liance, I was encouraged to expect a reward proportionate to any exertions I should make, however laborious or supererogatory. To him, therefore, I devoted myself. He found me docile, tractable, affectionate, and without guile or suspicion. He wished to train me up in that exclusive attachment to him and his pursuits, which rendered me a useful and necessary instrument for his present purposes, and which would prepare me for any future operations. He, therefore, exacted of me the prostration of the intellect, the affections, and the actions. All were to be at his disposal. Private views, and opinions, and friends, were to be discarded; and with a pure admiration and dependence, I yielded myself solely and wholly to his will. Severe and hard to endure was this course of discipline. He soon found that with the more gentle qualities of my nature, there were also united a warmth and impetuosity of temper, with a pride of spirit, which could be with pleasure led by gentleness, but which was fretted and wounded by harshness. But what could the vain ebullitions of youth avail against the cool and practised aims of age? By raising expectations without directly promising-by manifesting a parental care for my welfare, by professing sincere regard, by holding up inducements and future advancement, by candidly and honestly telling me my faults, by an air of the strictest justice, by enforcing unequivocal veracity, and every moral virtue, with a rigid industry, he bent and warped my mind to such a degree, that all my powers, and thoughts, and sentiments, were employed exclusively to please him, and fulfil his directions. I viewed nothing in the world but through the speculum he presented. Of himself he gave me a picture which I loved. He represented himself as delighted with truth, a lover of candour, the patron of merit; and he signalized me out as his little Lake boy, his protegée, nay, as his son, whom he regarded and trained up as his own. This, notwithstanding the many bitter moments of discipline which were used to try me, could not but gain upon such a heart as mine, particularly so inexperienced a

one.

He never appears to have lived happily with his wife, and in June, 1815, a regular deed of separation was drawn up and finally executed. He nowhere exhibits amiability of character. Few, if any, loved him.

His vanity was prodigious: sometimes it is hateful, sometimes amusing. Mr. Davies, his amanuensis, whom he would keep employed for months together almost night and day, apparently regardless of his health or comfort, having on one occasion written to him an account of the progress he was making in the wearisome task assigned him of compiling from an immense mass of papers a complete edition of all the doctor's works, receives the following consolation :-' Go on. You must be well aware how instructive, how exceedingly instructive your present task is to you, and must still further be when I come to criticise and correct all you shall do.' Davies writes that he is

at work from six in the morning till ten at night; to which the doctor replies: You must work, not as I have done, for that I do not expect, but as you can. Your labours in no other way can be so profitable to the world, or so improving to yourself.” Mr. Bamford's account is equally ludicrous.

'He triumphantly displayed the mighty advantages with which I was favoured in being allowed to copy and transcribe, from little scraps of paper and backs of letters, the chaotic effusions of his ardent mind. This was real training, far better than being at the university; and nobody knew where it might end, or what you may come to, if you give yourself up to this thing.' He would remark, after he tried my fidelity,- Now you know all my concerns; other people require oaths of secrecy; no man engages a common clerk, without having security for his faithfulness; but here I allow you to see my papers, and trust only to your honour. Though I do not ask you to swear, yet I expect that you will consider yourself as fully bound, as if you were sworn to secrecy.'

In this respect alone,-the attaching of vast importance to supposed discoveries in education,-Lancaster resembled him. He, too, had his mysteries,' known only to the initiated. He, too, was a moral spectacle, and a wonder to himself. If Bell 'wielded one of the most stupendous engines' known 'since the days of our Saviour and his apostles,' Lancaster was not a whit behind in celebrity. He could instruct a thousand children at the same time out of one book;'-his 'youngest pupil could teach arithmetic with the certainty of a mathematician without knowing anything about it himself,' and by these wonderful inventions' the world was to be regenerated. If Bell'attached an overweening importance to trifles, and insisted with vehemence on all his notions being adopted,' Lancaster, (we were about to say,) outdid him,-but that was impossible,-in this species of extravagance. Yet his boasted methods of punishment were radically bad, and have long since been abandoned as degrading and mischievous; and his system of rewards, including 'badges of merit,' 'orders' of merit, chains, medals, and expensive prizes, scarcely less objectionable, have shared the same fate. Time has already set its seal upon the doings of both these men, and judgment has long since gone forth. But how different is the verdict to that which they so fondly anticipated. On all the peculiarities in which they gloried, men already pour contempt. The monitorial principle survives; but the trappings with which they encumbered it have long since proved worthless. Their pride is in the dust; their ambition, a vain show. Posterity will remember them rather as party leaders than as inventors or philanthropists, and succeeding generations will honour their zeal, their energy, and their per

severance under difficulties, rather than their wisdom, their genius, or their modesty.

The diversities of character in the two men were many and striking. Lancaster, through his whole course, is the religious enthusiast; Bell, from youth to age, is distinguished by worldlyminded prudence. While the one is burning with desire to teach the blacks to read the bible; the other is quietly earning a reputation for sobriety and circumspection. When Lancaster is 'frequenting the meetings of Friends, and sacrificing worldly prospects to obtain inward peace,' Bell, is fighting a duel, and preparing to take orders in the church. While the unworldly quaker is exclaiming, 'I don't want a stock of money, I only want a stock of faith;' the 'disinterested' churchman is insatiate in his lust after place and preferment. While the one, generous to a fault and benevolent to a weakness, is complaining that his soul succumbs under the burden when he sees hearts breaking under distress' and he 'cannot or dare not help them;' the other, careful, and a little covetous withal, is pinching the 'brethren,' and bringing upon himself a visitation from the bishop. Both are proud; but with this difference,-Lancaster is arrogant, Bell, vain. Both are self-worshippers, 'the eye' of each is 'ever on himself,' but the result is not the same: in the one, self-complacency destroys love; in the other, it produces something like insanity. Under its influence, Lancaster, always generous and fervid, becomes habitually wasteful and flighty; Bell, with a natural tendency to be hard and grasping, becomes as habitually selfish and morose,—' of the earth, and earthy.'

In contemplating Dr. Bell as a beneficed clergyman, the mind is painfully affected in discovering no evidence whatever of spirituality of heart. He is always high and dry.' He has evidently more faith in natural philosophy, than in the gospel as a means of evangelizing India. Principal M'Cormick writes expressing distrust of the well-meaning but ill-judging patrons of plans for the conversion of Gentoos, and ridicules the idea of attempting to teach christianity to the natives of Bengal by 'preaching its doctrines slap-dash;' and faithless Dr. Bell, instead of rebuking his scepticism, replies, that without the power of working miracles none can ever throw down the barriers which enclose their sacred shrines, or gain any converts whom a rational divine or pious christian, who sets any value on a good life, would not blush to own.'

His theology, too, is more than questionable. He understands by our Saviour's declaration, that we must become 'little children' in order to enter the kingdom of heaven,' that, 'among children, and from them, and by becoming as one of

them, we are to learn those simple doctrines of nature and truth, innate in them, or which readily occur to their minds, as yet unbiassed by authority, prejudice, or custom.' And he calls this the 'school of nature and truth pointed out by the Son of God.' We are by no means disposed to make any man an offender for a word, but we cannot help observing, that if Lancaster had expressed himself so incautiously, the friends of Dr. Bell would have eagerly seized upon the passage as conclusive evidence of a socinianized mind.

Lancaster had his theological heresies, but they are of a totally different complexion. His perversions of scripture are all mystical, and it is curious to observe how they blend with his burning temperament. He is an Elijah,' a 'chosen vessel,' a David before Goliath-a Joshua before Jericho. Imaginative and excitable, he is always on fire; Bell, very rarely, except when defending 'his system.' The former often manifests heat without light; but the latter, as a christian, never warms—all is cold as death. Coleridge, in one of his letters to Bell, unconsciously reads his friend a lesson when he observes, A man who has nothing better than prudence is fit for no world to come;' he might have had poor Lancaster in his eye when he added, and he who does not possess it in full activity is as unfit for the present world.' Both might have profited by his conclusion. What then shall we say? Have both prudence and the moral sense, but subordinate the former to the latter; and so possess the flexibility and address of the serpent, to glide through the brakes and jungles of this life, with the wings of a dove to carry us upward to a better.'

Lancaster's lack of prudence was happily supplied by a little band of men, now all gone to their reward, who, at great personal sacrifice, nobly came forward in the hour of need, and saved the schools he had established from utter and irremediable ruin. On two or three of these departed worthies we must bestow a passing notice.

WILLIAM CORSTON, the simple-minded author of the 'Brief Sketch,' to which we have been so largely indebted, was once well known as the party who introduced into this country the manufacture of British Leghorn. Having shown that instead of being imported as heretofore from Italy and France, it might be manufactured by our own poor, he opened a warehouse for its sale on Ludgate Hill. The discovery attracted much notice. The Society of Arts' pronounced the invention a national benefit, and rewarded the inventor with a gold medal. The 'Society for bettering the Condition of the Poor,' also noticed

this valuable branch of manufacture in their reports. After many vicissitudes, some of which obliged him more than once, to compound with his creditors, he eventually succeeded in his undertaking, and after a long and laborious life, retired on a small property to his native village of Fincham in Norfolk, where, at a very early period of his career he had established a school for poor children. It is due to this good and honourable man to state, that after emerging from pecuniary difficulties he called his creditors together, and with rare probity paid every debt in full.

William Corston was a Moravian by religious profession, a man of tender spirit and of warm affections. We have often heard him relate with brimming eyes the circumstance which first led him to take so deep an interest in the education of poor children. 'I was going,' he used to say, 'when I was about twenty years of age through Butt Lane, Deptford, when I heard voices singing, and looking up, saw a board on which was inscribed, "To the glory of God and the benefit of poor children. This school was erected by Dean Stanhope.' I stood looking and musing upon it, when the voices of the children so affected me that tears flowed down my cheeks, and the prayer immediately arose in my heart, O! that it may please God that I may have it in my power one day to build a school like this for poor children!'* He accomplished his object, and the school still stands, bearing the same inscription-'To the glory of God and the benefit of poor children.'

Lancaster never had a more attached friend than this good Samaritan. In all his trials we find him pouring his sorrows into the sympathizing bosom of the man whom he delights to call his friend,' his fellow labourer,' his 'brother,' his 'best beloved and faithful one,'-and he never appeals in vain. In later years, Mr. Corston spent most of his time at Fincham, where he died on the 25th of May, 1843, in the 84th year of his age.

JOSEPH FOX, to whom Lancaster was introduced in 1807, was a medical man, not less eminent for his professional skill, than for his extensive and diversified benevolence. He was, like Corston, a man of quick feelings and of sensitive nature. In religious sentiment he was either an independent or a baptist, we are not sure which. Fox, while at Dover, was taken by the late Sir John Jackson, with whom he was residing, to hear Lancaster lecture, and such was the effect produced upon him by the fervid oratory of the speaker, that at the conclusion of the lecture he

By some unaccountable mistake Mr. Southey has attributed this incident to Lancaster, and made him the straw-plait manufacturer.