the means of saving the honest voter from the consequences of his own ignorance, and of rescuing him from being the passive victim of the demagogue, or being compelled to throw his vote blindly into the hands of his landlord or his employer. I pass to the second division of which you speak, the elevation of the taste. Taste is perception of beauty; to have taste is to recognise that which is right and congruous. When we speak of the moral sense, we mean the power of distinguishing between right and wrong; when we speak of taste, we mean the faculty of distinguishing that which is fitting from that which is unbecoming. There are many things which are neither right nor wrong, but which are yet offensive to good taste. It is not morally wrong to sit covered in the presence of a superior; but it is an offence against the propriety of manners. The juxtaposition of yellow and olive green is not a moral fault; but it is a fault to the eye which perceives the harmony of colours. There is nothing wicked in wearing a hat in a sacred building, or in discussing religious questions when the toast and the health are going round; but there is something which is exceedingly offensive to the feelings of religious propriety. The perception of all these harmonious fitnesses is what we denominate refinement, in contradistinction to vulgarity. But by vulgarity I do not mean the infringement of those laws which conventionality or fashion has laid down; for if fashion choose to decide that a man shall dine at seven, and he prefers instead to dine at one, though this may be a conventional, it is not a real vulgarism. Vulgarity is quite distinct from nonconformity to arbitrary rules. We have sometimes met the deepest, truest refinement of heart in the man whose hands are black with labouring at the forge; we have met the greatest real vulgarity in the man whose manners wore a perfect outward polish, and who would never infringe the smallest rule of etiquette. In this sense do I speak of taste as a matter of importance to the working men of this country. What is it that prevents sympathy between class and class? Not merely difference of opinion, but difference of taste. The difference in feeling between educated and uneducated men places a great gulf between them. We are attracted and repelled by our instinctive sympathies even more than by our intellectual views. Let no one tell us that the workman cannot become refined; he is a refined man in foreign countries. Vulgarity is a thing almost exclusively English. Look at the poor Hindoo who goes through your streets asking alms. There is a grace even in his very attitude, an elegance in his address, which would almost make you believe it if с you were told that he had been a prince in his own land. You may see, or might have seen, two peasants meeting on a high-road in France, and taking off their hats to each other with grave and dignified courtesy. The French peasant girl at a very trifling expense will dress herself in clothes that befit her station; but the inward refinement of her mind will be so reflected on the adjustment of every part of them, that she looks better dressed than the English lady's maid with all the aid of her mistress's cast-off finery. There is another thing. The refinement of the workman's mind is a matter of importance in the works of art. Let any mercer place the silk that comes from Spitalfields beside that which comes from Lyons, and tell us if the one in point of elegance of design will bear any comparison with the other? Let the English watchmaker place his watch beside the delicate fabric of Geneva, or his clock beside that which comes from Paris, and tell us whether it be not rude and clumsy in comparison? Let the English chinamaker place the manufactures of Worcestershire and Yorkshire on the same table with those of Sévres or of Dresden, and the superior beauty of the foreign article is visible at once. We are beaten out of the market whenever it comes to a question of taste. The reason is generally acknow ledged to be this,-that on the continent the artist has freer access to that which is beautiful in taste and art. In the designs which adorn the Parisian clocks, you may trace the forms of beauty which existed originally in the minds of Raffaelle and Titian, and transfused themselves upon the work insensibly through every touch of one whose fancy had been inspired and kindled at the living sources of the beautiful. A few years ago I was engaged in chamois hunting among the crags and glaciers of the Tyrol. My companion was a Tyrolese chamois hunter, a man, who in point of social position, might rank with an English labourer. I fear there would be a difficulty in England in making such a companionship pleasurable and easy to both parties; there would be a painful obsequiousness, or else an insolent familiarity on the one side, constraint on the other. In this case there was nothing of that sort. We walked together and ate together. He had all the independence of a man, but he knew the courtesy which was due to a stranger; and when we parted for the night, he took his leave with a politeness and dignity which would have done no discredit to the most finished gentleman. The reason, as it seemed to me, was that his character had been moulded by the sublimities of the forms of the outward nature amidst which he lived. It was impossible to see the clouds wreathing themselves in that strange wild way of theirs round the mountain crests, till the hills seemed to become awful things, instinct with life-it was impossible to walk, as we did sometimes, an hour or two before sunrise, and see the morning beams gilding with their pure light the grand, old peaks on the opposite side of the valley, while we ourselves were still in deepest shade, and look on that man with his rifle on his shoulder and his curling feather in his high green hat, his very exterior in harmony with all around him, and his calm eye resting on all that wondrous spectacle, without feeling that these things had had their part in making him what he was, and that you were in a country in which men were bound to be polished, bound to be more refined, almost bound to be better men than elsewhere. Mr. Wordsworth, one of the great teachers of our nation's feeling, has explained to us in many a passage how all these forms of God's outward world of beauty are intended to perform an office in the refinement of the heart. He has painted his country girl educated by the sky above her, the colours of the hills, the sound of the waterfalls "Till beauty, born of murmuring sound, |