men, of the clerical, medical, and legal professions, each treating of a subject with which he was well acquainted, and giving his auditors the benefit of his experience, and the conclusions at which he had arrived with regard to it. The lectures are altogether introductory, and are intended merely to indicate in broad outline the various modes in which ladies may be practically helpful and useful to the poor around them. But the field thus opened up to them is very wide, and the call upon their sympathy and aid is loud and urgent. We can only adduce a few examples. Dr Johnson, in his interesting lecture, after noticing the afflictive fact, that the number of pauper lunatics throughout England and Wales has increased, during the last eight years, 64 per cent., and that in the parish of Marylebone alone there are no less than 494, states his conviction, derived from his personal experience in the out-patients' rooms of King's College Hospital, and as physician to the Public Dispensary in Carey Street, that in the great majority of cases insanity has been the result of over-work, distress, and anxiety. In proof of this, he proceeds to sketch the history of a few of his poorer patients. One has been three months a widow, and is struggling to support herself and four young children by needlework. She toils incessantly throughout the day, to earn the scanty pittance which barely suffices to keep starvation from the door. She stints herself to feed her children, and passes her nights in wakefulness, or in broken slumbers, disturbed by frightful dreams. At length, exhausted in body and distracted in mind, with a terrible dread that she is losing her reason, or that she has some serious and perhaps incurable bodily disease, she comes and tells her tale of misery to the hospital or dispensary physician. He at once perceives that, unless he can speedily afford some effectual relief, this poor widow will soon become an inmate of a lunatic asylum. She is followed, perhaps, by a man, a tailor, who, like her, complains of sleepless nights, or of frightful dreams- of gradually increasing weakness of body and depression of spirits, and has been distressed by a continual palpitation of the heart,

Poor, by Geo. Johnson, M.D. On Dispensaries and Allied Institutions, by Edward R. Sieveking, M.D., F.R.C.P. The Influence of Occupation on Health, by Dr Chambers, Physician to St Mary's Hospital. On Law as it affects the Poor, by Fitzjames Stephen, LL.B., Barrister-at-Law. On the Every-day Work of Ladies, by Archdeacon Allen. On Teaching by Words, by the Rev. R. C. Trench. On Sanitary Law, by Tom Taylor, Esq., Secretary to the General Board of Health. On Workhouse Visiting, y the Rev. J. S. Brewer.

which has convinced him that he has serious disease of that organ; and this conviction brings him to a physician. On inquiry, it appears that this tailor has been working eighteen hours a day for some months past, in order to support a wife and six children. Even with this amount of labour, his earnings have been only just sufficient to keep him free from debt; and unfortunately the long hours of work, and want of time for exercise out-of-doors, have so diminished his bodily strength, that he is alarmed lest he should be unable to continue his work; and what is to keep him and his family from the union-house, if the failure of his health compels him to desist? And so this over-worked tailor grows rapidly weaker under the paralysing influence of fear and anxiety.

'I am convinced,' writes Dr Johnson, by long and careful observation, that the mental anguish of many of these poor men and women is out of all proportion greater and more intolerable than any physical sufferings they may have to endure. True it is that their bodies are often worn down by hard labour, poisoned by impure air, and exhausted by want of proper food; but worse than all this is the black despair which settles upon them, when they find themselves beneath a thick cloud of sorrow, or surrounded by a hopeless entanglement of debt and difficulties, from which they see no way of escape, with, perhaps, no one to lend them a helping hand, or to speak a word of encouragement or sympathy.'

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What a claim upon Christian benevolence is here established, and how much might be effected by the intelligent efforts of wise and judicious female visiters! Doubtless,' adds the able lecturer, many a sorrowing, poverty - stricken widow and bereaved mother may be rescued from a life-long residence in a pauper lunatic asylum by the aid of ladies who will leave their comfortable homes in order to visit these mourners in their extremity of misery, convincing them, by the most persuasive testimony, that they sympathise with their sufferings, and speaking words of friendly comfort and encouragement, which go to the hearts of those who hear them, with a power to calm the perturbed spirit, and to ward off the worst forms of mental disease, far exceeding that of any drug which the physician can prescribe.' And he goes on to express his earnest hope, that ere long we may have some well-organised plan of co-operation between clergymen, district visiters, and those medical men who attend upon the sick poor.

Dr Sieveking follows in the same strain. He too tells of the forlorn condition of the

sick poor, and of their pressing need of precisely that aid which the refined and educated female could bestow. What we claim for the woman in the house,' he says, we would also claim for her beyond its walls. Hers is not to usurp the privileges of the man, but to aid him in the prosecution of a common end. Wherever, out of the house, it can be shown that man's legitimate functions fail in achieving the duties acknowledged to be incumbent upon society. when those functions cease, then woman's functions commence; then she steps in, to complete, to adorn, to hallow. The medical man, as Mr Maurice truly observed in his opening address, perhaps more than any other, has occasions, daily and hourly, to feel urgently the want of the co-operation which is being urged upon you from this chair. He feels the want, possibly, more in the cottage of the lowly than in the mansion of the wealthy. But by no means is the instruction which the college pur. poses to impart solely destined to benefit the poor. What ladies will learn in order that they may carry comfort and help to the ministration of the physician's poorer patients, will, not only intellectually and morally, but in every other respect as well, prove a boon to their own families.'

Mr Maurice, in his second lecture, points out the connection between the college and the hospital. The founders of colleges, he says, saw around them corporations and trades-unions for the carrying on of different handicrafts. They endeavoured to establish corporations or colleges for head - crafts, or, as they phrased it, for humane studies. Human or humane life, they thought, was not adorned most by those things which are made by hand, but rather by those things which are not seen and tangible. The founder of the hospital, on the other hand, looked on fevers, wounds, and palsies, as his signs of humanity, and acted accordingly. The contrast is great, yet there is a close resemblance between the two. The college entertains the poor man as its guest, no less than the hospital: he may be taught in the one, he may be cured in the other --but there is a connection between them. Every hospital in London has produced an eminent college or school; and every college which has been formed in modern years has sought alliance with an hospital. The theoretical knowledge acquired in the one is carried into practice in the other; and one would be incomplete without the other. As the care of the sick is one of those duties which devolve especially upon woman, it is therefore designed that, in connection with the lectures to be deli

vered upon the subject in the new college, opportunities for acquiring practical experience in nursing, either in connection with hospital visitation, or in some other way, should be afforded to its members.

The primary object of the institution being the benefit of working women, the lectures to be delivered will, of course, be prepared with a view to their necessities, and will treat of such subjects as the care of health, the management of children, the economy of the house, the keeping of accounts, singing, what may be called domestic or practical ethics, and reading of the Bible. But,' as Mr Maurice justly observes, such a course would probably be more useful to the cultivated woman than one expressly designed for her. The chances are, that she has learned something respecting all those studies, but that she has not learned the elements of them; that she wants just that foundation which the lecturer who regarded her chiefly as his pupil could not lay. She may be in the habit of using words which she has not tested; she may have an acquaintance with a great many facts, and yet may not have associated them together; she may have heard of lawsbut the laws and facts may be widely apart in her mind. The efforts of the lecturer to be simple, for the sake of the uncultivated, may be of unspeakable benefit to her, because she has a cultivation which will enable her to appreciate it. And none of that cultivation will be in the least degree wasted while she listens to him. She will acquire with far greater ease and quickness than the uninstructed member of the class; she will see how she may communicate what she acquires; she may become, in the technical sense of the word, the monitor of the class, supplying the place of the male teacher when he cannot be present, filling up the blanks which ignorance, or ignorance of female difficulties, will often cause him to have, interpreting his obscure words and sentences, questioning the women separately or together, to see how much they have understood of one lesson before he gives another. What a healthy intercourse,' he adds, 'would thus be established between the lady and the worker ! How exactly the former would be accomplishing her own desire to be at once a learner and a teacher!'

The object of the originators of this scheme has not been, as our readers must have perceived, to find occupation for ladies, though this has resulted from their enterprise. It may fairly be boasted,' we are told in the postscript, that none of the lectures in this course has suggested

is all very kind; but she does not behave to me as she would to one of her own quality." Piety, earnestness, affectionateness, eloquence, all may be nullified and stultified by simply keeping a poor woman standing in her own cottage while you sit, or entering her house while she is at meals. She may decline to sit--she may beg you to come in; all the more reason for refusing utterly to obey her; because it shows that that very inward gulf between you and her still exists in her mind which it is the object of your visit to bridge over. If you know her to be in trouble, touch on that trouble as you would with a lady. Woman's heart is alike in all ranks; and the deepest sorrow is the one of which she speaks the last and the least.' Again: Approach those poor women as sisters. Do not apply remedies which they do not understand to diseases which you do not understand. Learn lovingly and patiently (ay, and reverently, for there is that in every human being which deserves reverence, and must be reverenced, if we wish to understand it)

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learn, I say, to understand their troubles, and by that time they will have learned to understand your remedies, and they will appreciate them. Each of you has some talent, power, knowledge, attraction between soul and soul, which the cottager's wife has not, and by which you may draw her to you with (as the prophet says) human bonds and the cords of love; but she must be drawn by these alone, or your work is nothing; and though you give the treasures of Ind, they are valueless equally to her and to Christ, for they are not given in His name, which is that boundless tenderness, consideration, patience, self-sacrifice which makes even the cup of cold water a precious offering, as God grant they may make yours.'

We must, however, enter our protest against the conclusions which Mr Kingsley draws from the existence of our maternal, clothing, and shoe clubs: They are all good in their way,' he tells us; yet they are but palliatives of a great evil which they do not touch-cloaks for almsgiving -clumsy means for eking out insufficient wages at best, kindly contrivances for tricking into temporary thriftiness a degraded and reckless peasantry. Miserable, miserable state of things,' he exclaims, out of which, the longer I live, I see less hope of escape, saving by an emigration which shall drain us of all the healthy, and strong, and brave among the lower classes, and leave us, as a just punishment for our sins, only the cripple, the drunkard, and the beggar.'

If we agreed with Mr Kingsley in this

gloomy view of our present condition and future prospects, we should imitate the philosophic follower of Mahomet, and folding our hands in the apathy of despair, should make no useless efforts to avert the impending and inevitable fate; but we differ in toto, and therefore can work cheerily and hopefully. It would, of course, be a preferable state of things, if labour were always adequately remunerated, and if our working classes were so prudent and economical as to be able to dispense altogether with eleemosynary aid; but, as this is not, and never has been, the case, we cannot look upon the clubs named as 'merely palliatives of a great evil,' opiates to give temporary relief to the dying,' and still less can we regard the necessity for them as 'a fearful and humbling sign of the decadence of this England, as the sportule and universal almsgiving was of the decadence of Rome." We regard them rather as valuable aids in a transitory period, like the leading-strings of childhood, which are intended to call forth and encourage, not to supersede the child's own efforts to walk alone, rather than, as the staff of decrepid old age, affording an artificial support to hopeless and growing feebleness. And if, as Mr Kingsley admits, they inculcate habits of order and self-restraint,' we confess ourselves utterly at a loss to understand why these may not be as useful in England as in Canada or Australia, or why those who have learned them should leave their native land, where they have comforts and appliances within their reach which were beyond the means of the middle classes in England's palmiest days, and at a time, too, when, by acquiring the habits referred to, they have laid the foundation for their speedy elevation in the social scale.

We are told, upon the highest authority, that the poor shall not cease out of the land.' While they remain in it, it is the manifest duty of the rich to minister to them of their abundance, and we must say that, in our opinion, there is a marked improvement, rather than a retrogression, in a system which combines what the Germans would term 'self-help' with aid from without, when contrasted with the daily dole of meat and bread received at the gates of the abbeys and monasteries of the olden time by an able-bodied yet halffamished crew; or with the indiscriminate almsgiving of later periods in our history. But we must not pursue the subject further.

Let us, in conclusion, cordially recommend the volume before us to our lady readers, and we can do this the more readily because it does not touch upon any of the peculiar theological tenets of Messrs Mau