The gents of to-day are the same. I was amused by hearing of a party of them, connected with one of the city houses, who went into the country one Easter Monday to enjoy themselves; they did enjoy themselves, as all young fellows should, thoroughly, but from their enjoyment they were recalled to a sense of dignity, by a characteristic remark of one of them, as he saw passers by, “Hush, hush!” he exclaimed, “They will think we are retail.” A writer in the _Builder_ remarking the degeneracy of regular cocknies attributes it to the want of good air, the expensive nature of a good education, the sedentary employment of many of them. And no doubt these reasons are the true ones, and of considerable force. Well might Coleridge anticipate for his son as prosperous career as compared with his own. “I was reared In the great city, pent ’mid cloister dim, And saw naught lovely but the sky and stars; But _thou_, my babe, shall wander in the breeze, By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags Of ancient mountains; beneath the clouds Which image in their arch both lakes and shores, And mountain crags, so shall thou see and hear The lovely shapes and sounds unchangeable, Of that eternal language which thy God utters.” This is true, and hence, let us judge leniently of the lad living within the sound of Bow Bells. Nature is the best and truest teacher a man can have—and it is little of nature that the cockney sees, or hears, and feels. He goes to Richmond, but, instead of studying the finest panorama in the world, he stupifies himself with doubtful port; he visits the Crystal Palace, but it is for the sake of the lobster-salad; he runs down to Greenwich, not to revel in that park, beautiful still in spite of the attacks of London on its purity, but to eat white-bait; he takes, it may be, the rail or the steamboat to Gravesend, but merely that he may dance with milliners at Tivoli. The only idea of a garden to a London gent, is a place where there is dancing, and drinking, and smoking going on. And this is a type of his inbred depravity. He has no rational amusements. In the winter time shut up the casinos, and do away with the half-price at the theatres, and the poor fellow is _hors de combat_, and has nothing left him but suicide or delirium tremens. Literary and Scientific Institutions don’t answer in London—even a place like the Whittington Club, where any respectable young man belonging to the middle classes may find a home, is by no means (so I have understood) a success.