I should be sorry to recommend any one to read the novels of Fielding or of Smollet. And yet in one sense they are useful. At any rate, they show how much the England of to-day is in advance of the England of 150 years ago. For instance, take London. It is held that London is in a bad way in spite of its reforming County Council. It is clear from the perusal of Smollet’s novels that a purifying process has long been at work with regard to London, and that if our County Councillors do their duty as their progenitors have done, little will remain to be done to make the metropolis a model city. “Humphry Clinker” appeared in 1771. It contains the adventures of a worthy Welsh Squire, Matthew Bramble, who in the course of his travels with his family finds himself in London. The old Squire is astonished at its size. “What I left open fields, producing corn and hay, I now find covered with streets and squares, and palaces and churches. I am credibly informed that in the space of seven years 11,000 new houses have been built in one quarter of Westminster, exclusive of what is daily added to other parts of this metropolis. Pimlico is almost joined to Chelsea and Kensington, and if this infatuation continues for half-a-century, I suppose, the whole county of Middlesex will be covered with brick.” A prophecy that has almost come to pass in our time. At that time London contained one-sixth of the entire population of the kingdom. “No wonder,” he writes, “that our villages are depopulated and our farms in want of day labourers. The villagers come up to London in the hopes of getting into service where they can live luxuriously and wear fine clothes. Disappointed in this respect, they become thieves and sharpers, and London being an immense wilderness, in which there is neither watch nor ward of any signification, nor any order or police, affords them lurking-places as well as prey.” The old Squire’s complaint is to be heard every day when we think or speak or write of the great metropolis.