Tom Moore says there is not in the world so stupid or boorish a congregation as the audience of an English play-house. I fear there is some truth in this as regards London. The regular cockney is not a fine sample of the genus homo, in the first place he is very conceited, and when a man is that, it is little that will do him good; in the second place, he thinks only of business and pleasure, he lives well, dresses well, goes to church once on the Sunday, and laughs at new-fangled opinions, and wonders why people grumble, and believes all he reads in the _Times_. If you want to start any successful agitation you must begin it in the provinces. The Anti-Corn Law League had its seat at Manchester, the Reform agitation had its head quarters at Birmingham. The wisest thing done by the United Kingdom-Alliance, was to plant themselves in Manchester rather than in London. Sydney Smith said it required a severe surgical operation to make a Scotchman understand a joke, it is almost as difficult to get a Londoner to understand anything new; he is slow to recognise worth or virtue, and if any of his own connection rise, he exclaims, with the writing-master, who would not believe Newton was a good mathematician, “the fool, he is an hour over a sum in the rule of three.” The truth is we are a city of shopkeepers; and if intellectual pursuits be denied to those engaged in trade, the consequence must be the popular opinion must be that of those who know little else than the business of the shop, and as a consequence a curse will go forth to the remotest corner of the land. Bigotry, prejudice, falsehood, and passion will be rampant and rife, and truth and reason will be trampled under foot. Just as manhood is forming, just as the moral and intellectual parts of our nature are developing themselves, just as life becomes a reality, and glimpses of the work to be done, and of the blessedness of doing it, catch and charm the youthful eye, the victim is compelled to stand behind the counter, and is threatened with beggary if he fail practically to remember that the pursuit of money, to the utter exclusion of aught higher and nobler, is the end for which life is given man. No wonder such a system fearfully avenges itself—that the sensual is exalted—that we meet so little in accordance with principle and truth. Debarred from intellectual pursuits, what awaits our young men but frivolous excitement? Ignorant, with the feelings of our common nature unnaturally aroused—with minds enfeebled by lack of healthy exercise—our middle class—the class perhaps the most important in our land—stands by society in its conventionalism and falsehood and wrong, and we mourn and sigh over giant ills, that we cannot grapple with effectually because we go the wrong way to work.