I SAW her once--so freshly fair And Nature joyed to view its moulding. Her cheek's fine hue divinely glowing,Her rosebud mouth,-her eyes of jet,Around on all their light bestowing. Oh! who could look on such a form, So nobly free, so softly tender, And darkly dream that earthly storm Should dim such sweet, delicious splendour? For in her mien, and in her face, And in her young step's fairy lightness, Naught could the raptured gazer trace But Beauty's glow and Pleasure's brightness. I saw her twice,--an altered charm, The very image of its mother, Her thoughtless, sinless look had banished, And from her cheek the roseate glow Of girlhood's balmy morn had vanished ; Within her eyes, upon her brow, Lay something softer, fonder, deeper, As if in dreams some visioned woe Had broke the Elysium of the sleeper. I saw her thrice,-Fate's dark decree As even my reveries pourtrayed her; The sunshine and the sparkling glitter, Still, though I noted pale decay, The retrospect was scarcely bitter; For in their place a calmness dwelt, Serene, subduing, soothing, holy, In feeling which the bosom felt That every louder mirth is folly,A pensiveness which is not grief,— A stillness, as of sunset streaming,A fairy glow on flower and leaf, Till earth looks like a landscape dreaming. A last time, and unmoved she lay A glorious mould of fading clay When she, a girl, was tender-hearted: Of ripened hope and sunny beauty : I felt the chill,--I turned aside, Bleak Desolation's cloud came o'er me, And Being seemed a troubled tide Whose wrecks in darkness swam before me! DIAMOND DUST. WE are never more deceived than when we mistake gravity for greatness, solemnity for science, and pomposity for erudition. THE base metal of Falsehood is so current because we find it much easier to alloy the Truth than to refine ourselves. HURRY and Cunning are always running after Despatch and Wisdom, but have never yet been able to overtake them. THERE is in every human countenance either a history or a prophecy. SORROW shows us truths as the night brings out stars. HE who gains the victory over great insults is often overpowered by the smallest. A MAN in earnest finds means; or, if he cannot find, creates them. WE seldom wish for what we are convinced is quite unattainable; it is just when there is a possibility of success that wishes are really excited. IT is one of the singular facts of the present state of society, that the qualities which in theory we hold to be most lovely and desirable, are precisely those which in practice we treat with the greatest contumely and disdain. How many an enamoured pair have courted in poetry and lived in prose! THE world is all up-hill when we would do, all down-hill when we suffer. As continued health is vastly preferable to the happiest recovery from sickness, so is innocence to the truest repentance. HARSH words are like hailstones in summer, which, if melted would fertilize the tender plants they batter down. THE man who works too much must love too little. THE intention of a sin betrays itself by a superfluous caution. The world's face is amply suffused with tears; it is the poet's duty to wipe away a few, not to add more. RESPECT is what we owe; love, what we give. LORD BACON beautifully said, "If a man be gracious to strangers it shows he is a citizen of the world, and that his heart is no island cut off from other lands, but a continent that joins them." HE who has most of heart knows most of sorrow. LITTLE truisms often give the clue to long, deep, intricate, undisplayed trains of thought, which have been going on in silence and secresy for a long time before the commonplace result in which most meditations end is expressed. THE life of almost every human being is governed by one master thought,-the life, we say, of human beings, not human vegetables. THE satirist is sadder than the wit for the same reason that the ourang-outang is of a graver disposition than the ape because his nature is more noble. No man would overcome and endure solitude if he did not cherish the hope of a social circle in the future, or the imagination of an invisible one in the present. Printed by Cox (Brothers) & WYMAN, 74-75, Great Queen Street, London; and published by CHARLES COOK, at the Office of the Journal, 3, Raquet Court, Fleet Street. GOVERNMENT AND PEOPLE.-THE PUBLIC HEALTH. BY DR. SMILES. THE Complaint is often made, that the Government lags behind the People; that it never moves unless it is driven; that it is only by the " pressure from without," that any greatly beneficial measure can be carried. In some respects this view of things is not correct. Take governments in general, and you will find them to be but a reflex of the actual condition of peoplesnot much better and not much worse. In representative governments, this is peculiarly the case. prejudices, the opinions, the wants, and the desires, of the represented, will have their echo in the voices and votes of those who represent them. The But sometimes it happens that representatives are even better than those they represent, and that the legislature is, in many respects, disposed to go faster than their constituents. We do not here venture to introduce any of the more vexed questions of political controversy, about which great differences of opinion exist; but confining ourselves to social questions, our impression is, that the governing class has recently proved itself to be decidedly ahead of the people at large. Take a few instances. The Government has passed a series of laws for the protection of factory children, without any "pressure from without" worthy of notice; and to this day, the principal opponents of the measure are the parents of the children themselves, who exert their ingenuity in all ways to evade the provisions of the act. Without any urgent call, and in the face of very vehement opposition, the Government, a few years since, passed a Factory Education Bill, rendering it imperative and compulsory on all masters employing children in factories under a certain age, that they should set apart so much of the children's time daily for purposes of secular instruction in day schools. But had the popular voice, of masters and men, been followed, thousands of children, who are now receiving day-school instruction, would have been growing up in a state of ignorance. Some years since, Goverment passed an act enabling town councils to levy a rate for the establishment and [PRICE 14d. formation of Museums of Art. In those districts where the bulk of the population earn their living by manufactures, and where the prosperity of their trade depends upon their keeping up a certain superiority in production and design; and where, if they fall behind other nations in those respects, they must inevitably suffer in the loss, to some extent, of their foreign trade; it might have been expected that the municipal bodies, urged on by the people whom they represent, would have hastened to erect and maintain such colleges of industrial art as were intended by the Act. But no! next to nothing has yet been done in that direction; and it is to be feared that the people at large do not appreciate the intentions of the Legislature in respect to this matter. The act referred to was subsequently amended in 1850, so as to enable town councils to establish Free Public Libraries, such as nearly every continental town possesses. A most wise and admirable measure truly; calculated, in our opinion, to promote education, temperance, and social well-being. But how was the measure received? It dropped from the Legislature still-born. Scarcely any town council took notice of it; except, we believe, that of spirited Manchester,* where a Public Library has already been formed, consisting of 19,000 volumes. At Sheffield, where the rate-payers were appealed to, they defeated the promoters of a Public Library. The other towns and cities throughout the country have not bestirred themselves in any way. In other educational measures, the Government, it is to be feared, is ahead of the people. They are understood to be ready to do a great deal more than they have yet done; but they require to be seconded earnestly by the people out of doors. There is positively an active agitation set on foot against the Government, because it gives its aid to Education. The money voted by the Legislature for educational purposes is not applied for as fast as it is voted; and at the date of the last balance-sheet published, the committee in council on education had a fund in hand of not less than £250,000. Then, there was the public measure for the establishment of Baths and Wash-houses. How few are the towns that have yet taken any advantage of the * Since this article was written, we observe that the Liverpool Town Council has taken the necessary steps to establish a Free Public Library. provisions of that act? There was also an admirable law, relating to Friendly Societies, passed in 1850, to enable the members of Odd Fellows, and such like societies, to enrol themselves and receive the protection of the law, as well as to carry on their benevolent, but often futile operations, with the aid of scientific actuaries, who are empowered by that act to supply certified tables of rates to Friendly Societies, by which they may be made secure and reliable at all times. Comparatively few of such societies have yet availed themselves of the provisions of that act. Then, there is the Public Health Act, the Act for the promotion of Extramural Interments, the Common Lodging-houses Act, and the Labouring Classes Lodging-houses Act,-all parts of one grand scheme of sanitary operations, which the Legislature is endeavouring to promote for the benefit of the people, notwithstanding their general indifference to all such improvement, and often in the teeth of their bitter opposition. Take, for instance, the provision in the Public Health Act of 1848, intended to put a stop to the use of cellar-dwellings. It has been found almost impossible to carry it into effect, chiefly through the resistance of the owners of property. About 15,000 people in Liverpool still live in cellars; almost as many in Manchester; and in most of the large manufacturing towns, the evil has very little abated since the introduction of the Public Health Act in 1848. The bill was not sufficiently stringent; and its subsequent amendments invited the action of localities by voluntary association. But the voluntary action has not been called forth; very few towns have yet availed themselves of the powers of the act; few labouring class lodging-houses are yet established; and a large number of the people are still living and dying, poisoned in cellars. a The Sanitary Commission say, in a recent Notification, that careful inquiries have disclosed "the fact that some of the worst forms of human misery exist amongst the comparatively settled labouring classes of towns crowded together in cellar-dwellings' condition of the poor disgraceful to a Christian community." The Government, unasked, has passed a law to remedy this state of things; and immediately the local" powers that be" are up in arms to resist them,-backed by all the owners of the cellar property. Power is given to form Local Boards of Health, but the Local Boards of Health are not formed; and even in the few cases in which they exist, the commission counsels them that "the due execution of the provisions of the law will need especial attention and support against the opposition, indirect as well as direct, which it is matter of experience will be raised against them by the owners of the worst-conditioned houses, who in most towns are found in array against the introduction of the Health of Towns' Act, or the application of its provisions, on the representation that they will eventually increase local expenses, whereas, when properly executed, they are found to diminish them." The Nuisance Removal Act has in like manner proved almost a dead letter as yet, through the indifference or the hostility of the general community. It is amazing to see how tenaciously the foul interests are defended. The Board of Health assails them with missiles in all ways; the indefatigable Edwin Chadwick waging an uncompromising warfare against foul air, dirt, cellar-dwellings, and the causes of disease; but the strongholds of all these are defended with a pertinacity certainly worthy of a better cause. For instance, at Sculcoates, in Hull, there is an abominable district, foul, uncleansed, and poisonous. Ninety-one persons died of cholera there in 1849, within a triangular space measuring about 200 yards on each side. Think of the domestic misery, and the fearful loss to the community in industrial labour, from this one visitation, which might have been prevented. Most reluctantly the Sculcoates Guardians began to prosecute parties who refused to remove their abominable death-causing nuisances. But though they obtained 100 convictions under the Nuisance Removal Act, they only applied for enforcement in one case, and in that case it was refused! Such is the value placed upon the lives of the people by those whose duty it was, in law and justice, to protect them! The Board of Health has proved over and over again, as clear as daylight, that the principal diseases which now prematurely cut off the working classes, or consign those who survive to lingering ill-health, to slow dying, to painful diseases, or what is worse, to disgusting immorality and vice, are preventible, and may be removed with a vast saving to the public, and great gain in all moral and social respects to the community at large. Yet the foul interests hold their ground, and almost bid defiance to all attacks that are made upon them. We have just been looking over the various reports of the Sanitary Commission, and find an array of facts there, as to the disease and premature deaths caused by man's indolence, selfishness, and neglect, which is positively appalling. We find localities there described, existing in all parts of the country, full of poisonous malaria, which is as fatal in its effects when breathed into the lungs, as arsenic is when taken into the stomach. Then we find entire districts in which typhus fever of the most fatal character is a constant denizen. And where typhus has taken up its abode, there cholera is invariably the first to make its appearance. But between the periods of the first and second visits of the cholera to this country, little or nothing had been done to remove the unwholesome local conditions requisite for its development, so that the disease came back, and fixed again upon the same towns, the same streets, the same houses, and often snatched its victims from the same bed! Everywhere it selected the neglected, filthy, and overcrowded localities-the invariable haunts of typhus. The Board of Health had in the meantime emphatically pointed out the danger, told where the cholera would fix itself again, but its warnings were unheeded. "Before cholera appeared in Whitechapel," said the medical officer of the Whitechapel union, speaking of a small court in the hamlet, I predicted that this would be one of its strongholds.' Cholera ap peared again there, and carried off eighteen persons! Before cholera appeared in Uxbridge, the medical officer there stated that if it should visit that town it would be certain to break out in a particular house to the dangerous condition of which he called the attention of the local authorities. They took no notice. The first case that occurred, broke out in that identical house. So constant was found to be the connection between filth, foul air, bad drainage, and fever, that the remark of the inspectors, on visiting such places, came to be such as this "Here, sir, you must have fever cases." And the observation was almost invariably correct. The unfortunate people who inhabit these places are not unconscious of their wretched state; and we have personally witnessed the eager anxiety with which they regard the visits of inspection made to them. The women come to their doors, pale and sunken, depressed in vitality and crushed in spirit, and addressing the strangers, implore that thing may be done for them." It is generally their poverty that makes them gravitate into such cesspools of corruption. Who would live there, that could afford to breathe sweet air and enjoy a cleaner neighbourhood? Into some of the worst of these some places the Irish poor sink; and so frequent are their attacks of typhus, that there are some parts of the country where that disease is now designated by the name of "the Irish fever." Here is a description of a property in the town of Selby, in Yorkshire, as related in the Board of Health Reports for 1850, by Mr. W. Lee : "Miss Elizabeth Proctor's property.-The yard is unpaved and saturated with filth. There is a large manure-heap. I examined the water. It was foul with organic matter. The poor people say they use it for all purposes. The cholera visited this property in September last. In the first house, a husband named Abbey, and four children, were removed in a fortnight, leaving a widow and three children surviving. In the next door, William Rosendale and his wife died, leaving six children destitute. The next door but one to that, William Wetherell and his wife died, and left one child an orphan. I think I have not, in any town I have visited, met with a parallel to this awful sacrifice of human life, which I have no hesitation in designating as PREVENTIBLE." But the other day, how shocked we all were at the wholesale massacre of about 3,000 human beings in the streets of Paris. And yet, in this country, a loss of life far more appalling, is going on almost at our doors -a loss of life caused by flagrant neglect of the laws of health, and which might almost be pronounced wilful, so obvious are its causes, and so certain are the means of their removal. Take the following fact in connection with the operative population of Manchester, regarded as the very centre of social activity in England! The mean age of death of the operative population of that town and of Liverpool, is only fifteen or sixteen years that is, the average age at which all persons of that class die, who are born alive into the world! -whereas the average life of the gentry of those towns is forty-three, showing a loss of not less than twenty-eight years of life, to all the members of the operative class in those towns, for the most part owing to the REMOVEABLE causes of disease. But it is even worse in Kensington, reputed to be one of the richest districts of London. Dr. Lewis states that in the district called "The Potteries," in that parish, surrounded by splendid villas and streets, is a population of 1,000; and in the three years ending December, 1848, the average age at which that population died off, was only eleven years and seven months! And of this enormous mortality not fewer than sixty-five out of every hundred deaths were of children under the age of five years! Cholera and typhus make the place their constant haunt. There are houses and rooms in the locality, where typhus has again and again appeared. "Mr. Frost, the surgeon, pointed out rooms where three or four persons had recovered from fever in the spring, to fall victims to cholera in the summer. Nearly all the inhabitants look sallow and unhealthy; the women especially complain of sickness and want of appetite; their eyes are sunk, and their skin frequently much shrivelled. The eyes of the children glisten with unnatural moisture, as if stimulated by ammonia." Pigs abound in the district. In 1849, no fewer than 3,000 were found in the Potteries. Dr. Lewis says “A woman living in a hovel more than usually dirty and offensive, pointed to a pig which her only daughter had brought up by the hand. The poor child had died of cholera. The manners of the people are more uncivilized and rough than I have observed in other parts of the metropolis." Take another illustration, frightfully illustrative of the fatal effects of foul conditions of life. It occurs in Mr. Haywood's report on the sanitary state of Sheffield. The inspector thus interrogates a poor woman: "Do you not perceive an unpleasant smell from that place behind your house?" "No, nowt as I know on." "What! does not that wet which runs down your wall smell bad sometimes?" "Sometimes. It does a bit of a mornin', but nowt to mean aught." "Have you lived here long?" "About sixteen years." "Pretty good health since you came?" "Pretty middling, considering." "What family have you had?" "O've had fourteen childer." "Have they had pretty good health as well as yourself?" "Nay, o've buried 'em all but three." "Were they all born in this house?" "No, four were born in Derbyshire-three of these are still living, but the youngest on 'em died here!" Surely he who runs may read the deep and painful meaning which lies in this brief recital. But the loss of life is not all, though that is very sad, involving as it does, premature deaths of parents, and orphaned children thrown destitute upon the parish. There is also a terrible loss in point of morality, virtue, and all the graces. Vice and crime consort with foul living. In these places, demoralization is the normal state. There is an absence of cleanliness, of decency, of decorum; the language used is polluting, and scenes of profligacy are of almost hourly occurrence, all tending to foster idleness, drunkenness, and vicious abandonment. Imagine such a moral atmosphere for women and children! Such moral pollution is indeed the monster mischief of all unwholesome localities. And yet such causes of physical and moral disease can be removed. Nothing is better authenticated than this fact. You can stop the ravages of typhus by drainage and cleanliness, as certainly as you can prevent small-pox by vaccination. Mr. Grainger, in his report, states that in no one instance has a well-matured plan of sanitary amelioration failed in diminishing sickness, suffering, and death, and the consequent promotion of human happiness. "To this statement," he emphatically adds, "I know not a single exception." In London, the Model Lodging Houses, and buildings which are constructed and regulated on sanitary principles, though situated in the most densely populated and unhealthy districts of the metropolis, were almost free of cholera during the late epidemic, and typhus fever very rarely visits them, though raging in their immediate neighbourhoods. Take the following instructive fact from the Report on the Health of Darlington, in Durham :-"Ague was prevalent in this town in former times. It has been ENTIRELY BANISHED by drainage. In one particular spot typhus existed for ten years! The cause of its cessation is accounted for by the chief bailiff, thus-The adjoining property had been THOROUGHLY DRAINED AND CLEANED. The Government Registrar of Births and Deaths mentions a similar case in his last Report :-" In the village of North Clifton, where the drainage was bad, low fever was seldom out of the place; but now, through the influence of an intelligent farmer, the place has been well drained, and nuisances removed, and as a consequence, there has not been any fever in the place for a year and a half!" We are too apt to blame the Divine Government for the premature deaths of those about us. We attribute them to "the mysterious dispensations of Providence." But it is to be feared that we ourselves are the parties mostly in fault. It is our own neglect which causes the premature deaths of our fellowbeings. We must obey the laws of health, else we shall surely die prematurely. We must live cleanly, purely, wholesomely, otherwise we shall inevitably suffer. annu "Fifty thousand persons," says Mr. Lee, ally fall victims to typhus fever in Great Britain," originated by causes which are preventible! Let us bear in mind this terrible fact. An able writer puts it in this striking form-"The annual slaughter in England and Wales, from preventible causes of typhus fever, is double the amount of what was suffered by the allied armies at the battle of Waterloo!" Again Mr. Lee puts it in this form,--By neglect of the ascertained conditions of healthful living, the great mass of the people lose nearly half the natural period of their lives! "Typhus," says a medical officer of one district, "is a curse which man inflicts upon himself by the neglect of sanitary arrangements." This is the question which the Government, through the Sanitary Commission, is now pressing with such earnestness on the attention of the people of this country. We regret to say that the people give them but little active aid. The majority are indifferent; and many are even actually hostile. In some of the foulest districts, Local Boards of Health are elected, pledged to do NOTHING! They will neither act themselves, nor allow the Government to act. And yet the complaint is from time to time made, that Government is a drag upon the progress of the people! The pressure from without, unhappily, is against health-against the adoption of measures for its improvement. The pressure for advance is made from within." The people really refuse to respond to the efforts of the Legislature to better their social elevation. The Public Health Act, even in the most deadly districts of the largest towns and cities, each of which has its municipal body, competent to carry the provisions of the law into active operation, often remains a dead letter. Thousands of human beings annually perish in those places, amidst the most perfect indifference of the local governments. Nothing is done, nothing said; and all that we hear is, the repeated protests, and the indignant appeals of the sanitary officers, against the continued neglect, and heartlessness, and cruelty, of those who have it in their power to stay the slaughter of the people, but who persistently refuse to do so. Surely it were full time this were altered. At all events, let us cease railing at the Government, which is really proving itself, in its concern for the people's well-being, to be considerably in advance of the people themselves. THE BARONET'S WIFE. ABOUT a mile from a provincial town, which we shall designate as Wilmore, was situated a house in the occupation of Mrs. Berrington, a widow, and her daughters. The residence was large in comparison to the family inhabiting it, and many of the rooms were empty and desolate; but what it wanted in inward comfort, was made up for, fully to Mrs. Berrington's satisfaction, in external grandeur; it had an air of rank,she would observe, there was something aristocratic, she thought, about the extended frontage and curved drive to the hall-door. That this was seldom put in requisition, was certainly matter of regret; but if useless, in so far as the purpose for which it was intended was concerned, nevertheless it made an appearance, and gave a finishing touch to that external mark of "style," which it was the mansion's mistress's desire to cherish, and, if possible, increase. Mrs. Berrington herself, in her young days, had been a belle,-she had been taught that Style and Fashion were the gods before whose altar all men bow, and had, in consequence, made them her presiding deities; she had been told, and thought it reasonable and true, that "a match was the end and aim of every truly fashionable maiden's life, and that if the gilded lips spoke sweetly, it little mattered what the heart might say; -that, in fact, was out of the question altogether: it more frequently led to misery than to wealth, and was, indeed, only fit to be descanted on in novels, and applauded by boarding-school misses, but for a "belle" to listen to the heart's affections, the thing was absurd, and so she thought and practised. But as very clever people are often too clever, even for themselves, and get caught in meshes of their own making, so Mrs. Berrington found that years were creeping on her, the fame of the "belle was fast giving way to a more novel, and consequently more attractive beauty, and worst of all, that in ber anxiety to crown her efforts with a triumphal fortune, she had allowed one after another of her suitors to fall away either in despair or disgust, and found herself at last under the galling necessity of accepting a moderate sort of man, with a moderate income, to avoid the shame which she imagined would attach to a total defeat, and then quietly consoled herself with spreading a report that her husband was worth double his real income, and managing his pecuniary affairs for him in such a manner, as to make believe that the report was true. But, as a matter of course, this line of conduct brought its own result, and after eight years of married life, her husband sinking under the course of dissipation her extravagance had led him into, died, leaving her, when all debts were paid, but a very scanty income, and two daughters to provide for. This state of things becoming known, it need hardly be said that Mrs. Berrington found herself entirely thrown upon her own resources; for if in her days of glory she had made conquests, she had, in most cases, ended by making foes; so that after several desperate but fruitless efforts to conquer circumstances, and regain her standing, she retired from the world of fashionable life to the house alluded to near Wilmore, upbraiding the world at large, and her own "circle" in particular, for its ingratitude. But Mrs. Berrington's was not a disposition to reconcile itself to retirement, neither was her disgust of the world of so heartrending a nature that the balm of solitude was necessary to its restoration; far from it; but little time elapsed, and, much against her inclination, as she said, she was present at a county ball, and once more sipped at that seductive fountain, from whose depths spring so much of bitterness and misery. And so the time passed on, until Mrs. B. with her good looks and fascinating little ways was considered as indispensable to every ball, assembly, or gathering of any sort, where the élite of the neighbourhood met together to "enjoy " themselves; nor was this without good reason, for "in company," Mrs. Berrington was an acquisition ; -there she was bright, gay, and brilliant, but at "home"--why, "home," in the truly English sense, was unknown to her. And so years rolled on in pleasure-seeking abroad, and ennui, anxiety for debts contracted, and annoyance at the consequences at home, until her daughters had arrived at the several ages of twenty and eighteen, and Mrs. Berrington had been unremitting in her instructions, as to the duty their age imposed upon them of losing no opportunity of making a "match." The eldest of these young ladies, Julia, joined in opinion with her mother, whom she much resembled in appearance and character; the youngest, Louisa, a soft, blue-eyed girl, had more of the amiability which characterized her father, without his weakness; she seemed by instinct to abhor the projects concocted |