undue compliment--that the retirement of this great artist had "eclipsed the gayety of nations." To nations, then, to his own generation, it was that he owed his farewell; but, of a generation, what organ is there which can sue or be sued, that can thank or be thanked? Neither by fiction nor by delegation can you bring their bodies into court. A king's audience, on the other hand, _might_ be had as an authorized representative body. But, when we consider the composition of a casual and chance auditory, whether in a street or a theatre,--secondly, the small size of a modern audience, even in Drury Lane, (4500 at the most,) not by one eightieth part the _complement_ of the Circus Maximus,--most of all, when we consider the want of symmetry or commensurateness, to any extended duration of time, in the _acts_ of such an audience, which acts lie in the vanishing expressions of its vanishing emotions,--acts so essentially fugitive, even when organized into an art and a tactical system of _imbrices_ and _bombi_, (as they were at Alexandria, and afterwards at the Neapolitan and Roman theatres,) that they could not protect themselves from dying in the very moment of their birth,--laying together all these considerations, we see the incongruity of any audience, so constituted, to any purpose less evanescent than their own tenure of existence. Just such in disproportion as these cases had severally been, was our present problem in relation to our time or other means for accomplishing it. In debating the matter, we lost half an hour; but at length we reduced the question to a choice between Westminster Abbey and St. Paul's Cathedral. I know not that we could have chosen better. The rival edifices, as we understood from the waiter, were about equidistant from our own station; but, being too remote from each other to allow of our seeing both, "we tossed up," to settle the question between the elder lady and the younger. "Heads" came up, which stood for the abbey. But, as neither of us was quite satisfied with this decision, we agreed to make another appeal to the wisdom of chance, second thoughts being best. This time the cathedral turned up; and so it came to pass that, with us, the having _seen London_ meant having seen St. Paul's.