coaches,' by the footways on either side of the streets; and he explains to his 'dearest Gedike' the mysteries of giving the wall. He thinks London better lighted than Berlin (which implies little short of Cimmerian darkness in that centre of civilization!), and he waxes sorrowful over the general evidence of dram-drinking and the sale of spirituous liquors. 'In the late riots [i.e. the Gordon Riots of 1780], which even yet are hardly quite subsided, and which are still the general topic of conversation, more people have been found dead near empty brandy-casks in the streets, than were killed by the musket-balls of regiments, that were called in.' Another thing which strikes him as foreign to his experience is the insensibility of the crowd to funerals. 'The people seem to pay as little attention to such a procession, as if a hay-cart were driving past.' Among more pleasurable novelties, are the English custom of sleeping without an eiderdown, and the insular institution of 'buttered toast,' which, incredible as it may sound, appears to have been still an unknown luxury in the land of Werther. * * Another of his remarks is of special interest in our day:-- 'That same influenza, which I left at Berlin, I have had the hard fortune again to find here; and many people die of it' (the italics are ours). Elsewhere he says that the Prussian quack Katterfelto--Cowper's= ```'Katerfelto, with his hair on end. ```At his own wonders wondering for his bread,'= whose advertisements were then in every paper, attributed the epidemic to a minute insect, against which, of course, he professed to protect his patients. Walpole's correspondence contains references to the same visitation. It was, he writes, 'universal,' but not 'dangerous or lasting.' 'The strangest part of it,' he tells Mann in June, 'is, that, though of very short duration, it has left a weakness or lassitude, of which people find it very difficult to recover.'