world can show such a vicinity. The Regent's Park, with its handsome buildings, lay at my feet like a mass. Its clumps of young plantations, and the tall trees here and there of a darker shade of foliage, the villas, the church spires innumerable of "proud Augusta," the "sister hills that skirt her plain," with lofty Harrow in the distance, the canal lacing the green turf with a winding stripe of water of a luminous blue colour, the little silvery lakes scattered about, reflecting their "living light," and the modern Babylon stretching right and left away until it was lost in the obscurity of the atmosphere, formed together a coup-d'œil of magnificent though mingled character, partly natural, and partly artificial. If it be cockneyism to enjoy such a prospect, then hail cockneyism! there is truth, beauty, and nature in the term. Its original meaning shall be forgotten; and in future, it shall be a designation of whatever is beautiful and excellent for ten miles around St. Paul's.

I gazed with intense interest upon a city where a million of human beings were pursuing pleasure or business, mischief or downright vil lainy; the bird's eye view of it which was before me diminished its aggregate effect. The inhabitants were to me as ants in their little cells, and I a giant of Brobdingnag contemplating them. The mighty accumulation of buildings seemed but one entire mass, no streets, nor passages of communication being visible. Yet among these ants what schemes were devising, what scenes acting, what acts perfecting, what ingenious mechanisms constructing, what acts of virtue and benevolence performing, what vices committing, what monuments of glory rearing;-royalty, legislation, nobility, learning, science, trade, and commerce, were concentrated before me in a mightier whole than they had ever before been in the history of the world; and its fame and glory had gone forth and been felt in the most remote corners of the earth. Pondering in this way, I gradually lost the irritability from which I had suffered during the heat of the day. The "intellectual being" actively employed itself in conjecturing what might be the predominating passion of the congregated mass,

what the ultimate object of individual aims, whether worthy or unworthy; and even pried into the designs of the awful Being who had placed them all there, to run each his race of "glory" or "shame," and at no distant time "to be with them that rest." Some scenes thus accidentally brought before the eye call up thoughts worthy of record, and these thoughts are possessed very frequently of a brilliancy which we look for in vain in the most studied efforts. Idea crowded upon idea, until my mind was overflowing with them, and I had taken out my notebook to preserve one or two, when my friend M. came up to me, and broke in upon my abstractions. M. is a worthy fellow, always over head and ears in love, and for ever meeting disappointments; imaginative, and fond of propounding favourite theories upon every possible subject. The weather with Englishmen is always the first topic of discourse on meeting. M. is too well informed to put any faith in old women's gossip, or Moore's Almanack; he therefore does not imagine that a comet has had a "finger in the pie❞ lately, but he has revived the notion, and pushed it very far too, that the obliquity of the earth's axis is constantly varying, and that we are getting every year more and more under the perpendicular action of the sun's rays. He had consulted the Gentleman's Magazine of forty years ago, and found that seventy degrees of Fahrenheit was then the extreme of summer heat, and of late it had been ten or fifteen degrees more elevated several times in the season. This was basis enough for one of his theories. He accordingly asserted that the Regent's Canal will one day be choked up with mangroves; that palms and plantains will flourish on the banks of the Thames; date trees overshadow the sands of Hounslow; and cocoas and ananas spring up wild in Hyde Park, while the boa constrictor writhes himself in many a "fold voluminous" round the old oaks of Windsor Forest, now and then feasting on royal venison, or gorging a prime Merino ram. He confidently anticipates that the mango, kissmiss, and tamarind, will be. as plentiful at our desserts as apples

are now; that our ladies, a little duller in complexion than at present, will bathe themselves in rose water, and go shopping in Bond-street in their palanquins; that the perfumed hookah will supersede the segar; indigo and cochineal be grown at Chelsea; the window tax, from the uselessness of glass, die a natural death, to the consternation of some future Chancellor of the Exchequer ; and tallow candles, butter, and fat London mutton, be altogether dispensed with. As Montesquieu has demonstrated that laws depend upon climate, M. asserts that our present ones will all be repealed, and others enacted more suitable to tropical habits. A plurality of wives will be tolerated; our lords will establish harams; while our cits, jealous as Turks of their wives and daughters, will keep them closely locked up in the loftiest stories of their dwellings. He admits, however, that we shall not get the warmth of India more than a month together in the year, for a century or two to come.

Full of this subject, he continued explaining the effect of this change on our habits and manners, as we walked to the bottom of the hill, on the side of Chalk Farm, that most pugnacious of tea gardens, celebrated in the annals of duelling, and renowned among volunteer riflemen. There many a tyro in the art of rifle-shooting, first soils the virgin purity of his weapon with a leaden bullet, and pulls the trigger at the unendangered target with heroic resolution. As we proceeded further, we heard the hum of voices, and saw a number of people assembled in the garden of the tavern. It is pleasant to observe holiday-keeping folks in their relaxations from the affairs of business. The Frenchman dances, the Italian both sings and dances, the Dutchman smokes in a state of apparent insensibility and apathy, and the Englishman drinks himself drunk before he utters more than a monosyllable, and finishes with a boxing match. The visitants of a tea-garden may furnish as good matter for observation as the more showy devotees to Almack's or the Opera. The humour of Hogarth, in his delineations of vulgar life, is as conspicuous and interesting as his ex

quisite satires on more elevated stations. When we seek to observe the natural man only, the more he is divested of the mere garnish of life the better. Outside the garden fence, we saw two well-dressed persons, with double-barrelled guns, of prime workmanship. A round table with bottles and glasses upon it stood near them. There were several lookers on, and a servant, and five or six ragged boys in attendance. A box which had contained ten or twelve dozen of unlucky sparrows destined for the amusement, some of thei scarcely fledged, was under the care of an attendant who supplied the place of the fugitives or slain, with fresh victims. These birds were let out of a secondary box, at about twenty yards distance, having a trap door which opened with a string on a signal being given for the purpose. Though so near to the shooters, not more than one in ten was killed outright; numbers were cruelly maimed, and some flew away unhurt, not from the mercy, but clumsiness of the marksmen. These two wouldhe sportsmen had amused themselves thus the entire afternoon of a burning day, when, as they say at Naples, "None but Englishmen and dogs would be out of doors." A number of the poor birds lay about on the ground, convulsed and bleeding to death in the hot sun. M. and I passed these men of coarse natures with disgust; my friend observing, that he was sorry "human blood was not the only kind wantonly spilled at that place.' The English vulgar, whether those in mind among the better orders, like the late Mr. Windham, or those in manners and person among the lower, are far more cruel to animals than any classes of persons in other countries. The agonies of suffering nature only heighten their flagitious merriment. The true sportsman derives little advantage from these practices, and they always tend to brutalize the heart.

We now entered the garden, surrounded by boxes, in which people of every age, and both sexes, were regaling themselves. Every spot was occupied with a table or form, save where the green sward extended itself, and a number of children were gambolling. We entered the tavern,

artist for want of leaf-gold had covered with vermilion. Her voice, as she snappishly addressed her husband, is still present to my ear; but a Scotsman playing a clarionet prevented our catching the dialogue which ensued with her spouse, whose meekness and resignation were too plainly the result of long discipline, the conviction that resistance was unavailing, and that only to imagine treason towards her would infallibly make him its victim.

The clarionet player was an old man with white locks that hung over his shoulders, and that meagre but never unmeaning physiognomy which distinguishes his countrymen. He had lost an eye, and stooped and hobbled in his gait, but his features were good though timeworn; they had that kind of expression that told his life's tale better than his tongue could have done; they spoke of care, sorrow, and isolation. He was dressed in ragged plaid, and as he tuned a merry air to amuse the bystanders, we thought how very little his feelings must agree with it. He should have played only the melancholy music of his country, for he had tasted of the waters of bitterness. After long serving as a soldier in every climate, he was discharged with his glory and wounds for a subsistence, and begged his way to his native place in Sutherlandshire, where his fathers had dwelt for ages. He found it a desart. Its inhabitants had emigrated to the frozen shores of Canada, or haply

Where wild Altama murmurs to their woe.

equitable distribution of the good things of this life, had not the girls of a large charity school at that moment entered the gardens. They are a pleasing sight, these charity schools, they cover a multitude of our sins. No nation under heaven has ever yet come near us in deeds of charity. It is true we are rich, and therefore can give more than others, but in these days we have demands enough upon us that leave little superfluity. Much money is no doubt given away ostentatiously to shine forth in public advertisements, for we have our Pharisees as well as the Jews had. But we have also a stock of pure unadulterated feeling-a redeeming charity of the most exalted kind, that does honour to human nature. The sums expended in good done "by stealth" are enormous, and perhaps equal in amount all that is given away publicly. Let it be recollected too, that this benevolence is free from superstition. Few think, at the time they are giving, that the act will propitiate secret crime, and recommend them to the Being who has been sufficiently bountiful to them to enable them to give-modern charity in this country is therefore of the most honourable species. The children before mentioned had come to be regaled with tea on their annual public day, when they are marshalled to gratify their patrons as they did us, by their wholesome neat appearance, and to exhibit their proficiency in reading and writing. The sight is heart-cheering, it is the triumph of social life over savage, of intellect over ignorance, of Christianity over the thousand creeds that divide mankind.

Two-thirds of the county were depopulated to make sheep walks; the moral tie, (why was it not a legal one?) that bound the lord of the soil to his tenantry, scorned and violated. He wept over the heartless desolation before him and fled from it for ever. We dropped our mite into the old man's bonnet, and he went away playing "Queen Mary's Lament." M. in the mean time was repeating to himself,

Has heaven reserved in pity to the poor
No pathless waste-no undiscover'd shore?

No secret island in the boundless main ?— And he would have communicated to me a scheme for removing the evils of poverty, and achieving a more