My dear Will Ranstead ,—        When, in our too infrequent talks, I have confessed my growing fondness for life in London, your kindly countenance has assumed an expression so piteous that my Conscience has turned upon what I am pleased to call my Mind, to demand explanation of a feeling so distressing to so excellent a friend. My Mind, at first, was disposed to apologise. It pleaded its notoriously easy-going character: it had never met man or woman that it had not more or less admired, nor re

H. S. Leigh. Let them that desire "solitary to wander o'er the russet mead" put on their clump boots and wander. I prefer the Strand. The Poet's customary meadow with its munching sheep and æsthetic cow, his pleasing daisies and sublimated dandelions, his ecstatic duck and blooming plum tree, are all very well in their way; but there is more human interest in Seven Dials. may have a very good time if his self-satisfaction suffice to shelter him from Boredom; but of what use is he to the world or

Moore. The celebrated novelist Ouida has made a general indictment against the " cruel ugliness and dulness " of the streets of London. The greatest city in the world, according to Mdlle. de la Ramé, has "a curiously provincial appearance, and in many ways the aspect of a third-rate town." Even the aristocratic quarters are "absolutely and terribly depressing and tedious"; and as for decorative beauty , this is all she can find of it in London:— An ugly cucumber frame like Battersea Park Hall, g

Charles Mackay. Once upon a time, as the charmed books tell, there was a mountain covered with stones, of which each particular flint or pebble had been, "upon a time," a live and sentient man or woman. The stones lay, with no attribute of life except a power to appeal in such wise to passers-by as to compel them to remain. But there came, one happy day, a beauteous maiden with a pitcher full of the Water of Life, and she, sprinkling the precious fluid over the stones, transformed them again int

( Newes From Bartholomew Fayre ; an undated, anonymous black-letter poem.) "Much time," says Andrews in his history of the sixteenth century, "was spent by the citizens of London at their numerous taverns." The tavern was the lounging-place, not only of the idle and dissolute, but of the industrious also. It was the Club, the Forum, sometimes too the Theatre. The wives and daughters of tradesmen collected here to gossip, and, strange as it now seems to us they came here, too, to picnic. An old s

Scott. At last I was alone. The landlord, douce man, could stand no more; his conversation had been large and ample up to midnight, and had indeed left a fair remainder to spread a feast for solitude; but for the last two hours he had done nothing but alternately yawn and doze. Now, thank goodness, he had gone, and I could read in peace. Angels and ministers of grace defend us—Bacon's Essays and Donnelly's Cryptogram !—in the parlour of a shabby old inn! Was mine host, then, of a literary turn?

When I go up that quiet cloistered court, running up like a little secure haven from the stormy ocean of Fleet Street, and see the doctor's gnarled bust on the bracket above his old hat, I sometimes think the very wainscot must still be impregnated with the fumes of his seething punch-bowl. Washington Irving. My Bosom's Lord declares that it is more of a smell than a street; but there is not a journalist of any literary pretension in Britain who does not regard Fleet Street as the Mecca of his c

Thomas Freeman (1614). "Hogsdon" has come to Hygate long since, as our friend Cartmel, wearily pedalling his bicycle through the up-piled accumulation of dingy streets that divide his slum from my elevated fastness, can sadly testify. Where will "she" be a hundred years hence? Where when "she" is finished? I wonder. James I. predicted that London would shortly be England and England would be London. Yet London in his time was literally the village that modern facetiousness calls it. Little more

Dr. Mackay. There is an old Dutch pier at Gorleston separating the open sea from the mouth of the river that leads to Yarmouth. It is not ornamental; it has no pavilion, no railings, no band, but only capstans, tarry ropes, a small white-washed observatory, and—the most surprising jumble of odd, cosy, sheltered nooks overhanging the blue water, where one may sprawl all day in any garb and any posture, and, soothed by the sea's lullaby, blink at the sun, or, with the aid of our country's literatu

Charles Kingsley. What is this Life at all, and what its purport? Is Good its aim or evil? If roses be fair, what need of thorns? God sends youth and health and beauty; what devil brings sickness, grief, and decay? When I wrote the irrelevant, drowsy chapter preceding this, the sun shone so kindly, and so benignly Nature beamed, that Care was as a dream of what never could have been. To live was to be blessed; to think was to enjoy. Nature was a doting mother that fed us with bounty and kissed u

James Thomson. Since I met the Lancashire excursionist at Lowestoft I have been wondering what is the essential distinction between the Cockney-tripper and the holiday-maker one meets at New Brighton, Douglas, or Blackpool. We were tightly packed in the shelter on the promenade waiting the end of the thunderstorm. There were two native boys singing a temperance song to the tune of "There's nae luck aboot the hoose," translated to a dirge with a drawling refrain of "No d-r-r-rink! no d-r-r-rink f

It was a Sunday in London—gloomy, close, and stale. Maddening church bells of all degrees of dissonance, sharp and flat, cracked and clear, fast and slow, made the brick and mortar echoes hideous. Melancholy streets, in a penitential garb of soot, steeped the souls of the people who were condemned to look to them out of windows in dire despondency. In every thoroughfare, up almost every alley, and down almost every turning, some doleful bell was throbbing, jerking, tolling, as if the plague were