, a large proportion
of those who can do so with too much difficulty to admit of the exercise
being an amusement to them. Again, few of those who can read with
comparative ease, have the taste for doing so. It is but justice to them
to say, that many of those who can not read, have bitterly regretted, in
my hearing, their inability to do so. I shall never forget the tone in
which an old woman in Cornwall intimated to me what a comfort it would
now be to her, could she only read her Bible in her lonely hours."

We now turn to the high lights of the picture as presented abroad, and
which, from their very brightness, throw our own intellectual gloom into
deeper shade. Mr. Kay observes in the work we have already cited:

"It is a great fact, however much, we may be inclined to doubt it, that
throughout Prussia, Saxony, Bavaria, Bohemia, Wirtemberg, Baden, Hesse
Darmstadt, Hesse Cassel, Gotha, Nassau, Hanover, Denmark, Switzerland,
Norway, and the Austrian Empire, ALL the children are actually at this
present time attending school, and are receiving a careful, religious,
moral, and intellectual education, from highly educated and efficient
teachers. Over the vast tract of country which I have mentioned, as well
as in Holland, and the greater part of France, _all_ the children above
six years of age are daily acquiring useful knowledge and good habits
under the _influence_ of moral, religious, and learned teachers. ALL the
youth of the greater part of these countries, below the age of
twenty-one years, can read, write, and cipher, and know the Bible
History, and the history of their own country. No children are left idle
and dirty in the streets of the towns--there is no class of children to
be compared in any respect to the children who frequent our "ragged
schools"--all the children, even of the poorest parents, are, in a great
part of these countries, in dress, appearance, cleanliness, and manners,
as polished and civilized as the children of our middle classes; the
children of the poor in Germany are so civilized that the rich often
send their children to the schools intended for the poor; and, lastly,
in a great part of Germany and Switzerland, the children of the poor are
receiving a _better_ education than that given in England to the
children of the greater part of our middle classes."

"I remember one day," says Mr. Kay in another page, "when walking near
Berlin in the company of Herr Hintz, a professor in Dr. Diest