exactly at midnight go upstairs backwards and jump into bed in silence, expecting thereupon to see, not the future husband himself, I am glad to say, but a vision of him ; and it must be a sluggish fancy that, by the aid of a genuine confidence in the charm, cannot conjure up in the dark something which may be interpreted as the presentment of a lover. Most of the love spells contain within them some element calculated to produce their real or apparent verification. A young woman eats an egg-shell full of salt before going to bed in the expectation that her future husband will bring her a cup of drink in the night. Wedding-cake drawn through a ring and laid under the pillow makes the love-sick maid dream of her sweetheart. The maiden who, in the process of shelling green-peas, finds a pod containing nine berries, lays it on the lintel of the kitchen door, and the first single man who enters shall be her husband. Mr. Glyde's investigations seem to indicate that in the rural districts of Norfolk the popular belief in these mystic tokens is hardly less strong than it was in the days of witchcraft and sorcery.

SINCE Parliament has been asked by one or two gentlemen who are not numbered among the howling fanatics of currency, to reconsider the policy of the Bank Charter Act, I have been induced to look into a book sent to me from Manchester, on "The Bank Charter Act and the Rate of Interest," dedicated, "without permission," to Mr. Gladstone, and published by Simpkin and Marshall. As usual in these intellectual exercises on the money question, I find that while the currency reformer confines himself to criticism of the existing system he is at least worth listening to, but so soon as he begins to propound an alternative scheme he plunges himself into difficulties and his reader into scepticism. The author of this book, for example, by way of providing against the consequences of a drain of gold, proposes to the Government to issue a large amount of Three per Cent. Consols, the proceeds to be invested in good foreign funds. Is it not wonderfully simple? So soon as large draughts are made on the national reserves of gold the Government of course proceeds to sell these foreign stocks, and so supplies itself with coin to meet the exceptional drain, repurchasing foreign stock when the equilibrium is restored. The provision that the stock purchased shall be foreign is very ingenuous. The writer does not seem to remember the great sympathy which exists between British and foreign stock markets. It does not occur to him that to sell stock, foreign or otherwise, in order to meet or replace a drain on our reserves, would have the

effect of increasing that drain, probably to the extent of the sale; nor does he bear in mind that a Government so dealing in stock would invariably have to sell when the stock was depreciated, and purchase when the price was high. Another of his schemes is to issue temporary bank notes of small denomination, such as forty shillings, twenty shillings, or ten shillings, when gold and silver are scarce-as if a scarcity were to be cured by withdrawing coin from circulation and substituting temporarily inconvertible paper. All these philosophers are more or less fascinated by the fallacy of inconvertible paper money: that most costly device for supplying the public with a circulating medium at the public expense. No doubt our science of currency is far from perfect, but we trust that Mr. Lowe will preserve us from any of the extremely speculative and terribly experimental changes proposed by the excited currency reformers.

I AM grateful to Sir John Duke Coleridge for going down to Exeter in the very midst of a Parliamentary Session and telling the members of a literary society that the works of the poet Wordsworth are the constant companions and the solace of his intellectual life. From certain sad signs around me, I had begun to be afraid that busy men were getting every day more and more divorced from books. It has sometimes seemned to me that the study of pure literature, apart from the mere indulgence of a leisure half hour in easy literary entertainment, was becoming in the active world of London almost a thing of the past. But if the Attorney-General, in the same year in which he conducted the defendant's case in Tichborne against Lushington, and delivered the longest speech ever made by any man in any age, can in the brief holiday of the Easter week go home to his native county and discourse for an hour on Wordsworth, showing that he understands every turn of that quaintly simple and curiously philosophic mind and revealing by his enthusiasm that the labour of his days does not separate him from frequent communion with his favourite poet, there is some hope yet for poetry and for the old literary feeling of days gone by that were quieter than these.

READING Some time ago an article in a popular publication, calling young ladies to account for making use of slang phrases which are compelled to do service on all sorts of occasions, whether fitting or not, I was led to watch for awhile the manner in which the ladies of our day express themselves on passing topics. The result is that I think our fair friends do not much lay themselves open to these

allegations. Such words as "nice" and "jolly" do, no doubt, frequently occur, but I must do the ladies the justice to say that when they use hack terms and phrases, it is generally by imitation, and not through any poverty of verbal resources; while many men, if they did not utter the cant sentence, would have no other words ready in which to indicate their meaning. Looking more generally at the capacity of educated people to put their ideas of the moment into words and sentences, I find the ladies are far more ready, skilful, and graceful than my own sex. It is very rare to hear a lady hesitate for a word, or halt over the construction of a phrase. Her conversational sentences are often so neat and so admirably finished that you could not improve upon them in your study if you were working up her observations into an essay. In point of composition I find the conversation of most educated ladies almost perfect; its only fault is that it is apt to be a little too conventional. Even in this last respect, however, I am not sure that the average gentleman of society has any advantage over the average lady.

THE

GENTLEMAN'S MAGAZINE

JUNE, 1873.

CLYTIE.

A NOVEL OF MODERN LIFE.

BY JOSEPH HATTON.

CHAPTER XII.

ALONE IN LONDON.

O adviser, no protector, no guide, no friend; alone in London. Alone in the great city, alone amidst thousands; alone in the streets; alone when the clocks repeat the hour at midnight.

To the brave man the solitude of a vast city is appalling. What, then, must it be to a simple girl, standing alone, for the first time, in the great Babylon? The desolation of the smitten mariner was comparable in its way to the loneliness of Clytic, though a world dashed its mighty waves at her feet.

Alone on a wide, wide sea,

So lonely 'twas that God Himself
Scarce seemed there to be.

Can you not picture her?

Can you not imagine the dazed anxious face of the wilful beauty?

Can you not see the startled eyes as they meet the great cruel crowd? She waits now and then, as if she waited for the throng to pass by and leave room for her.

Can you not see the sweet face of the country belle, full of surprise and wonder, full of fear and timidity; suffused now and then with hot burning blushes, unsophisticated responses to the rude stare of cads and ruffians?

VOL. X., N.S. 1873.

T T

The

He is not confined to any particular class of society, the cad, though Clytie rarely encountered but one representative of the great lying, sneaking, selfish family. You meet the thing, which pestered Clytie, most frequently west of Temple Bar. He delights to walk in Belgravia. Bond Street and the Row are his special haunts. most despicable form of the cad is the two-legged animal that walks from the hips, with rounded arms and insolent swagger, and seems devoted to the amusement of annoying respectable women and girls who find themselves alone in the West End streets. Poor Clytie! this eye-glassed, stay-laced thing, called a fashionable man; this hawhawing, blue-eyed nonentity, sorely beset her, filling her with fear, and bringing the tears into her eyes. It is true she had been accustomed to admiration in Dunelm, but the rude, vulgar, leering stare of the London cad in stays was a new and terrible sensation to her. It almost frightened her as much as the otter scared Mr. Kingsley's water-baby. I wonder honest men with wives and sisters, honest men who honour their mothers, have not long ago united themselves in a vow to exterminate this creeping vermin of the streets, which is a blot upon manhood and a curse to society.

Alone in London !

Alone, and with everybody against her; this soft-eyed, dimpled beauty of the Cathedral city! Yes, with everybody against her-men because of her loveliness, women for the same reason; both on account of the money she had in her purse. It was not much gold that she brought away from Dunelm ; but many a woman has been murdered for less.

Thousands of arms seemed to be extended towards her, but none to help. Hands clutched at her on all sides: some for her purse, some for her watch-chain, some with intent more base and wicked still.

The great city hemmed her in everywhere with its rush and roar, with its ebb and flow of human life, with its pomp and glitter, with its rags and wretchedness; the great city was all around her, hot and seething, rattling over the streets, shuffling along the pavements, screeching on iron rails above and below her; the great dusty city, hot with the June sun that made a pulsation in the air, and fell in burning beams upon the pavements. London was everywhere. She could not move for it, she could not get away from it. No fields, no brooks, no quiet lanes and corners; brick and stone, stone and brick, shops, cabs, houses, people without end-the great whirling, turbulent, reckless city of cities; the city of love and hate, of poverty and wealth, the world's emporium, the centre of civilisation, the giant