revelations of love and happiness, with all the
gloss of newness on the marriage ring as yet.
You read of a pretty home, with the clean
bright furniture arranged like pretty play-
things, and re-arranged almost daily; of
sisters coming to stay, full of pride and love,
and thinking Henry the most charming
brother possible.

You meet the strong-minded woman always,
and always recognisable under her various
disguises—the lurcher still and ever. And
you meet the silly little woman whose
bonnets are farther off her head, whose petticoats
are longer—especially in dirty weather—and
whose cloaks are shorter, than everybody's
else; orange girls with bloated faces,
flattened bonnets, and torn shawls; butter boys
with greasy jackets; butcher boys with
greasy hair; newspaper boys, impudent and
vocal; ragged school boys, in red jackets or
green, cleaning your honour's shoes for a
penny, and with a strange expression of hope
and redemption in their faces; tigers, pages
—all buttons and silver lace, poor monkies;
vulgar boys, coming from school; charity
schoolboys, dressed out of all reason;
foreigners with beards, hooded cloaks, slouched
hats, and smoking; artists imitating them—
very badly; shopmen, oily and pert; country
clergymen up for the day, with a train of
women the reverse of fashionable; guards-
men; soldiers, lately in old-fashioned hunting-
coats; footmen; workmen, all lime and paint;
pretty girls and lovely children: this is the
London world as seen in the London streets,
and met with every day.

And what a world it is, as it passes so
swiftly by! The hopes, the joys, the deadly
fears: the triumph here, the ruin there; the
quiet heroism, the secret sin—what a tumult
of human passions burning like fire in the
volcano of human life! Look at that pale
woman, with red eyes, sunken cheeks, and
that painful thinness of the shabby genteel.
She is the wife of a gambler, once an honourable
and a wealthy man, now sunk to the
lowest depths of moral degradation—fast
sinking to the lowest depths of social poverty
as well. He came home last night, half mad.
The broad bruise on her shoulder beneath
that flimsy shawl would tell its own tale, if
you saw it. Her husband's hand used once
to fall in a softer fashion there than it fell
last night. She has come to-day to pawn
some of her clothes; the first time in her
miserable career that this task has been forced
on her: by this day next year she will have
known every pawnbroker's shop in the
quarter. Lucky for her, if she does not corne to
know every ginshop as well! This little
woman laughing in the shrill voice, ran away
from her home a year ago. She is laughing
now to choke back the tears which gushed to
her strained eyes as the baby in the white
long cloak was carried by. She left one
about the same age, on the hot summer's
night when she fled from all that good men
reverence. Those tears show that conscience
is not all dead within her yet. Poor mother!
the day will come when that false laughter
will no longer choke back those penitent
sobs; when you will forget to smile, and
learn to weep and pray! The downcast man
stalking moodily along has just lost his last
farthing on the Stock Exchange. He is going
home now to break the news to his wife, and
to arrange for a flight across the Channel.
He, this moment jostling him, was married
last week to an heiress, and a pretty one too:
he is humming an opera tune as he walks
briskly home to his temporary lodgings, and
wondering what people can find in life to
make them so miserable and dull! For his
part, he finds this world a jolly place enough;
and so might others too, if they chose, he
says. That pale youth sauntering feebly,
dined out last night, and woke with a headache
this morning. He wears a glass in his
eye, and is qualifying himself for manliness
and—death, by a course of dissipation. He
has just come to his fortune, which he won't
enjoy many years, unless he finds out that he
is living the life of a fool—and he must grow
wiser before he can find out that. The clean
respectable woman of middle age is a
gentleman's housekeeper coming from her visits
among the poor. She has just taken
some wine to a sick woman down in a
filthy street in Westminster, and some
socks and flannel to a family of destitute
children. There is much more of this kind of
charity than we see on the surface of society;
though still not so much as is wanted. The
sweet-looking girl walking alone, and dressed
all in dove-colour, is an authoress; and the
man with bright eyes and black hair, who has
just lifted his hat to her and walks on, with a
certain slouch in his shoulders that belongs to
a man of business, is an author, and an editor;
a pope, a Jupiter, a czar in his own domain,
against whose fiat there is neither redress
nor appeal. No despotism is equal to the
despotism of an editor.

Past the Circus—up Regent Street,
lingering to look at some of the beautiful things
set up in the windows—through Oxford
Street, and towards the Marble Arch—
crowds on crowds still meet; and face after
face, full of meaning, turned towards you as
you pass; signs of all nations and races of
men pass you, unknown ot all and to
themselves whence they came; beasts and birds
dressed in human form; tragedies in broadcloth,
farces in rags; passions sweeping
through the air like tropical storms, and
silent virtues stealing by like moonlight;
LIFE, in all its boundless power of joy and
sutiering—this is the great picture-book to be
read in London streets; these are the wild
notes to be listened to; this the strange mass
of pathos, poetry, caricature, and beauty
which lie heaped up together without order
or distinctive heading, and which men endorse
as Society and the World.