mythologies and supernatural actors, but from the destinies of one family, wrought out by individual passions, but tending towards one fulfilment, They will from the chapters already in their possession be able to see how entirely different a thing Grecian dramatic interest is, from that which would now engage the sympathies of an audience. They will see how insulated the Greek drama stands-and (we would hope) how beautiful it is in that its position.

Our next chapter will bring before them the story of Edipus, as contained in three plays of Sophocles.

IN the deep summer thou dost sink to slumber;
Thou liest down to thine eternal rest;
Thou goest hence to join that happy number
Who, pure like thee, like thee are ever blest.
Go, loved-one! to the bosom of thy mother,
Meet there the smile in infancy thy own;
Meet there thy infant sister and thy brother,
Knowing in heaven whom thou on earth hast known.

Yet quit us not for ever, oft descending

Visit thy native haunts, these walks, these flowers;
Come with thy mother, some blest moments spending,
As God himself walked once in Eden's bowers.

For thou art now more like thy Maker, holy,
Now that frail form has perished, thou art now,
Above these haunts of mortal melancholy,

A thing of light, with love-encircled brow.

Love, and pure joy attend thee-thou dost gather
Flowers in the fields of Paradise-thou art
Where goodness dwells with the eternal Father,
Of Love and Joy eternally a part.

We do not weep-we would not bring thee hither-
We would not wrong thee-happiness is thine!
For looking on all earthly flowers that wither,
We learn the lore that fits us to resign!

A name hast thou bequeathed us, and a vision;
And thoughts that ever more will on thee dwell:
And hopes that onward speed to realms elysian,
Blent with regrets, and many a fond farewell!

REVIEW OF BOOKS.

Means and Ends: or Self-training, By C. M. Sedgwick, Author of Redwood, Hope Leslie, Poor Rich Man, &c. (Reprinted from the American edition.) London: Tilt. Small 8vo. pp. 273.

We are no friends to national prejudices; but we must candidly confess that we never felt so thankful for our English birth, and the frame of society as established in our own country, as after rising from this work. Mrs. Sedgwick has in it given her young country-women advice as to their duties consequent on the state of American society. Why it should have been reprinted in London we are quite at a loss to guess: for anything more utterly inapplicable to young females in this land (except so far as a few moral and physical commonplaces, which every book of the sort must contain, are concerned) can hardly be conceived.

We have one reason however to be thankful for the book: and that is, that it has given us accounts of American life, written in sober sadness by a native, which, if set down by a foreigner in burlesque, would scarcely meet with belief. We shall justify our assertion by a quotation:

Will you, my young friends, go with me to two houses, a short distance from a certain lovely village? They are separated by a small orchard. They are both placed low down on the declivity of a gently sloping hill, with gardens behind them, a little enclosure in front, and a by-road, nearly grass grown, intervening between them and a bit of meadow that borders the river, which slowly wanders away through the richest and loveliest grounds in our country. This gate is swinging open; so we will first go in here. Hold up your dresses, we must go round through the grass, for "the boys" (as Mrs. Doolittle calls her scape-graces) have left the wheelbarrow in the path.

"Good morning, Mrs. Doolittle. You are an enviable woman, with this river and these beautiful meadows always before your eyes."

"Oh, ma'am, I never look out of doors. Walk in, ladies. I'm afraid you can't find a place fit to sit down. I'm somehow behindhand this morning. I have got dreadful uneasy feelings in my head, and side, and back, and all over. I never enjoy but poor health, you know, ma'am." Meanwhile she has tossed on a cap over her tangled, linty hair, and is "sweeping up," and I have declined a seat, and taking my stand in the doorway, where, besides indulging my prejudice in favour of pure air, I can survey both rooms. "Jefferson," continues Mrs. Doolittle," has not been well, and Cicero is complaining, and Anny Matildy caught her foot in a rip of her frock, and fell down stairs last night. I and my children are dreadful apt to meet with accidents, besides being sickly. Now there's Mrs. James, my next neighbour, never meets with any trouble, and her children are always healthy, but some people are born, as it were, with silver spoons in their mouths. I should not be so at sixes and sevens, if I was as well off as some folks."

Even this slovenly, shiftless, and most thoroughly uneducated woman, is ashamed of her disorderliness. I never saw an American woman so low as not to be mortified by an exposure of her slovenly housekeeping. While Mrs. Doolittle is making her lamentations, let us see what she calls being at "sixes and

sevens."

There are two apartments and a loft. One is a bedroom, the other is used for all domestic purposes. It is obvious, that with a husband and four children, Dame Doolittle could only maintain neatness by industry, and the most exact habits. She, poor woman, has neither.

The walls are stained and daubed by the children's dirty hands, and the plaster is picked out in sundry places, and crumbling away. The summer's sunbeams, shining there, so gladly on that little meadow, are beating through the dirty panes of the bedroom window, and quickening into life and activity myriads of flies. The bed, covered by a filthy quilt, is spread up, but not so as to conceal the dirty sheet (there is but one!) and the pillow-cases. The bed. tick is ripped, and the feathers are scattered over the room. The trundle-bed is half out. Its straw bed is ripped too, and the boys seem to have been amusing themselves with drawing out the straw, and have left their bedclothes in such a tangle, that it would seem that wild horses, instead of young mortals, had been there.

Half way between the bed and the window stands a bureau, hacked by the boys' penknives. The drawers are half open, a string hanging out of one, and the end of something out of another, and the clean and dirty clothes stirred in together.

On the bureau is a book, that, from its size, I infer, is a Bible. The covers and title page are gone. Beside it are two japanned lamps stained with oil, and the wick of one pendent over the bureau.

It is the month of flowers; and Nature, too strong even for Mrs. Doolittle, has induced her to pick a bunch of peonies, which she has placed in a broken black earthen teapot on the bureau. Miss "Anny Matildy," in spite of her recent lameness, has clambered into a chair beside the bureau, and is pouring the water out of the spout of the teapot, and drawing figures with her finger; geometrical, for aught I know, for they look to me very strange and incomprehensible. Her education is going on!

If, my young friends, you are not too much disgusted to proceed, let us take a survey of the outer room. In one corner there is an unmade bed-an unmade bed in a room where cooking and eating are to be done! There are two tables; one is minus a leg, but supported by a stick. The other is reserved for eating; but what lessons must the children be learning, who take their meals from that stained, uncleanable table?

Between the tables is a projecting cupboard with doors, or rather with one hanging by a single hinge. The other door has long since disappeared. Mrs. Doolittle guesses "the boys hooked it to put on their sleds last winter." Tin and earthenware, knives and spoons, are huddled on the shelves without order; clean and dirty plates, side by side. Here a broken mug with milk, and there a tea-cup with molasses, both with flies buzzing around, or floating (poor navigators!) on their surfaces. The sugar bowl is uncovered, and the impress of the children's fingers is on the sugar. On the lower shelf there is a broken earthen pan, with a motley mass of cold food, consisting of pork, fresh meat, beans, potatoes, and cabbage. Beside this frightful compound is a plate with a daub of butter, in which three or four luckless flies have been caught, and beside that, another with broken bread and bits of cheese. There are no pans of milk (as you sometimes see) catching the floating dirt. You would hardly expect such productive property as a cow attached to the Doolittle establishment; but, rather, that the children should be sent twice a day to beg "a little skim-milk” of long-suffering neighbours.

Dare you explore the upper shelves of the cupboard? There you will find a variety of roots and herbs, dried for sickness. You must guess their names, for they are all stuffed in together, with strings of dried apples, bits of dried pump. kin, broken saucers of mixed seeds, old phials of medicine, rolls of salve, a box of pills, mixed too, a hunk of tobacco, a roll of patch-work, broken plates that never can be mended, and unsoldered tin that never will be!

Cast your eye over the mantelpiece, covered with blackened, dogs-eared books, a torn almanac, a pipe, a snuff-box, a bit of bread and butter, a dirty finetoothed comb, and a half-eaten apple!

I spare you an inventory of hoopless tubs, bottomless chairs, leaky pails, &c., &c., for I have detained you long enough, my young friends, upon this revolting picture, and I will only ask you to stay for its moral. You see all this destruc

tion, discomfort, and unthrift, is imputable to Mrs. Doolittle. There is no extremity of poverty in her case. She is suffering the consequences of her bringing up under a mother, the prototype of herself; and Miss "Anny Matildy" bids fair to repeat the same scene to the next generation. No wonder Dame Doolittle is pursued by ill luck; no wonder that her children are "dreadful sickly," bred amidst filth and impure air, and fed on such messes as we have seen in her cupboard.

But now for a contrast. Go with me to Mrs. James's, the Doolittle's "lucky" neighbour. Take care and shut the gate behind you, girls, lest some damage should be done to Mrs. James's pretty yard. "Ah, Lucy, how are you? Is this your work, planting these rose-bushes and snow-berries? and oh, what a beautiful honeysuckle!"

"I take care of them," replied a bright little girl who was sitting, shelling early peas, under the shadow of a maple, which, growing outside the yard, threw a deep shadow over one angle of it; "my father planted them for me. You know the damask rose, ma'am? that is mother's. She had it planted there forever ago, when I was a baby, and she sets almost as much by it as by Ellen and me." Ellen is her little sister, and is reciting her Sunday's lesson to Lucy. Their education is going on too! "Good morning, Mrs. James." "Good morning, ma'am; you're looking for the scraper, ladies? there it is, and here is the mat." pp. 83-88.

If Mrs. Sedgwick's chapters on "Manners" be a faithful picture of the deficiencies on this score among our Transatlantic neighbours, we fear their favourite maxim, one man is as good as another," must be changed into "One man is as bad as another." We had intended to quote one sentence respecting a prevalent American practice, but on a second reading, we have determined to spare our readers the disgust which it would give them. Suffice it to say, that the ladies of America are cautioned against the indulgence of the habit!!

We must again repeat our surprise that this very silly book should have been reprinted in England, at a time like this, when we hope our own females are thinking of and studying acquirements of a far higher order and more lasting benefit.

The Women of England: their Social Duties, and Domestic Habits. By Mrs. Ellis, Author of the Poetry of Life,' &c. &c. The Fifth Edition. Fisher & Co. London and Paris. 8vo. pp. 356.

We have been led to notice a new edition of this work, partly from its own claims, and partly by way of contrast to the book which we have reviewed above. We have here, the sensible and feeling advice of an English woman, who knows well the depths of the female heart (and what depths were ever so deep as those?) and can stir them at her will. Mrs. Ellis takes rather a melancholy, and we would hope not quite a fair view of the state and prospects of the female character in England. It may have been perhaps her lot to have been at one time or other, associated with societies which impressed upon her the fears and regrets to which she

has given utterance. Still we would not say that her charges are entirely unfounded but would hope that they are not true to the extent which she supposes, and even where they are, that there may be deeper influences counteracting the baneful work. The subject is a most important one-and the authoress has well laid open the vast power for good or evil which is entrusted to the women of England: entering powerfully into the springs and motives of action which prevail among men, and showing how much of them may be traced to home influence; and how much the better feelings, moral and religious, are kept in action and vigour by the refreshment derived from the purity and clear-sightedness of the female conscience. If' then, (and the words are not profaned by this use of them) the light that is in us be darkness, how great will be that darkness!' If the fountain to which we turn to refresh our spirits, wearied by the eternal crowding and crushing for advancement in which we are mingled abroad, be dried up, or what is worse, poisoned, how will our hearts fail, nay our lives be rendered noxious and unprincipled! To drop our figure,-if a loathing of home-duties, and a restless craving for excitement, be found to usurp the place of the quiet contented purity, the unostentatious and self-sacrificing kindness, of the English female character, we shall lose with these qualities our strong moral sense, our national power for good; and all the evil which is at work among us, will gain ground and finally triumph. We give one or two extracts, with the sincere hope of inducing every one of our readers to purchase, or at least peruse carefully, the book for herself.

When we meet in society with that speechless, inanimate, ignorant, and useless being called "a young lady just come from school," it is thought a sufficient apology for all her deficiencies, that she has, poor thing! but just come home from school. Thus implying that nothing in the way of domestic usefulness, social intercourse, or adaptation to circumstances, can be expected from her until she has had time to learn it.

If, during the four or five years spent at school, she had been establishing herself upon the foundation of her future character, and learning to practice what would afterwards be the business of her life, she would, when her educa tion was considered as complete, be in the highest possible state of perfection which her nature, at that season of life, would admit of. This is what she ought to be. I need not advert to what she is. The case is too pitiful to justify any farther description. The popular and familiar remark, "Poor thing! she has just come home from school; what can you expect?" is the best commentary I can offer.

There is another point of difference between the training of the intellect, and that of the moral feelings, of more serious importance than any we have yet considered.

We all know that the occupation of teaching, as it relates to the common branches of instruction, is one of such herculean labour, that few persons are found equal to it for any protracted length of time; and even with such, it is necessary that they should bend their minds to it with a determined effort, and make each day a renewal of that effort, not to be baffled by difficulties, nor defeated by want of success. We all know, too, what it is to the learner to be dragged on day by day through the dull routine of exercises, in which she feels no particular interest, except what arises from getting in advance of her fellows, obtaining a prize, or suffering a punishment. We all can remember the atmosphere of the school-room, so uncongenial to the fresh and buoyant spirits of youth--the clatter of slates, the dull point of the pencil, and the white cloud