screened from the contagion of bad example at home, is one of these :— that all the children of moral and well- conducted parents should perform their work at home, and, by so doing, avoid the demoralising effects of the vice-crowded factory, is another :-that societies under royal patronage should be established to procure for the entire mass of the working classes amusement, combined with instruction, during the Sundays and the other periods of idleness, is a third. All these plans would be excellent were they not impracticable. To subject every drunk. ard to punishment has been tried in Germany without success. increase the duties on wine and spirits has been recommended; but in a vine-growing country like France this would be a check to industry, and it would be unjust towards the sober portion of the community. Another plan is uniformly to publish in the newspapers an account of all the accidents, fatal quarrels, and crimes resulting from drunkenness. As, from the extension of education, every one will in a few years be able to read, this public exposure would tend powerfully to check the vice.'

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We greatly doubt it; and, indeed, of all the suggestions brought forward in this section, there appears to us to be only one from which any important practical good might result. It is, that systematically, and by a mutual compact among all the manufacturers and master artificers, every habitual drunkard should be expelled from their establishments, however able a workman he may be. No doubt, if this system were generally and rigidly adopted, there would result from it, after a time, an important improvement in the habits of the working classes. M. Frégier does not advert to the temperance movement in Ireland and England. As he cannot be ignorant of it, his silence may, we presume, be attributed to his conviction that this singular impulse on the public mind will be of short duration.

Tolerated gambling-houses no longer exist in France; and the plan adopted by the government, of first suppressing them in the provincial towns, and then attacking the grand establishments in Paris, was politic and wise. It would appear, however, that the evil, if abated, is very far from being conquered. The vigilance of the police has, indeed, successfully put down the houses established for the specific purpose of clandestine gambling; but it has hitherto been foiled by the augmented numbers and activity of the maisons à parties. In these, high and unfair play is carried on, under the specious exterior of ordinary visiting, to a far greater extent than formerly; and our author is of opinion that alterations in the penal code are imperatively called for to meet these subtle evasions of the law.

Two diametrically opposite systems have been proposed for the reformation of the unhappy victims of prostitution. The advocates of the one, filled with the benevolent desire of reinstating

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these women in the honest ranks of society, assert that it is the duty of the civil authorities to facilitate this object by assiduously labouring to introduce among them habits of order, forethought, and economy. The advocates of the other system reprobate, as vitally detrimental to public morals, any measures which would tend to blend these degraded beings with the respectable portion of the community, or to lessen the ignominy which attaches to them, and which forms one of the strongest safeguards, perhaps the strongest of all, to female virtue: they fear, also, that any improvements in the habits of these women would, in proportion as it lessened prostitution, augment illicit connexions more irreparably detrimental to the happiness of families. Far from promoting any objects of this nature, they are anxious to make the line of demarcation more clearly apparent than it is at present; and would willingly bring back the ancient laws which restricted women of this class to certain parts of each city, and obliged them to wear a peculiar dress. Our author inclines evidently to the milder of these systems, and so did also his great authority, ParentDuchâtelet in England this controversy is not likely to be agitated.

It is quite evident that the science of prison discipline is, of all others, the one nearest our author's heart; and his ardent partisanship in favour of the system of solitary confinement leads him, as we have already stated, to devote a very undue portion of his volumes to this especial subject. We shall not attempt to follow him through the details; the question being one which we but recently discussed, and which, if not actually decided in this country, may be considered as on the very eve of being so. The balance of evidence, we think, leaves little doubt that the bodily health does not suffer by even the most strict system of solitary confinement: but the case is by no means so clear with regard to the mind. Here, although the evidence is far from conclusive, there is strong ground for believing that long-protracted confinement, in a state of constant and absolute solitude, will injure the functions of the brain, and induce insanity, or permanent mental imbecility. The matter is one of such importance, that the only safe thing to do is at once to assume the fact to be so, and to act on that assumption. Confine a prisoner in a separate cell, interdict him absolutely and entirely from all communication whatever, either by eye or mouth, with his fellowprisoners; but give him employment and instruction—let him, in the course of each day, be visited by carefully-selected gaolers, by the master artisan who has to superintend his work, by the schoolmaster, the physician, and the chaplain and experience has proved that there will not be the slightest cause to fear any injury to the

mind, however long such a course of solitary confinement shall continue, be it for years, or even for the whole of life. There is also the strongest evidence to prove, that amelioration of character, radical and permanent reformation, is the cheering and encouraging result in very numerous instances.-Under these modifications -and they may now be considered as points the necessity of which is generally conceded-the insulation of prisoners may be pronounced to be the best and most successful system which has yet been devised to punish crime and amend the criminal.

The great additional outlay necessary in the construction of a building where several hundred convicts are to be completely separated from each other, is a weightier objection than it may appear to be at first sight. Every portion of the establishment must be more elaborately fitted up than at present; the exercisegrounds must be multiplied, the passages and corridors must be peculiarly constructed, and the entire structure must be more extensive and more complicated. In some instances, the existing prisons might, by a considerable outlay, be rendered applicable to this new mode of confinement, but in the majority of cases it would be necessary that entirely new buildings should be erected. In many counties in England this demand upon the local revenues would almost amount to a prohibition; in all it would be severely felt but the object is one of such vital importance, that, when the superior advantages of the separate system shall no longer be a matter of dispute, the legislature will, we have no doubt, lend a willing aid to extend it throughout the kingdom. The first expense is the only real difficulty; for although the charges of superintendence will be increased, this is a trivial consideration, and will be compensated for a hundred-fold by the gradual diminution of crime.

M. Frégier claims for his country the merit of extending a much greater degree of paternal solicitude towards a convict on his dismissal from prison than is usual in England. In France, a liberal portion of the profits of his work is paid to him when he is discharged, and he is thus not compelled by actual want, as is too frequently the case in England, at once to resume his career of crime. This is wise and worthy of imitation; but the system established in France for the surveillance of liberated prisoners, the convict-passports given them, and the societies of patronage,' as they are called, the object of which is to facilitate their re-introduction into society, are considered by our author as failures s; and he is of opinion, that, except as relates to the younger classes of criminals, they should be abolished altogether. He is decided in his condemnation of our penal settlements; the formation of agricultural colonies in the mother country for the employment

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of liberated prisoners he demonstrates to be attended with insurmountable objections; and the result at which he arrives is, that the best chance to render the liberated criminal an inoffensive and useful member of society is to give him moral instruction, and the knowledge of some useful trade, during the period of his detention; and that, when he is again thrown upon society, such funds shall be supplied as shall give him the time and means of fixing himself in some honest course of life.

With this subject M. Frégier concludes his treatise. Differing from him on many points, compelled to smile at some passages, and to express our reprobation of others, the final ́impression which his pages have produced upon us is one of respect and gratitude.

ART. II.--The ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA; or Dictionary of Arts, Science, and General Literature. SEVENTH EDITION, with Preliminary Dissertations, &c. &c. Edited by Macvey Napier, Esq., F.R.S. Edinburgh. 1842. 21 Vols. 4to.

THE task of analysis and appreciation would have been overwhelming, had this vast work been submitted to our judgment in the fulness of its stature, and in the maturity of its age: but we have had the advantage of being familiar with it from an early period of its existence; and trust, therefore, that our readers will not deem us presumptuous if, in giving them an account of its rise and progress, we at the same time venture to pronounce a judgment upon its general merits, and even upon some of the most remarkable articles which its pages now contain.

Although we might naturally have expected that dictionaries explanatory of words would give rise to dictionaries explanatory of ideas, and descriptive of the things which these words represent, yet such a transition was not the first step which was taken in the composition of encyclopædias. Systematic digests of literature and science appeared under the name of encyclopædias long before the alphabet was employed as the principle of the arrangement. The Arabian Encyclopædia of Alfarabius, of which the MS. exists in the Escurial, and the more modern one of Professor Alstedius of Weissenbourg (2 vols. folio, 1630), are examples of this method of systematising knowledge.

The first Dictionary of the arts and sciences was the Lexicon Technicum' of Dr. Harris, which was published in two folio volumes, the first in 1706, the second in 1710; but its limitation

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almost entirely to mathematics and physics deprived it of the character of an encyclopædic work.

This dictionary was followed, in 1721, by the Cyclopædia' of Mr. Chambers, a work of great merit and utility, which ran through no fewer than five editions in the course of eighteen years. Its reputation extended to the continent, and it was translated into French and Italian. The French translation was completed in 1745, by one Mills, an Englishman, with the assistance of Sellius, a native of Dantzic. About this time the Abbé de Gua projected the celebrated Encyclopédie,' a collection which formed an epoch in the literary, if not in the political, history of Europe. So limited was the early plan of this work, that Mills's translation of the Cyclopædia of Chambers was assumed as the groundwork of the undertaking. In consequence of a dispute between Gua and the booksellers, the editorship of the Encyclopédie was intrusted to D'Alembert and Diderot, who, while they represent Chambers as a servile compiler, principally from French writers, acknowledge at the same time that without the groundwork of the French translation of that book, their own would never have been composed. To enlarge an article already written was a task which the contributors willingly undertook, while they would have shrunk from the labour and responsibility of composing a new one.

A few years after the completion of this work, which has been as much reprobated on account of the irreligious and revolutionary doctrines which it inculcates, as it has been extolled for the originality and depth of many of its articles, the first edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica' was given to the world in three vols. 4to. It was edited, and the plan of it probably devised, by Mr. William Smellie, a printer in Edinburgh, and the author of an interesting book on natural history. The peculiarity of this encyclopædia consisted in its treating each branch of literature and science under its proper name, and in a systematic form, the technical terms and subordinate heads being likewise explained alphabetically—while details slightly connected with the general subject could be thus separately introduced.

We have now before us two rival methods of constructing an encyclopædia, each of which has been regarded as possessing peculiar advantages. Although from the prevalence of both methods we cannot rightly collect the opinion of the public, yet we have no hesitation in giving a decided preference to that in which the leading branches of knowledge are discussed in separate treatises, as in the Encyclopædia Britannica.' The facility of composing, or of obtaining authors to compose, the short articles which correspond to the technical titles or sections of any branch

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