The Rev. Sydney Smith has thus sketched a scheme, in which he deems it of the highest importance that the education of a British youth were directed to the true principles of legislation: what effect laws can produce upon opinions, and opinions upon laws; what subjects are fit for legislative interference, and when men may be left to the management of their own interests. The mischief occasioned by bad laws, and the perplexity which arises from a multiplicity of laws; the causes of national wealth; the relations of foreign trade; the encouragement of agricultures and manufactures; the fictitious wealth occasioned by paper-credit; the use and abuse of monopoly; the theory of taxation; the consequences of the public debt: these are some of the subjects and some of the branches of civil education, to which we would turn the minds of future judges, future senators, and future noblemen. After the first period of life had been given up to the cultivation of the classics, and the remaining powers were beginning to evolve themselves, these are some of the propensities in study which we would endeavour to inspire. PRACTICAL DISCIPLINE. The want of Practical Discipline has been thus put by a writer in _Blackwood’s Magazine_: “What is the use of battering a man’s brains full of Greek and Latin pothooks, that he forgets before he doffs his last round-jacket or puts on his first long-tailed blue, if ye don’t teach him the old Spartan virtue of obedience, hard living, early rising, and them sort of classics? Where’s the use of instructing him in hexameters or pentameters, if you would leave him in ignorance of the value of a pennypiece? What height of stupidity it is to be fillin’ a boy’s brains with the wisdom of the ancients, and then turn him out like an _omadhaum_, to pick up his victuals among the moderns!” With equal truth, but finer humour, has Sydney Smith, at his own expense, exposed this neglect of the practical as a fair indication of the mode of English education. He is writing to his publisher, whom he tells: “I have twice endeavoured to write the word _skipping_—‘_skipping spirit_.’ Your printer first printed it ’stripling,’ and then altered it into _stripping_. The fault is entirely mine. I was fifteen years at school and college—I know something about the Romans and the Athenians, and have read a good deal about the præter-perfect tense—but I cannot do a sum in simple addition, or _write a handwriting which any body can read_.” “CRAMMING.”