that every section of England so much abounds with the mansions of the rich and the palaces of nobles that the Metropolis can claim no special preeminence in this respect? Preeminent for the sweet attraction of its homes it certainly is. With ample wealth, intelligence, elegant manners, and taste exquisitely refined, there is an absence of display, a charming simplicity and ease, and a luxurious contentment and repose which make a London home, of all the homes we have seen, most beautiful and captivating.

It is true you will also meet now and then with something very much the reverse of all this, a man on whom Heaven seems to have conferred one solitary gift the ability to get money; and by whom that single endowment has been so diligently improved that he finds himself transformed by degrees to a wealthy London merchant, and takes a suburban house at Camberwell or Islington, and sets up his carriage with servants in livery. Such a man you shall find haughtier than any Duke, and all the arrangements of his household characterized by a profuse glitter and stilted stateliness which too surely betray the past circumstances of his history. Yet he shall be guilty of the most distressing violence to the Queen's English, while doing the honors of his own table in the midst of a fashionable dinner-party, and cannot write the shortest letter on business without misspelling simple words.

member once to have dined at the house of such a London merchant when the party was mostly literary, and were not a little exercised to answer discreetly when our host suddenly pounced upon us with the very grave inquiry, what language was spoken in the United States! Another gentleman connected with one of the largest and wealthiest wholesale houses in London, and the son of a wealthy gentleman farmer, paid us the delicate compliment to express his astonishment at the facility and correctness with which we spoke English after a residence of only some six months in London. It should be stated, however, that an Englishman's acquaintance with our country must on no account be taken to indicate the range or accuracy of his intelligence in other directions. Even so accomplished a scholar as the Reverend Dr. Vaughan, Editor of the "British Quarterly Review," a gentleman who all his life has been much addicted

to historical studies, speaks of New England, in a work of marked ability, as one of the United States! As regards London merchants, however, there is no doubt that many men of great wealth and great worth may be found in this class whose literary attainments are less than may be secured in the common school of a New England village. They came up to the Great Metropolis poor young men from the country, with only such intellectual training as England supplies to her poor boys, which, for the greater part, is slender enough, and have achieved success by their own energy and enterprise. In not a few instances their souls are as full of broad intelligence and noble impulses as of commercial sagacity and enterprise; while their modesty and fine sense are an exquisite foil to both.

One of the characteristic specimens of middle-class society in London is to be seen in the old families which have lived there for several generations. There are many such dwelling in the now quiet and lonely squares, in the self-same houses which have been occupied by their fathers and grandfathers from time immemorial. These old families become moulded in a succession of generations to the very type of London, and render back its image with marvellous truthfulness and felicity. In the same antique dwelling, with tall, narrow windows, wainscoted walls, and staircase of polished oak, you shall find chairs, tables, chimney-ornaments, pictures in curiously carved frames, and even knives and forks and family plate, the very same that were used there a hundred years ago. All the family arrangements remain now a long time unchanged, and are hardly less regular than the movements of the old clock that stands in the hall, covered all over with Chinese-looking figures in gilt. To such a pitch of intenseness does the dislike. of all change grow at length, that the last surviving generation, consisting of a brother and two sisters, perhaps, cannot make up their minds to be anything but bachelor and spinsters. And so they dwell together by the old hearth-stone, sacred to them and dear as the altar of household gods. Punctual as the return of the Sabbath in their attendance at the venerable Gothic church where they were baptized; going always on the set days to the Bank for their ample dividends in the three per cents Government securities; having made their wills, each in the

others' favor; seeking no new acquaintance when their own. friends and their father's friends die or remove to a distance; dwindling, dwindling, year by year, toward an invisible point; expanding only in the past, the golden age to them, when their father and mother were still living, where they live now, whose sayings and doings they recount with reverent fondnessstrange reversion and turning backward of the affections which ought to have found a healthier play in the gambols and prattle of their own offspring; themselves old children, with whom all things are inverted - they take along with them, when they die, the family name and escutcheon, and all the cherished household memories of the generations of their fathers to a sudden oblivion.

It is a reflection which cannot fail to diminish considerably the satisfaction with which we breathe the delightful social atmosphere of London, that it floats above so dismal a nether region of hopeless penury and woe. We shall not, however, dwell now on what has been described a thousand times, till every reader is familiar with the heart-rending tale. We will present a single picture of sorrow, which is not only not seen by the casual observer, but of which he would little suspect the existence. It is true indeed, almost as a rule, that the appalling distress of London is invisible, and that where there is most of appearance there is least of reality. Though a stranger in the Great Metropolis, you will shrewdly guess that the miserable wretch who sits crouched and shivering on the pavement under a wall on a bitter February morning, with no rag of clothing on but a pair of trousers and the remnant of a shirt, may have chosen that costume, out of a joint-stock miscellaneous wardrobe, in order that he may return with a fuller hand at evening to the hot supper and midnight revels of merry London beggars; and that the pale-looking man and woman, so poorly yet neatly clad, who are standing with a pair of twin infants in silent, despairing wretchedness, do not necessarily sustain any very intimate relation to each other, and may have hired those hapless children from different mothers, at sixpence each per day, as a means of exciting compassion. The squalid boy who selects you out of the crowd and follows you close with the piteous tale of "mother sick, father out of work, and brothers

and sisters starving!" talks too glibly and too much by rote. His lesson has been well conned till he can say it without missing a word. 'Tis business. Just say to him that if he runs a mile he will have the pleasure of running back again, and then watch the rogue's countenance ! You know that the actual distress which pines unseen in close apartments and crowded garrets, away from the great thoroughfares, seldom comes abroad, and when it does it draws its faded and worn-out shawl close about its emaciated and weary shoulders, and skulks stealthily along the pavement, as if it would beg pardon for existence, while it never asks for anything to render that existence something better than a burden and a curse.

Besides all this, however, there is, in great London, a vast amount of acutest suffering much higher up in the social scale, and where there is no visible sign that a stranger will read. It is in a kind of middle-class families who manage to maintain appearances, but struggling desperately, all the while, to avoid sinking from their present social position into the bottomless gulf of forgetfulness in that dreary, awful Babylon. It is bad enough to suffer from hunger, and sufficiently harrowing to the feelings to think of the mass of men and women and little children in London who are never fed to the full, and who are always dying by the slow process of a famine of bread, and that in the very midst of never-failing abundance and profusest luxury. But the portraiture of waning respectability in that proud capital, with its intenser sorrows, is yet to be drawn.

That word "respectability" is of most pregnant and thrilling significance in London and in all England. A word in everybody's mouth, and in which everybody apprehends deep meaning, but which none among the lexicographers has assayed to define, according to the modern English usus loquendi. It is a prize that everybody covets, a deity that all worship, a tyrant that everybody hates, a disease of which multitudes die. It is not of the nature of moral excellence, nor mental superiority, nor refinement of manners, nor high birth, nor worldly wealth, nor official station, nor success in active life. Yet it may be all together, or each by turn, as it might be the Chinaman's tail, or the cap of a cavalier. We learn from a brisk discussion which has lately been ventilated in the select columns of the

London daily and weekly press, that English respectability in the Boulevards last summer was a tight-fitting black broadcloth coat, and a particularly hard hat, with black kid gloves, all under a Parisian sun! It is undefined, intangible, ever changing, never fixed. It is that which makes a man to be regarded as somebody, and not as nobody, which is not to be regarded at all. In London there is always a vast multitude, incredibly great every day, all struggling bravely to stave off the loss of their respectability; not their good morals, their fair fame for manly virtue and uprightness; but their very social existence to be, in the sunlight and warmth of human smiles and sympathies, and not in the dismal, frozen hades of obscurity and forgetfulness. Far more acute than cold and hunger on the pavement of London streets is the suffering attendant on such a change, of which, what more conclusive proof could you have than the fact that both cold and hunger are always being endured voluntarily by stomachs and nerves more sensitive than those of hereditary poverty, in order to retain but the mere outer garment and shadow of respectability; so that, as we said, many people in England everywhere, and most of all in London, do literally die of respectability; - partly from the self-imposed privations which its tyranny demands, still more from the intenser mental anguish which the unequal struggle inflicts.

You will perhaps think the London shopkeeper obsequious and craven. His evident anxiety to meet your wishes in the most trivial article you propose to buy may be simply that characteristic civility of English tradesmen which is very much to their honor, and which is often shamefully wanting among ourselves. Or it may be, as in thousands of instances it is, the unsuspected indication of his sorrowful struggle to keep himself and his family from sinking in the vast abyss. Many noble hearts are slowly breaking every day because all their endeavors prove in vain. The presence of a new man in the shop reveals the final, hopeless issue. The other disappears, leaving his name behind, a thing absolutely indispensable to his successor, who, very likely, will make much more of it than he was ever able to do himself. Dead men's names have frequently made large fortunes in London. As for the man himself, you