almost daily along the Strand; and with many other forms of beggary, even less attractive than these. What Felix saw in the streets were not his only studies; he read the newspapers carefully, and not seldom was he amazed at the inequality of things. He found it difficult to understand how, in one shape, a certain thing was held up for public censure and condemnation, while in another shape precisely the same thing (in a worse form perhaps) was quietly tolerated, and even admired. As thus: He read in the papers from time to time accounts of proceedings taken against the publishers and venders of a weekly illustrated sheet, against which it was charged that it contained objectionable pictures. When he saw the illustrations he at once acquiesced in the justice of the proceedings, and decided in his own mind that they pandered to the worst taste, and were calculated to do much harm. But looking in many of the shop windows in the locality of the Strand, he saw pictures infinitely worse in the effect they would be likely to produce than those which were published in the objectionable paper. The portraits and full-length pictures of nearly naked women, taken in every attitude that the lascivious imagination could suggest, and paraded conspicuously in these windows for public admiration, were worse, in their insidious badness, than anything that Holywell Street ever produced. There was no disguise of what are called "female charms" in the pictures; they were displayed to their fullest extent to feed the sensual taste, and neither art nor any useful purpose was served by these degrading exhibitions. On the contrary; they tended to mislead, in their incongruous mixture of worth and shamelessness. For here was an actor deservedly popular; here was a courtesan, deservedly notorious; here was a statesman and a poet, whose names add lustre to the history of the times in which they live; between them a shameless woman, bold and lewd, and almost naked; above _her_, a princess, worthily loved, with her baby on her back, clasping the mother round her neck--a picture which the poorest wife in England feels the happier for looking at, so much of homely love and wifely virtue and sisterly kinship does it suggest; while below was paraded the painted face of a wanton, whose name is shame. In one window of a semi-religious kind, in which the frequenters of the May meetings at Exeter Hall might be supposed to gaze without fear of contamination, the very worst of these lewd pictures were displayed in the company of Bibles, and Prayer Books, and Church Services; an association which, by any sophistry, could not have been proved to be a good one.