rooms are not willingly let to families
numbering more than four, and no tenants are
allowed to admit lodgers, or to give sleeping
accommodation to more than the number
agreed upon when they entered.  Nor are
they suffered to keep animals in their apartments.
Each tenant's room must be scrubbed
at least once every week.  A superintendent
lives upon the spot, who is to have access to
all the apartments, and right of interference
for the preservation of the property, and the
maintenance of the conditions under which
alone it is possible for the houses to
continue wholesome.  Beyond that, there is no
attempt to exercise control.

The quality of the rooms, according to the
original plan, is lowered a little as one mounts
the stairs, and thus a variation occurs in the
rents, the price diminishing as one ascends;
the scale of charge also, and for the same
reason, is lower for back than for front rooms.
The rent of the front rooms varies from
between three shillings and two and threepence.
The rent of the back rooms varies between
half-a-crown and one and eightpence.  The
provision of a decent room for one and eightpence
is the fulfilment of a condition most
essential to be borne in mind by those who
would serve society to the best purpose in
providing better dwellings for the poor.  The
single room provided for the highest price—
three shillings, is airy and spacious, provided
with an excellent fireplace, cupboarded, and
well-partitioned.  Throughout the houses,
indeed, the fireplaces are good, and there is
not one room without an ample cupboard.
There are ventilators in the doors and walls,
and a grating in the centre of each ceiling
communicates, by a large pipe, with the outer
air.  No ornamental work whatever has been
introduced; the rooms are precisely such
rooms as their tenants have been used to feel
at home in, with the one vast difference, that
they are clean and wholesome.

Some tenants with large families, or better
means than others, occupy two rooms; but
the majority, as we have said, content
themselves per force, with one. They all seem to
be able to earn their living without falling into
any serious straits.  Half of them, or more than
half, are costermongers: the rest are tailors
or shoemakers; one, we observed, called his
ground-floor room a dairy.  Every room
contained the necessary articles of furniture:
in one of the cheap upper rooms—through
which an open sewer ran when we last saw
it—a clean and healthy woman was perfuming
the air with beans and bacon.  Somebody, in
a room below, scented his entire floor with
a stock of lavender.  We will not affirm
that we smelt nothing whatever, worse than
this, for it is one thing to erect water tanks,
another thing to get an efficient water supply
out of a London company.  An occasional
hitch in the matter of water will occur even
to the rich, since nobody has power to
protect himself, and a temporary difficulty in
this respect happened to be afflicting Wild
Court when we paid our visit.  In the way
of all wholesomeness and cleanliness stands
that which should be made their main
support—the system of water supply in this
metropolis; which is as bad as trading
companies can make it.

It is not much to say, that in the short time
since Wild Court was reconstructed there has
been no case of fever in it; it is more to
say, that not only the superintendent notices,
but the tenants themselves notice, the change
made even by so short an experience of good
lodging, in the aspect of the children.  Health
has come to their cheeks, light is at home in
their eyes, they are more brisk, active, and
happy at their play.  Of their elders, we saw
none who looked discontented, and there is
no reason to doubt that they will, in due
course of events, come by the
    "Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health,
     Truth breathed by cheerfulness."

POOR ANGELICA.

In the fasta of gifted, beautiful, good,
wronged, and unhappy women, there are few
names that shine with so bright and pure a
lustre as that of Angelica Kauffmann.  The
flower of her life was spent in this country;
but she is scarcely remembered in it now,
even among the members and lovers of the
profession which she adorned.  Those who
wish to know anything definite concerning a
lady who was the pet of the English aristocracy,
and the cynosure of English painters for
some years of the past century, must turn to
foreign sources, and hear from foreign lips and
pens the praises of poor Angelica.  Though
undeniably a foreigner, she had as undeniable a
right to be mentioned in the records of British
painters as those other foreigners domiciliated
among us at the same epoch: Listard,  Zucchi,
Zoffani,  Bartolozzi,  Cipriani,  Roubiliac,
Michael Moser,  Nollekens,  Loutherbourg,
Zuccarelli,  Vibares, and Fuseli.  Of all these
worthies of the easel there are copious
memoirs and ana extant, yet the published
(English) notices of Angelica would not fill
half this page.  In Sir William Beechey's
Memoirs of Sir Joshua Reynolds, there is no
mention whatsoever made of my heroine;
nor, which is more to be wondered at, is she
named in Mr. Allan Cunningham's excellent
Life of Sir Joshua.  Yet Angelica painted
the president's portrait; and the president
himself, it is darkly said, was desirous on his
part of possessing not only the portrait of his
fair limner, but the original itself.  Even the
garrulous, tittle-tattling, busybody, Boswell,
has nothing to say, in his Life of Johnson,
of the catastrophe of Angelica's life;
although it was town talk for weeks, and
although the sinister finger of public
suspicion pointed at no less a man than Johnson's
greatest friend, JOSHUA REYNOLDS,
as cognisant of, if not accessory to, the