find it worth their while to purchase for themselves the meals which their own children had cooked. A profit might thus accrue to the school, whilst the children would have practical experience in the class of cookery which would be of most use to them in after life. We have already said that many School Board teachers are in the habit of providing meals for the more destitute scholars at their own expense. It is not right that a class who as a rule are not too highly paid, or over favoured by fortune, should be called upon either to shut their eyes and harden their hearts, if they can, against the sight of children suffering from the effects of hunger, or else to draw upon their own scanty incomes for the means of affording them relief. If the pill above suggested should be too large a one for the contracted gullets of our economists (though it may, en passant, be mentioned that dinners at nominal prices are provided for the children in the National Schools of Germany), philanthropists might surely be invited to look upon the subject as one not unworthy of their consideration. Money might be worse spent than in providing cheap dinners, at all events during the winter months, for the destitute children attending our Board Schools. If this were done, not only would the School Board officers find the list of truant children rapidly diminish, and the school gain favour with the most obdurate of parents, but we should be sure that every child in a Board School (which ought to mean every child in a large city) was provided with at all events one good meal a day, and that its body was warmed for a certain number of hours during the twenty-four. Now as to fresh air and exercise, the other requisites for health. The Rev. S. A. Barnett, Vicar of Whitechapel, has for some time been in the habit of boarding out during the summer months the children of his poorer parishioners in the country and at the seaside. The Leicester Charity Organisation Society has also been instrumental in carrying out a similar scheme, and the London Charity Organisation Society, encouraged by the success which has attended these efforts, has referred the question of boarding out to a special committee, which has reported favourably on the subject. It is to be hoped, therefore, that before long some general organisation will be established, by means of which city-bred children, whether convalescent or not, may from time to time be enabled to breathe true country air, refresh their minds and eyes and ears by the sights and sounds of country life, and lay in a stock of health against the hour of their return to town. Most Board Schools possess a small yard attached to the school, within which the children are allowed to amuse themselves, and sometimes have the opportunity given them of exercising their limbs in running round a 'giant's stride.' This is good as far as it goes, but it is a poor substitute for the games which country children enjoy. Would it not be possible, in the absence of a park or open space, to encourage children to do something better than loiter about, or bully one 6 another, or talk bad,' as it is called, when congregated in knots? Might not the 'giant's stride' be supplemented by a couple of fives courts, a cat's-gallows, or a circular running path? Prizes might be given to successful competitors in these healthy exercises in the open air, and provision might be made for proper exercise on wet days by suspending a few ropes, rope-ladders, and a trapeze or two to the ceiling of the schoolroom. These might be so arranged as to be drawn up to the ceiling by means of a pulley during the lesson hours, and thus not interfere with the ordinary work of tuition. The above plan, in the absence of a proper gymnasium, has been most successfully carried out in a school with which the writer is acquainted. In Germany and Switzerland gymnastics are made as much a part of the system of education as reading and writing. If Germans and Swiss, who mostly live in country districts or in small towns, where ample means of exercise are to be found, consider it essential for the maintenance of national health that their children should be taught gymnastics, surely it is of some importance that our city-bred English children, who never have any opportunity of using their limbs, should be supplied with these artificial means of strengthening their bodies and of fortifying their nerves. There is no reason why a certain knowledge of gymnastics should not be required of every School Board master, so that he might be able to superintend these exercises during the hours which are now nominally given up to play, but which are really often passed in a manner neither conducive to morality nor to health. The teachers, who perhaps suffer from want of exercise more than the scholars, would welcome the establishment of good gymnasia and fives courts, and would find themselves clearer in head and brighter in mind after an hour's bout at the one or the other, whilst their scholars might possibly perceive in them a greater equanimity of temper. Each School Board district in London is provided with a spacious room, now used for meetings of managers, and for other similar purposes connected with the business of the schools. These might with very small expense be easily fitted up as gymnasia, without in the least interfering with the objects for which they were built, and here might be held advanced classes in gymnastics under properly qualified instructors. In addition to these classes, is there any reason why these rooms should not be thrown open, under proper supervision, on week-day evenings, subject to a small annual payment or entrance fee, to former Board School scholars, or, indeed, to any young lads between the ages of thirteen and twenty, who chose to spend their evenings in healthy exercise, rather than in the dissipation of the gin palace, the music hall, or the cheap gaff? Prison statistics inform us that men rarely take to a life of crime after twenty-one years of age, and that the criminal classes are as a rule recruited from young men between the ages of fifteen and twenty, who not infrequently are induced to desert honest industry, and to enter upon a life of crime, by associating of an evening with bad characters in low places of resort. A young man after hard work or close confinement all day must have society and recreation of some sort. Where at present can he find this out of the gin palace or music hall? English towns, as compared with continental ones, are lamentably deficient in places where of an evening a young man can find innocent and wholesome recreation. Surely the establishment of gymnasia for the use of the youth of our towns would not be foreign to the educational purposes for which School Boards exist. Physical and intellectural education should go hand in hand. The London School Board has so far acknowledged this principle, as to allow prizes to be given to their scholars for swimming and drilling, and have encouraged them to become proficients in both exercises. If gymnasia were fitted up, and occasionally thrown open, as suggested above, and made attractive to the young men of the neighbourhood, no doubt these establishments would shortly become a source of income to the Board. The object of this paper will have been fulfilled if it induces some School Board authorities to devote greater attention to the question of improving and of promoting the physique of the city-bred children assigned to their care. The ideas thrown out do not profess to meet all the difficulties of the question of the health of our city populations. The writer is well aware that he has but touched the fringe of the subject; that a radical reform can never be effected until much bolder and more important measures than he has proposed, or would venture to suggest, have approved themselves to our parliamentary and municipal authorities. He has therefore confined himself to considering the best means of improving the health of our city children, leaving to abler hands the wider question of how to deal with the adults. If some improvement, even though slight, may reasonably be expected to accrue to the health of the rising generation in cities by the adoption of the above suggestions, surely it would be worth an effort to endeavour to bring them into practice. Salus populi suprema est lex. BRABAZON. M. RENAN AND MIRACLES. Ζεῦ πάτερ, ἀλλὰ σὺ ῥῦσαι ὑπ' ἀέρος υίας Αχαιῶν. WHETHER or no the civilised world be in its actual practice manifesting an increased regard for morals and religion, there seems at least to be no doubt that those subjects occupy now a larger space in its thoughts than has been the case since the Reformation. Discussions of this kind pervade all schools of opinion, and Goethe himself could scarcely in our days maintain his antique impassiveness amid the problems of man's life and destiny. To students of the historical sciences these questions are necessarily of the first importance. A language and a religion are the legacies of every race, and these two things are for the most part indistinguishably fused together into a single record of the minds of far-off men. In Germany and Holland, and less markedly in France and England, the current of research has for some time set strongly in the direction of the history of religions. And no book of this kind has attained a greater fame, as none has dealt with a theme more important, than M. Renan's Origines du Christianisme, now on the eve of being concluded by the volume entitled Marc-Aurèle, after occupying twenty years of its author's labours. Detailed criticism on a learned work of this magnitude would be hardly in place in a review which addresses itself to the general public. It must suffice here to indicate some general points of view, often overlooked amid the desultory and acrimonious comment to which a work of such scope and novelty, on themes of such close concern to all, is not unnaturally exposed. We may remark, in the first place, that M. Renan's great work almost exactly fills up the gap between the two most considerable histories of ancient times to which modern erudition has given birth. Between the foundation of the Roman Empire, where Mommsen ends, and the reign of Commodus, where Gibbon begins, the main event in the world's history is the rise of Christianity, and of this, with much reference to contemporary occurrences, M. Renan treats. 6 Better examples than these three writers it would be hard to find of the various tempers of mind in which the historian may approach the facts and personages with which he has to deal :-examples of philosophic indifference, of strong and clear convictions, of manysided sympathy. Gibbon's method lays him least open to criticism, but it is suited only for a Byzantine abasement of human things. Many tracts in his thousand years of history still seem as if they had been made to suit him; but wherever extraordinary characters or impulses of strong life and passion claim a place on his canvas, we feel that all his learning does not save him from being superficial. Mommsen, on the other hand, is by far the most effective as a teacher. A third, if one may so say, in the intellectual triumvirate, with Bismarck and von Moltke, he hurls upon his readers a greater mass of knowledge with a greater momentum than any of his rivals. Yet through the garb of the historian is sometimes visible the pamphleteer; and the unimpassioned Gibbon would scarcely have repudiated Renan's Jesus so decisively as Mommsen's Cæsar. The chameleon sympathies of M. Renan, his critical finesse, his ready emotion, again have both advantages and dangers of their own. On the one hand, they enable him to see more of truth than ordinary men; for insight requires imagination, and the data of history cannot always, like the data of physical science, be best investigated in a dry light.' Rather may we say if it be allowed to specialise the metaphor-that they often need to fall upon some mind which, like a fluorescent liquid, can give luminosity to rays which were dark before, and extend by its own intimate structure the many-tinted spectrum of the past. On the other hand, he who attempts to descend so deeply into the springs of human thought and feeling cannot but unconsciously lay open also the limitations of his own being. Gibbon may dismiss all events alike with majestic indifference or a contented sneer. The definite and straightforward judgments of Mommsen give little grasp on their author's idiosyncrasy. But M. Renan, explaining his characters from within, indicating their subtler interrelations and intimate desires, attempts much that is usually left to the poet or dramatist; and, like the poet or dramatist, whatever else he is depicting depicts himself. And thus it is that one defect in him,-a defect, it is fair to say, in which he does not stand alone among his countrymen,-has appeared so conspicuously, and has been so readily seized on by opponents, that it has come to colour the popular conception of him to a quite unjust extent. This is his want, one cannot exactly say of dignity, for the master of a style so flexible and so urbane cannot but be dignified whenever he pleases, but of the quality to which the Romans gave the name of gravitas, the temper of mind which looks at great matters with a stern simplicity, and which, in describing them, disdains to introduce any intermixture of less noble emotion. Such, at least, has undoubtedly been our English verdict. Yet it is |