they sustain a swimmer on the surface, they
make sinking difficult; but, a clear lake of
the unsophisticated element is much to be
preferred.

These drawbacks, we have indicated in no
ill-humoured or disheartened spirit. Growth
must be gradual, we know, and England has
not, for a long time past, been standing still.
In our own time, we may see schools plentiful
in villages and towns; we may see land
ceasing to be spell-bound, saleable by those
who cannot make a use of it, and purchaseable
by their friends who canwe may get titles
to land registered and proved for half-a-crown.
We, or our children, shall see Chancery abuses
fall among the ghastly legends of the past.
Every new attainment, points, and will
always point, to something else beyond. We
shall go on and prosper, so long as we are
in earnest; and to-day we are in earnest. The
civilised world has not, in all past history,
a period upon which to look back, so full of
human hope arising from the thoughts and
deeds of nations, as our own. Men have begun
to understand each other; and they quarrel,
therefore, less. Let us, in England, do our
part; let us find out our faults and mend
them, while we are modestly conscious of our
merits. No theory will save us or ruin us,
but "precept must be upon precept, precept
upon precept; line upon line, line upon line;
here a little and there a little." We may
then go upon our way, advancing, with quiet
confidence.

WHAT A LONDON CURATE CAN
DO IF HE TRIES.

THE payment of sixpence at the London
station of the Blackwall Railway secures
not only a first-class ticket for the Shadwell
station, but the privilege of looking
from the carriage window into the apartments
of all the upper-floor inhabitants
between Fenchurch Street and the station in
St. George's-in-the-East; the Railway, as
every Blackwall sailor and every Blackwall
whitebait-eater knows, running, like a giant
brick-and-mortar wall, straight through the
buildings, on a level with many of their roofs,
and permitting the passenger to look, like
Asmodeus, into the dingy tenements of this
Eastern region. A few minutes suffice for
the journey, and stepping from the train, the
passenger descends a stone stair, to find himself
in the parish of St. George's-in-the-East,
a district which could not be more full of
contrasts to its namesake at the other
extremity of the modern Babylon—St. George's,
Hanover Square—if it were forty instead of
four miles distant. The houses in the Eastern
St. George's are almost all small, and the
streets and alleys form a sort of labyrinth—
a tangled web of dingy structures—ins and
outs, and twisted meshes of lane and alley,
having only the one feature in common,
that feature telling of poverty—not always

squalid, for many show the struggle of decency
for appearances by a polished brass plate
or door-handle, with here and there bright
symptoms of green paint portal and a whitened
door-stone—but ever displaying the presence
of a population of the humblest means. Round
the outside of the district there may be found
a street or two, containing the shops of the
chief traders of the place, in which signs of
more affluence may be detected; but within
this crust lies one mass of almost unredeemed
poverty—a population of very many thousand
souls, located upon a very few acres of ground.
Scores of houses, of six rooms, holding six
families; scores of houses, of five rooms, hold-
ing five families; hundreds of houses, of four
rooms, holding four families each. " Time
was," said an old inhabitant of the spot,
when the people could get two rooms—one to
live in, one to sleep in. But the evictions at
the west-end, and other circumstances, have
so increased the numbers, that rents have
risen, and the people can afford but one room.

Such a spot offers so few attractions to the
class who are able to choose a location for
themselves, that there are no resident gentry
in the place. Those who own the property,
live away from it. There are no large good
houses offering a contrast to the surrounding
poverty; no wealthy people who may be
asked to lend a little help to their poorer
neighbours. One in every fourteen of the
whole population of the parish are paupers.
Surely such a spot offers few inducements
for its selection as a place of permanent abode.
Yet here, some years since, came a hopeful,
zealous, hard-working man, who seeing and
feeling the wants of the neighbourhood, went
single-handed to work to see what good
intentions, backed by perseverance, could do in
a hand to hand fight with poverty, ignorance,
dirt, neglect, and crime.

Twenty years ago, the then rector of St.
George's-in-the-East, was a Doctor of Divinity
of the old school, whose pride it was to leave
the world at large, and his own parish in
particular, just where he found it. The dust and
the modes of past times should, he thought,
be preserved inviolate, and hence, though
ignorance stalked through his parish
unchallenged, save by the feeble efforts of one
small charity school, he lived quietly on,
untroubled by any idea that popular knowledge
should be promoted among the flock of a
London rector. The patronage of the living
was the gift of his college, and with him it
was a religious duty to leave things as they
were. The world let him live quietly, why
should he disturb the world?

One fine day the rector found himself without
a curate, and as the close courts and
poverty stricken streets of his parish sent
every year many hundred tenants for the
parish grave-yard; and as the young men and
women, notwithstanding their poverty, would
be young men and women, and made up
amongst them scores of matrimonial matches