are enormous; and potatoes double the price that they are in the agricultural districts. To a family fresh from the country, these things appear serious; they have perhaps been used to live in a good-sized house, for which they paid ten pounds a-year; in London they pay twenty for one much less. In summer-time they bought butter for sixpence or sevenpence a pound; each pound generally weighing twenty ounces; here they must pay a shilling or fourteenpence a pound for any thing good, and have but sixteen ounces to the pound. Coal, too, is much dearer than what it is in the midland counties; there they pay eightpence or ninepence per hundred weight; in London, to buy it in small quantities, the price is double. Milk they could have almost for an old song;' often, a pint of the very best for an halfpenny; not half-and-half and sky-blue, but such as the cow had given that fed on cowslips and such sweet grass, that a town-smoked gentleman would almost be tempted to gather a salad out of it. As to fire-wood, every lane, and hedge, and forest-side, abounds with it; and it is wonderful to see what large lumps of dry bread the children will eat after they have been out a few hours to gather their pinafores full of sticks; beside, if you are compelled to buy it, you obtain as much for a penny as will, with care, last a whole week. Potatoes I have known, many a time, to sell for fourpence the peck, or fourteen pence a bushel; not more than a farthing a pound.

'True, greater wages are generally obtained in London than in the country; and those who possess wealth, for the most part, dwell in the suburbs, where they can enjoy either town or country at pleasure.'

Nothing can be truer than this contrast of town and country to the working-class; the most wretched place in the world to the greater portion of the poor is London; and the paradise of the working-man is the country town; so far advanced as to have its mechanic's library, where he can occasionally refresh both body and mind; and its plots of mechanic's gardens, in which he can dig and plant and follow his healthful hobbies in his leisure hours. Mr. Miller's description of the lodger-population of London is not the less true, and is still more curious; it is quite as graphic and less exaggerated than a page of Boz.

In London, the lodger who occupies a first floor, would scarcely deign to speak to the common people who live in the attics. There is as much difference between the habits of the people who all live under one roof, as there is between the pure aristocrat, and the independent and quiet citizen. He who occupies the third-floor is perhaps a mechanic. He comes home regularly at twelve to dine, gives a single knock, is admitted by his poor but clean-looking wife, wipes his feet, and goes up stairs; first and second-floor doors never, by any possible chance, opening in the meantime. Second-floor comes with a double knock; he dines at one or two; his wife is on nodding terms with first-floor. Sometimes they exchange a 'good morning' with each

other; especially if second-floor is not intimate with the common people up stairs. First-floor dines at three or four, if he is a clerk, or holding some situation under government; he gives a regular 'ran, tan, tan,' for they keep a girl, a little, dirty, begrimed wretch; no matter, it is our servant. The ground-floor people, (generally the landlord and family,) if they chance to be at the window, bow and smile to the first-floor; he is such a respectable man; he pays so regular; has a gallon of spirits at a time; and never such beggarly lots as a quarter of a hundred of coals at once,-disgracing the appearance of the house.'

Then, perhaps, there are the children of each floor; first, hair platted, riband behind, and long tails; second very tidy indeed; perhaps they put most of their washing out, and can spare more time to look after their children; third-floor, often a dirty face, and sitting on the top-landing eating bread-and-butter, or pulling the coals out of the cupboard while the mother is working.'

We must here end our extracts. We had marked several other passages, especially on the beautiful scenery which Mr. Miller calls the attention of his London readers to, on the Surrey side of the capital, and which he invites them by thousands to visit; and another on the heartlessness and unsatisfying nature of the crowds which get together in London drawing-rooms, and call it gaiety. We have seldom met with more sound sense and sound philosophy than are embodied in his remarks on this subject; and we are glad to think that the writer has had the discrimination to dive into the cause of the evil, and the boldness to point it out. He is not alone in his discovery, or in his sentiments on that head. In London, as in the country, it is by the domestic fireside, and in the select circle of well-chosen friends, that happiness is to be found.

There are many papers to which we would fain turn the eye of the reader. The sketch of Bonny Bell is one of the most original we have seen in any book. The dashing farmer's daughter, galloping to market on horseback, turning all the heads of the young farmers, marrying the unattractive butcher, going down in the world, and the steps by which she goes down, have many examples in the country, but have been rarely sketched. The story of Mary Gray may be placed besides Geoffery Crayon's Pride of the Village,' but is told with a more natural sentiment. The Old Coachman is excellent; and Railway Travelling is full of humor. The Old Woodman, the Old Fisherman, and the Country Fair, are all good of their kind. The book is, nevertheless, unequal in its interest and truth, and perhaps the more rational on that account. It bears, however, ample evidence that the mind of the author is working right, throwing off the wild extravagance of some of his former papers, and bearing the best fruits of the serious experience of life. We would point out to him one paper

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which he has cruelly marred by a departure from the general good taste of his volume, and that is 'A Stray Chapter.' His remarks on Woman are beautiful; the reverse, given at the suggestion of some shallow fop, is in the very worst style. We would recommend him, by all means, in another edition to strike it out.

We must not dismiss the volume without observing that, like most of Mr. Van Voorst's publications, it is very tastefully embellished. Some of the wood-cuts, as the Cottage on the river-bank in the Old Fisherman; the Village Wedding; the Market Boat; the Room of the Country Justice; and the Moonlight Gibbet Scene in the Haunted House, are particularly beautiful.

Restitution of Decayed Intelligence in Antiquities, concerning the Most Noble and Renowned English Nation, by the Study and Travel of R. Verstegan. London: 1673.

THIS

HIS title hath the true antique sound; our readers will know its genuineness as the antiquary does that of a first brass of one of the twelve Cæsars-by the ring of the metal. There is something so sonorous, so stately in the enunciation of this blazonry,that the veriest novice in literary heraldry would at once pronounce that nothing so euphonous, so magniloquent could be intended to usher into the lists one of those crestless yeomen of these degenerate days, who has left the more congenial work of delving, and endeavours to career his ill-paced and ill-harnessed hack amongst the steel-clad chargers of ancient chivalry. No; we have lost the very sounds which erst awakened us to noble deeds, and we verily believe that even Garter or Norroy themselves would fail to excite any expectation of valorous and gallant exploits in the breasts of the spectators of our literary tournaments, if they should announce the combatants under the plebeian appellations of Pickwick, Oliver Twist, and Sam Slick. We live in the age of little men, little books, ignoble names, and stunted title-pages. In spite of all we hear of the march of intellect, of the growing intelligence of the age; in spite of rail-roads and steam-carriages, yea, even of those intellectual rail-roads and mental steam-carriages which professing to facilitate our progress through the regions of science, do indeed bound over and annihilate the space between ignorance and knowledge, and make both extremes the same; we, who hate penny magazines, and duodecimo cyclopædias, and cabinet libraries, and can read no tracts excepting the quarto tracts of the Cromwellian age; we, who were nourished in our intellectual infancy with the stately folios

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hight, The Polyolbion' of Drayton, the Fairey Queen' of Spencer, the Funerall Monuments' of Weever, the Titles of 'Honour' of John Selden, the Theatre of Honour' of that incomparable master of ceremonies Anthony Favine, and the 'Complete English Gentleman' of that garrulous cavalier Master Henry Peacham, cannot endure the baby duodecimos meanly wrapped in red or blue linen, which in such preposterous fecundity are daily crowding forth from Paternoster Row and the other lying-in hospitals of literary mendicity, nor behold this swarm of ephemera without being painfully reminded of the locusts in Egypt which immediately preceded the day of universal darkness, and which have in all countries subject to their devastation, been the precursors of famine. We are, perhaps, singular on many points we are confessedly so, and our friends do remind us of the fact abundantly, but we look back with veneration to the period when the stream of learning in a deeper current ran though perhaps it did not cover so broad an expanse, when the offspring of literature, though it underwent a longer period of gestation, yet made amends for the lateness of its birth by a vigorous stamina and a healthful longevity; when authors read before, and consequently were read after they wrote; when magazines, reviews, and other periodicals did not exhaust by frequent and continually re-iterated appeals the sap which would otherwise have ripened into the fruits of perennial life. We love the olden time, her men, her manners, and her books; the time when scholars were not fugled into Latin under Hamiltonian drill-serjeants, nor the road of learning pulverized into one level uniformity, and deprived of all its graceful undulations by Macadams; when the portly tomes of divinity once the boast and the solid ornaments of our bookshelves, were neither curtailed of their fair proportions by the child of their own adoption, nor abridged to the vulgar stature by those other children who seek to hide their own conscious littleness by lowering the supereminence of taller men. We revel in the remembrance of her antique customs and her quaint allusions; her obsolete phrases and her racy words convey to our ears a more delightful and heart-stirring music than the most artificial symphony of modern eloquence: they speak of nature and of home. We retire from the verbiage of contemporaneous fine writing, and seek the gentle communion of Sir Thomas Browne, or dear old Tom Fuller, or the quiet musings of that most companionable of all the piscatorian brotherhood, Isaac Walton; or if we indulge a more serious strain of thinking, we dive into the quaint metaphysics of that knight of noble blood Fulk the Greville, or take a yet more sober excursion with Hakewill, in his Apology for God's Providence.' But we have no design to introduce the public at large to an acquaintance with our library: right well we know they could not

sympathize with our books of faded, of by-gone greatness, but rather they would insult over their antiquated, and to speak candidly, somewhat tattered costume. We distinctly remember that one person of no very despicable character for literary attainments, once passed a whole day amidst our tomes, and piteously complained of the destitution of any thing like an amusing book in the whole collection. But what communion could be expected between a reader of Scotch novels, English theological prizeessays, and modern sermons of any nation, and the pages of Milton, Raleigh, and Bacon, to say nothing of Ockham and John Scotus Erigena, who are truly caviar to the multitude' even of professed bookworms? Peace be to the tender sucklings! the publications of the Society, neatly bound in silk, and fastened with a classic tuck for their more easy conveyance in a young lady's reticule, would be far more to their taste! To a kindred soul, untainted with the heretical pravity of the age, a firm believer in the orthodoxy of black letter, a sworn enemy to all new editions, abridgments, and duodecimos, and waging perpetual and unrelenting warfare with all those gilt-edged and red or blue silk playthings, which under the name of Gems of Sacred Poetry, Selections, and Beauties, either of Kirke White, or any other haberdasher of small ware, are in very deed the fogs which plague our whole land, and infest our houses, nay, our very parlours and our bedchambers, in mischievous abundance,-to such an one our treasures will ever be cheerfully open to inspection: amongst them he will find tracts of other times, which contain something less of false religion, and a great deal more of good sense than the tracts for these times commonly do; many books of poesie in prose compiled,' forming a fine contrast to the prosy versification of living bards; treatises, which though discussing the dark night of antiquity administer no inducement to the sleep to which such themes are usually subservient; lives, which may be read in a somewhat less space of time than the usual period of our own life, and which speak as much of the subject as of the author of the biography, and many other specimens of antediluvian authorship of which there are no existing representations since the fatal inundation of letters in the last century. Within our museum, rich with many 'a monument of banished 'minds,' lie intranced, as in a magic cell, the mighty spirits of a by-gone age hushed in profound repose; Aristotelian and Platonist, sceptic and dogmatist, realist and nominalist, sorbonist and molinist, Papist and Protestant, Calvinist, Lutheran, and Arminian, Conformist and Dissenter, Mahometan, Hindu, and some whom Evans, and Bellamy, and Beausobre, nay, even Ephinaius himself has forgotten to enumerate, all enjoying that quiet which in life they knew not themselves, and which they took all imaginable means to prevent others from realising. We look at them, per