The review of the past may here be terminated. And how welcome a change it would be if we might here completely emerge from the gloom which has overspread it. How happy were it if in proceeding to an estimate of the people of the present times, we found so rich a practical result of the means for forming a more enlightened race, that we should have no further recollection of that sentence from the Prophet, which has hitherto suggested itself again at every step in prosecution of the survey. But we are compelled to see how slow is the progress of mankind toward thus rendering obsolete any of the darker lines of the sacred record. So completely, so desperately, had the whole popular body and being been pervaded by the stupifying power of the long reign of ignorance, with such heavy reluctance, at the best, does the human mind open its eyes to admit light,--and so incommensurate as yet, even on the supposition of its having much less of this reluctance, has been in quantity the whole new supply of means for a happy change,--that a most melancholy spectacle still abides before us. Time, in sweeping away successive generations, has preserved, in substance, the sad inheritance to that which is as yet the latest. Even that portion of beneficial effect which actually has resulted from this co-operation of new forces, has served to make a more obvious exposure of the unhappiness and offensiveness of what is still the condition of the far greater part of our population; as a dreary waste is made, to give a more sensible impression how dreary it is, by the little inroads of cultivation and beauty in its hollows, and the faint advances of an unwonted green upon its borders. The degradation of the main body of the lower classes is exposed by a comparison with the small reclaimed portion within those classes themselves. It is not with the philosophers, literati, and most accomplished persons in higher life, that we should think of placing in immediate comparison the untutored rustics and workmen in stones and timber, for the purpose of showing how much is wanting to them. These extreme orders of society would seem less related in virtue of their common nature, than separated by the wide disparity of its cultivation. They would appear so immeasurably asunder, such antipodes in the sphere of human existence, that the state of the one could afford no standard for judging of the defects or wants of the other. It was not in a speculation which amused itself, as with a curious fact, in seeing that the same material can be made into scholars, legislators, sages, and models of elegance--and also into helots; and then went into a fanciful question of how near they might possibly be brought together: it was in a speculation which, instead of dwelling on the view of what was impossible to the common people in a comparative reference to the highest classes of their fellow-men, considered what was left practicable to them within