own, strutted their short hour on the stage of life four thousand years ago; and yet, by labours living beyond the grave, they still exist, though scarcely "to point a moral or adorn a tale." The cities of Athens and Rome still possess many of their trophies of art and labour. Phidias, in his works, at least, is still with us; and to him and to other ancient promulgators of art and science, modern advancement is greatly indebted. For the beautiful in architecture, for the proportions of materials, and the true principles which give strength, safety, and splendour to the buildings in the cities of these days, we owe our gratitude to labours exerted when this island was unsubdued and held by the rude savage. To compare the genuine fruits of labour possessed by the ancient inhabitants of the world with those enjoyed in modern times, will be, however, superfluous. That drudge of mankind-the steam engine had not been invented; the means of intercourse and exchange were rare and difficult; the productions of industry were few in ancient days; and, therefore, comforts and elevating influences which now prevail, could not possibly be diffused. Whatever the toil of the many produced in beauty, rarity, and excellence, the luxurious few appropriated, who kept the laborious masses in abject dependence, or in a state of slavery, and scarcely permitted them more than the spontaneous fruits of the earth to subsist on.

Let us now approach that vast productive industry which pre-eminently prevails and distinguishes the existing state of society. Growing intelligence has not only increased the wants of man, but has also increased the means of ministering to and of gratifying them. By wise and providential arrangements, few members of the human family are requisite to raise the food to sustain the whole, and which food the earth abundantly yields. Probably not one-tenth of the human race is needed to labour in the field for all. If, then, so few can, with the blessing of Heaven and fruitful seasons, provide amply for the support of

animal life, what shall be the duties of the other overwhelming many members of the great common family of man? Geology has revealed to us the riches which the depths of the earth contain. Has it been for no wise purpose that beneath our feet are placed mines of coal, of lime, of iron, of copper, of lead, of tin, of silver, of gold, and of the countless stores which labour finds there? Has it not been to provide for some foreseen necessities of the human race that the flax, the cotton, and other plants, give their yielding fibres; that the silkworm winds its destined shroud in a continuous thread of exquisite fineness and singular beauty; and that the patient sheep and their kindred tribes, give their loads of wool, with which, in summer time they are oppressed? Need we here declare that these wondrous gifts are bestowed to employ that labour which, to raise mere food, is not required; to sweeten and reward that toil, the doom of all; and to increase the comfort and happiness of mankind, in every country and in every clime? How beauteous, therefore, is the ordained provision for labour! The mines yield their fuels and their metals; and with these really begin the modern agencies which benefit man. Without coal

and iron, the genius of Watt would have been useless, and their non-existence must have left the human family, few in number and circumscribed in comforts. Now, by the aid of the steam engine, mines are worked; their contents are converted into engines and machines by labour, and labour thereby generates labour, providing by the process labour's own reward. But with all the benefits derived from the working of mines, the moral and personal condition of the miners must not be overlooked. Deep in the bowels of the earth, excluded from the light of the sun, frequently in impure air, and drenched in dropping water, the workman's position is unsafe; and often his mind is left unstored with intelligence and knowledge such as might contribute to the mitigation of evils inseparable from his avocation, and as would solace.

him in the deprivations which his employment inflicts upon him. In the absence of the voluntary correction of mining evils, the legislature has wisely established an inspection which is calculated to remove them, and to improve the moral and mental attainments of those who have been subjected to them. Women, happily, are no longer permitted to be degraded by working in mines, and the ventilation and safety of the mines have been greatly improved. There are, to their honour, working miners of extraordinary mental acquisitions; men whose exclusion from external objects has only stimulated them to concentrate upon the abstruse subject of their studies a force of reasoning powers equal to the development of the intellectual faculties of more highly favoured and educated men. May the labour of this, and of every pursuit, be always associated with the refining influence of mental cultivation.

Labour having provided food in abundance, raw materials of every kind, and constructed mechanical adjuncts, the preparation for manufacturing, and extended domestic industry, may be regarded as complete. Hence from the period when this progress was attained and matured, large manufactories were erected, and employment increased. The activity manifested on every hand has become the significant proof, through the vast increase of every comfort, that the toils of men are not now unrewarded. The rich in every age have been able to procure the comforts and elegancies of life, and therefore when such overwhelming productions of comforts as now exist are offered for consumption, it is evident that those who already have enough need them not, and consequently the masses of mankind have placed within their grasp the full benefit of all increase.

(To be continued.)

THE WIT AND POETRY OF HOOD.

BY THE REV. MARMADUKE MILLER.

[Delivered for a special benevolent purpose, in the Assembly Room of the Free Trade Hall, Manchester, May 22, 1857, the Rev. J. W. WYLD presiding.]

It is strange that although we are in the middle of the nineteenth century, no one can yet answer the question, "What is Poetry ?" Since the times of old Homer, the world has always had enthusiastic admirers of poetry; but what its essence consists of has yet to be stated. Aristotle says, "It is the pleasure of a truth." Bacon says, "It is the pleasure of a lie.” Milton says it is, "Thoughts that voluntary move harmonious numbers." "It is the music of language, answering to the music of the mind," says Hazlitt. Macaulay says, it is "The art of doing by means of words, what the painter does by means of colours." And thus Shakspere has defined it :—

As the imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.

All these definitions are good. They are all true, but all defective. For we still have to ask, What is Poetry, and in what does it differ from Prose?

One may find verses by the cart-load composed on the model of Elkannah Settles :

Who faggoted his notions as they fell,

And if they rhymed and rattled all was well.

Verses made with the full understanding, that

VOL. II.

One line for sense, and one for rhyme,
Are quite sufficient at one time;

I.

10,

but without a particle of poetry in them. Take that verse of Dr. Johnson's, in which he mimicked the style of the early ballads :

As with my hat upon my head

I walked along the Strand,
I there did meet another man
With his hat in his hand.

Now the rhyme is there good enough, but no one will say that there is any poetry in it. And as you may find verses plentiful as blackberries without a particle of poetry; so, on the contrary, you may meet with a deal of prose that is full of poetry. That sentence was true poetry which Napoleon spoke to his soldiers when preparing for battle in the sight of the pyramids of Egypt:-"From the tops of those pyramids," said he, forty centuries look down upon you."

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ridge has well remarked, that "the proper antithesis of poetry is not prose but science; " and Archdeacon Hare has said, that "A deal of the prose of the seventeenth century was poetry, and a deal of the poetry was prose."

But while it is difficult to give a definition of poetry, it is still more difficult to give one of wit. Dr. Barrow, in his sermon "against foolish talking and jesting' has given a description of wit, which Sir James Mackintosh regarded as the greatest proof of mastery over language ever given by an English writer. The doctor commences by saying, "To the question what the thing we speak of is, or what this facetiousness doth import? I might reply, as Democritus did to him that asked the definition of a man, "Tis that which we all see and know: any one better apprehends what it is by acquaintance than I can inform him by description. It is, indeed, a thing so versatile and multiform, appearing in so many shapes, so many postures, so many garbs, so variously apprehended by several eyes and judgments, that it seemeth no less hard to settle a clear and certain notion thereof, than to make a portrait of Proteus, or to define the figure of a fleeting air.”