garments have that sooty surface which has nothing in common with the continental costume of labour and privation. It is the hard prose of misery—an ugly and hopeless imitation of respectable attire. This is especially noticeable in the battered and bedraggled bonnets of the women, which look as if their husbands had stamped on them, in hobnailed boots, as a hint of what may be in store for their wearers. Then it is not too much to say that two thirds of the London faces, as the streets present them, bear in some degree or other the traces of alcoholic action. The proportion of flushed, empurpled, eruptive masks is considerable; a source of depression, for the spectator, not diminished by the fact that many of the faces thus disfigured have evidently been planned on lines of high superficial decency. A very large allowance is to be made, too, for the people who bear the distinctive stamp of that physical and mental degradation which comes from the slums and purlieus of this duskiest of modern Babylons—the pallid, stunted, misbegotten and in every way miserable figures. These people swarm in every London crowd, and I know of none in any other place that suggest an equal depth of degradation. But when such exceptions are taken the observer still notes the quantity and degree of facial finish, the firmness of type, if not always its fineness, the clearnesses and symmetries, the modelled brows and cheeks and chins, the immense contribution made to his impression, above all, by the elements of complexion and stature. The question of expression is another matter, and one must admit at the outset, to have done with it, that expression here in general lacks, even to strangeness, any perceptible intensity, though it often has among the women, and adorably among the children, an indescribable shy delicacy. I have it at heart, however, to add that if the English are handsomer than ourselves they are also very much uglier. Indeed I think all the European peoples more richly ugly than the American: we are far from producing those magnificent types of facial eccentricity which flourish on soils socially more rank. American ugliness is on the side of physical poverty and meanness; English on that of redundancy and monstrosity. In America there are few grotesques; in England there are many—and some of them have a high plastic, historic, romantic value. III