be created. As we lately traversed a spacious down, a little boy, our companion, picked up a coarse medal from the ground. On the one side was the figure of the Bible, chained, padlocked, and something more than a sealed book. The legend was "Britain under the dominion of the Church of

Rome." Are we, or are we not, returning to that state? On the obverse lay the Bible, open, irradiated, and expounded by a minister of God. Is it desirable, or is it not, that a system described by that device should be perpetuated, and handed down to our children's children?

October 1846.

MY DEAR A.,-I am glad to hear that you are enjoying your tour in the Highlands; and am ready to forgive you for your triumphing over me"the only man in town." I should be glad enough to join you, but, as that is impossible, I am doing my best to be reconciled to my stay in London during the dead season.

As the old poet tells us―

"Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage."

Neither do I find, that because all the world of fashion has left the town, that I am solitary, and deprived of matter for interesting and instructive observation in it.

Grand people do not cities make,
Nor gafeties a town.

No, A.;—I think I never saw more of the fixed, the permanent, yet everchanging London, than I have done during the past six weeks; and you are quite mistaken in supposing that I "live like a vegetable in vacuo.' The external has still much attraction for me; and, as I have a little time to spare, you shall have the benefit of my observations and speculations.

You ask me "What London looks like now?" The question is not very easily answered; yet it is a cogitative stimulant, and so, by your leave, I will put it in my mental Meerschaum, and give you the benefit of the fumes it may produce. London! What is like it! is there any thing under heaven that is

like London? A popular author told the public not very long ago that Rome is like London. Perhaps the public believe that it is so, on the strength of his assertion; for myself, I shall wait till I can see Rome, before I believe any such thing. Until then, "the Niobe of Nations" will stand alone in my imagination, as unlike in the actual, as she is in the ideal, to her imperial succes

sor,

-

"The queenly city cradled by the Thames."

And I shall continue to suppose that the latter is without parallel, or, as our quarrelsome friends the Yankees would express it, that "it beats all creation by a long chalk."

Still, I may find a simile that will suggest to your mind some faint idea of London, as it is at the present time. Something appropriate and fanciful.Let me see ;-what do you think of— London is like a fine lady who has laid aside her finery to repose a while, and, to an unsophisticated taste, she is not a whit the less fine a woman, because she no longer dazzles us with her jewels, or bewilders us with her many coloured robes ?-or this-She is like a snowy mountain-top, which has ceased to receive the direct beams of the sovereign sun, or the reflected light of the western clouds? Perhaps you will prefer the following:- She is like Time, which goes on ever; though neither you, nor I, nor Pollock himself, were to mark its course. London is like a machineperforming all her functions regardless

of events; and she is like a human being, for she seems to sympathize with a man's varying moods. You say contemptuously, in your letter, that you suppose London looks like the Great Desert now?" As I never had the pleasure of travelling in Sahara, I cannot pretend to satisfy you on that point; but there is one particular in which, for the last two months, London has resembled the accounts given by all travellers, of deserts in general-it has been very sandy. In all the principal streets they have been pulling up all the old pavement and pulling down the old houses, thereby creating a world of dust and sand; which is not diminished by the subsequent processes of putting down the new pavement, and building up the new houses. It is very likely that the sensations of a man on escaping from any of these streets into some fortunate one, which is not being marred or mended, may give him no very bad idea of those of the Bedouin, when he comes upon some Oäsis, some Terra Felix in the desert, where he may shake the dust from his feet and yawn pleasantly, without fear of having his mouth filled with sand.

In another respect, too, it occurs to me that London at present resembles what is told us of deserts. It seems to be looked upon by travellers as a dull uninteresting tract of land, which it is necessary for them to pass through, in going from one habitable region to another. People who are going from Brighton to the Moors, or from John o'Groats to the Land's End, must all pass through London. I meet every day in my walks men with their families, or without their families, driving with the utmost expedition from one railway station to another, utterly uninterested in all that meets their eye between the two;-it is evidently a desert to them. I have found it far otherwise.

I do not pretend to say that the fashionable quarters are not very much changed in appearance from what they were when you last saw them. All those magnificent houses, the doors of which were always encumbered with lounging pampered menials," during the season, are shut up and empty,

66

the clubs are quiet; the places of fashionable amusement are closed. The elegant carriages, the fine horses, the gay leaders and followers of the fashion, that were wont to throng the Parks and their artistocratic neighbourhood, are all gone. No "bevies of ladies fair" are to be seen shopping in Regent Street; no groups of gentlemen, by twos and threes, are to be seen sauntering down St James' Street; or in animated, earnest converse near the precincts of " the House." Fair equestrians, and well mounted beux, are no more to be met with in dozens, between the hours of two and seven, in Hyde Park; and nursery-maids, with aristocratic charges, no longer make St James's and the Green Park populous, at an earlier hour in the day; when, if you want to cross either of those parks, you "must walk knee-deep in children."

The band no longer plays twice aweek in Kensington Gardens; and the many old ladies, dressed to represent young ones, are not to be seen parading about in defiance of good sense and good taste; nor do we see the many happy young persons of both sexes, who used to crowd round the musicians while they played, and promenade in the intervals of the music, with less of that frigid stiffness than one is accustomed to see in the imitators of the fashionable world. In modish phrase it may be said— "There is nobody that any body knows in town now." "Pas un chat de connaissance.

But as I said before, great people do not make a great city, and London has much left when "6 every body is out of town."

Did you ever try to realise the emotions of the charming young savage Prince Lee Boo, or any intelligent barbarian when first brought to London? How would it affect him? At first, doubtless, all would be sheer amazement, if not terror, at a sight so wonderful and so novel, and it would be long before the insurgent senses could be brought again within the control of reason. When thoroughly certain that it was not all a dream; that all those palaces and streets-houses, churches, carriages- "thick as the leaves in

Valambrosa;" those long lines of stars terminating in clusters wherever the eye can reach; that all this was the work of his brother-man; would he not be lost in admiration of that power which produced all this?-of that power, which is civilization; a power which he would believe it impossible that his nation could acquire? Perhaps no sight in another world will be stranger to him than this monument of Christian civilization in this. This, merely as it regards the visible substantial London-the world of brick and stone; for, as to the vast system of society which constitutes the real, living, yet abstract London, he could not comprehend that. We might show him our ultima thule of poverty and vice, and our warm sunny Golden Hesperides St Giles and Belgravia; and we might make him understand the moral difference between the two; but it would not be possible to make him see the moral relations between them.

Taking London from the Lee Boo point of view only, it is sufficient to Occupy our attention long. The accumulated and ever increasing inventions for personal convenience -the very pavement you tread on, is a wonder; ay, not only to a savage, but to any sort of foreigner; so broad, clean, and even. The gas, the public conveyances, the bridges; all these have been the slow growth of centuries. Let us ask our fathers or grandfathers, (if we are so happy as to have them,) what was the state of London in their day; and their account will be very unlike what we see in London now. No gas! No police! No omnibuses! No cabs! I will not go farther back; but leave you to follow if you please the decreasing number of London means and appliances to her citizens' well-being; even as far as the days of the conquest by the Normans, or (if you feel inclined to retrograde more) by the Romans.

Few people will deny to London what is its due as regards utility; but if you were to talk to any one about its beauty, it is ten to one that you are laughed at for your pains. As I walked down Piccadilly yesterday, and admired the improvements lately made there,

D

I could not help wishing our friend B- away from the delights of a crowded steam-boat on the Rhine, that he might stop with me to admire the scenery from Cambridge and Apsley Houses. Ehrenbreitstein and Coblence, the Drachenfels and Andernach, are consecrated in the annals of the sublime and beautiful. Their beauties are described in all the books of all the tourists that have been running about Germany in search of the picturesque during the last thirty years. It is quite safe to launch out ad libitum and ad infinitum in praise of what every body has agreed to admire; but even you may smile, when I talk of a fine view in Piccadilly, and may suppose it to be seen only from "the retired rustic cottages, surrounded by green fields," which a French writer describes as existing at the present time in various parts of the same street. I will say my say, nevertheless. The Green Park, as seen from Cambridge House, on a fine October day, is worth looking at. fine trees, near, or in the distance, with their varied autumnal hues; the gentle, grassy slopes, scattered over with sheep; the beautiful, clear sheet of water in the fore ground, and the back ground of trees with the towers of the glorious old Abbey rising amid them, and the Royal Palace at one extremity of the prospect;—this view has often made me think that it would be pleasant to have lodgings rent-free for life in the Duke of Cambridge's mansion.

The

When standing about sun-set at Hyde Park Corner, I have marked the rich flood of orange-coloured light, poured over the beautiful buildings and gateways there; while Grosvenor Place lay in shadow, that seemed deep purple by the contrast; it has not unfrequently struck me, that some English Claude or Canaletti might learn colouring here, if he would condescend to come here to study.

In gazing at the marble palaces of the few who constitute the aristocracy of a great city, it would be difficult to keep in mind the wretched places inhabited by the lowest classes, if one did not occasionally turn out of the broad highways of wealth into those localities

where vice, and misery, and poverty abide. Some of these are so near the dwellings of the lords and princes of the land, as to startle by their contrast. It would seem that the extremes of civilization were brought into close juxtaposition, that the high might have the low and the poor ever with them, to assist and to console.

But is it so? What do the dwellers in the palace know of the poverty and disease and vice in Pimlico? They may have hearts" open as day to melting charity;" they send money, and they give tears and best wishes, and fervent prayers, for the emancipation of the negro slave, for the civilization of the savage, for the religious instruction of the heathen, and for food and clothing to the starving Irish. They do not know that within a few hundred yards of their happy home are hundreds of human beings, bought and sold to slavery worse than that of the negro; who unite the brutality of the savage to the viler brutality of so-called civilization; as ignorant of God and the Gospel as the darkest heathen; and as much in want of food and clothing as the poor Irish. The other day, after strolling about Regent Street and Oxford Street, I went to examine what still remains of the former notorious St Giles. Fair new streets, open to the light and the air of heaven, are fast rising in the midst of that which was so lately an impenetrable labyrinth of narrow streets and filthy alleys. The Rookery and the Seven Dials will soon become dim traditionary horrors-like Whetstone Park and Alsatia, St Giles will become the scene of deeds of crime in the novels which our grandchildren will write. To us, at the present day, it is an interesting question to inquire, "What has become of the thousands who so lately crowded the spot?" It would exceed the hopeful powers of the most sanguine believer in the perfectibility of man, to suppose for one moment that these degraded, ignorant, beings have been changed like the place they inhabited. No. We may destroy a substantial physical evil in a few weeks when we once set about it in earnest; even though it has been the slow growth of as many centuries; but we cannot destroy a

moral evil so-that will take as long to destroy, in most cases, as it took to create. All honour, then, to those who go forth armed to fight against Moral Evil! Who know, that work as they may, in their good work, little enough will seem to have been done when There are their labours are closed. such men now at work for the poor and ignorant in London-many such I believe-who spend time, and health, and money for the increase of knowledge and goodness among the poor. They co-operate readily with men of all parties and sects, in any new movement that is likely to raise the lowest and to improve the worst. They promote "Societies for visiting and improving the dwellings of the poor"-baths and washing houses for the poor"Sunday Schools”- "Ragged Schools"

66

"Prison Discipline Improvements" -"Temperance Societies"-" Benefit Clubs." All these are means, greater or less in degree, for ameliorating the evil attendant on-shall I call it halfcivilization, or overgrown civilization?

To all observing and reflecting minds, to men who " 'deeply meditate such things," the question must often occur, "Have we now attained the ne plus ultra of civilization, or are we only half way to it?" Shall we, if we have attained the highest point of civilization, decay and sink gradually back into barbarism, as did the great monarchies of antiquity, or can we retain our position by the action of some principle in our civilization which was unknown in theirs? I know that our eager, sanguine, practical men, put their faith in machinery and railroads—the printing-press and political reforms. They say, "Look

at these! Can you doubt that when set fairly to work their utmost, they will succeed in destroying poverty and ignorance?—and from these two spring all the ills that flesh is heir to. None of these great means for ministering to man existed in those ancient monarchies. There is no analogy between the present and the past." And some of them add-" There is the Christian Religion too-as long as Christianity does not die out of Great Britain, Great Britain will not die out among the nations. Christianity is the grand preservative of

modern civilization; for want of which India and Egypt, Assyria and Persia, Greece and Rome fell victims to their own overgrown empires." It may be thus. It will be cheering to every lover of his country, to believe that the great truths of the Christian religion, rightly understood, and ever present to the souls of all, will work in conjunction with those other vast earthly powers to preserve the health and strength of this great kingdom.

It is a sad and painful thought-that of the fall of greatness—be it of what it may—an oak, a king, or a kingdom. This feeling is more nearly connected with religion than is generally supposed -it is our veneration for what is above us-for what is stronger than us-and for what endures, and is typical of the infinite, that is wounded. We would not have our nation perish, and be forgotten, neither our own nor any other noble nation. I have sometimes tried to speculate on the changes of the world that might reduce London to a heap of ruins, interesting only to the historian and the antiquary, or to the state of those Mexican cities, Copau and Palenque, monuments of a forgotten civilization, at which the traveller can only gaze and wonder. I know that all things are possible, and that even this may be the fate of London -strong, gigantic, imperial, literary London. But the thought is painful, and the mind instantly takes refuge from it, in consideration of the improbability of such a sequel in the history of England. "It will never be," we say to ourselves. "Even if another conquest should destroy London-the visible city-the memory of it can never perish from the earth; while Chaucer, Shakspeare, Milton, Bacon, and a host of our men of genius, are remembered among men, London will be immortal." And yet, A., surely there were greater, more powerful, more learned nations than the Greeks. They had their poets, perhaps greater than Homer; their philosophers, perhaps wiser than Pathagoras and Socrates; they had written language, arts, and sciences, perhaps more perfect than the Greeks, and nothing of all this has come down to

us.

Only now and then, a traveller in Central Asia or Central America, in the dephs of Ethiopia, or in the Syrian Desert, lights upon some indistinct trace of a high state of civilization, long since passed into oblivion.

However, I am wandering far away from my subject; and as the road in which I wander leads nowhere, it will be as well to return to the point from which I started. What has become of the poor, the profligate, the lawless, who have been lately swept from their haunts in St Giles? As I said, they have not all been converted into virtuous members of society as speedily as their nest of iniquity has been converted into handsome and convenient streets. Did you ever watch a slovenly maid clean a dirty floor? She takes away the chief part of the impurity, and then with a scrubbing-brush in hand, she begins to scrub away the remaining dirt from the middle of the floor, and sends it all before her into the corners and along the sides of the room. It is upon this plan that St Giles has been cleaned out. The worst part of the population who could be got at, were sent out of the country as emigrants, and many Irish went back to Ireland, while the remainder, being driven out of their filthy, unwholesome dwellings, as they were pulled down, retreated gradually before the march of cleanliness and order; and many may be found still hovering round the limits of the hated improvements. They have found dwellings in the neighbourhood. I have seen many of these poor wretches-haggard, untidy, half-dressed women, with puny children in their arms, low, brutish men, with broken pipes in their mouths, standing in the new streets (perhaps on the very spot where their home or their favourite gin-shop once was), staring round them with amazement at the alteration, and I have heard them utter curses on the inroad of that spirit of improvement which they believed injurious to them and theirs. On such occasions, I was strongly reminded of what must have been the sensations of the Red Indian on seeing his hunting ground turned into a city, or a farm; or those of the Saxon,