permanent incarceration is due to the community at large; and it can hardly be considered cruel towards themselves. If they persist in crime whenever they have the opportunity of doing so, it is clearly necessary that they should be for ever deprived of such opportunity. It is proposed, therefore, that imprisonment for life-which would mean in reality imprisonment during the pleasure of the Crown-should be the lot of this class of utterly hopeless offenders.

Means should be taken, by special provision for the purpose, to secure such a registration of convictions as exists in France; so that the criminal who has been punished at Birmingham in one year should not in the next be treated as a novice in guilt at York or Lancaster. Police-officers should be appointed for the special purpose of tracking these offenders from one tribunal to another, and making each judge before whom they are brought, each jury which has to try them, acquainted with their previous history. Having thus ensured a thorough knowledge of the character of the culprit, his sentence should be determined accordingly. If he has been once punished without effect, his second punishment should be proportionately severe; he may reasonably be set down as of the criminal class, and doomed. accordingly to a long term of confinement, which should bring into play all the resources of reformatory experience, and leave time for a trial of the results during a considerable period of permissive freedom. A further crime would then fairly entitle him to be regarded, not merely as belonging to the criminal class, but to the class of incorrigible criminals. The sentence would take the form of imprisonment for life. But the prerogative which enables the Crown to accord at any moment a free or conditional pardon, would prevent such a sentence from conveying the meaning of absolutely hopeless and irretrievable confinement. Whenever, under a system of discipline adapted to the character of such prisoners, it had become clear to the prison authorities that any one of their charges was really fit for liberty, and had the means and opportunity of living honestly when at large, it would be competent to them to recommend his release; and such a recommendation would never be unnecessarily rejected. We should not deprive the most guilty of hope; but we should secure ourselves almost as effectually as in former days against that class of incorrigible offenders whose career used to terminate on the gallows. Those who should show themselves fit for liberty, would not fail to regain it; those who could not safely, and therefore should not under any circumstances, be restored to society, would be incapacitated from further mischief. Nor need their confinement be either expensive to the country or painful to themselves. By employing

them on public works of undoubted utility, and permitting them to improve their condition-subject only to the requirements of their safe custody-by means of their industry, we should at once gain for the state a supply of cheap and constant labour, and for society security against an intolerable nuisance: we should have converted dangerous enemies into useful servants.

Such a scheme as this any method, in short, of dealing with incurables-would be greatly recommended to public opinion, and greatly facilitated in action, by the adoption of a system of punishments in the first instance which should give us fewer incurables to deal with. While we persist in a method of treatment which tends only to familiarise with punishment and to harden against shame the novice in guilt, it seems hard to visit with severe penalties the natural consequences of our own error when he has become a desperate and persevering cri minal. A better system of discipline in the case of those convicted for the first time would obviate this objection, while it would probably diminish to a very considerable extent the number of second and third convictions. We do not venture to pronounce with absolute confidence in favour of any of the suggestions we have recounted. Only of two points do we feel absolutely certain: first, that our present system of short and frequent imprisonments is unsound in principle and unwise in practice; and secondly, that in all plans suggested for its amendment, the essential conditions of success are-provision for the enforcement of industrial training in the first instance, and for the permanent detention of absolutely incorrigible offenders when means of correction have been employed in vain.

ART. IV. VIRGIL AND HIS MODERN CRITICS.

P. Vergili Maronis Opera,-The Works of Virgil,-with a Commentary by John Conington, M.A., Professor of Latin in the University of Oxford. London: Whitaker.

HAD that celebrated Chinese sage, who visited this metropolis a hundred years ago in his capacity of Citizen of the World, arrived among us a century later, there is one subject that we think would have attracted his attention, of which he then took little notice. We have often, indeed, thought it odd that the condition of our two elder Universities at a time when Gibbon was an inmate of Magdalen should have elicited not a single satirical allusion from that sly and humorous observer. But it is not

And how

possible that such a philosopher could at the present day neglect those signs of activity which pervade every department of education. Could poor Goldsmith return to life, how easily we can picture to ourselves the honest enthusiasm with which he would hail this new "revival of letters," as well as the good-humoured gravity with which he would sometimes raise a smile at the anomalies by which it is accompanied: anomalies which are perhaps inevitable at the present stage of our progress, and not, therefore, deserving of serious censure so much as of friendly and generous criticism. But if there is one of these which more than another would have tickled that lively sense of the incongruous for which our philosopher was remarkable, it is, we think, one connected with the subject we are about to discuss. How is it, we think we hear him asking, that an author who still continues to be a text-book in our schools, and whose graces are still thought best adapted for the formation of an elegant taste, is now set up as a butt for all critics to shoot at? shall we account for the still more astonishing fact, that the very same men are encouraging these two opposite views at the same time, and are engaged during one half of their time in teaching their pupils to admire what they are engaged during the other half in proving unworthy of admiration? We cannot help fancying that the solution of this problem would have caused Lien Chi no ordinary amount of perplexity. And, albeit we have put the inconsistency in perhaps a somewhat exaggerated shape, yet we own to thinking it of sufficient consequence to justify some curiosity. Accordingly, as we have been long convinced that, owing to the over-anxiety of our best school of critics to confirm and perpetuate principles which in themselves are worthy of all recognition, the author of the Georgics and the Eneid stood in great danger of undue depreciation, we take the opportunity afforded by Mr. Conington's edition to invite our readers' attention to the subject. For it is not, in our opinion, a matter of small importance, to determine whether it is the position of Virgil in our schools and colleges, or the theories enunciated by his latest critics, that demand reconsideration.

It may perhaps be thought that we have overrated the influence of this particular author in our system of classical education. That is a question of experience; and our own experience is in favour of our own assertion. But be this as it may, there are quite sufficient literary reasons for discussing this question, if the more practical reason fails us; and we fancy that most of our classical readers will feel more or less beholden to us if we can supply them with any good grounds for hesitation ere they consent to look upon their old favourite as a concocter of sham goods and a corrupter of great traditions. For

really, if we believe all that Mr. Conington and Mr. Gladstone have written of him, that is what we positively must do. We think it quite possible that Mr. Conington himself did not see all the necessary consequences of his own criticism. Such cases are far from uncommon. But whether he did or did not, we must of course recognise in the opinions of so distinguished a scholar, and so candid and temperate a writer, an authority that may not be lightly set aside. And we beg, therefore, to assure him that, while objecting to the tone of his recent commentary, we do not for a moment forget the respect due to his position, or the claims which he justly has upon our confidence in all questions of classical literature.

Of the three kinds of poetry of which Virgil has left us specimens the pastoral, the didactic, and the epic-we know not if the first would have redounded any more to his credit had it been an original instead of a translation. It is a remarkable fact, that the world has only one pastoral poet. Of those that have perished we can take no account; but certainly the circumstance that in that species of poetry which appeals to the widest class of readers, and demands the fewest extraneous accomplishments in the poet, only one author has succeeded in writing any thing which mankind cares to read, has hardly been allowed sufficient weight. Of course we are using this word 'pastoral' in its strictly formal sense; because, if we once admit "the poetry of external nature," as Mr. Conington seems half inclined to do, into this species, we shall be doing a manifest injustice, not only to Virgil and Pope, but also to Theocritus himself. How far, then, the art of composing metrical dialogues between shepherds and milkmaids on the subject of their ordinary occupations is valuable for its own sake, is, we think, extremely doubtful. There is nothing peculiarly poetical either in milking a cow or in shearing a sheep. No doubt the emotions of people so occupied are as capable of poetic illustration as those of their betters; but then it must be done by themselves.

"Come, all you jolly shepherds

That whistle through the glen,

I'll tell ye of a secret

That courtiers dinna ken.

What is the greatest bliss

That the tongue o' man can name { 'Tis to woo a bonnie lassie

When the kye come hame."

This is capital: but a gentleman could not have written this song. Mr. Tennyson perhaps may be alluded to in Mr. Conington's eulogy of modern English idyllists; but in such of his poems as partake of that character his personages are idealised. The

gardener's daughter and the miller's daughter might just as well have been clergymen's daughters. The "Ratcatcher's Daughter" is more like the old pastoral than they are. And here Mr. Tennyson was acting exactly in the spirit of Pope's own precepts, quoted sarcastically by Mr. Conington. A genuine poet of the people, be he what he may, is doubtless well worth listening to. But such an idea, we need hardly state, was not at the bottom of the ancient idyl. That sprang, in fact, from the radically false notion that the poor were happier than the rich; that the lives of shepherds and fishermen were more happy and innocent than those of the dwellers in cities. And the pastoral proper has been vitiated by this falsehood from Theocritus down to Ambrose Philips. When the peasant himself makes this blunder, it does not offend our taste, because we know it is natural for him to believe that in certain circumstances of life he has the advantage of the "courtier;" but when the scholar says the same thing, we know it to be affectation, and are disgusted accordingly. Theocritus had this advantage, that when he described manners, he probably wrote what he saw; and when he described feelings, he possibly believed what he wrote. But the essential untruthfulness remains; and although the superiority we have mentioned, coupled with the fact of his having been the first in the field, as far at least as we are concerned, have been enough to preserve his poems from neglect, we do not believe they have been enough to render them really delightful to any very large class of readers. Our view of Virgil, then, as a pastoral poet would be something of this kind: That his own exquisite taste prevented him from making any original efforts at a style of composition of which he perceived the inherent weakness; but seeing also the convenience of this species of writing as a channel for the payment of compliments, he borrowed it wholesale from his predecessor, and cared so little to make it appear like his own, that even the incongruous Sicilian scenery was left in the picture. This last-mentioned circumstance, for which Virgil has been so much blamed, is to us of the highest significance. Virgil's taste at least is undisputed; his powers of description are universally acknowledged. Surely it would have been as easy for him to paint in Italian scenery as Sicilian. Surely, too, he could not have expected that the discrepancy would escape the notice of his contemporaries. If, therefore, he had ever meant the Eclogues as a work on which his poetical reputation should even partially rest, is it probable, is it possible, that he would have left them in their present state? At least seven out of the ten Eclogues, and perhaps more, are complimentary or political effusions, just as Pope's and Spenser's are; and Virgil might have appropriated the "setting" which he found ready to his