colleges in Ireland which the Pope is so
angry with; nor even at any one of the colleges
recently instituted in this country " for
ladies only," as the railway carriages have
it—yet in an university. Letitia, as most of
the university-educated do, went in the first
instance to a public school; that founded by
Lady Honoria Woggs (wife of King William
the Third's Archbishop Woggs), where
intellectual training was an object of less solicitude
by the committee of management than
the attainment of a strong nasal style of
vocal elocution, as applied to the sacred
lyrics of Messrs. Sternhold and Hopkins, and
the wearing a peculiarly hideous costume,
accurately copied and followed from the
painted wooden statuette of one of Lady
Woggs's girls, in Lady Woggs's own time,
placed in a niche over the porch of the dingy
brick building containing Lady Woggs's
school, and flanked in another niche by
another statuette of a young gentleman in a
muffin cap and leathers, representing one of
Lady Woggs's boys.

From this establishment our Letitia passed,
being some nine or ten years of age, to the
university, and there she matriculated, and
there she graduated. Do you, know that
university to which three-fourths—nay,
nineteen-twentieths—of our London-bred
children " go up?"  Its halls and colleges are
the pavement and the gutter; its Lecture-theatre
the doorstep and the post at the
corner; its schools of philosophy are the
chandler's shop, the cobbler's stall, and the
public-house; of which the landlord is the
chancellor; its proctor and bull-dogs are the
police-sergeant and his men; its public orators,
the ballad-singers and last dying-speech
cryers; its lecturers are scolding women. The
weekly wages of its occupants form its university
chest. Commemoration takes place every
Saturday night, with grand musical performances
from the harp, guitar, and violin,
opposite the Admiral Keppell. The graduates
are mechanics and small tradesmen and their
wives. The undergraduates are Letitias and
Tommies. The university is the street.

Right in its centre stands the Tree of
Knowledge of good and evil. And all day
long children come and pluck the fruit and
eat it; and some choose ripe and wholesome
fruit, the pleasant savour of which shall
not depart out of their mouths readily;
but some choose bad and rotten apples, which
they fall upon and devour gluttonously, so
that the fruit disagrees with them very much
indeed, and causes them to break all out in
such eruptions of vicious humours, as their
very children's children's blood shall be
empoisoned with years hence. And some, being
young and foolish and ignorant, take and eat
indiscriminately of the good and of the bad
fruit, and are sick and sorry or healthful and
glad alternately; but might fare badly and be
lost in the long run did not Wisdom and
Love (come from making of rainbows and
quelling of storms, perhaps a million miles
away, to consider the sparrows and take stock
of the flies in the back street university) appear
betimes among these young undergraduates
gathered round the tree, and teach
their hearts how to direct their hands to
pluck good sustenance from that tree. I never
go down a back street and look on the multitude
of children (I don't mean ragged, Bedouin
children, but decently attired young people, of
poor but honest parents, living hard by, who
have no better playing-ground for them), and
hear them singing their street songs, and see
them playing street games, and making street
friendships, and caballing on doorsteps or conspiring
by posts, or newsmongering on kerb
stones, or trotting along with jugs and halfpence
for the beer, or listening open-mouthed
to the street orators and musicians, or watching
Punch and the acrobats, or forming a ring
at a street fight, or gathered round a drunken
man, or running to a fire, or running from a
bull, or pressing round about an accident,
bonnetless and capless, but evidently native to
this place—without these thoughts of the
university and the tree coming into my head.
You who may have been expensively educated
and cared for, and have had a gymnasium
for exercise, covered playing courts,
class-rooms, cricket-fields, ushers to attend
you in the hours of recreation; who have gone
from school and college into the world, well
recommended and with a golden passport, should
think more, and considerately too, of what a
hazardous, critical, dangerous nature this
street culture is. With what small book-learning
these poor young undergraduates
get, or that their parents can afford to provide
them with, is mixed simultaneously the
strangest course of tuition in the ethics of
the pawnbroker's shop, the philosophy of
the public-house, the rhetoric of drunken
men and shrewish women, the logic of bad
associations, and bad examples, and bad
language.

Our Letitia graduated in due course of
girlhood, becoming a mistress of such household
arts as a London-bred girl can hope to
acquire at the age of fourteen or fifteen.
Well, you know what sort of a creature the
lodging-house maid of all work is, and what
sort of a life she leads. You have seen her;
her pattens and disheveled cap, her black
stockings and battered tin candlestick. We
have all known Letitia Brownjohns — oft-times
comely, neat-handed Phillises enough—oft-
times desperately slatternly and untidy
—in almost every case wofully over-worked
and as wretchedly underpaid. She must be
up early and late. With the exception of
the short intermission of sleep doled forth
to her, her work is ceaseless. She ascends
and descends every step of every flight
of stairs in the house hundreds of times in
the course of the day; she is the slave of the
ringing both of the door bell and the lodgers'
tintinnabula. She must be little more than an