Elsewhere will you meet architectural effects more beautiful,—quaint old streets a thousand times more captivating, reaches of river more lovely and more strange,—but nowhere else will you find modern life unrolling in an atmosphere of such beguilement, set in a frame of such large and harmonious beauty. Nowhere else will you find the very poorest in a measure to be envied, since even they, with a little good will and an eye to look about and enjoy, may make something cheerful of their lives by reason of their environment. The perspective of starvation is not an agreeable one anywhere on earth, but surely a dry crust may be not altogether ungratefully munched walking along the quays of Paris, with those broad sweeps of lines and hues of enchantment upon either horizon; and something not unlike a step of delight may be danced along the joyous, noisy “Boul’ Mich’” with an empty pocket, even if one be the victim of the remorseless term-day, or have no prospect but the shelter of the doss-house at night. For there is no squalor in Paris, no griminess, and penury itself is decent, discreet, admirably self-respecting; and even drunkenness, though of a far more perilous character, if we are to believe the newspaper reports, than in London, abstains from the revolting outrages against sight and hearing we are accustomed to in the cities of the British Isles. To be poor in London is to be the poorest of poor devils upon the globe, for there life offers you no compensation. You live in such a slum as the Parisian eye has never gazed upon; the faces around you are sour or bloated, according to temperament and habits. There is no lightness of air, no brilliance of perspective, to distract the eye from the inward contemplation of daily misery, unless you put on your hat and trudge endless miles to get a glimpse of the long, bright boulevard of Piccadilly, or the sophisticated wonders of the Strand. The attractions of these I willingly admit, and own the Strand, on a wet, lamp-lit winter’s evening, to be a beautiful, strange vision of grandeur and diversity. But then how far these all are from the slums, and the way in London is long, and if your pocket is empty, how are you to get on the top of an omnibus to enjoy a change of view?