education which is most beneficial for any one class of society, can neither be imparted nor purchased by any other class. Charity schools will never be held in much estimation by any one who has seen the progress of those poor children for whose education their own parents pay. There is something in the receiving of any kind of charity which is humiliating and debasing; and to bestow a charitable education upon the whole or the greater part of the labouring classes in the country, would be the surest means not only of leaving them nearly uneducated, but of destroying their virtue and diminishing their usefulness. It is to the absence of this humiliating mode of being instructed, and the presence of one infinitely better and more rational, that the grand peculiarity of the Athens, and remarkably of the provincial parts of Scotland, is chiefly to be attributed. The smallness of Scotch and even of Athenian society, the limited number even of the labouring classes, who, except in Glasgow, and perhaps a place or two more, are all intimately known, as well in their connexions as in their individual characters, and perhaps also the low rate of wages, and the fewer facilities to solitary dissipation, may no doubt account for some portion of the intelligence and virtue of the humbler Scotch. But still, in as far as those circumstances operate, they must operate upon the higher classes as well as the lower; and, as the higher classes in Scotland have no such superiority over the higher classes in other countries, as the lower have over the lower, there must be some special cause which operates in favour of the Scotch peasantry. I have looked round for causes; I have found none except those remarkable advantages in respect of teachers of education, (unless, perhaps, it be that the sober and simple Kirk of Scotland has a more wholesome influence upon the poor than a more showy and aristocratical establishment can exert,) and I think I discovered that those advantages are quite sufficient to account for the fact.