Her

rise and progress of the popular literature of the century. When the instruction of the people was frowned on by the aristocracy of England, denounced as democratic, and dreaded as the prelude of revolution, the idea of a cheap instructive literature was being cast in his mind, and was shaping itself into the work of his life. No weekly serial or monthly volume of attractive information, adapted to the tastes and suited to the comprehension of the people, issued from the British press. Science had not condescended to popularise her doctrines. wonders were still the pride and the possession of the aristocracy of mind. The pen of the littérateur still aimed to command 'ears polite.' To write for the tradesman and mechanic, for the farmer, the clerk, or the shopman, for the needlewoman, the nursery-maid, or even the boardingschool young lady, was beneath the function of the man of letters. He shot at higher game, to bring down my lord or lady as patron or patroness to his genius, or to win the homage of the literary taste and higher mind of the country. The 'cheap publications' of that period, or such as bore the name, were almost exclusively democratic or infidel. Nothing seemed to have strength to live, or the vigour of self-support, unless the vehicle of sedition or of infidel opinions. Wooler's 'Black Dwarf,' 'The Republican,' 'The Medusa's Head,'

The Cap of Liberty,' ran the race in the metropolis with Cobbett's "Twopenny Register,' and the large manufacturing towns had their competing journals for working men of a similar stamp. Even larger works designed for the mechanic,

the factory workers, or the few reading agricultural labourers, were tainted with the same poison. Mr. Knight mentions a Manchester paper that came under his eye some time in the year 1814, an entire column of which consisted of an advertisement of books, nearly the whole of which aimed at the overthrow of Christianity, all published in numbers, and at a price accessible to the unhappy mechanics who were then labouring sixteen hours a day for less than a shilling.

It was time that the new power of education that was beginning to develop itself among the working men of England should have impressed upon it a safer direction. The pious and loyal tracts dropped by aristocratic distributors in the homes of the poor, with their invariable dreary commonplace of loyal obedience and reverential contentment, were no antagonists to the fiery appeals of the anarchist or the wild novelties of the sceptic. Something more attractive than pious commonplaces and stale advices was required to displace the revolutionary literature which, wanting in every quality as a guide or instructor, yet broke in upon the monotony of the artisan's life and thought, with its magnificent promises, daring fault-finding, artful flattery of his class, and the hopes it fed of its vindicating for him a higher social position and a more commanding political influence. To drive it from the field, a cheap literature was called for which should at once attract and instruct the popular mind, deliver it from its subjection to political quackery, and prove the means of the higher mental culture of the working man.

To project a literature of this character fifty years ago was a bold undertaking-to propose to conduct it on the mercantile principle of self-support, seemed as hazardous as the enterprise was novel. It could hope for no support from the

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dominant class of British society who had borrowed from Rome its maxim, 'that ignorance was the mother of devotion,' and translated it into the political one that knowledge was the mother of revolutions.' The age of Mechanics' Institutes was still in the distance, when noble lords should occupy the chair at an 'Introductory, or themselves turn lecturers, and for the time meet all ranks on the common platform of knowledge. It was still the strong prejudice of their order that for the working men to read books was to make him a dangerous member of society. His part was to obey his superiors, and enjoy, when he could, unlimited rashers from the flitches of his bacon rack.' The hope of support from the working classes themselves seemed as desperate. The few readers amongst them had for the most part taken their side with the journals that had poisoned their principles and soured their hearts. Throughout the rural districts of England a dreary, degrading ignorance at the time prevailed. The believers in Moore's Almanack,' Mr. Knight tells us, 'comprised at that period nearly all the rural population. When" Master Moore," as the good folks called him, uttered his mystical sentences under the awful heading of "Vox Coelorum, Vox Dei-the voice of the heavens is the voice of God," how small sounded the mundane reasonings of all other writers! If the great astrologer prophesied disaster few would be the believers in success. There was scarcely a house in southern England in which this two shillings' worth of imposture was not to be found. There was scarcely a farmer who would cut his grass if the Almanack predicted rain. No cattledoctor would give a drench to a cow unless he consulted the table in the Almanack showing what sign the moon was in, and what part of the body it governed. When, on the 3rd of November, the guns were fired for the intelligence of the mighty victory of Leipzig, few would believe that the war would have a favourable termination till they had read "the Signs of Heaven" in the mysterious picture which might

happily foreshadow the fall of the Beast in the Revelation.'

With Master Moore' as the political instructor and scientific handbook of farming and working England, the prospects were not inviting for the advent of a higher cheap literature. Had Mr. Charles Knight been a man of less discernment or less steadfast energy of purpose, he would have been appalled by the obstacles to success. At the period despondency had paralysed the best friends of the people. They despaired of their future. Charles Knight marked the light that was breaking in the education that had begun and was rapidly spreading, and which was destined to usher in a morning brighter and fairer than had been forecast even in his most sanguine thoughts. How the idea of his higher popular literature sprung up in his mind, grew, took shape, and stamped itself as a new feature on the British press, and of the age, is pleasantly and naturally told in the Passages of a Working Life.' Once having found its practical sphere, the idea of his life became his work. His London press poured out in rapid succession The Library of Entertaining Knowledge, The Penny Magazine,' 'The Pictorial Bible,' 'The Pictorial History of England,' 'The Penny Cyclopædia,' the extensive series of the Weekly Volume,' and during twenty years the numerous volumes of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, which, during that period, were under his care as publisher, and in several cases as editor. The fountain once pierced flowed plentifully, and the more copiously it flowed it wrought new and ever-widening channels for its streams. For a season useful-knowledge books became the rage of the press. Mr. Knight's idea, caught up by a host of publishers, was reproduced in a thousand shapes, till our very primers for infant minds were crammed with scientific facts, and our school books turned into scrappy useful-knowledge collections. With more discernment, Mr. Knight held on his own way, mingling the gay with the grave, the lively with the severe; now interweaving the

"Thousand and One Nights,' or again the 'Pictorial Shakspere,' with his volumes of more formal instruction. The reactionary wave of the sensational press has already carried us many years beyond the useful-knowledge era, to throw us back again we trust, when it shall have spent its violence, upon a popular literature, that will do more for the reader than minister to his craving for excitement, or use up the hours that hang heavy on his hand. When this fresh reaction shall have set in, men of the type of Charles Knight will again have their place in the councils of British popular authorship.

In the mean time Mr. Knight, after a busy life of fifty years, is reviewing the past and presenting us with its most salient incidents in his 'Passages of a Working Life.' The readers of the volume that has appeared will agree with the author that in that life there were passages that might have an interest for a wider circle than that of his family and immediate friends if presented without the tedious egotism of a formal auto-biography.' Mr. Knight has given just enough of himself to give to his reminiscences the unity and charm of a personal narrative, and to throw around them the colouring of his kindly, genial character. His 'Passages' have much more to say of others than himself; yet in what he says of others, there is no missing his own quiet sense and delicate feeling. We could not have had less of the personal without taking from the interest of the volume, and removiug it into the colder impersonal and colourless region of a history of the times. When the work is completed, it will prove one of those helps to a writer who shall undertake a history of the first half of the present century from which he will draw the best materials for giving reality and life to his historic canvas. We already feel as if we had added not a little to our stock of information of the more eminent men of the first half of the century, and of the general manners, several habits, and class feelings of English society during the period, by the perusal of the first volume. If we are not as a nation what we

should be, nor what we hope to be, let us be thankful we have made some advances from our position half a century ago, and that we are still strong in the energy that pushes on to fresh attainments.

We can afford space but for one or two of the characteristic pictures of the men and times fifty years ago with which Mr. Knight's volume abounds. A Windsor boy, and reared beneath the shadow of the palace, when royalty lived with less reserve than now, he was familiar with the person of 'Farmer George and his wife,' and with all the gossips about what the frank inquiring old gentleman, who lived up the hill, said and did. His picture of George III. leaves a more pleasant impression of the man than Thackeray's sketch, half satire, half history. We like its quieter colours.

'My early familiarity with the person of George III. might have abated something in my mind of the divinity which doth hedge a king; but it has left an impression of the homely kindness of his nature, which no subsequent knowledge of his despotic tendencies, his cherished political hatreds, and his obstinate prejudices as a sovereign, can make me lay aside. There was a magnanimity about the man in his forgetfulness of the petty offences of very humble people, who did not come across his will, although they might appear indiscreet or even dangerous in their supposed principles. Sir Richard Phillips, with somewhat of a violation of confidence, printed in his "Monthly Magazine" an anecdote of George III. which was told him by my father. Soon after the publication of Paine's "Rights of Man," in 1791-before the work was declared libellous-the king was wandering about Windsor early on a summer morning, and was heard calling out "Knight, Knight!" in the shop, whose shutters were just opened. My father made his appearance as quickly as possible at the sound of the well-known voice, and beheld his Majesty quietly seated reading with marked attention. Late on the preceding evening a parcel from Paternoster Row had been opened, and its miscellaneous contents were exposed on the counter.

Horror! the king has taken up the dreadful "Rights of Man," which advocated the French Revolution in

reply to Burke. Absorbed majesty continued reading for half an hour. The king went away without a remark; but he never afterwards expressed his displeasure, or withdrew his countenance. Peter Pindar's incessant endeavours to represent the king as a garrulous simpleton were more likely to provoke the laughter of his family, than to suggest any desire to stifle the poor pests by those terrors of the law which might have been easily commanded. The amusements which the satirist ridiculed when he told of a monarch

Who rams and ewes and lambs and bullocks fed,'

were pursuits congenial to the English taste, and not incompatible with the most diligent performance of public duty. The sneers of the rhymester at "sharp and prudent economic kings," at the parsimony which prescribed that at the breaking up of a royal card party " the candles should be immediately blown out," fell harmless upon Windsor ears. Blowing out of wax candles, leaving the guests or congregation in the dark, was the invariable practice of royal and ecclesiastical officials. At St. George's Chapel, the instant the benediction was pronounced, vergers and choristers blew out the lights. Perquisites were the law of all service.

The good-natured king respected the law as one of our institutions. He dined early. The queen dined at an hour then deemed late. He wrote or read in his own uncarpeted room, till the time when he joined his family in the drawingroom. One evening on a sudden recollection, he went back to his library. The wax candles were still burning. When he returned, the page whose especial duty was about the king's person, followed his Majesty in, and was thus addressed, "Clarke, Clarke, you should mind your perquisites. I blew out the candles." The king's savings were no savings to nation. In 1812 it was stated in the House of Commons that the wax lights for Windsor Castle cost ten thousand a year.'

the

'It was in 1804 I saw Mr. Pitt. He was waiting among the crowd till the time when the king and queen should come forth from a small side door, and descend the steps which led to the level of the Eastern Terrace. A queer position this for the man who was at that moment the arbiter of European affairs; who was to decide whether continental kings were to draw their swords at the magical word "Subsidy;" upon whom a few were looking with sorrow in the belief that he had forfeited the pledge he had given when England and Ireland became an United Kingdom, and whom the many regarded as the pilot who had come to his senses, and who could now be trusted with the vessel of the state in the becalmed waters of intolerance. Soon was the minister walking side by side with the sovereign, who, courageous as he was, had a dread of his great servant till he had manacled him. It was something to me, even this once, to

have seen Mr. Pitt. The face and figure and deportment of the man gave a precision to my subsequent conception of him as one of the realities of history. The immobility of those features, the erectness of that form, told of one born to command. The loftiness and breadth of the forehead spoke of sagacity and firmness, the quick eye of eloquent promptitude, the nose (I cannot pass over that remarkable feature though painters and sculptors failed to reproduce it), the nose somewhat twisted out of the perpendicular, made his enemies say his face was as crooked as his policy. I saw those characteristics or had them pointed out to me afterwards. But that smile, revealing the charm of his inner nature, that was to win the love of his intimates, but it was not for vulgar observation.'

We shall welcome the appearance of the remaining volumes of this most agreeable work, so rich in its reminiscences of the Men, the Books, the Social Progress, and changing Manners of the eventful period of its author's life, and richer still from the transfused mellow light of the author's ripened wisdom.

In the and 15323

years 1530, 1531, and 1532,

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of Plymouth, a man for his wisdom, valour, experience, and skill in sea causes much esteemed and beloved of King Henry VIII., and being one of the principal sea-captains in the west parts of England in his time, not contented with the short voyages commonly then made only to the known coasts of Europe, armed out a tall and a goodly ship of his own of the burthen of 250 tons, called the Paul of Plymouth," wherewith he made three long and famous voyages unto the coast of Brazil, a thing in those days very rare, especially to our nation.' In that brief sentence Hakluyt gives the pith of all we know about the great man who, as far as extant history shows, was the first actual voyager from England to Brazil, and the founder of English commerce with America.

For forty years before that time

doubtless for longer than that-the enterprising merchants of the West of England had thought and talked of a new world of trade across the Atlantic, and as often as they could had actually gone out in search of it.

For the last seven years,' says the Spanish ambassador in London, writing to his sovereigns Ferdinand and Isabella in 1498, as we read in a document lately discovered at Simancas, the people of Bristol have sent out every year two, three, or four light ships in search of the island of Brazil and the seven cities.' This statement, if true-and though hard to believe, it is harder to dispute, coming as it does from a man who certainly could have no interest in exaggerating the naval skill of England, and who would be far more likely to say too little than too much-shows that our Bristol merchants were sailing out into the Atlantic a year before Columbus made his first voyage. Be that as