its construction, and the still greater novelty of its hero, required some protection, and this protection he sought behind the name of Southey: with which he tells us in the Dedication, his own had often appeared "both for good and evil." The deriders of the poet laughed still louder than before – his admirers too were at first somewhat amazed – and the only consolation which the poet obtained was from a sonnet of his own, in imitation of Milton's sonnet, beginning:

A book was writ of late called "Tetrachordon."

This sonnet runs as follows —

A book came forth of late, called "Peter Bell;"
Not negligent the style; – the matter? – good
As aught that song records of Robin Hood;
Or Roy, renowned through many a Scottish dell;
But some (who brook these hackneyed themes full wet
Nor heat at Tam O'Shanter's name their blood)
Waxed wrath, and with foul claws, a harpy brood
On Bard and Hero clamorously fell.