I have lying before me a French book, the title of which, translated into English, runs, ’Geography for Young People.’ It is in its eighth edition, and written by M. Lévi, Professor of Belles-Lettres, of History and Geography in Paris. The date of the book is 1850. The Professor in it describes London, and if his pupils ever have, or rather had, occasion to visit our capital, they must have been unable to recognise it from their teacher’s description of it. Among the many blunders he commits, there are some which are excusable in a foreigner, because they refer to matters which are often misapprehended even by natives; but to describe London as possessing a certain architectural feature which a mere walk through the streets with his eyes open would have shown him to have no existence at all is rather unpardonable in a professor who takes on himself to teach young people geography. But what does M. Lévi say? He says: ’In London you never see an umbrella, because all the streets are built with arcades, under which you find shelter when it rains, so that an umbrella, which to us Parisians is an indispensable article, is perfectly useless to a Londoner.’ M. Lévi evidently, if ever he was in London, visited the Quadrant only, before the arcade was pulled down, and thereupon wrote his account of London. Yet he must have looked about a bit, for he tells us of splendid cafés to be met with in every street; the nobility patronize them; ’one of them accidentally treads on the toes of another, a duel is the consequence, and to-morrow morning one of them will have ceased to live.’