The laws in Holland against nocturnal disturbers of the peace are very severe. A few months before I was in Amsterdam, two young gentlemen of family and fortune had been condemned to pay ten thousand florins for having, when “flushed with the Tuscan grape,” rather rudely treated two women of the lower orders. The night police of Holland would form an excellent model for that of England. The watchmen are young, strong, resolute and well appointed, but annoying to a stranger; for they strike the quarter-hour with a mallet on a board; which disturbs his repose, unless he is fortunate enough to sleep in a back room, or until he becomes accustomed to the clatter. Midnight robberies and fires very seldom occur: to guard against the spreading of the latter, there are persons appointed, whose office it is to remain all day and all night in the towers or steeples of the highest churches, and as soon as they discern the flame, to suspend, if it be in the day, a flag; if in the night, a lantern towards the quarter of the city in which it rises, accompanied by the blowing of a trumpet. This vigilance, and the facility of procuring water in summer, the natural caution of the people, and their dread of such an accident, conspires to render it a very rare visitor. An average calculation of fires which occur in London, where a regular account of all such accidents are registered, by each fire insurance company having an establishment of firemen and engines, may be collected from the register of one year, commencing from Michaelmas 1805, viz. three hundred and six alarms of fire attended with little damage, thirty-one serious fires, and one hundred and fifty-five alarms, occasioned by chimneys being on fire, amounting in all to four hundred and ninety-two accidents. The English fire insurance companies calculate on an alarm of fire every day, and about eight serious fires in every quarter of a year. This is a frightful estimate, and when it is considered, that scarcely a fire of any material extent has been known in the memory of man to have broken out in either of the universities, or in any of the inns of court, where it would be most likely they would occur, on account of the frequent carelessness of the inhabitants, little doubt can remain on the minds of any one, that infinitely the greater number of fires which happen are the fatal consequences of diabolical design.