rtizans of Birmingham have legislative recognition of their rights as
inventors, and free access to a first-rate school of design, their "cunning"
hands will excel in beauty as well as ingenuity all previous triumphs.

The wealthier classes have, from various causes, deteriorated within the last
sixty years, while the workmen have improved within that time. Men who have
realized fortunes no longer settle down in the neighbourhood of their
labours. They depart as far as possible from the smoke of manufactures and
the bickerings of middle class cliques, purchase estates, send their sons to
the universities, and in a few years subside into country squires.
Professional men, as soon as they have displayed eminent talent, emigrate to
London; and the habit, now so prevalent in all manufacturing towns, of living
in the suburbs, has sapped the prosperity of those literary and philosophical
institutions and private reunions, which so much contributed to raise the
tone of society during the latter half of the last century. The meetings of
an old Literary and Philosophical Society have been discontinued, and the
News Room was lately on the brink of dissolution. Instead of meeting to
discuss points of art, science, and literature, the middle classes read the
Times and Punch, and consult the Penny Cyclopaedia. The literary and
scientific character which Birmingham acquired in the days when Boulton,
Watt, Priestly, Darwin, Murdoch, and their friends, met at the Birmingham
Lunarian Society, to discuss, to experiment, and to announce important
discoveries, have passed away never to return; and we are not likely to see
again any provincial town occupying so distinguished a position in the
scientific world. The only sign of Birmingham's ancient literary pre-
eminence is to be found in several weekly newspapers, conducted with talent
and spirit far beyond average. It is an amusing fact, that the sect to which
Priestly belonged still trade on his reputation, and claim an intellectual
superiority over the members of other persuasions, which they may once have
possessed, but which has long been levelled up by the universal march of
education. The richer members publish little dull books in bad English on
abstruse subjects, and, like Consuelo's prebendary, have quartos in
preparation which never reach the press.

In fact, the suburban system of residence and the excessive pretension of
superiority by the "pots over the kettles" have alm