126 Education and Amusements of the Loisoer Classes. 



with the field and garden instruction of the Bavarian schools, 

 as will teach things as well as woi'ds, and indelibly implant in 

 the scholars a love of order, good manners, knowledge, and 

 virtue. 



To the general and improved education of the lower classes 

 in England, should be added the promotion of rational and 

 humanising amusements amongst them, in addition to their 

 present ones of mere strength and address, by the money, 

 countenance, and sympathy of the rich. Each school-room, 

 whether in villages or towns, should be easily convertible into 

 a ball or concert room ; and itinerant teachers of music, sing- 

 ing, and dancing, all teaching on improved systems, should 

 give lessons on very moderate terms to the youth of both 

 sexes ; while the gentry should promote politeness and good- 

 breeding by their presence at these balls and concerts, as Mon- 

 taigne tells (in his Travels in Jtahj, in 1581, now before me) 

 he did, when at the baths (bagni della villa) near Lucca, where 

 he invited all the peasants of the neighbourhood to a ball (his 

 account of which, given with his usual delightful naivete, fills 

 eight pages), and distributed, with the aid of a committee of 

 ladies, ribands and various other prizes to the best dancers. 



At other times, short courses of [ectures,realli/ popidar, should 

 be delivered by itinerant lecturers in natural history, physics, 

 gardening, and agriculture, in these school-rooms ; which once 

 a year might, for a week or two, be turned into theatres for 

 the performance of dramas, such as the highly amusing ones 

 of Miss Edgeworth, and others to be written like them (to the 

 exclusion of mere farce or love plots), which might be made 

 to^have the happiest influence on the moral and domestic vir- 

 tues, if the countenance of the higher classes were previously 

 to elevate the profession of an itinerant actor into one of greater 

 respectability and estimation than at present. All this will 

 seem very frivolous to many of your readers, but not, I am 

 persuaded, to such as, having travelled on the Continent, have 

 seized every opportunity of observing the amusements of the 

 poor, and have been convinced, by reflecting on what they have 

 witnessed, that " These little things are great to little men." 

 Next to the existing school societies, there is nothing I am 

 more anxious to see, or would more gladly contribute to, than 

 a Society for iiromoting the Rational Amusements of the Lower 

 Classes, the first aim of which should be to instruct itinerant 

 teachers of music, singing, and dancing, in improved modes of 

 imparting their arts, and thus fairly set the plan a going, when 

 it would soon work its own way, and might then be extended 

 to higher objects. The taste for flowers among the Paisley 

 weavers, for gooseberry-growing at Manchester, and for music 



