It requires great philosophy to get over the effects of City Life. “Let any one,” says Addison, “behold the kind of faces he meets as soon as he passes Cheapside Conduit, and you see a deep attention and a certain feeble sharpness in every countenance; they look attentive, but their thoughts are engaged on mean purposes.” This feeling is perpetuated. Addison remarks of a gentleman of vast estate, whose grandfather was a trader, “that he is a very honest gentleman in his principles, but cannot for his life talk fairly; he is heartily sorry for it, but he cheats by constitution, and overreaches by instinct.” I heard of such a one the other day—A, a city merchant, married his daughter to B. A proposed that A and B should stock the cellar of the young couple with vine—B agreed—A purchased the wine—got a discount—and charged B full price for his share—yet A was rich as Crœsus. I have seen this grasping displayed by city boys. The writer was once accosted by some little children with a request that he would contribute something towards a “grotto,” on his declining any assistance, he was politely informed that he was no good, as he had “got no money.” London abounds with Montagu Tiggs, and a genuine article of any kind in any trade, if by any possibility it can be adulterated, by painful experience we know it, is utterly impossibly to buy. In trade, words have long ceased to represent things. We need not dwell at length on the wrong thus inflicted on the community at large, all feel the minor evils resulting from such conduct, and occasionally we hear of sickness induced, or of life lost,—and for what? merely that Brown may get an extra farthing on the rascally rubbish he sells as the genuine article. I fear these are not times in which we may argue for the abolition of death punishments. Such things as these sadly teach us that in London commercial morality is in danger of undergoing gradual demoralisation—that we are in danger of becoming absorbed in the pursuit of material wealth, careless of the price it may cost—that our standard of morality is not now as it ought to be in a city that boasts its Christian life and light, and that from London the evil circulates all over the British realm.