correspond in shape and size with eight hundred other receptacles devoted to study, refreshment, and recreation. If I gazed from a window, or stood at a doorway, I should see hundreds of other windows, and hundreds of other doorways, that matched mine in relative position and design. I should look down upon the same infant shrubs, and the same even, level walls, or up at the same long, level parapets, without break, the same regular army of chimney-pots, without variety,—until I should feel as if I had settled in a fashionable penitentiary, to feed upon monotony for the rest of my days. My dreams at night would probably be a mixture of the past and the present, of my old tastes and my new sufferings. The builder, whose trowel seemed ever ringing in my ears, would dance over me in hoops and patches; and the whitewasher, whose brush seemed always flopping above my head, would be mixing his composition in my favourite punch-bowl. My old books, my old prints, my old china, my old furniture, my old servants, would pine away in such a habitation; and I should have to surround myself with fresh faces and fresh voices, according to the latest model. Finally, I should die of a surfeit of stucco, and be the first lodger entered in the records of the adjoining bleak, unfinished cemetery. If I have little sympathy with those people who dwell in such tents as these,—who neither belong to the town nor the country,—who hang upon the skirts of London in mushroom suburbs that blend as inharmoniously with the great old city as a Wandsworth villa would blend with Rochester Castle,—I am totally unable to understand the character of those other people whose love for the modern carries them even farther than this, and who take a pride in planting damp and comfortless homes in the very centre of wild, unfinished neighbourhoods. Who are they? Have they human form and shape, with minds and hearts; or are they, as I have often suspected, merely window-blinds? If they are not policemen and laundresses in charge of bare walls and echoing passages; if they are not hired housekeepers put in to bait the trap, and catch unwary tenants; if they are not restless spirits, who, for an abatement of rent, are always willing to lead the advanced posts in suburban colonization,—whence springs that singular ambition which is always anxious to be literally first in the field, and the oldest inhabitant in a settlement of yesterday? Surely, there can be little pleasure in living, for months, amongst heaps of brick-dust, shavings, mortar and wet clay; in staring at hollow shops that are boarded up for years until they are wanted, and at undecided mansions which may turn out to be public-houses; or in being stared at, in a tenfold degree, by rows of spectral carcases and yawning cellars? There can be little pleasure in contemplating cold stucco porticos of a mongrel Greek type, that crack and fall to pieces in rain and frost; or gaping gravel-pits; or stagnant ponds; or lines of