which could dispense with them. Sects rise up every now and then
which carry their abhorrence of all that is not fanaticism--after
their own pattern--to the extreme, and which lay pleasure under the
same curse with vice; but sects are cometic, and are not to be judged
of after the generalisations of national character. Practically, we
find that rigidness and vice, amusements and morality, go together,
Siamese-like. In the year of the Crystal Palace, the London
magistrates had fewer petty criminals brought before them than at any
other period of the same duration; and what Mr Wilson proves in his
cricket-ground, what London shewed in the time of the World's Fair,
generations and countries would always exhibit in larger characters,
more widely read--that the mind and body of man require
amusement--simple pleasure--purposeless, aimless, unintellectual,
physical pleasure--as much as his digestive organs require food and
his hands work; not as the sole employment, but mixed in with, and
forming the basis and the body of higher things--the strong practical
woof through which the warp of golden stuff is woven into a glorious
fabric--a glorious fabric of national progression. Yes, and into a
wider garment still; one that will cover many an outlying Bedouin
cowering in the darkness round--one that will join together the high
and the low, the good and the bad, and so knead up the baser element
into amalgamation with and absorption into the higher. This is no
ideal theory. It is a possibility, a practical fact, proved in this
place and in that--wherever men have taken the trouble to act on
rational bases and on a true acceptation of the needs of human nature.
For as the quality of light is to spread, and as the higher things
will always absorb the lower, so will schools and kindly sympathy
diffuse knowledge and virtue among the ignorant and brutalised; and
Love to Humanity will once more read its mission in the salvation of a
world.

OUT-OF-DOORS LIFE IN CENTRAL EUROPE.

The out-of-doors life enjoyed by the inhabitants of the continent,
strikes a person, unacquainted with their habits and manners, more
perhaps than anything which meets his eye in that part of the world.
Rational, agreeable, and healthy as it is, it requires a long time
before a thorough Englishman can accustom himself to it, or feel at
all comfortable in eating his meals in the open air, surrounded by two
or three hundred persons employed in the same ma