beside John Doe and Richard Roe, had not an active movement been in progress for a further development of the reformatory principle.

In the year 1851 three distinguished leaders of the reformatory cause- -Miss Carpenter,* Mr. M. D. Hill, and Mr. Sydney Turner-invited all persons interested in the matter to meet and discuss it. A conference was accordingly held at Birmingham in December of that year, the proceedings of which were afterwards printed in the form of a pamphlet, and widely circulated. At this conference the subject of reformatory schools was placed in almost every possible light by the various speakers. Some, like the Rev. W. C. Osborn, chaplain to the Bath House of Correction, brought forward striking facts to show how the unfortunate children that once enter the criminal class take up crime as a profession, and ebb and flow into and out of our gaols with periodical regularity; others, like the Rev. J. Clay, chaplain of Preston Gaol, showed to how great an extent the sins of these children were chargeable on parental neglect, and also to what a large amount society was a loser by juvenile depredations. Mr. Sydney Turner described Red Hill, and gave a sketch of the state of the law bearing on young offenders. Mr. Wolryche Whitmore entered into details as to the system of industrial education successfully pursued in the Union . School at Quatt. Mr. Power, the Recorder of Ipswich, gave an interesting account of the exertions of John Ellis, a shoemaker in a very humble position of life, who had opened a sort of industrial school in the neighbourhood of the Regent's Park, and had succeded in reclaiming several confirmed and expert London thieves, and putting them in the way of obtaining an honest livelihood. The chairman himself, Mr. M. D. Hill, the able Recorder of Birmingham, than whom no one has paid more anxious attention to the whole subject of criminal legislation, clearly laid down the principles upon which all were agreed, and summed up in a convincing manner the evidence which proves both that criminal children are, for the most part, capable of being reformed, and that the cost of their reformation is as nothing when compared

with that which is entailed upon society by their maintenance as criminals.

These, and many other interesting particulars, were thus for the first time brought under the notice of a great portion of the public. The attendance at the meeting had not been very large, and those who had assembled in the most sanguine frame of mind felt a little disappointed, we believe, at the apparent poverty of the result of their conference: but they soon found that the publication of their proceedings was to produce effects far beyond hopes.

In the year 1852, a Committee of the House of Commons was appointed to take into consideration 'the present treatment of criminal and destitute juveniles in this country, and what changes are desirable in their present treatment, in order to supply industrial training and to combine reformation with the due correction of juvenile crime.' The committee sat during two sessions of parliament, and in 1853 presented a Report strongly advo-_ cating the reformatory system. In 1854 an Act was passed (17 and 18 Vic. c. 86) which has placed that system upon a recognised basis, by empowering the managers of reformatory schools to apply to the Secretary of State for licences, and by authorising judges and magistrates to commit children under 16 years of age to such institutions, for periods varying from two to five years; the managers being free to choose whether they will accept the children consigned to them or not, and being armed with full authority to control them while under their care, and if necessary, to send them to prison for any attempt to abscond or for any gross breach of rules. No child is to be sent to a reformatory school without undergoing a previous imprisonment of at least a fortnight, which may of course be made as much longer as the judge thinks right. A power is taken of charging the parents or guardians with a weekly contribution towards defraying the expense; and the Treasury is also authorised to assist. The practice, we believe, is for the latter to pay the school managers at the rate of five shillings a week for every child; the sum assessed upon the parents being levied from them afterwards (if at all) in aid of the Treasury contribution.

Under this Act several private reformatory schools have been established; but even before it had passed, the movement had begun. In the early part of 1852, the year after the Birmingham Conference, Mr. Barwick Baker and Mr. George Bengough, two magistrates of Glouces

With regard to further legislative mea

To consider and promote such legislative measures as are still required for the better care and reformation of youthful offenders:

To assist in the placing out and subsequent guardianship and protection of young persons leaving reformatory institutions:

To consider and promote means for the employment and restoration to society of discharged prisoners :

To promote the practical training and preparation of efficient masters and teachers for reformatory institutions :

This association promises to be of material assistance to the reformatory movement. At the present time benevolent persons are working in different parts of the country, each in ignorance of the proceedings of the rest, and sometimes suffering serious inconveniences which mutual concert would readily remove. Means ought also to exist for enabling one institution to assist another by occasional exchanges of boys, or by a concerted system of 'patronage' of those who leave the schools. It may often be convenient to send a boy to a school at a distance from his own home; thus a Gloucester boy committed to Hardwicke may advantageously be exchanged for a Reading boy committed to the Berkshire School; or, again, a boy whose apparent fitness for sea-service renders it desirable to train him up for it, may be sent from an inland school to Liverpool, where a hulk school is, we believe, in contemplation.

The training of Masters, which is one of the purposes of the association, is a matter of the highest consequence, and, we fear, of the greatest difficulty also. The ordinary run of national schoolmasters will not meet the peculiar want which has to be supplied. The special training which it was intended to give at Kneller Hall might perhaps in time have produced the right class of men; but Kneller Hall has been given up by the Government, and can no longer be regarded as an element in the calculation. The subject is one which deserves the consideration of the Privy Council, and which may well engage the attention of the new association. A simple registration of men willing to undertake the office would be a useful measure, and if means were found of ap

rience which has been acquired is as yet sufficient to justify the Government in advancing materially from the position which was taken up by the Act of 1854. There is, perhaps, something that looks undignified in throwing upon private benevolence the whole risk, and at least onehalf of the burden, of a great national experiment; but we cannot help feeling that while the principles of reformatory action are still unsettled, it is much better that they should be left to our Turners, our Bakers, and our Hills, to work out for us, than that they should be entrusted to official authorities, who must necessarily work by rule, and who may very possibly be wanting in that sympathy (though we must own that such men as Captain O'Brien, Captain Williams, and Mr. Perry, are standing proofs that the reverse will often be the case) which is essential to the success of the scheme. We abstain, therefore, from entering into a discussion of the questions involved in a system of governmental action, for which the subject is not yet ripe, though apparently approaching to ripeness. What the managers of private reformatories, however, have a right to demand from the legislature is, that they should be allowed fair play, and should not be hampered by unnecessary difficulties in working out the act. As the law at present stands stumbling-blocks are placed in the way, which remind us of the gates and ditches so liberally sprinkled across the fashionable game of the race-course. The first catching of your boy is in itself a work of no small intricacy, for the Act prescribes that the committing judge or magistrate, at ten minutes' notice (or, if the boy pleads guilty, at once), shall decide not only that he is a fit subject for a reformatory school, but that he shall be sent to school A, school B, or school C, while, on the other hand, the managers of A, B, and C, are clearly informed that they need not take any given boy unless they choose. The result may be that the boy is sentenced to school A, that the managers refuse him, the school perhaps being full, and that the sentence fails altogether, though B and C may both have vacancies and be ready to accept the offender. This anomaly was pointed out last session, and Mr. Adderley introduced a bill to correct it, which the Government refused to support, apparently because

they could not bring themselves to believe that such a dead lock really existed in the law. They will probably have discovered the truth by the coming session.

Another matter, which should be attended to, is, the giving greater facilities to school committees to exchange boys. If two schools be equally licensed, it cannot signify to the Government whether the weekly allowance for the convict John Smith be paid to the one or to the other. It is true that an exchange may be accomplished by means of an appeal to the Secretary of State; but the occasions for these steps arise sometimes suddenly, and the three or four weeks' delay, which the reference to the Home Office involves, may make the whole difference. In a case within our knowledge, a boy, who was about to be removed from a school which had not the means of controlling him, to another where much more efficient control could have been exercised, ran away two days before the order of exchange arrived, and succeeded in concealing himself for a considerable time.

Lastly, it seems reasonable that if the schools are to be left on the present footing, the weekly allowance (of 5s. a-head) should be somewhat increased. While the private system is continued, the Government cannot be expected to grant public money for the erection of buildings or other purposes which involve the sinking of capital; but when we see that these institutions have become a recognised appendage to our criminal code, it seems only just that the current expenses should be mainly defrayed by the public instead of by individuals. Five shillings a-week at present prices is not quite sufficient to pay for the board and clothing of a boy in establishments conducted on a small scale; and we believe that, in order to make a school thoroughly efficient very nearly as much more will have to be laid out in salaries of masters, and other current expenses. The cost per head in little schools is of course much greater than in large ones, and the comparative economy of the latter may perhaps lead in due time to their general adoption by the State, and to the introduction of Government management: but while the present system is under trial, it is bad policy to starve it, and we believe that it would be well worth the while of the Government to increase the present allowance (say) to 7s. a-week for each boy, which would pretty satisfactorily meet the exigencies of the case.

These are, we believe, the chief points upon which the managers of reformatories

are likely to require aid; but there still remains one, which, though not directly affecting them, is of paramount importance to the success of the whole system, and which has hitherto been but imperfectly attended to. We allude to the provision for compelling parents to pay something towards their children's maintenance. It cannot be denied by the most ardent supporters of the reformatory cause, that there is considerable force in the objection that the advantages which the schools offer to young offenders are such as to render it probable that parents may be encouraged to neglect their children, and to allow them to run into mischief, in the hope that they will ultimately be taken off their hands. We do not say they would deliberately encourage them to commit serious crimes, but, as the law now stands, a simple act of vagrancy may be made to serve as a basis for commitment to school, and a benevolent pair of magistrates who see John Stokes' children running wild, never going to school, and often getting into scrapes, are likely enough to take advantage of some trifling peccadillo to send one or two of them to an establishment where they will be clothed, fed, and instructed in industrial arts as well as in book-learning, at no expense whatever to John Stokes himself, and much to the benefit of their own parish and neighbourhood: whereas if the committal of the children to the school were accompanied by an order on John Stokes to pay a couple of shillings a-week for their maintenance, and if that order were punctually enforced, other parents in the neighbourhood would calculate whether it would not be cheaper after all to send their own boys to the National School, and keep them from becoming chargeable in so unpleasant a way; and if this be so in country districts, still more would it be the case in London and the large towns, where wages are higher and children more neglected.

Mettray and its system have done great good in France; but, for want of such a provision as this, the number of committals of young offenders has undoubtedly increased since its establishment.* There are but two ways of checking this tendency. The one is to afford to the children of the honest poor the same advantages of industrial training, &c., as we afford to our young thieves, without compelling them to serve

This appears from the Criminal Returns. It does not prove an increase in juvenile crime so much as in juvenile commitments, many children being now brought to justice who would formerly have been allowed to go free; but even so, the result is unsatisfactory.

an apprenticeship in crime for the purpose | of obtaining them. This plan, we fear, is greatly in advance of the opinion of the day. The other is to enforce parental responsibility by enforcing the law with regard to the contributions of the parents; and this, as the more feasible of the two, we hope to see carried into effect without loss of time, and in a thoroughly earnest

manner.

ART. III.-1. Ménandre: Etude Historique et Littéraire. Par M. Guillaume Guizot. Ouvrage couronné par l'Académie Française en 1853. Paris, 1855. 2. Essai Historique et Littéraire sur la Comédie de Ménandre. Par Ch. Benoît. Ouvrage couronné par l'Académie Française. Paris, 1854.

SOME forty or fifty years ago, if in a company of scholars and accomplished readers it had been put to the vote what work of all the lost treasures of ancient letters they would most rejoice to see retrieved from oblivion, the general acclamation would have been for a comedy of Menander. Now perhaps, besides those who would at once give their suffrage for the later books of Livy or of Tacitus, or the writings of some of the Greek philosophers known to us but by fame, there would be some who have studied Greek poetry with more intimate knowledge and finer perceptions of its excellence, who might prefer the remains of the tender-hearted Simonides; those Dithyrambics of Pindar, to which the odes which we possess were esteemed but feeble and lifeless lyrics; something more of Archilochus or of Sappho; or the rest of the Promethean trilogy, or the Niobe or Bacchic tragedies of Eschylus. Yet Menander would still have many voices. The fame of the last of the Attic poets, the crowning glory of the Grecian stage, in his own day contested by more successful rivals, cut short by premature death (he was drowned while bathing in the Piræus at the age of fifty-two, though not before he had produced above a hundred plays), went on increasing in lustre, and has left an unbroken tradition of his transcendent excellence. All the later Greek writers might seem to vie with each other in extolling his name. Plutarch wrote a feeble and singularly unintelligent comparison of Menander with Aristophanes, asserting decidedly the superiority of Menander, and

Plutarch was long held of high authority even in such matters. The Roman comedy seemed to be excellent, almost in proportion as it was avowedly borrowed or translated from Menander. Plautus, with his genuine and original humour, when he leaned towards the Sicilian comedy of Epicharmus, more kindred perhaps to the native Italian farce, was heard with less favour, and held more rude and barbarous than when he followed Menander. Terence, who did hardly more than transpose or mould up two plays of Menander into one, whom throughout the lower Latin period, and deep into the middle ages, the Christian writers, churchmen, monks, and even holy abbesses (witness the theatre of Hroswitha), attempted to exorcise from the study of their disciples, with but feeble successTerence could not but keep alive the fame of his lost prototype. The Greek Fathers (though it was Aristophanes who was said, from his pure Atticism, to have been cherished upon the pillow of St. Chrysostom) could not suppress their regret at the stern proscription with which themselves had doomed to oblivion what should have been, and but for their fatal influence had been, the imperishable works of the great comic writer.

No one is ignorant how much more powerful was their proscription than their lingering respect; no scholar but knows how scanty, mutilated, and imperfect are the few fragments which survive of the hundred comedies of Menander. Yet why they have so entirely perished may seem almost unaccountable. By what caprice of what we must confess to esteem good fortune have we eleven plays of the coarser, no doubt, but we scruple not to say more truly great comic poet, Aristophanes-of all later writers of Attic comedy not one? Aristophanes, it might have been supposed, would have been doomed to inevitable oblivion, for the very reasons which-in addition to his wild fancy, his boundless fun, his broad but exquisite satire, his true Athenian democratic boldness, his language of such infinite pliancy yet such perfect purity, the unrivalled harmony of his verse

make his works invaluable to us-for the fulness, namely, of local and temporary allusion, and his almost utter incomprehensibility to those unacquainted, or not intimately acquainted, with Athenian laws, institutions, and manners. How did Aristophanes survive, and not merely himself, but with him his satellites the Scholiasts, who alone shed light on his dark places? The later Greek Fathers can hardly have had the courage or the taste attributed to