wish I could do the same by an excellent piece upon female education which I once had the pleasure of reading in MS. Why will not the benevolent author be prevailed upon to publish a thing which would benefit thousands without hurting one?"

The benevolent author is, of course, Bentley himself; and, no doubt, enlightened views of every kind might at that period be adequately expressed by "an excellent piece on Female Education," just as it might be an excellent test of the intelligence of an advanced Parsee gentleman at the present day but there is something very quaint in the discussion of such a subject between the two men, one of whom was unmarried, and the other a childless young widower. Bentley afterwards wrote, to all appearance well and effectively, on a subject probably more in his way, the Inland Navigation question, which he, like Wedgwood, supported strongly. He was, at the same time, a busy and important man in all the public matters of the community to which he belonged. The next letter which we will quote, and which some of our readers in Scotland may find instructive at this moment, refers to the affairs of the Octagon chapel which Mr Bentley and his friends had built for their "liberal section of Dissent." These good people preferred a liturgy and a set form of prayer to extempore devotional exercise, at the same time retaining the usual scruples with respect to the Athanasian Creed, with its damnatory clauses, and other parts of the Common Prayer which either savoured of Catholicism or did not allow of sufficient latitude of opinion. To meet these views and wishes, a liturgy consisting of three distinct services was drawn up," about which Wedgwood thus makes inquiries:

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"When you favour me with a line I shall be glad to hear if you have fixed upon another minister for your Octagon;

and when your Prayers are pub

lished I should be glad to buy two or three copies of them. I wish they had been published two or three months ago -we should have stood a chance of having them made use of in our neighbourhood. A gentleman at Newcastle has built a chapel in one of our villages which lay at an inconvenient distance from the mother church. When the building was finished, he applied to the bishop and prayed his lordship to give it his blessing, which was refused from motives that do no honour to the cloth, and are not worth troubling you with. The good old gentleman, who was late

an attorney, now one of his Majesty's justices of the peace, being unwilling that his pious endeavours to instruct the ignorant should be lost to the poor inhabitants, went to work himself with his prayer-book, altered it to his own liking, and sent the MS. to have two or three hundred copies printed for the use of his chapel, for which he has now took out a licence, and agreed with a good orderly schoolmaster, his neighbour, for the valuable consideration of and he is to enter upon his new employ£15 per annum, to officiate as priest, ment the next Lord's day. You'll naturally conclude that the hearts of these villagers must overflow with gratitude to their benefactor, who has made his way through so many difficulties to serve them. Nothing like it sir, indeed. The Church is in danger with them, even before it is well built, and many of his intended flock are afraid of being cheated out of their religion before they have any to lose. His prayers are found great fault with before they are seen, and they cry mainly out, "We will have them like other folk's prayers,

or have none.' The ferment is so strong amongst them at present that 'tis thought the poor chaplain may sell his sacred vestments again, for in all probability they will not let him enter upon his function."

The friends had much correspondence of this general kind on all subjects, from criticisms on Thomson's Poems, of which Bentley was a warm admirer, to accounts of the Parliamentary news, which Wedgwood, being in London, was in a position to communicate to his friend, from whom he seems to have derived his literary, but not his political opinions; and this goes on until both plunge, body and soul, into the canal movement, and

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there is no longer anything written or thought about except inland navigation. During this time Wedgwood's life progressed in a course of calm but certain prosperity. He married a wife whom he loved, and who brought him some fortune; he found favour with the great, and executed services of cream ware" and other ware, for Royalty itself; he made progress in public opinion, and apparently became, in the course of the canal agitation, one of the most prominent men of his district. At the same time, what was perhaps as important as any, he went on collecting round him a staff of good workmen and faithful assistants, many of them of his own training, upon whose comprehension and faithfulness he could rely. And the people with whom he came in contact in his canal agitation, and the patrons who gave him commissions, seem both to have recognised the special interest of his life, and to have taken pains more or less, according to their degree of connection with him, to further his aims as an artist and craftsman. Indeed, acquaintance with Wedgwood seems to have implied, to some extent, an interest in pottery, which is no small testimony at once to the force of his character and to his own enthusiasm for his craft. These gentlemen, entirely unconnected with the art, put themselves to pains to collect drawings for him, when that happened to be in their way; or, if their minds had a scientific turn, made experiments for him, and helped him with hints as to the chemical elements which could be combined most successfully. He appears indeed throughout his life, so far at least as this volume leads us, a perfectly comprehensible reasonable man, honestly devoted to his profession, but noway addicted to those flights of imagination which go beyond the general sympathies-a man who could give as well as take, and whose honest tendency to inVOL. XCVIII.-NO. DXCVIII.

crease in substance and wealth and comfort gave body and shape to his other aspirations. He, too, could help his neighbours as they helped him. Art was with him no passion, but a sensible purpose, meaning more than the mere production of beautiful things or winning of personal fame. Such a character is perhaps more congenial to the English mind than the halfcrazy genius, possessed by one idea, could ever be; and accordingly everybody helped Wedgwood heartily, and encouraged him, and bought his ware, and aided his researches -so that instead of losing life and fortune in the perfecting of his art, as so many have done, his art brought him wealth and reputation, and an enlarged and expanded life.

We refer our readers, for the fullest and most interesting details of his progress, to the work itself, from which we have taken this brief sketch, and which is, as we have already stated, illustrated throughout with engravings from some of his finest works. The volume leaves him at the most interesting period of his course, when, the groundwork being well and effectually laid, he is just preparing to enter upon the special labours which are most distinctly connected with his name. This later and still more interesting portion of his life, for which all the readers of the beginning will look with interest, was begun by the formation of a partnership with his friend Bentley, who had been more or less connected with him in business for several years, and for whose energies there was now full scope in the increasing trade of the future Etruria. found this great centre of art and industry and domestic comfort, Wedgwood had taken the first step by the purchase of a small estate in an admirable situation; after which he makes his proposal to Bentley, or rather supports the proposal already made, in an extremely interesting and character

M

To

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To

An infinite variety of periphrases, more or less refined, have been adopted by different classes and in different stages of society, as the correct form of disguising the commonplace fact that a man is going to make a woman his wife. say nothing of such vulgarisms as "splicing," and "tying the noose " -which may be taken as the two antagonistic metaphors in plebeian use, one implying that man is a useless and imperfect article without the woman; the other, that he is hopelessly fettered by the encumbrance or that queer Americanism by which a man talks of getting slung to a gal," which is even a more undignified notion of a permanent union;-setting all these aside, more civilised society has a euphuism of its own upon this subject which is not many degrees better. Fashionable intelligence, if it avoids the more odious phrases of "a marriage being on the tapis," or the " preliminaries being arranged"-language which is quite sufficient to account for the alleged disinclination of our young men to marry-has to fall back upon the absurdities of the Grandisonian era; either we are told that the gentleman is "about to lead the lady to the hymeneal altar ❞—a thing which he certainly never does, and which would be a very pagan performance if he did; or the lady is about to "bestow her hand" upon the favoured individual-a very unsatisfactory endowment, if she has nothing else to bestow. This latter phrase, however, has most meaning after all-a meaning very much beyond the conception of the composers of "marriages in high life." They talk a mystic philosophy without knowing it, as the Frenchman talked prose. In

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the Hand lie the mysteries of life. If it does not exactly contain the heart, it contains the key to it. But, in fact, as all of us know, the heart is a mere force-pump, and not of the least use to any man or woman in the way of the affections, except for the purposes of poetry or fiction. The stomach, and so forth, are much more intimately connected with the tender feelings, as the old heathens knew. But whether their seat be in the one or the other, they may defy scrutiny so far as those organs are concerned. But in the hand they lie open to the minutest investigation. No man or woman willingly wears their heart upon their sleeve;" but, willingly or unwillingly, they all wear it inside their glove, patent as day to the initiated. If the bridegroom be but an adept, one glance at the palm of his betrothed when stripped of its kid covering (which operation, so far as our own observation goes, forms the one great practical difficulty in getting married)-one rapid and comprehensive survey of that little pink field may, even at that last moment, reveal to him secrets which he could never have learnt from hours of gazing into her eyes, or listening to pretty nonsense from her lips.

"She has two eyes of heavenly blue

And what she says, it is not true." But there can be no "fooling" in the tell-tale outline of the fingers, or the mystic lines upon the palm. By these he may know, if he will, what is the real worth of the hand she is about to bestow upon him, and how much of the heart-and what sort of a heart-goes with it.

But it must be admitted that the moment we have imagined would be rather late in the day for him to repent of his bargain; and amongst

the many ingenious alterations which the authors of a "Revised Prayer - Book" have been good enough to suggest in the marriage service, we do not remember that, even for the relief of the most scrupulous consciences, it has been proposed that the gentleman should be allowed, "at his discretion," to substitute for the usual answer"I won't." It is desirable that he should have some idea of what is in his partner's hand, as a whist-player would say, rather earlier in the game. He will have had abundant opportunities, it may be assumed, even in the most decorous modern courtship, of making the necessary investigations at his leisure, before the "preliminaries" are carried too far and he will find this new and infallible mode of studying character fully developed, with rules and applications, in a volume with which we have recently made acquaintance-rather too late for our own practical guidance in life. Its size and shape, fortunately, preclude any puns upon it as a handy-book or a hand-book; but it is a book of "The Hand, as an index of mental development"- or, in the more scientific language of its title-page, "The Psychonomy of the Hand."

:

In short, a grand new word for palmistry-for that is what it really comes to. The gypsies have been right after all. Magistrates have fined and imprisoned them, while Mr Home and the Brothers Davenport go free yet they are the true martyrs of science, while the others are the apostles of humbug. The "lines in the pretty lady's hand" do really contain her "fortune," and her temper, and her tastes, and her moral virtues and deficiencies, and other revelations on which the poor gypsy oracles were wisely silent. No young woman would give sixpence to be told that " a cross on the mound of Jupiter" indicates 66 egotism," or that " a line having its rise in the mound of Mercury, and proceeding directly to the mound of the sun," betrays "a ten

dency to talk about science of which little is really known." This branch of psychonomy is anything but popular, and our gypsy friends, though no doubt they understood it, very wisely kept their knowledge to themselves, and stuck to plain fortune-telling. Not all the wheedling in the world would have persuaded the maid-of-all-work to cross the sibyl's palm with silver in order to be told of her faults; her mistress does that for nothing every day; but it was well worth a shilling, out of the lowest wages, to be given the choice between the dark man and the fair.

We are indebted to our French neighbours for this old friend with a new face. The volume in question is little more than the presentation, in an English dress, and with some English illustrations and comments, of the speculations of MM. d'Arpentigny and Desbarrolles. These two gentlemen have sought to find in the hand those indications of character which Lavater professed to discover in the features, and the phrenologist in the bumps of the head. But the system of each is quite distinct, and, for ought that appears, may be even contradictory: and though it may have been convenient to put them both into the same volume as both having the Hand for their subject, they have very little other connection. M. d'Arpentigny "has endeavoured to show that every mental organisation is uniformly accompanied by a certain definite form of hand.' To establish this system "has cost him," says his English disciple, "thirty years of careful investigation, and the exercise of strong analytical" (shall we say also of imaginative ?) "powers." He terms his science Chirognomy. M. Desbarrolles's theory is, "that the vital action of every organisation tends to develop certain lines and marks upon the susceptible surface of the palm;" and this he calls Chiromancy. He does not claim it as an invention of his own: it came first,