of mechanics, might contain a small building
capable of being used as a reading-room, with
baths and wash-houses.

There is no good reason why residence in
flats should not become popular among us,
and being popularised, become even to be
recognised by fashion. The Albany is but a
set of first-class flats, spread out upon the
ground, and since we have no longer ground
to waste, and the business or the pleasure of
the Londoner is already interfered with by the
necessity of constant walking or riding over
all the miles of ground we occupy at present,
why may we not change our tactics, and have
little Albanies built up into the air?

Still there will be letters of apartments,
because furnished lodgings are a necessary
town accommodation. But one need go no
farther than Edinburgh to find out how the
flat system operates on the subletting of
apartments, furnished or unfurnished. The
woman who in London takes a presentable
house, and pays a hundred a year for it, in
rent and taxes; besides struggling very hard
to get the furniture together, is to be half
forgiven if she preys upon the public. She has
so much to do to find herself in bread and
butter, that she may well be tempted to eke out
her dinner from her tenant's meat. In Edinburgh,
lodging-letting is a business of a much
less speculative kind. A flat may be taken and
all rooms but two sublet. The speculation is
not great, and the return tolerably certain.
When it appears prudent and safe to extend
the business, a second flat can easily be added
to the first.  The landlady, in fact, attempts
only what she can do, and, being sure enough
of the power to live honestly, is all the less
disposed to cheat.  The price of furnished
apartments in London would fall by one-third
if the flat system were extensively adopted,
and the lodging-letters would nevertheless be
better off than they are now.

And, after all, one of the best advantages
of the change, would be the banishing
from London of a swarm of social fictions
which tend to demoralise society.  Our false
method of tenancy has much to do
with the trouble given themselves by so many
people in this town to enlarge the world's
opinion of their incomes.  It is connected
with the false system of balls and dinner parties,
which are admirable things in themselves,
and in their season, but which become unseasonable
always when, instead of being honest
gatherings of friends, they are mere shows
painfully got up to cheat a little public of
aquaintances.  In this matter, too, London
may learn wisdom from Edinburgh, where
not only house-keeping but hospitality is
set upon its most natural footing.  In each
case the thing itself becomes more real as
well as habitual.  We believe that
in Edinburgh the proportion of domestic
servants to the population, is greater than in
any other town in the three kingdoms; this
being caused mainly by the ease with which
every person of moderate means establishes
for his own household— thanks to the flats —
a comfortable home.

TOM D'URFEY.

One of the oddest epitaphs in London is to
be seen on the south wall of the church of
Saint James's, Piccadilly. Sculptural character
it has none. It is at the best a common
piece of Yorkshire flag, with a very brief
inscription: —

Tom D'Urfey
Dyed February ye  26th, 1723.

We have a kind of Old Mortality interest
in this monument, paying periodical visits to
it — not from any particular admiration for
the poor inhabitant it seeks to commemorate
— but purely from a desire that some architect
may not remove it as unsightly, or some
churchwarden destroy it as of no manner
of use.

These periodical visits to Tom D'Urfey's
tomb extend over a quarter of a century.
Many have looked at it besides ourselves.
Some few have evidently known " all about"
Tom D'Urfey.  Some have a rude guess that
he was a clever and companionable fellow.
Some have shrugged their shoulders before
it, and passed on with a  " Well, I'm sure
— brief enough for any residuary legatee."
Others have laughed before it, and cried
"Poor Tom's a-cold ; "  and it was but the
other day that we detected a charity-boy
trying a hard ball against Tom's crumbling
tablet, thinking perhaps it would have been
a good bit of fun to have  " done for the old
buffer."  We have a liking for Tom, and
have actually dived into Tom's history, and
collected what no bookseller has yet collected
— Tom D'Urfey's works.

Tom was half a Frenchman, half an
Englishman. His uncle was that D'Urfé who
wrote the romance of Astree — a kind of
French Arcadia and New Atalantis  — which
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu delighted to
read, and was we suppose the last woman
who did delight to read. His father, the son
of a Frenchman, was married to a gentlewoman
of Huntingdonshire, of the family of
the Marmions; and Tom was born, it is believed,
in Exeter, in the year sixteen hundred
and forty-nine.

He was intended for the law, but Coke
upon Littleton had no attractions for so volatile
a student; and the two theatres existing
when Tom was a boy, in Drury Lane and
Dorset Gardens, tore him away from Plowden
and the Inns of Court. " My good or ill
stars,"  he says, " ordained me a knight-errant
in the fairy land of poetry."  We first hear of
him in sixteen hundred and seventy-six, in
his twenty-seventh year, when he produced
at the King's Theatre a tragedy, full of
bombast and fustian, called "The Siege of
Memphis; or, the Nubitian Queen."