nine loaves of bread, 4 lbs. each, 4s. 6d. ; candles, 4d.; salt, d.; lard, 2d.; soap, 3d.; flour, 6d.; potatoes, 8d. Total, 8s. 6d. Thus we see that this sober and industrious labourer and his family are doomed to live, if they can, at the rate of about 12d. per head per day. But as there is 6d. over, we shall add it to the above sum of 8s. 6d.; and still the hard-working man's earnings, when divided into eight equal parts, do not amount to 2d. per day for each of the family of eight persons. Yet this labourer, having constant work, is much better off than scores of families. who are well known to us.

There is no allowance here for butchers' meat, or tea or coffee; these are all called luxuries, far beyond the reach of the poor labourer of Oxford or Bucks. "There are hamlets in Oxfordshire at which the poor people have no other water to drink than what they draw from the stagnant ponds at which horses and cows drink, and in which ducks and geese swim." “We have known a case in which a hard-working and honest man was told, at the end of harvest, that his employer had nothing more for him to do. This labourer had a wife and three children to support. A few weeks after he had been at home doing nothing, he was sent for by his former master, who gave him two days' work, and then paid him with one shilling a-day, adding, I thought it would be better for you than being at home doing nothing." Another field labourer, who is a pious Wesleyan Methodist, and well known, had to leave his parish hovel some time back, to make room for

another person who was coming to the place to live with his own aged mother. He was compelled by the parochial authorities to give place to another person. He took shelter in the union-house, but he had no sooner done so than one of the village farmers said that he would employ him. The poor man returned to his parish, went to work, but when night came he could not find a single room in the village in which his family could take shelter. They sat down under a hedge, and there spent the night, in the depth of winter, and during a snow storm! Next day he returned to the workhouse. The guardians wrote to the commissioners to know how they should act. The commissioners decided that, as the peasant had work to go to, he must be sent back to his parish. He went back, but still he could not get a cottage. We stated this case to the clergyman of the parish, who is also a poor-law guardian and county magistrate. The reverend gentleman felt for the ill-fated man and his family, spoke well of them, but he could not find them a cottage. What became of this poor and badly-used family at last, we know not, but believe that they got into a shed, coal-house, or hovel, there to spend their days of earthly sorrow and spiritual joy in the midst of trouble."

"It was only the other day that we went into a labourer's cottage, in which we found a stillborn child, which the poor man could not get buried, because he was not in circumstances to pay one shilling for the grave-digger. At another house we found the corpse of a fine

child stretched on a mud floor, with a piece of old sacking, or something like it, thrown over it. The small sleeping attic was occupied by the other children, all of whom were suffering from fever. In the same village a poor woman died about three years ago, without a sheet or a blanket to cover her skeleton frame. The poor family had but one sheet--not a blanket in the house; and the suffering woman died while a neighbour was washing the sheet.”*

Again, he says: "A clergyman in our neighbourhood, whose living is worth about £800. per annum, charges the people at the rate of eight shillings a chain for land, for which the late occupier could not pay more than two shillings a chain. And even at this unjust and unreasonable price they cannot have it, unless they consent to withdraw their children from the British School, and send them to the National School, and keep them from the chapel on the Lord's-day! True, the reverend gentleman pays the rates and taxes to which his land is liable but he charges the peasantry more than double the rent which a farmer could pay."+

What reprobation is sufficiently strong for a catalogue of horrors like these? In the town, the overcrowding arises from the concentration of the employment, from the scarcity of land, from the independence of the population; but none of these causes operate in the country. The cause of these sad horrors is the

* Impending Dangers of the Country, pp. 32, 33.

+Ibid. p. 16.

entire absence of all sympathy, resulting from the prevalence of unmixed selfishness. However other sections of the community have made progress in comfort, however the towns may have increased in the facilities of enjoyment, we do not hesitate to say, in many, in most of the agricultural districts, the comfort of the people has very materially deteriorated. It seems extremely probable that the race of landlords and landowners of the present day, are a far more selfish body of men than those of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: or, perhaps, we should express our meaning better, if we were to say that the selfishness had taken a mode of gratification more inimical to the interests of the small farmers and labouring class; ever the thought meets us, that the evils of our social state are not in nature but in man.

We by no means imply, that the fields and the villages are less favourable to moral discipline and education than the city; for ourselves, we like the village best for the training school in the whirl of the city the greatest problem of existence seems always farthest from solution;-there, all reminds of manwe are most impressed by his power and his wonderful workings. But, when from the city we retire to the lonely quiet of the mountain hamlet, or the village in the field or forest, the village church-yard, where, lie the countless generations of the dead, and the thought rushes over us, that even those graves we see are few compared with the graves unseen, and in their turn buried. When night, and the immensity

of the heavens is spread over our head, and the solemn stars, each a world, or the centre of worlds, move on, silent and vast, then the impression of littleness comes over us, then the question is asked, "What am I?" A little dot in a world, that world itself a dot in the great universe of being. Lessons like these come more frequently to the mind amidst such scenes than amidst all the vivacity and glitter of the crowded street. To many, we are quite aware, the life of the hamlet, the vil-. lage, the pedlar, or the peasant, seems only to be suggestive of low thoughts, or of exceeding monotony; but it is only the coldness of our own nature and the apathy of our own spirits, that prevents us from reading everywhere the one human tale of sorrow and of joy. What mean we by this quest after novelty, this perpetual thirst after the marvellous? Is not the life of every one of us a romance? And truly has Thomas Carlyle said, that there is "the third scene of a comedy in every marriage, and the fifth act of a tragedy in every death-bed." The life of every one of us is full of incidentevery tombstone is a drama. Go to the lowest roof in the land, take the most unimaginative history, the most quiet and retired existence of all, and you shall find there is not one so humble as to be the unforgotten of tears and hopes: The humblest stream, nay, the mud pool before thy door, hath its own wave and its alternation of light and shade. Man's life. is generally passed in turbid hurry, and hence his sympathies are for the most part with action