interesting as a novel, as instructive as "a screed of Adam Smith's doctrine; and as humorous, or thereabouts, as a chapter of Rabelais.

Yes 'tis a curious, pie-crust Babel, this London of ours: (since passing my season here, entitles me to speak in the tone of a Proprietor)-in more ways than the above. When one goes

-as a

to the Treasury to look for Sir John Soane's Architecture,German friend of mine, an architect, made me do the other daythe pretty caramel cover (to use one of dear M. Soyer's terms of culinary edification) spun over it by Barry, not only flatters the eye prodigiously, but also quickens the spirits of the Projector. Good man! he sees no reason why there should not be a new dropscene run up by somebody's Lame Boy, twenty years hence, when he becomes a great man: if it should please the Prince of Wales, like his father, to busy himself in "pictures, taste, and the musical glasses" (Shakspeare left out). The National Gallery, towering on tiptoe above the two wash-hand basins, cowering behind that new West-End Bully-the Nelson pillar-and sideling out of St. Martin's way-is already under a cloud of rumours; which, ere long, they say, will take a real form, and blot out the face and the façade thereof to the great comfort of architects who lack occupation, and dream, like simple Tom Pinch, of their own immortality. Then, down comes the Marble Arch at Buckingham Palace, and up goes a new front, in order that the glue-pots, which nearly set Her Majesty on fire while she sat at her spinet, may be fairly driven out of the royal residence :-and that the servants may cease to sleep in their present zoological pens, which but want the tin plate bearing scientific name and classification— the pan of water-and the grate in front-to be complete ! "Punch," and the great hail-storm, seem between them to have made an end of the Quadrant, which cut so wondrous a figure in the "Microcosms" and "Pictures of London" not so long ago:and a Mr. Albano ("it's like those Italians!" my Mrs. Bell would say) has taken care, that if Mrs. Siddons did walk, she should not know her own Covent-garden again!-were she foolish enough to enter there, in the hope of such ghostly comfort as a sight of Congreve's "Mourning Bride," or Jephson's "Braganza," or Hannah More's "Percy," or Shakspeare and Cibber's "Juliet." Whether, in fact, this London of ours be London at all, is a matter which the Babbages might do worse than question, and the Wheatstones than experimentalise to prove. The Temple

Church dressed up, dressed prettily, I confess (but what should we think of the barristers in Middle-Aged suits of motley ?)-The Fleet gone, albeit the national debt burdens us so heavily, that Mr. Doubleday assures us no mortal will presently have any money left to pay for anything withal-St. Giles's, so riddled through and through with grand stucco streets, not of gin-palaces only, but of other shops, where the wares are cheap and chaste, like Mrs. -'s shawl, that the Rooks must needs wing their way to some other shelters:-here be data enough on which to build, according to pie-crust usage, a fair structure of question which would last its season ere it could be settled; were there not still the cloud which blocks up the summit of that Olympus, Ludgate Hill-St. Paul's Dome-the greatest deed ever achieved by a Wren-to re-assure bewildered elderly persons from the country that they are still, after all that has been pulled down and pulled up,-in Whittington's town. Long be it ere the foundations thereof are removed!

Again; in getting about-just think how the gentilities which used to contribute so much pleasure and dignity to the stranger in London have shifted their ground; not merely in articles of brick and compo, as from Red-Lion Square to Bayswater, but in a thousand usages and outward and visible signs. Lady Sailsbury, and Lady Bertie and Bellair, go to buy their Railway stock, not in a coach-and-four, but the two in a one-horse Brougham. Hack cabs drive up to Court: whence it fell out the other day that a high and staunch pillar of the Country Party arrived in the Royal presence, appropriately enough, garnished with a streamer of straw. A sixpenny omnibus has come to be thought aristocratic and extravagant; so has a fourpenny boat; and the person who uses either must sit under the imputation of buying green peas at Christmas (or whenever green peas are the dearest). Ere I set out from Manchester, good Miss Le Grand, in a gush of advice and kindness at her prospect of temporary release from "the Radical" of the Row-warned me, from her own experience, against the extortion of the Hackney Coachman. Why, sir, there is but one left: that rubicund and bottle-nosed functionary in Piccadilly, who is the Bashaw of the Reservoir, as rightfully as his opposite neighbour is Duke of Chatsworth-or the Lady in the corner, the Heiress of St. Millions. And he hath no vehicle to drive is merely a waterman. I foresee trouble from this when I go home. My neighbour will never believe it ;-being apt,

even when she fancies she knows least about any subject, to charge "Republican persons with exaggeration-and piquing herself on the strength of her fond memory of a visit to the metropolis in 1800, as giving "a tone a tone" to our neighbourhood.

It is not many years ago (and since some persons think proper to entertain an exaggerated notion of my age, which is detrimental to my circulation in London, I may as well here rectify what is a mistake) since I did the honours of our spinning-jennies, and print-works, to a great Transatlantic Lady-the Miss Angela of New York-who had crossed the Atlantic to visit everything in Europe. Her experiences of London had been charmingly diversified. She had sate on the platform in Exeter Hall in the morning, behind the burning lights of the "Fiery Furnace;" and afterwards just dropped in at Taglioni's on that memorable noon, when dear, clever Lady Macarthy was teaching the Swedish "Poetess of Motion" (as the Post called her, long ere "the Swedish Nightingale" was thought of!) an Irish jig!She was present when the author of "The Joys of Memory represented the same, by dancing a minuet. She witnessed that "flash of silence" from the Honourable Member of blue and yellow renown, which, but for her testimony, might have passed for one of rare Sydney's most hardy inventions. She saw Mr. Besom-then innocent of a title, a château en Espagne, or a novel "which nobody owns"-keep his temper; and Lord Never Froward lose his. She was the lady for whose sake Blair (not Blair of the Grave, nor he of Blair Adam, but Adam Blair of the Slaughterer) paused in his honourable warfare against the weaker sex, and made his one civil speech to a Woman: though the speech, after all, as she repeated it, had a sting in its tail. Like the modest, silent member aforesaid, she had dated a letter, or an order to her jeweller-I forget which-from Windsor Castle. She had "thrashed down" to Epsom in a chariot and six-hating, as she further phrased it, to travel in "a lumbering style." She had taken a whole house in the City, and sate up all night there" to see a Hanging! We were amazingly entertained by her adventures: since, with all her ill-directed industry to see, and to snatch, and to parade her good management and her "family diamonds,' -the last a rather American propensity, she was a hearty, true, shrewd woman. And, as her experiences were among the most vivid descriptions of London I ever heard, I suppose I may have looked out for some faint and far-distant participation in a like round of

pleasures: since, short of going to Court, which in this new reign is not the thing that it used to be-and, as I pointed out, is not a visit I am likely to pay-and short of the coach and six (just four horses beyond my means) there are few things which we literary men cannot compass. Everybody opens everything to us. Our antichamber days are over. "The Garretteers that border on the sky," as Sterne called them, sit above the salt and pepper!

But the sights Miss Maizey saw are gone: or else they have lost season and savour. Cold water has been thrown on the fires of Exeter Hall: since the last batch of missionaries was eaten cold with cassava bread, (not by the natives of the Sandwich Islands), and since the Pope has grown so much more liberal than his Lordship of Exeter that there is a chance (Mrs. Blackadder writes) of Roman Catholicism becoming the Low church! Lord Besom has taken to keeping his temper: and nobody minds him a bit the more for the change! Taglioni is dancing for Duchess Dollalolla, at Munich: a stout Sylphide-unequal, therefore, it may be presumed, to further hints from the sprightly Irish lady. Elssler revives "the joys of memory in Don Giovanni "-the last of the Minuets to be seen our men of science having vainly tried to fossilize the persons and costumes of that memorable Court ball at which every one looked so ashamed, and moved so awkwardly. The Slaughterer hath opened its arms "to the sex:"-has taken to writing enthusiastically about bibs and tuckers, caps and flounces, and is possibly hoarding up the kiss of peace for even that least compromising of the sisterhood, Harriet Martineau: by way of welcoming her home from the Pyramids ! As for Hangings, "their damask hath become huckaback." There has not been one worth going to, since Courvoisier's: and methinks the description of that, by Michael Angelo Titmarsh, hath closed the subject. No Bell, in search of an article, will henceforth sit up all night to describe the grisly spectacle, should even another of "those wretched foreigners" rise up naked to murder his master in cold blood! The Gallows will presently be packed off to the Museum, along with the Pillion and the Hackney Coach!

But all manner of strong sensations and striking contrasts are at a discount. Mendicity is on the wane. The Beggar's whine will be soon a lost note from among the London cries-for, since Mendicants, beyond most people, follow the fashion; enjoy the delicacies of the season, frequent favourite resorts, and indulge in forced flowers of speech, in curiously mathematical proportion with

their clients, how shall the Mumper, the Counterfeiter of Fits, the Proprietor of Seven Small Sickly Children, "make both ends meet," seeing that confusion hath been introduced into "the order" seeing that a real Palsy hath stricken Supplicants of rank and family. How shall even Jack-in-the-Green think it "the thing" to keep his toll-dish on May-day?-now, that Sinecurism is as clean gone from White-Hall, as Sir John Soane's "frontispiece," and that Salt Hill hath lost its savour-Montem being no more?

What a step is here made! What a delicious regeneration of the infirmities of the higher classes! Their crutches burnt! their lame legs compelled to be put to the ground! the paint washed out of their sore eyes, and handed over to the Ethiopian Serenaders! Here is a vast improvement with a vengeance-no, with a beneficence-to all concerned! And in spite of Rosa Matilda's tears, and the tearings of her hair, at the shame which has come upon "the old Etonians; from their being hindered, henceforth, from running down to the mud at Slough, in pink satin buskins-or charging Peasecod-street, in the guise of very new Crusaders-in spite of "the fine old English gentleman being bemoaned over as extinct, because, in the completion of his studies, the course of mountebank-ism is left out-in spite of one show the less, the departure of which, as the Cremorne Prophet awfully said, may foreshadow the exit of even Gog and Magog (now, especially, when Lord Mayors are beginning to give literary dinners!)-I for one feel that a spot is wiped off our character. I rejoice the honour of work is asserted in our highest classes, as more honourable than riding in a sedan chair, with a muff and a chapeau-bras, as the Younger Son was content to do in 1747-to carry scandals from the chocolate-house to the china auction. I am sure that Scholarship gets a lift by every measure which dissociates it from Mummery. Those, at all events, who cling to ancient ab-usages, are now driven to seek their philosophy and connection among ladies of Bethany and Queens of Ansarey, like Tancred the Crusader. The bell has rung, too, or I mistake not, which will clear the course of English life, of the thimbles and the dice-box. Ladies of quality are no longer brought before our Hardwicks and Maltbys for keeping Faro banks on Sunday evening, as happened to the Countess of Buckinghamshire, Lady E. Luttrell, Mrs. Strutt, and Mrs. Concannon, fifty years since. Crockford's is a booth, to which the bevy of gingerbread-coloured