The Sun.
London, England, 1864-01-22 00:00:00

LITERATURE,

The Grade Lesson Book. Sixth (and Last) Stan-
dard. By E. T. Stevens and elarles Hole. One
vol., pp. 220. Longman and Co.
Already we have had occasion repeatedly to com-
mend the really admirable plan upon which this
thoroughly readable series of Grade Books has been
constructed. Issued from the press, in half-a-dozen
volumes, each of them published quite independently
of its companions, but all of them together forming
a regular sequential and homogeneous whole; we
have been enabled to examine the six books very
carefully, and with an unusual degree of minute-
ness. Our opinion, therefore, in regard to the
general excellence of the scheme upon which this
particular educational course has been framed, is in
no respect whatever formed either precipitately or
superficially. The plan, as a plan, has been scruti-
nised, as it were, under the microscope. We have
scanned it, and considered it again, and yet again
—now viewing it piecemeal, and now (particularly
at this moment) regarding it as a whole. And the
more completely the plan of these Grade Books has
been brought under our examination the more
entirely satisfied have we become that it is
one essentially practical of its kind, one
steadily and entirely practicable. It is not simply
that the notion is theoretically good—it appears to
us to be one that any liberal-minded teacher could
and would, can and will carry out satisfactorily to
himself—actually work with pleasure to himself and
to his pupils. It is with the sixth and concluding
Standard that we have now to do—our estimate of
its predecessors we have already expressed. Turn-
ing, therefore, to the final volume of the halt-dozen
we find it to be—unmistakeably, as it ought to be
—the best, because of course the most advanced.
The contents of the little book for one thing are far
more varied, are far more miscellaneous than those
of the five books or standards preceding it. They
breathe, these contents of vol., or standard,
vi., more directly of the age in which
we live. The authors quoted in the contents
are either very recently deceased or are actually
still living. Among the former, Samuel Rogers and
the Earl of Dundonald, Edgar Poe and Lord Ma-
caulay. Among the latter—that is, among our
living writers—Charles Dickens and Alfred Tenny-
son, Ruskin and Longfellow, Punch and the Times.
In this respect alone—namely, in the mere charac-
ter of the selections made—what an immense and
perfectly obvious improvement upon those twad-
dling, mawkish, "goody" kind of exemplars, clubbed
together in the old elementary school-books, from
the earliest spelling-books that held up to view in
such invidous contrast Tommy the Naughty Boy
and Johnny the Good Boy : our sympathies always
somehow going, by the rule of contraries, with the
former and against the latter—the former
being a study little Turk ; the latter an un-
questionable little Ass. Instead of which literary
pabulum in the shape of a kind of intellectual pap
to the young mind, is furnished with wholesome
and relishing, and appetizing sentiment, such as
that to be found here in this sixth delightful little
volume at p. 34, in the heroic Lord Cochrane's re-
cord of his astounding capture of the "El Gamo"
frigate, p. 87, in the Poet-Laureate's exquisitely
dulcifluous lyric " The Brook," at page 93, in our
glorious Dickens's wonderful account of his visit to
the Chatham Dockyard, a piece of powerful writ-
ting only very recently published in All the
Year Round, and to which we welt remember our-
selves directing particular attention in these columns
immediately upon its first publication ! It was in
the August of 1863, and the paper from which the
extract is taken was from one of the very happiest
of the second series of the Uncommercial Traveller.
Recollecting what the requirements of the Revised
Code are precisely, we cannot but think that they
are fulfilled to a nicety by these six excellent Guide
Books, especially adapted by Messrs. Stevens and
Hole to meet these requirements.

People's Edition of the Poets. No. I. Cowper.

W. Tweedie.

Penny wisdom is not always found foolishness.
In signal proof of which we need only turn to the
initial number of this new penny weekly venture
of Mr. Tweedie. From his prospectus we take the
following extract :
" On the muster-roll of British Poets is inscribed a long
list of immortal names, whose lustre will remain unim-
paired by comparison with the poets of any country in any
age. From Chaucer down to Byron, that heir of doubt and
passion, who alternately oppresses us with gloom and
hurries us along to the lightest and most sparkling of mea-
sures—and Shelley, who, in exquisite verse, depicted his
own wondrous dreams of the future—there is one grand
array of poetic names—
That on the steady breeze of honour sail
In long succession, calm and beautiful.
Nci have the fancy and invention of Spenser—the beauty,
pathos, and awful sublimity of Milton—the wit of Butler—
the archness and piquancy of Prior—the strength, ele-
gance, and ease of Pope and Dryden—the descriptive
power, and intense love of nature of Thomson and Bloom-
field—the rough satire of Churchill—the manly sense, the
patriotic and religious zeal of Cowper—the unstudied grace
and harmony of Goldsmith—the good nature of Gay—the
humour and feeling of Burns. A host of minor bards, too,
might be mentioned, whose contributions to our poetic
wealth are gems, though not so massive, yet rare and
priceless."

And it is this treasury of literature that the enter-
prising publisher is now bringing out in this per-
fectly new form to scatter thus broadcast among the
population.

THE SPECIAL GRIEVANCE FELT AT THE PRE
SENT TIME.—A dozen years ago, a projector o
lively imagination, when he took up a map to scratch a new
line across it, almost invarial4 avoided houses—especially
valuable houses—as if they had the plague. No curves and
gradients were thought too severe if they enabled a com-
pany to escape the necessity of paying for such costly land
as that which was covered by buildings. Now all this is
changed. The open country has been scored all over with
iron roads until there is not room left for a paying line ;
and the great mania of the moment is to cut through dis-
tricts where land and houses are of fabulous value, trusting
to the surveyor-machinery to keep the compensation some-
what within bounds. Who can so much as guess at the
enormous value of the property comprised within a circle of
a quarter of a mile round the Mansion House? And yet
on this sacred spot the map of London is so marked by the
projected lines of new companies that it seems almost to
be obliterated by them. Practically,f,he Lands Clauses Act
has hitherto been tested for the most part by its operation
upon ordinary farming land, though it has long been known
that it presses most seyerely upon the occupiers of
of house.property which a railway company think fit to ap-
propriate. A mere tenant from year to year may practically
have the assurance of continuing his business as long as he
pleases on the accustomed spot, because he knows it will
answer his purpose to pay a higher rent than any
stranger would give; but if he is dispossessed by a com-
pany, his whole trade may be ruined without the chance of
any compensation at all proportioned to the magnitude of
the injury. A thriving shopkeeper is driven to make a
connection in a new locality, and has perhaps £3O or £4O
allowed him as compensation for the compulsory removal,
on the plea that his landlord might, if he pleased, have dis •
possessed him on a six months' notice. It has become the
fashion, too, for the companies to exert their power to the
utmost, and, as a matter of course, to expel *heir victims on
a notice of a few days or weeks. To take a different class
of cases, where a company requires to demolish a residence,
the compensation generally obtained by the occupant is
ludicrously disproportioned to the expense and annoyance
occasioned by a forced removal from a house on which the
savings of years may have been judiciously or injudiciously
lavished. At a time when the blood of projectors are con-
templating a raid upon house-property on a scale quite un-
exampled, it would well become Parliament to inquire how
the existing provisions for compensation work in this class
of cases, and, if they are found deficient, to introduce into
future bills a new set of clauses for the protection of the
unhappy owners of property which railway companies may
think fit to covet,—London Review.
ROYAL HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY.—WO are in-
formed that, having in view the encouragement of
the study of scientific botany amongst all classes, the Royal
Horticultural Society offer the following prizes Ono
silver, and two bronze medals for the three best collections
of wild plants of each separate county of the United King.
dom, dried, mounted on paper, folio dewy size, classified
according to the natural system, and labelled with the name
of locality where found, and the date when found. Intend-
ing competitors may obtain tho forms of labels on sending
1" postage stamps to the Secretary of the Royal llorticul-
tural Society, South Kensington. 2. Three gold medals
will be given for the three best of all the collections out of
all the several county collections. Not more than one of
the medals can be awarded in ono county. The collections
must be delivered on or before the 31st December, 1864, to
, the Secretary of the Royal Horticultural Society, South
Kensington, carriage free, marked with a number or cypher,
and accompanied with a sealed letter containing the collec-
toi's name,
the address, and the price at which the collec-
tion can be sold or another made. A society's gold medal
will also be awarded to every exhibitor of a new species of
plant found growing iLt the United Kingdom.