has been established among the Protest- lute wonderment. Were their vulgarity ants at Paris. They exist also in many of the provincial cities.

here, as in all similar cases, the misfortune | his conviction that this singular impulse on is, that the persons who would avail them- the public mind will be of short duration. selves of these advantages would be the moral and well-conducted; the vicious and ill-regulated would reject them altogether. From the preventive M. Frégier proceeds to the remedial means-that is, the means by which existing vice and crime can best be controlled and diminished; and he chiefly directs his attention to the three vices most widely extended and most pregnant with crime-drunkenness, gambling, and prostitution.

It is,' he says, 'an easy task for any political economist to point out a variety of plans which, if they could be carried into effect, would abate the vice of drunkenness: but, unfortunately, all these are good only in theory, and are means of prevention rather than cure. That all factorychildren, whose parents are notorious drunkards, should be boarded and lodged by the manufacturer who employs them, and thus screened from the contagion of bad example at home, is one of these:—that all the children of moral and well conducted parents should perform their work at home, and by so doing, avoid the demoralising effects of the vice-crowded factory, is another:-that societies under royal patronage should be established to procure for the entire mass of the working classes amusement, combined with instruction, during the Sundays and the other periods of idleness, is a third. All these plans would be excellent were they not impracticable. To subject every drunkard to punishment has been tried in Germany without success. To increase the duties on wine and spirits has been recommended; but in a vinegrowing country like France this would be a check to industry, and it would be unjust to wards the sober portion of the community. Another plan is uniformly to publish in the newspapers an account of all the accidents, fatal quarrels, and crimes resulting from drunkenness. As from the extension of education, every one will in a few years be able to read, this public exposure would tend powerfully to check the

vice.'

Tolerated gambling-houses no longer exist in France; and the plan adopted by the government, of first suppressing them in the provincial towns, and then attacking the grand establishments in Paris, was politic and wise. It would appear, however, that the evil, if abated, is very far from being conquered. The vigilance of the police has indeed, successfully put down the houses established for the specific purpose of clandestine gambling; but it has hitherto been foiled by the augmented numbers and activity of the maisons à partics. In these, high and unfair play is carried on, under the specious exterior of ordinary visiting, to a far greater extent than formerly; and our author is of opinion that alteratious in the penal code are imperatively called for to meet these subtle evasions of the law.

Two diametrically opposite systems have been proposed for the reformation of the unhappy victims of prostitution. The advocates of the one, filled with the benevolent desire of reinstating these women in the honest ranks of society, assert that it is the duty of the civil authorities to facilitate this object by assiduously labouring to introduce among them habits of order, forethought, and economy. The advocates of the other system reprobrate, as vitally detrimental to public morals, any measures which would tend to blend these degraded beings with the respectable portion of the community, or to lessen the ignominy which attaches to them, and which forms one of the strongest safeguards, perhaps the strongest of all, to female virtue: they fear, also, that any improvements in the habits of these women would, in proportion as it lessened prostitution, augment illicit connexions more irreparably detrimental to the happiness of families. Far from promoting any objects of this nature, they are anxious to make the line of demarcation more clearly apparent than it is at present; and would willingly bring back the ancient laws which restricted women of this class to certain parts of each city, and obliged them to wear a peculiar dress. Our author inclines evidently to the milder of these systems, and so did also his great authority, Parent-Duchâtelet : in England this controversy is not likely to be agitated.

We greatly doubt it; and, indeed, of all the suggestions brought forward in this section, there appears to us to be only one from which any important practical good might result. It is, that systematically, and by a mutual compact among all the manufacturers and master artificers, every habitual drunkard should be expelled from their establishments, however able a workman he may be. No doubt, if this system were generally and rigidly adopted, there would re- It is quite evident that the science of sult from it, after a time, an important prison discipline is, of all others, the one improvement in the habits of the working nearest our author's heart; and his ardent classes. M. Frégier does not advert to the partisanship in favour of the system of solitemperance movement in Ireland and Eng-tary confinement, leads him, as we have land. As he cannot be ignorant of it, his silence may, we presume, be attributed to

already stated, to devote a very undue portion of his volumes to this especial subject.

upon the local revenues would almost amount to a prohibition; in all it would be severely felt: but the object is one of such vital importance, that, when the superior advantages of the separate system shall no longer be a matter of dispute, the legislature will, we have no doubt, lend a willing aid to extend it throughout the kingdom. The first expense is the only real difficulty; for although the charges of superintendence will be increased, this is a trivial consideration, and will be compensated for a hundred-fold by the gradual diminution of crime.

We shall not attempt to follow him through | many counties in England this demand the details; the question being one which we but recently discussed, and which, if not actually decided in this country, may be considered as on the very eve of being so. The balance of evidence, we think, leaves little doubt that the bodily health does not suffer by even the most strict system of solitary confinement: but the case is by no means so clear with regard to the mind. Here, although the evidence is far from conclusive, there is strong ground for believing that long-protracted confinement, in a state of constant and absolute solitude, will injure the functions of the brain, and induce insanity, or permanent mental im- M. Frégier claims for his country the becility. The matter is one of such import- merit of extending a much greater degree ance, that the only safe thing to do is at of paternal solicitude towards a convict on once to assume the fact to be so, and to act his dismissal from prison than is usual in on that assumption. Confine a prisoner in England. In France, a liberal portion of a separate cell, interdict him absolutely and the profits of his work is paid to him when entirely from all communication whatever, he is discharged, and he is thus not comeither by eye or mouth, with his fellow-pelled by actual want, as is too frequently prisoners; but give him employment and the case in England, at once to resume his instruction-let him, in the course of each day, be visited by carefully selected gaolers, by the master artisan who has to superintend his work, by the schoolmaster, the physician, and the chaplain-and experience has proved that there will not be the slightest cause to fear any injury to the mind, however long such a course of solitary confinement shall continue, be it for years, or even for the whole of life. There is also the strongest evidence to prove, that amelioration of character, radical and permanent reformation, is the cheering and encouraging result in very numerous instances. Under these modifications-and they may now be considered as points the necessity of which is generally conceded-the insulation of prisoners may be pronounced to be the best and most successful system which has yet been devised to punish crime and amend the criminal.

career of crime. This is wise and worthy of imitation: but the system established in France for the surveillance of liberated prisoners, the convict-passports given them, and the societies of patronage,' as they are called, the object of which is to facilitate their re-introduction into society, are considered by our author as failures; and he is of opinion, that, except as relates to the younger classes of criminals, they should be abolished altogether. He is decided in his condemnation of our penal settlements; the formation of agricultural colonies in the mother country for the employment of liberated prisoners he demonstrates to be attended with insurmountable objections; and the result at which he arrives is, that the best chance to render the liberated criminal an inoffensive and useful member of society is to give him moral instruction, and the knowledge of some useful trade, during the period of his detention; and that, when he is again thrown upon society, such funds shall be supplied as shall give him the time and means of fixing himself in some honest course of life.

The great additional outlay necessary in the construction of a building where several hundred convicts are to be completely separated from each other, is a weightier objection than it may appear to be at first sight. Every portion of the establishment must be more elaborately fitted up than at With this subject M. Frégier concludes present; the exercise-grounds must be his treatise. Differing from him on many multiplied, the passages and corridors must points, compelled to smile at some passages, be peculiarly constructed, and the entire and to express our reprobation of others, structure must be more extensive and more the final impression which his pages have complicated. In some instances, the exist-produced upon us is one of respect and ing prisons might, by a considerable out- gratitude.

lay, be rendered applicable to this new mode of confinement, but in the majority of cases it would be necessary that entirely new buildings should be erected. In

ART. II. The Encyclopædia Britannica; or Dictionary of Arts, Science, and General Literature. Seventh Edition, with Preliminary Dissertations, &c., &c. Edited by Macvey Napier, Esq., F. R. S. Edinburgh, 1842. 21 vols., 4to.

dertaking. In consequence of a dispute between Gua and the booksellers, the editorship of the Encyclopédie was entrusted to D'Alembert and Diderot, who, while they represent Chambers as a servile compiler, principally from French writers, acknowledge at the same time that without the groundwork of the French translation of that book, their own would never have been composed. To enlarge an_article already written was a task which the con

would have shrunk from the labour and responsibility of composing a new one.

THE task of analysis and appreciation would have been overwhelming, had this vast work been submitted to our judgment in the fulness of its stature, and in the maturity of its age: but we have had the ad-tributors willingly undertook, while they vantage of being familiar with it from an early period of its existence; and trust, therefore, that our readers will not deem us presumptuous if, in giving them an account of its rise and progress, we at the same time venture to pronounce a judgment upon its general merits, and even upon some of the most remarkable articles which its pages now contain.

A few years after the completion of this work, which has been as much reprobated on account of the irreligious and revolutionary doctrines which it inculcates, as it has been extolled for the originality and depth of many of its articles, the first edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica' was Although we might naturally have ex-given to the world in three vols. 4to. It pected that dictionaries explanatory of was edited, and the plan of it probably dewords would give rise to dictionaries ex-vised, by Mr. William Smellie, a printer in planatory of ideas, and descriptive of the Edinburgh, and the author of an interestthings which these words represent, yet ing book on natural history. The pecusuch a transition was not the first step liarity of this encyclopædia consisted in its which was taken in the composition of en-treating each branch of literature and scicyclopædias. Systematic digests of litera-ence under its proper name, and in a systeture and science appeared under the name matic form, the technical terms and subof encyclopædias long before the alphabet ordinate heads being likewise explained was employed as the principle of the ar- alphabetically-while details slightly conrangement. The Arabian Encyclopædia nected with the general subject could be of Alfarabius, of which the MS. exists in thus separately introduced. the Escurial, and the more modern one of Professor Alstedius of Weissenbourg (2 vols. folio, 1630,) are examples of this method of systematizing knowledge.

The first Dictionary of the arts and sciences was the Lexicon Technicum' of Dr. Harris, which was published in two folio volumes, the first in 1706, the second in 1710; but its limitation almost entirely to mathematics and physics, deprived it of the character of an encyclopædia work.

This dictionary was followed, in 1721, by the Cyclopædia' of Mr. Chambers, a work of great merit and utility, which ran through no fewer than five editions in the course of eighteen years. Its reputation extended to the continent, and it was translated into French and Italian. The French translation was completed in 1745, by one Mills, an Englishman, with the assistance of Sellius, a native of Dantzic. About this time the Abbé de Gua projected the celebrated 'Encyclopédie,' a collection which formed an epoch in the literary, if not in the political, history of Europe. So limited was the early plan of this work, that Mills's translation of the Cyclopædia of Chambers was assumed as the groundwork of the un

We have now before us two rival methods of constructing an encyclopædia, each of which has been regarded as possessing peculiar advantages. Although from the prevalence of both methods we cannot rightly collect the opinion of the public, yet we have no hesitation in giving a decided preference to that in which the leading branches of knowledge are discussed in separate treatises, as in the Encyclopædia Britannica.' The facility of composing, or of obtaining authors to compose, the short articles which correspond to the technical titles or sections of any branch of science, has no doubt led to the opposite method, which is exemplified in the Cyclopædias of Harris and Chambers. But when these titles or sections are numerous, as they generally are, when they are written by different authors, in different styles of execution, and on different scales, they must compose a disjointed and unsystematical whole, which cannot fail to be unsatisfactory to the general reader, as well as to the ardent student. The only method indeed by which such a plan can be properly executed is to have the general treatises composed by a single individual, and