Rome;" but at the present day it is a reservoir,
a giant vat, into which flow countless streams
of continental immigration. More so than
Paris, where the English only go for pleasure;
the Germans to become tailors and boot-
makers; and the Swiss, valets, house-porters,
and waiters. More so than the United
States, whose only considerable feed-pipes of
emigration are Irish, English, and Germans.
There is in London the foreign artistic population,
among which I will comprise French,
and Swiss, and German governesses, French
painters, actors, singers, and cooks; Italian
singers and musicians; French hairdressers,
milliners, dressmakers, clear-starchers and
professors of legerdemain, with countless
teachers of every known language, and
professors of every imaginable musical
instrument. There is the immense foreign servile
population: French and Italian valets and
shopmen, and German nurses and nursery-
maids. There is the foreign commercial
population, a whole colony of Greek merchants
in Finsbury, of Germans in the Minories, of
Frenchmen round Austin Friars, of Moorish
Jews in Whitechapel, and of foreign shop-
keepers at the west end of the town. There
is the foreign mechanical, or labouring population:
French, Swiss, and German watchmakers,
French and German lithographers,
Italian plaster-cast makers and German
sugar-bakers, brewers, and leather-dressers.
There is the foreign mendicant population:
German and Alsatian buy-a-broom girls,
Italian hurdy-gurdy grinders, French begging-
letter writers (of whose astonishing
numbers, those good associations "La Société
Frangaise de Bienfaisance à Londres" and
"The Friends of Foreigners in Distress," could
tell some curious tales may be), Lascar street-
sweepers and tom-tom pounders. There is
the foreign maritime population: an enormous
one, as all men who have seen Jack
alive in London can vouch for. There is the
foreign respectable population, composed of
strangers well to do, who prefer English
living and English customs to those of their
own country. There is the foreign swindling
population: aliens who live on their own
wits and on the want thereof in their neighbours:
sham counts, barons, and chevaliers;
farmers of German lotteries, speculators in
German university degrees, forgers of Russian
bank-notes, bonnets at gaming-houses, touts
and spungers to foreign hotels and on foreign
visitors, bilkers of English taverns and boarding-
houses, and getters-up of fictitious concerts
and exhibitions. There is the foreign
visiting or sight-seeing population, who come
from Dover to the Hôtel de l'Europe, and go
from thence, with a cicerone, to St. Paul's,
Windsor, and Richmond, and thence back
again to France, Germany, or Spain. Lastly,
there is the refugee population; and these be
mine to descant upon.

The Patmos of London I may describe as
an island bounded by four squares; on the
north by that of Soho, on the south by that of
Leicester, on the east by the quadrangle of
Lincoln's Inn Fields (for the purlieus of Long
Acre and Seven Dials are all Patmos), and on
the west by Golden Square.

The trapezium of streets enclosed within
this boundary are not, by any means, of an
aristocratic description. A maze of sorry
thoroughfares, a second-rate butcher's meat
and vegetable market, two model lodging
houses, a dingy parish church, and some
"brick barns" of dissent are within its
boundaries. No lords or squires of high
degree live in this political Alsatia. The
houses are distinguished by a plurality of
bell-pulls inserted in the door-jambs, and by
a plurality of little brass name-plates, bearing
the names of in-dwelling artisans. Everybody
(of nubile age and English) seems to be
married, and to have a great many children,
whose education seems to be conducted chiefly
on the extra-domal or out-door principle.

As an uninterested stranger, and without
a, guide, you might, perambulating these
shabby genteel streets, see in them nothing
which would peculiarly distinguish them
from that class of London streets known
inelegantly, but expressively, as "back
slums." At the first glance you see nothing
but dingy houses teeming with that sallow,
cabbage-stalk and fried fish sort of population,
indigenous to back slums. The
pinafored children are squabbling or playing
in the gutters; while from distant courts
come faintly and fitfully threats of Jane to
tell Ann's mother; together with that unmeaning
monotonous chant or dirge which
street-children sing, why, or with what object,
I know not. Grave dogs sit on door-steps—
their heads patiently cocked on one side,
waiting for the door to be opened, as— in this
region of perpetual beer-fetching they know
must soon be the case. The beer itself, in
vases of strangely diversified patterns, and
borne by Ganymedes of as diversified appearance,
is incessantly threading the needle
through narrow courts and alleys. The
public-house doors are always on the swing;
the bakers' shops (they mostly sell "seconds")
are always full; so are the cookshops, so are
the coffee-shops: step into one, and you shall
have a phase of Patmos before you incontinent.

Albrecht Lurleibeg, who keeps this humble
little Deutsche Caffee und Gasthof, as he calls
it, commenced business five years ago with a
single coffee-pot and two cups and saucers.
That was a little before February, 1848.
Some few foreigners dropt in to visit him
occasionally; but he was fain to eke out his
slender earnings by selling sweetstuff, penny
dolls, and cheap Sunday newspapers. After
the first three months' saturnalia of revolution
in '48, however, exiles began to populate
Patmos pretty thickly. First, Barbes' and
Albert's unsuccessful riot; then the escapade
of Ledru-Rollin and Louis Blanc; then the