aggravating;) German band; Ethiopians; hurdy-
gurdy; harps and accordions; brain-
crushing machine; knife grinder (most
excruciating;) Finnan haddocks; hearthstones;
and "Pop goes the Weasel" until eleven
o'clock at night.

However, despite all our annoyances, we
get on pretty well in Adeliza Castle. I
believe there is afloat some London aphorism
that the rent paid by a householder should
represent about the sixth part of his income.
A money making City bachelor who has few
friends and sees no company, is thus often to
be found tenanting a mansion which is as
well fitted for him as a cocoanut shell would
be fitted for the cover of a filbert. We ought
to fit our houses to the size of our families,
our wants, and habits with as much regard to
accuracy as we show when buying clothes to
fit our bodies. When we go to the tailor's we
do not enter into competition with each other
who shall buy the widest trousers. The stout
man takes, if he needs it, more room than his
neighbour, although he may not be so well
able to buy the cloth.

I do not know whether the house-agents,
whom I found counselling men of small
desires to be ambitious and to let lodgings,
follow or lead the movement against which I
am protesting. I have no doubt, for my own
part, that without (horrible reference!) letting
apartments, I could pay a rental of two
hundred a year, if I could persuade myself and
my Arabella to live on the parsley and
nasturtiums which are coming up with remarkable
vigour in the back garden. I do not
choose, however, to take bricks in lieu of
bread. And I thoroughly believe that any
builder who now plans houses with an eye to
the Apartments Furnished into which they
may be parcelled, would do no ill service to
himself if he would set himself to increase the
number of London houses small enough, and
modest enough in their rental, to form fair,
honest, and independent homes; the rent of
which could be paid without strain by men
who support families on incomes varying
between two hundred and three hundred and
fifty pounds a year. The want of accommodation
set forth in this narrative forces great
numbers of us little-incomed men into a false
position. There are many wives in London—
ladies by birth and training—whose homes
are marred, and who are made landladies in
spite of themselves, because there is not
enough house accommodation of the kind that
suits their husbands' means. I will not calculate
what would be the area of London if we all
had detached and independent homes; but we
must in some measure live one over another's
heads; and might plan our house architecture
so as to have more real homes than there are
now among us. The hint furnished by the
"flats" of Edinburgh and by the étages of
Paris might be followed in London. Although
one roof covers each of these residences, they
are as separate and inaccessible to neighbours
as detached dwellings are. In Edinburgh flats
or floors are called "houses," and houses they
are, separated horizontally as well as
perpendicularly by deadened floors as well as by party
walls; the wide stone stairs by which they
are entered being so many vertical streets.

Arabella tells me that it is an absurd thing
to suppose that I, at my age, can make a
Peter the Hermit of myself, and carry on
much longer my Quixotic struggle to procure
emancipation for the lodger. I am a lodger
now no longer. Let another rise and speak.
So be it. I pause to hear him.

ALWAYS UNITED.

As we grope through the mental gloom of
the Dark Ages, stumbling over the lamentable
ruins of libraries, and schools and arts,
it is sometimes the good fortune of the student
to see, glittering at his feet, a jewel of price
and brilliancy—glittering among the crushed
and irrecognisable fragments of arts gone by,
and the gross and clumsy paraphernalia of
a barbarian epoch.

As bright a jewel as ever shone in a
century of intellectual darkness and ignorance
was a man admired, revered, beloved, hated,
followed, celebrated in his own age; and who
has been famous to successive ages and to
this age almost universally, not for what he
had the greatest cause to ground his fame
upon—for his learning, his eloquence, or his
philosophy—but for being the hero of one of
the most romantic love stories the world ever
wept at—for being Abelard, the husband of
Heloïse.

The story of Abelard and Heloïse, if it be
not universally known, is at least universally
public. That a thing can be the latter without
being the former I need only call Dr.
Johnson (in his criticism on Kenrick) to
prove. Every pair of lovers throughout the
civilised world have heard of Abelard and
Heloïse. They are as familiar in the mouth
as Hero and Leander, Pyramus and Thisbe,
Cupid and Psyche, Darby and Joan, Jobson
and Nell. Yet beyond their names, and the
fact that they were lovers, not one person in
twenty knows much about any of these
personages. Every visitor to Paris has seen the
Gothic tomb of Abelard and Heloïse in the
cemetery of Père la Chaise. Every reader of
Pope will remember his exquisite poetical
paraphrase of Heloïse's epistles to Abelard.
Every student of the urbane and self-
devouring Jean Jacques Rousseau has once
wept and now yawns over the philosophic
sentimentalities of La Nouvelle Heloïse. The
names, indeed, of these immortal lovers are on
the lips of the whole civilised world; but of
the man Abelard and of the woman Heloïse,
what they really were like, and what they
really did and suffered, the knowledge of the
vast majority of readers is very limited indeed.
Their renown has been transmitted from
century to century with the triple consecration