out by the priest and pedagogue; and in manhood dried up by intercourse with the world. From earliest childhood we are accustomed to see things valued in an inverse ratio to their real worth, place, wealth, or fashion control the many, and to find regarded as the nobility of the race not those who labor honestly and efficiently for mankind, but those who have been most successful in love, avarice, or ambition. A poor man who gets tipsy is brought up before your city police and fined or sent to the house of correction; a rich man may get drunk in his own house and be carried to his bed he knows not when or how, and yet be counted a gentleman. He who kills but one man is a murderer; he who can kill or cause thousands to be killed is a hero ; and everything else in society is of the same stamp. Is virtue possible, I mean virtue beyond the virtue of intention, is virtue possible in such a state of society? He who would be strictly honest, unless he have some capital in advance, must beg or starve. Men live by cheating, grow rich by cheating, — highminded, honorable men, by cheating. A man, by way of commerce, may rob, make poor, a thousand widows and orphans in some uncivilized island of the ocean, and yet be one of our first and most respectable citizens. And if, out of his superabounding wealth, he give a few hundreds to some benevolent society, as old sinners formerly made donations to the Church, he shall be praised in all the public prints, and held up as one whom every young man should study to imitate. He who by some strange mischance finds himself encumbered with a conscience somewhat tender, and disposed to inquire into the rectitude of his doings, is counted a mere simpleton by the business world. Go on 'change,

into a bank, a broker's office, a factory, or into any of your legislative halls or courts of justice, if you would ascertain what are one's chances of being virtuous in society as it is. Or go into the charmed circles of Fashion, or into one of your popular churches, if you would learn the temptations to sin, which society furnishes and will furnish as long as it remains in its present

half-civilized state. Fashion makes people afraid to act themselves and enjoy themselves in their own way, lest their fashionable acquaintances cut them; and the church makes them afraid to think freely and utter themselves honestly, lest they be turned out of the synagogue, and sent to hell before their time.

C. Come, come, man, you are growing crazy. R. Would to God I were crazy. Would to God the evils I see were only the visions of my own disordered fancy. Would to God all I have uttered were but the ravings of the madman. But I fear, Sir, that I am but too sane. I fear that it will be found that what I say is but too true. I shall not be believed now. I know my fate. I know I am doomed to utter prophecies that will not be believed. Yet I must speak. I must lay down my burden, however bitterly I may weep to foresee that it will be disregarded. No matter. I speak not in wrath; I blame not individuals; I know human weakness; I know what men have to combat, and my heart bleeds for them. If, as I glance at their conduct, I sometimes find my mind growing dark and perplexed, and a curse rises in the bitterness of my soul to my lips, I check myself, and lay the blame to systems and not to individuals. Individuals are our brothers; they are made as you and I are; they would do good; the basest of them kindles up at sight of the disinterested and the heroic; the most abandoned love virtue, and long to return to their Father's house and hold communion with the wise and good; but alas, the temptations to sin are too strong; a false standard of worth, a wrongly organized society, mischievous social influences hurry them onward and downward to hell. O, Sir, I would not censure a single human being as an individual. I know not what struggles may have torn the bosom of that poor brother they are dragging to prison, on whom that iron door is soon to be closed and those bolts are to be drawn. I know not how those, whom society brands as felons, may have struggled to be good and great, and till I do, I dare not condemn them. The hardened villain, as he was called,

who, a few days since was choked to death by law, may have started in life wtth a noble ambition, with warm and generous sympathies, looking forward to be one of the greatest and best of the human race. Had his heart been responded to by society, had he found the influence needed to bring out in full glory and omnipotence the infant god within him, who can tell what he might not have been? Who can tell the efforts he had made, the good resolutions he had formed, and the anguish he had suffered, the fire which had burned within him, the hell which had consumed him! O, if the hearts of those, we most condemn, were laid open to our inspection, could we but see their workings, examine their scars, and judge of their conflicts with sin and the devil, and know how a word, a thoughtless word, a discouraging look, a temptation thrown in their way by that very society which condemns, hangs, or imprisons them, has proved their ruin, overpowered them, sunk them, as the feather too much broke the camel's back, my life on it, we should find infinitely more to commisserate and forgive, than to condemn and punish.

And yet, Sir, do not fancy that I am a whit more charitable than I was yesterday. I admit men are weak rather than wicked, and the depravities of their character I am disposed to charge to the depravities of the social state, rather than to the perversity of their wills; nevertheless they are not wholly blameless. Man is not wholly a passive being. He can act as well as be acted upon. If circumstances act upon him, up to a certain extent, he can act upon them, and so modify them that their reaction upon him shall be salutary. I blame individuals, not because they cannot, by a mere effort of volition, make themselves highminded and virtuous beings; but because they do not exert the moral power given them to mould society, so that it may be in harmony with the higher laws of man's nature. I blame you, Sir, as a rich man, that instead of making the social influences to which we are exposed favorable to the growth of moral excel

lence, you have been intent merely on amassing an estate. I blame the learned and the gifted, because they devote their learning and gifts, not to the improvement of man's social condition, but to their own aggrandisement. I blame politicians and statesmen for their selfishness and neglect of the true end of government, the elevation of man.

C. And what would you have these men you blame attempt for the elevation of man, as you term it?

R. Much. But I am fatigued now, and you must wait for my answer till I am disposed to give it.

ART. II. The Laboring Classes in the Age of Chivalry.

"THE age of Chivalry is gone!" exclaimed Mr. Burke in one of those brilliant speeches of his, which, entrancing the imagination, led reason captive in her train; and a thousand voices have caught the sound, reechoing wherever the English language is spoken"The age of Chivalry is gone!" loudly and mournfully, as if in its departure, society had incurred some strange and irremediable loss. The age of chivalry has been bewept and bewailed in poetry and prose. Its apotheosis has been sung in every possible metre, the disconsolate bards gazing wistfully where it soars away among the stars, and no Elijah's mantle falling upon them to bid them revive the departing era. very school-boy to whom that celebrated "apostrophe to the Queen of France" is given as an oratorical exercise, catches the sentiment with the style, and lifts also his little voice in lamentation. So continually are these changes rung in our ears, that we almost involuntarily join the general cry and contribute with full throat to swell the melancholy chorus-"The age of Chivalry is gone!"

Chivalry is gone, and thank God for it!

The

Would too

we could say that its remains and influences had followed it! It was evil, and its age was evil. In the inscrutable dealings of a wise Providence, it doubtless had its uses and its mission. Its mission done, what else did it deserve but to be abolished? Conceived in sin and brought forth in iniquity, it could no longer be allowed to cumber the earth. Its origin was in that ever-flowing fountain of bitter waters, the insane pride of the human heart. When the chief of one of those savage tribes of the North, which overran the Roman empire summoned his men to the field, the caballerus or cavalier, who could appear on horseback, looked with disdain on his humbler fellow vassal, who could only follow the wars on foot. In this simple fact we perceive at once the rise and the spirit of chivalry. Pedestrianism was the token of inferiority, for human nature was the same then as now, when prim "Respectability, who keeps her gig," dashes along the highway, careless what humble footmen are bespattered by her hurrying wheels. In process of time, however, it became something more, the distinction between the two classes grew wider as a new form of society was established. The horsemen became more exclusive; and we finally see them constituting a distinct order enjoying immunities and privileges, which could be entered only by a regular investiture of the candidate with arms by some conspicuous member, after sufficient proof of desert had been given.

But it is not in this aspect that chivalry particularly interests us. The word, as we use it, is made to signify in the main a sentiment originating in this institution and pervading and governing society, a conventional code, recognised by the superior classes as their rule of conduct, and as such we apply it to the description of individual action and character. In this view, chivalry may be regarded as threefold, consisting of the sentiments of loyalty, knightly honor, and gallantry. highest duties was obedience to superiors. vassal, kneeling before his lord, vowed to and faithful man, he resigned the control

Among its When the be his true of all his