pass strange boots on their way to bed, have
too often the smell of strangers' dinners
steaming from their kitchen, and the hats of
men who despise them, hanging in their hall.
The master or the mistress of the house is,
in three instances out of four, more justly to
be called its servant. For the most part the
house of the Londoner is not his castle; the
home of the Londoner is not a refuge from
the world; it is no haven of peace; but the
ring in which landlord, or landlady, spars
with lodger from sunrise until after sunset.

There is an incessant tax upon the fancy.
Mr. Watson is the renter of a dwelling, and
his friends are to suppose that the house is his.
Watson himself thinks so, though he lets
the drawing-room floor to the Mopsons,
and sells to them with it, the command over
his kitchen. Also, notwithstanding that he
has lodged Mr. Kinderbogie, a despotic
foreigner, in his front parlour, and in his
most cozy bed-room, Kinderbogie's friends
are required to suppose, when they visit
Kinderbogie, that they see him in his house;
and there can be no doubt that the Mopsons,
who are polite people, would forfeit a month's
hire, and quit their apartments instantly, if
Watson, who pays the rent for his house, were
to assert his right to it, by putting his own
name on the front door. As for a row of
bell-handles with Watson, Mopson, Kinderbogie,
under each, respectively, not one of the three
would submit to it. There is the make-believe
of the whole house for each, one bell labelled
' visitors," and one ditto " servants," for
them all, one slovenly and weary maid of
all-work waiting upon them all.

Furthermore, we need only mention the
vast calls upon the fancy made in such houses
in connexion with the most matter-of-fact
things,—the ghostly disappearances of tea
and sugar,—the magical transformation to
which hams are often subject between
breakfast-time and breakfast-time; the miraculous
loss of power suffered by eggs, which go by
scores into puddings, and there leave no trace
of their existence; the mysterious book of
the landlady, with which she conjures in a
way bewildering to ordinary business men.
No more of this:

"For 'tis a chronicle of day by day,
Not matter for a breakfast."

We hold it to be, beyond doubt, that London
lodging-letting is the black art of the
nineteenth century, and it is dreadful to know, as
it is known by the statistical, that in no less
than three out of four of all the houses in
London this art is practised. Thus London
streets tell nothing of the truth of London
life; and the housekeeping of the majority of
Londoners is simply and entirely fiction.

Weary of one British capital, let the same
bachelor betake himself, or the same small
family betake itself, to another. Try
Edinburgh. There the case is reversed. Out of
doors all is romance. In the Old Town,
houses of stone, piled as by a dreamer, story
over story; a High Street, full of fantastic
pictures, lined with shops that rarely are
content with simple labelling, but crowd the
way with emblems to the right hand and the
left. Mambrino's helmet, the very same brass
basin that was precious in Don Quixote's
eyes, is represented over every barber's door;
the golden fancy of the chemist is pestle and
mortar; and the watchmaker hangs out a
vast gold watch, that clearly belongs by
natural right to a pantomime, and dangles of
course, at the door, for a clown to pocket. At
the top of this dreamy hill, is Edinburgh
Castle, open freely to all comers, where Mons
Meg occupies a place of honour, and the crown
and sceptre worn by Scottish kings and queens
in the old days of chivalry glitter mysteriously
in an illuminated vault. There, the kilted
Highlander, off duty, will point up to the window
of Queen Mary's room, and tell how a
young prince was let down in a basket from
that window long ago, hundreds of feet down,
by the steep side of the rocks. At the bottom
of the steep, fantastic street, Holyrood Palace
and the ruins of the chapel are almost as free
to all comers as the castle. For a sixpenny
fee one may have all the story of it told, be
shown the stairs in the wall by which the
conspirators went up to murder Rizzio, the
very tapestry from behind which they entered
Mary's room, the bed on which Queen
Mary slept, the bower in which she dressed,
the glass by which her features were reflected,
the antechamber, — a grim cupboard
now half filled with Darnley's armour, — in
which she was supping with Rizzio when the
murderers entered, the (apocryphal) stain on
the floor made by the soaking all night through
it of Rizzio's blood, let out by six and thirty
wounds. Bridges leap across a valley edged
with gardens, to connect the old town with
the new, and in the valley live the great
steam dragons. Then there is the new town,
an idea in stone, without a crook in one of
its straight lines, or a flaw in one of its circles,
— no twisting hither and thither in obedience
to this interest and that; but broad, straight,
uniformly intersecting streets, that seem to
have sprung up together in the same hour, at
the touch of an enchanter's wand. There is the
Calton Hill, littered over with waste fancies —
a rubbish heap of the imaginative architecture
— a hill to be looked from, with an elevation
of the spirit, but to be looked at with an
elevation of the nose. And finally to press
the seal down tightly on the impression of
Edinburgh as a city of romance, there is the
newest glory of the town, — a monument
which dwarfs the proportions of the Castle
Hill, — to Walter Scott, the citizen of whom
the city is most proud  — a mere writer, my
English lords and gentlemen, of romances.

But, our bachelor who, judging from all
these appearances, makes up his mind that
he has found his way to a community of
imaginative, unbusinesslike people, very soon