his privilege and pleasure to visit the extremest limits of his vast dominions, and leave some beneficial traces of his kingship there. The name PETERSBURG, whose Teutonic character it is impossible to ignore, indicates the civilisation of a Sclavonic country by an emperor whose early training was received from a people of German blood and breed; while CONSTANTINOPLE recalls the momentous change which took place in the centre of gravity of the European world, when the declining empire of the Roman Cæsars was about to become Greek in its principal site, as it had long been in its dominant culture. The streets of great cities, as one may see prominently in Paris, in their designations often contain a register of the most striking events of their national history. Genuine names of streets in old cities are a historical growth and an anecdotal record, which only require the pen of a cunning writer to make them as attractive as a good novel. London, in this view, is particularly interesting; and Emerson, I recollect, in his book, _How the Great City grew_ (London, 1862), tells an amusing story about the great fire in London, which certain pious persons observed to have commenced at a street called PUDDING LANE, and ended at a place called PYE CORNER, in memory of which they caused the figure of a fat boy to be put up at Smithfield, with the inscription on his stomach, “This boy is in memory put up for the late fire of London, occasioned by the sin of gluttony, 1666.” Many a dark and odorous close in Old Edinburgh also, to men who, like the late Robert Chambers, could read stones with knowing eyes, is eloquent with those tales of Celtic adventure and Saxon determination which make the history of Scotland so full of dramatic interest; while, on the other hand, the flunkeyism of the persons who, to tickle the lowest type of aristocratic snobbery, baptized certain streets of New Edinburgh with BUCKINGHAM Terrace, BELGRAVE Crescent, GROSVENOR Street, and such like apish mimicry of metropolitan West Endism, stinks in the nostrils and requires no comment. But not only to grimy streets of reeking towns, but to the broad track of the march of the great lines of the earth’s surface, there is attached a nomenclature which tells the history of the adventurous captain, or the courageous commander, who first redeemed these regions from the dim limbo of the unknown, and brought them into the distinct arena of cognisable and manageable facts. In the frosty bounds of the far North-West, the names of MACKENZIE, MACLINTOCK, and MACLURE proclaim the heroic daring that belongs so characteristically to the Celtic blood in Scotland. But it is in the moral triumphs of religion, which works by faith in what is noble, love of what is good, and reverence for what is great, that the influence of history over topographical nomenclature is most largely traced. In ancient Greece, the genial piety which worshipped its fairest Avatar in the favourite