e-chapel, that young men study
arithmetic in the room the Great Seal was stolen from, that Mr. Ruskin
teaches water-color drawing in Thurlow's bed-chamber, that Tom Brown,
_alias_ Mr. Hughes, presides over a weekly tea-party in the three-pair
back, and drills the awkward squad of the working-men's battalion in the
garden, it seems worth while to show that at least some places in the
world have improved in eighty years, whether the world itself is to
be given up as a mistake or not. We will let Lord Thurlow go, as Lord
Campbell does, with this charitable wish:--"I have not learned," he
says, "any particulars of his end, but I will hope that it was a
good one. I trust, that, conscious of the approaching change, having
sincerely repented of his violence of temper, of the errors into which
he had been led by worldly ambition, and of the irregularities of his
private life, he had seen the worthlessness of the objects by which he
had been allured; that, having gained the frame of mind which his awful
situation required, he received the consolations of religion; and that,
in charity with mankind, he tenderly bade a long and last adieu to the
relations and friends who surrounded him." There is not an atom of fact
known on which to found Lord Campbell's hope. But I, also, will leave
Lord Thurlow with this charitable wish, and I will now ask the readers
of the "Atlantic," who may be enough interested in social reform and a
mutual education, to see what has happened between his wine-cellar and
ridge-pole since the "London Working-Men's College" was established
there.

The founder of the Working-Men's College, as I have intimated, is the
Rev. Frederic Denison Maurice, the eminent practical theologian. Its
age is now six years,--as it was founded in the autumn of 1854. He says
himself, in a striking speech he made at Manchester not long since, that
the plan originated in that "awful year 1848, which I shall always look
upon as one of the great epochs in history." He says that "a knot of
men, of different professions, lawyers, doctors, parsons, artists,
chemists, and such like," thought they saw, in the convulsions of 1848,
a handwriting on the wall, sent them by God himself, testifying, "that,
if either rank or wealth or knowledge is not held as a trust for men, if
any one of these things is regarded as a possession of our own, it must
perish." In a real desire, then, to "make their own little education of
use to such persons as had