PREFACE.

THE First Volume of the New Series of this Magazine is now complete. The Editor hopes that some, at least, of the wishes which he expressed in his Prospectus have been realized. He has not consciously undervalued discussion on the principles or hints on the practice of Education; he has endeavoured to treat the Higher Education as work of the Lower; he has given accounts of Foreign as well as of English Schools. The Magazine owes any value it may possess to the kindness of his different Correspondents, for which he wishes gratefully to thank them. But he hopes also that, through the same help, it may become far more useful to the country and to the Church, than it has yet been.

THE

EDUCATIONAL MAGAZINE.

JANUARY, 1840.

FRONTISPIECE.

AN engraving of Westminster Abbey appears on the title-page of our Magazine. A frontispiece should not be merely ornamental, it should be symbolical. The question therefore naturally occurs, what has Westminster Abbey to do with education? This question we propose shortly to answer.

The sight of such a building as Westminster Abbey, to a person quite unacquainted with the purposes for which it exists, would surely be perplexing. It stands upon a river consecrated to commerce-it stands in the midst of a city in which all kinds of business and pleasure are going forward. What does it mean? Great pains and expense have evidently been spent in the erection of it; the workmanship is costly and elaborate. Yet it appears to be unsuitable for most of the objects which the people around it are pursuing. It is ill contrived for an exchange-it is not fit for a banqueting-house; and yet surely it cannot have been merely set up to be looked at. Surely no men who were able to conceive such an edifice, can have proposed to themselves so poor an aim as that other men should stare at it.

If the inquirer were told that this building was not indeed, either an exchange or a banqueting-hall, but that from time to time a strange ceremony was transacted within it, called a Coronation; that here, the lords and mighty men of the land, and a large concourse of people, owned themselves the subjects of one, perhaps younger and weaker than all of them, and that this person there assumed to be the guardian and overseer of them, and of the whole land besides-if he were told, VOL. I.-New Series, January, 1840.

B