hot punch, paramours, packs of cards, and
roaring songs. Houseless, indeed! I'd give
'em a night's lodging—in the station-house,
and send 'em to the treadmill in the morning."
Whereupon Sharplynx departs; muttering
something about the good old times, and
the stocks, and the whipping-post.

So they go their separate ways—Pragmos
and Sharplynx—yet I cannot blame either of
them. It is but the old story of the many
punished, for the faults of a few. You, I,
thousands, are coerced, stinted in our
enjoyments, comforts, amusements, liberties,
rights, and are defamed and vilified as
drunkards and ruffians, because one bull-
necked, thick-lipped, scowling beast of a
fellow, drinks himself mad with alcohol, beats
his wife, breaks windows, and roams about
Drury Lane with a life-preserver. Thousands
—whose only crime it is to have no money, no
friends, no clothes, no place of refuge equal
even to the holes that the foxes have in God's
wide world—see the hand of charity closed,
and the door of mercy shut, because Alice Grey
is an impostor, and Bamfylde Moore Carew a
cheat; and because there have been such places
as the Cour des Miracles, and Rats' Castle. ''Go
there and be merry, you rogue!" says Mr. Sharplynx,
facetiously. So the destitute go into the
streets, and die. They do die; although you
may continue talking and tabulating till
Doomsday. I grant the workhouses, relieving
officers, hospitals, infirmaries, station-houses,
boards, minutes, and schedules, the Mendicity
Society, and the Guildhall Solomons. But
I stand with Galileo: Si muove! and asseverate
that, in the city paved with gold, there
are people who are destitute, and die on
doorsteps, in the streets, on staircases, under dark
arches, in ditches, and under the lees of walls.
The police know it. Some day, perhaps, the
government will condescend to know it too,
and instruct a gentleman at a thousand a-year
to see about it.

Thinking of Pragmos and Sharplynx, I
walked last Tuesday evening through
Smithfield and up Barbican. It is a very dreary
journey at the best of times; but, on a raw
February night—with the weather just
hesitating between an iron frost and a drizzling
thaw, and, not making up its mind on either
subject, treating you to a touch of both
alternately—the overland route to Whitecross
Street is simply wretched. The whole
neighbourhood is pervaded with a miasma of
grinding, unwholesome, sullen, and often
vicious poverty. Everything is cheap and
nasty; and the sellers seem as poor as the
buyers. There are shops whose stock-in-
trade is not worth half-a-dozen shillings.
There are passers-by, the whole of whose
apparel would certainly be dear at
ninepence. Chandlers' shops, marine stores,
pawnshops, and public houses, occur over and
over again in sickening repetition. There is
a frowsy blight on the window-panes and the
gas-lamps. The bread is all seconds; the
butchers' shops, with their flaring gas-jets,
expose nothing but scraps and bony pieces of
meat. Inferior greengrocery in baskets chokes
up the pathway; but it looks so bad that it
would be a pity to rescue it from its neighbour
the gutter, and its legitimate
proprietors the pigs. The air is tainted with
exhalations from rank tobacco, stale herrings,
old clothes, and workshops of noxious trades.
The parish coffin passes you; the policeman
passes you, dull and dingy—quite another
policeman compared to the smart A Sixty-
seven. The raw night-breeze wafts to your
ears oaths, and the crying of rotten merchandise,
and the wailing of neglected children, and
choruses of ribald songs. Every cab you
see blocked up between a costermonger's
barrow and a Pickford's van, appears to you
to be conveying some miserable debtor to
prison.

Struggling, as well as I could, through all
this squalid life; slipping on the greasy pavement,
and often jostled off it, I came at last
upon Whitecross Street, and dived (for that is
about the only way you can enter it) into a
forlorn, muddy, dimly-lighted thoroughfare,
which was the bourne of my travels—
Playhouse Yard. I have not Mr. Peter Cunningham
at hand, and am not sufficient
antiquary to tell when or where abouts the
playhouse existed in this sorry place. It is but
a melancholy drama enacted here now,
Heaven knows!

I was not long in finding out the Refuge.
About half-way up the yard hung out a
lamp with a wire screen over it, and the
name of the asylum painted upon it. I made
my way to an open doorway whence issued
a stream of light; and, before which, were
ranged in a widish semi-circle a crowd of
cowering creatures, men, women, and children,
who were patiently awaiting their turn of
entrance. This was the door to the House
of Poverty.

I need not say that the object of my visit
was promptly understood by those in authority,
and that every facility was afforded me
of seeing the simple system of relief at work.
It was not much in a sight-seeing point of
view, that the society's officers had to show me.
They had no pet prisoners; no steam-cooking
apparatus; no luxurious baths; no corrugated
iron laundry; no vaulted passages, nor octagonal
court-yards gleaming with white-wash and
dazzling brass-work; no exquisite cells fitted
up with lavatories and cupboards, and
conveniences of the latest patent invention.
Everything was, on the contrary, of the simplest
and roughest nature; yet everything seemed
to me to answer admirably the purpose for
which it was designed.

I entered, first, an office, where there were
some huge baskets filled with pieces of
bread; and where an official sat at a desk
registering, in a ledger, the applicants for
admission as they presented themselves for
examination at the half-door or bar. They