nected with any denomination. No doubt these first numbers have since 1858 greatly increased, and no doubt also they will still more increase in the next two years, when the effect of those building grants which the secularists so much dislike shall become apparent. Yet why there should be any cause to regret that an expenditure from the public exchequer of not more than 400,000l. should draw upwards of 1,600,000l. from private pockets we cannot imagine, particularly when this will give school accommodation to nearly half a million of children. The fact is that in this, as well as in a much larger sense, the Church is the greatest educational establishment in the country; and while we are spending and proposing to spend vast sums raised by rates and by taxation for the support of schools, we are asked to abolish a means of education which costs us nothing. Just as we are founding a vast national establishment to teach everything except religion, we propose to sweep away another national establishment which teaches too, and whose only cause of offence is that religion is what it teaches.

While these people are talking of endowment and establishment as things of the past, created long ago, and which have failed to accomplish their task, they seem utterly unconscious that the work of endowment is going on every day on an enormous scale under their eyes. Bishoprics have been founded, churches are built, cathedrals are repaired, charitable trusts are created, the Bishop of London's Fund has reached half a million; and all this property has accumulated and is accumulating, by voluntary gifts for the national benefit, and is now invested on the faith of what? On the faith of the laws which maintain and govern the perpetuity of the Establishment of the Church of England.

We must now conclude. We have endeavoured to show what Establishment really means, and what changes would be produced by Disestablishment. We have marked out the results, most injurious as we believe, which would inevitably ensue from Disendowment. We have given what we think to be sound reasons for a belief that the whole agitation arises as much from soreness of feeling as from any deliberate conviction that any wrong is done by the present system. And we have expressed our view that it is not legislative enactment which will cure professional jealousy, and that no abolition of the parochial system will place a half-trained and, as a rule, humbly-born class, on a level with men whose very profession, implying as it does a participation in the best education the country can afford, is their passport to a position entirely independent of birth or lineage.

ART. V.-Memoir and Letters of the late Sir Charles Bell London: 1870.

THIRTY years have passed since the death of the distinguished physiologist whose letters are published in the volume before us; and the volume itself has been for some time in the hands of readers. We need not, however, offer any apology for devoting a few pages to an analysis of its contents, and of the character, merits, and services of a most accomplished and remarkable man; thinking that it may not be devoid of interest to a new generation to study the career and characteristics of one of the most unobtrusive, but, in our times, one of the greatest benefactors of our race. these letters we find photographed the inner life and common thoughts of one who united to rare practical genius social graces and tastes which do not always accompany it. The picture is a very pleasing one, and suggests several points of interesting reflection.

In

Sir Charles Bell was the youngest of four brothers, all of whom started in the race of life with few adventitious aids. Their father was an Episcopal clergyman, in the north of Scotland, who brought up his family on the slender emoluments which, in the last century, such a vocation implied. Even now, the clergy of that communion in Scotland are but scantily provided for; but, in those days, they had but precarious and very limited sources of income. Although generally some of the wealthier classes attended their ministrations, they were still in the rank of Dissenting clergy, with little hold on the body of the people, and with but little means or hope of extending their influence, or of raising their position. The father of these young men came of a Presbyterian house, but had changed his ecclesiastical views at college; and he lived and died in the humble calling he had chosen, and left to his family little but the independent spirit of his example, and the refined and intellectual cast of his character.

The career of his four sons-Robert, John, George, and Charles, although none of them rose to any pinnacle of worldly fortune, affords an instructive lesson to the aspiring spirit of youth. They all made their mark on the world, and were eminent and distinguished in the professions which they adopted. They started in very narrow circumstances, and were sustained by their own self-reliance, and by mutual aid. They were a type of what Scotsmen in those days were. We are not sure that the type remains; but we may see in their

history, and read very clearly and graphically portrayed in this little volume, the national character as it stood towards the end of last century. That century had done great things for Scotland. The Union had carried off its Parliament, and among other results had carried off with the Parliament a host of jobbers and intriguers who had repressed and stifled the energies of the nation. From that time, rivalry with England in the field of intellect, and a desire to gain not a local but an imperial position, was the incentive which fired every well-descended Scot. At home, political eminence was all but excluded; but the energies of the race were devoted to two sources of progress--to the cultivation of their barren hills and marshy plains, and to those intellectual pursuits which might bring them up to the mark of their richer sister. Before the century had nearly closed, these efforts, pursued amid many disadvantages, had resulted in the formation of a Scottish school of agriculture and of a Scottish school of literature. The golden prizes of the East thrown open to her sons, sent back many a cadet of an ancient house, who had left the ancestral castle penniless, to spend his well-earned rupees on the slopes and valleys of his native land. Meanwhile the reputation of Hume, Adam Smith, Robertson, and Reid had founded a school not of thought only, but of study. To write as these men had written, so as to command the attention and applause of England, was the one great ambition of the aspiring Scottish student, and the desire infused into the scholastic and academic life an amount of impulse and incentive to thorough work which we fear has in these days much abated.

The four brothers, of whom Sir Charles Bell was the youngest, were very early deprived of their father, who died in 1779. At this time the eldest, Robert, was little over twentyone; the second, John, was only seventeen; George, only nine, and Charles, five. Yet, like more than one Scottish family-the Malcolms, for instance, to whom Sir John and Sir Pulteney belonged-they all became distinguished. But the Malcolms, although only the sons of a substantial Scottish yeoman, had good friends and early advantages. The family of the poor Episcopal clergyman had no such aid. Under what difficulties they received their early training may be gathered from the fact simply told in a little memoir compiled by George: Our circumstances,' he said, were so narrow, that my education was much stinted, the rest of the family expenses having gradually increased; so that my schooling which required no more than five shillings a quarter, could not

'be continued after I was eleven years old.' The rest was accomplished by his own private study, and the efforts of a most affectionate and praiseworthy mother. Such were the foundations on which, in those days, the energy and aspirations of Scottish youth could build the attainments and cultivation of a gentleman and a scholar.

Of the four brothers, Robert, the eldest, on whose exertions probably much of the progress of the family depended, had the least conspicuous career, although he was a man of undoubted ability, kindly disposition, and clear judgment. He adopted the legal profession, and was admitted a member of the Society of Writers to the Signet. He ultimately became Professor of Conveyancing in that body, and was the author of several practical works of standard reputation on various legal subjects. He died in Edinburgh in 1816.

The second son, John Bell, was a much more remarkable man, and was gifted with rare powers of very varied and uncommon quality. Devoted, as it was said, by his father, out of gratitude for a successful operation of which he was the subject, to the medical profession, he became one of the most renowned surgeons of his time. Slender as may have been his original advantages, he not only obtained a thorough education, but had travelled through Russia and the north of Europe, before he commenced his professional career. Between 1786 and 1796, young as he was, he lectured with great success on surgery in Edinburgh, and very early formed for himself a high reputation; while as an operator his fame became second to none in Europe, and many resorted to him from England and all parts of the Continent. He had many accomplishments. He was a clever draughtsman, a good classic, and had literary knowledge, as well as literary ability, of a high order. After failing health had compelled him to travel, he wrote and illustrated a volume of Observations on Italy,' indicating considerable powers of appreciation as well as of composition. He died at Rome in 1820.

He was a singular, restless, persistent, combative man, inspired with a volatile essence of genius, which made him popular, interesting, and sometimes uncertain. His good taste, refined artistic perception, his love and knowledge of music, and his resources in conversation, rendered him a favourite in society. His enthusiasm for his profession, and his habits of thorough investigation, brought him to its head, while his ill-concealed scorn of venerable pomposity embroiled him with many combatants. We looked the other day into a volume which contained the letters of Jonathan Dawplucker,'

a sobriquet which having been used against John Bell by a professional antagonist, he adopted in a very effective retort. It was a provincial squabble among Edinburgh surgeons; and one cannot help being amused by the power and vigour expended in a conflict, the cause of which no reader of the present day can discover. But the combatants, Barclay, John Bell, and Gregory, were masters of their weapons; and even in total ignorance of the casus belli, it is impossible not to be struck, as well as diverted, by the keenness of John Bell's style, his fertility of illustration, and his wonderful command of picturesque personality.

George Joseph Bell, the third son, was eight years younger than John, having been born in 1770. We have already mentioned how scanty were the resources of his education. Yet indomitable spirit carried him through, and he joined the Scottish Bar in 1791. He says he was then devoid of friends and interest, but he was, before long, in the centre of a very brilliant circle. He was contemporary with Scott and Jeffrey, and some years older than Brougham, Horner, Cockburn, and Moncreiff; but with them and their associates his lot in life was cast, and he maintained throughout a long and distinguished career a foremost place among them. As a lawyer, he has left a reputation which renders his authority scarcely inferior to that of Lord Stair, the great oracle and arbiter of Scottish jurisprudence. His great work on the Laws of Bankruptcy, which was afterwards expanded into a profound Commentary on Mercantile Law, will ever remain as a monument of his learning, sagacity, and logical power. It was the first attempt which had been made, with the exception of some desultory although ingenious essays by Lord Kames, to harmonise and elucidate the principles of the Law-merchant as practically applied in the Courts of the two kingdoms. Its authority and reputation has grown rather than diminished since his death, not only in Scotland but in England and in America; and every resort to it in order to solve emerging questions only tends to illustrate more strongly the perspicacity and breadth of his legal knowledge. The present

Bankrupt Law of Scotland, with which traders seem to be fairly satisfied, has been built entirely on the foundations which he laid, and conduces not less to the substantial benefit of the nation than many more ostentatious although not more solid reforms.

His work is quoted in the American Case before the Geneva Court of Arbitration.