But when, in these recent days, the same traveler observes the human life of English streets and homes and public places, he does not perceive so exact a resemblance to the life portrayed in books and pictures. English life seems gentler and better than it was represented forty years ago; manners are freer and more cordial; people are less intemperate; the physical life is much less obstreperous; the topics discussed have a more frequent relation to the higher interests of human nature. The glory of the last generation was held to be Waterloo; the distinction of the present one is a peaceful arbitration. The six-bottle men of Sheridan's time--where are they? Gone, quite gone. _One_ bottle is now almost as unusual as it is excessive. Gone is the coach, with its long train of barbarisms--its bloated Wellers, its coachmen who swallowed "an imperial pint of vinegar" with their oysters without winking, its mountainous landlord skillful in charging, its general horseyness and cumbersome inconvenience. The hideous prize-fight seems finally suppressed. If there are still estates upon which there are family cottages of one room, they are held in horror, and it is an axiom accepted that the owner who permits them to remain is a truer savage than the most degraded peasants who inhabit them. Art, humanizing art, has reached a development which a dreamer of Hogarth's day could not have anticipated for any period much short of the millennium; and not a development only, but a wide diffusion. Chadband--where is he? If he exists, he has assumed a less offensive form than when he ate muffins and sniveled inanity in Mrs. Snagsby's back room. Where are Thackeray's snobs? They, too, have not ceased to be, for the foible which he satirized is an integral part of human nature, which can be ennobled, not eradicated. Strangers, however, do not often observe those violent and crude manifestations of it which Thackeray describes; and there seems a likelihood of the "Book of Snobs" meeting the fate of Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations," which made itself obsolete by accomplishing its purposes. Beer still flows redundant in every part of the British Empire. Nevertheless, there is here and there a person who has discovered how much more can be got out of life by avoiding stimulation. A decided advance must have been made toward tolerance of opinion when men can be borne to honorable burial in Westminster Abbey whose opinions were at variance with those which built and sustain the edifice. Chadbandom feebly protests, but no man regards it. [Illustration: Term Time. (George Cruikshank, 1827.)]