element in the degradation of our large towns. They are, however, _pagans_, not of the new, but of the old type: and are chiefly formidable from the squalid wretchedness of a physical character which they have transferred from their mud cabins into our streets and lanes, and from the course of ruinous competition into which they have entered with the unskilled labourers of the country, and which has had the effect of reducing our lowlier countrymen to a humbler level than they perhaps ever occupied before. Meanwhile, this course of degradation is going on, in all our larger towns, in an ever-increasing ratio; and all that philanthropy and the Churches are doing to counteract it is but as the discharge of a few squirts on a conflagration. It is, I fear, preparing terrible convulsions for the future. When the dangerous classes of a country were located in its remote districts, as in Scotland in the early half of the last century, it was comparatively easy to deal with them: but the _sans culottes_ of Paris in its First Revolution, placed side by side with its executive Government, proved very formidable indeed; nor is it, alas! very improbable that the ever-growing masses of our large towns, broken loose from the sanction of religion and morals, may yet terribly avenge on the upper classes and the Churches of the country the indifferency with which they have been suffered to sink. I was informed by Cousin George, shortly after my arrival, that my old friend of the Doocot Cave, after keeping shop as a grocer for two years, had given up business, and gone to college to prepare himself for the Church. He had just returned home, added George, after completing his first session, and had expressed a strong desire to meet with me. His mother, too, had joined in the invitation--would I not take tea with them that evening?--and Cousin George had been asked to accompany me. I demurred; but at length set out with George, and, after an interruption in our intercourse of about five years, spent the evening with my old friend. And for years after we were inseparable companions, who, when living in the same neighbourhood, spent together almost every hour not given to private study or inevitable occupation, and who, when separated by distance, exchanged letters enough to fill volumes. We had parted boys, and had now grown men; and for the first few weeks we took stock of each other's acquirements and experiences, and the measure of each other's calibre, with some little curiosity. The mind of my friend had developed rather in a scientific than literary direction. He afterwards carried away the first mathematical prize of his year at college, and the second in natural philosophy; and he had, I now found, great acuteness as a metaphysician, and no inconsiderable acquaintance with the antagonistic positions of the schools of Hume and Reid. On the other hand, my opportunities of observation had been perhaps greater than his,