Upper Area 140 0 69 The Great Hall 157 0 123 Lower Area 130 0 63 The two Colonnades connecting the divisions, and leading to Gallery-Staircases, each 11 6 Total width of building, river front 126 Total length of building from River to Hungerford-street 475 6 --------------------- THE VILLAGE POOR-HOUSE. By a COUNTRY CURATE. Smith, Elder, & Co. 1832. This little volume claims our attention by the high poetical talent it displays. It professes, moreover, to describe the actual state of feeling amongst the poor, or the labouring body in England--that class of society to whose wants and improvement our humble labours are mainly directed. The author thus beautifully opens his subject:-- Our village has a pleasant look, A happy look as e’er was seen-- Right through the valley flows a brook Which winds in many a flowery nook And freshens all the green. On either side, so clear and white, A row of cottages you see-- And jessamine is clustered o’er The humble trellis of each door, Then left to clamber free And shake its blossoms far and wide O’er all the white-wash’d cottage side. As dying evening sinks away, The old church tow’r, erect and grey, Catches far up the parting light And half grows holy to the sight. But from this description of the village itself the author passes to its inhabitants, and then would prove to us, that this external beauty is but a veil to cover what is in reality a more disgusting place than a charnel-house. For within the village, he says, there is nothing but tyranny and slavery,--pampered luxury on the part of the few, and the most abject poverty on the part of the many. There is not one family, he would show, in those happy circumstances, below wealth but above poverty and dependence--there is not a single industrious contented labourer. All here is misery--the most degrading, unrelieved suffering, and unrepented crime, among the poor; from the rich _few_, there is not to be drawn a single gleam of commiseration or charity to break the horrid gloom. Were all the plagues of Egypt busy at once on the devoted place, the village could not be so loathsome as it is here represented. We are fully prepared to admit the existence of evils among the labouring classes of this country, but we are sure that the state of things represented in this poem has no more foundation in truth than those poetical pictures of rural life which our author, justly enough, pronounces to be _only_ poetical.