Smuggling, as well as rebellion, profited greatly by the roadless character of England in those days. Mr. and Mrs. Harris, on returning home one night from Heron Court, then the property of their friend Mr. Hooper, had great difficulty in getting over Ringwood Heath, an adjoining waste land, about five miles in length--'the vile heath,' as Mrs. Harris calls it--even with 'the assistance of two servants riding before.' Heron Court now belongs to the Malmesbury family; and the editor, in a foot-note, states that until the beginning of the present century there were no roads but smugglers' tracks across those heaths. They were a favourite place for contraband transit from the south coast; and he mentions that all classes aided in carrying on this traffic. 'The farmers lent their teams and labourers, and the gentry openly connived at the practice, and dealt with the smugglers. The cargoes, chiefly of brandy, were easily concealed in the furze bushes, that extended from Ringwood to Poole, and in the New Forest for thirty miles.' We suspect that the impossibility of carrying on such operations nowadays has had much more to do with their cessation than the improvement in the morality of the age. Look at the customary frauds in making returns to the income-tax, and then say whether the middle-classes are a whit more honest in fiscal matters now than they used to be when smuggling was rife. How vastly London has changed and grown since the last century need not be said, and the contrast between then and now, meets one almost in every page of these lively letters. There was no Rotten-row, or the fashionable rides in the Park, which make so gay a sight now in the summer afternoons; and the whole district north of the Park knew nothing of the noble streets and terraces which now occupy the space. Mrs. Harris speaks with delight, almost rapture, of the sweet rural beauty of a 'ride to Paddington of a July morning.' But with all our knowledge of the change which has come over the British metropolis since that time, it is startling to find that some nameless Dick Turpin or Claude Duval could ply his trade with impunity even within the courtly precincts of St. James's. In February, 1773, Mrs. Harris writes that 'a most audacious fellow robbed Sir Francis Holburne and his sisters in their coach, in St. James's Square, coming from the Opera. He was on horseback, and held a pistol close to the breast of one of the Miss Holburnes for a considerable time. She had left her purse at home--which he would not believe. He has since robbed a coach in Park Lane.' In these letters, too, there is the earliest mention which we have met with of the tiny member of the finny tribe which now confers a greater popular renown upon Greenwich than even its world-famous Observatory or its magnificent Hospital, and which for a generation has caused that place to be the honoured scene of the annual Ministerial banquet at