being then principally consumed by the middle classes. The very diseases attending this full mode of living were an evidence of the state of national comfort prevailing. Surfeit, apoplexy, scrofula, gout, piles, and hepatitis; agues of all sorts, from the want of drainage; and malignant fevers in the walled towns, from want of ventilation, were the ordinary complaints. But consumption in all its forms, marasmus and atrophy, owing to the better living and clothing, were comparatively unfrequent: and the types of fever, which are caused by want, equally so." We shall fairly confess that we have been much confounded by the dissimilarity of the two pictures; for they probably furnish the strongest instance on record of two historians flatly contradicting each other. The worst of the matter is, that we have in reality few authentic data which can enable us to decide between them. So long as Gregory King speaks to broad facts and prices, he is, we think, accurate enough; but whenever he gives way, as he does exceedingly often, to his speculative and calculating vein, we dare not trust him. For example, he has entered into an elaborate computation of the probable increase of the people of England in succeeding years, and, after a show of figures which might excite envy in the breast of the Editor of _The Economist_, he demonstrates that the population in the year 1900 cannot exceed 7,350,000 souls. With half a century to run, England has already more than doubled the prescribed number. Now, though King certainly does attempt to frame an estimate of the number of those who, in his time, did not indulge in butcher meat more than once a week, we cannot trust an assertion which was, in point of fact, neither more nor less than a wide guess; but we may, with perfect safety, accept his prices of provisions, which show that high living was clearly within the reach of the very poorest. Beef sold then at 1-1/3d., and mutton at 2-1/4d. per lb.; so that the taste of those viands must have been tolerably well known to the hundreds of thousands of families whom Mr Macaulay has condemned to the coarsest farinaceous diet.