The public museums and picture-galleries are made, not for the common people of the seething slums, but for the modified Minervas of the genteel suburbs. These are the legatees of the public philanthropists. That which is given for the "elevation of the masses" tends in practice to elevate nothing except the already tilted tips of their particularly cultured noses. The benevolent Croesus produces no happiness by his benefaction, except that which these ladies derive from the admiring contemplation of their refined superiority. What the common people want is the glitter of spectacle, the intoxication of beauty and grace, of music and dance; the sensation of light and brightness and stirring movement. The wisest thing to do with appetites so old-established and deep-rooted is, not to suppress, but to guide them. Obstruct them, and they will run into dark and dirty channels out of sight; recognise and cultivate them in the clear light of day, and they may produce in every town even better sources of amusement than Earl's Court. LONDON GHOSTS I pass the populous houses In terrace or street or square, I hear the rattle of chariots And the sound of life on the air; And up at the curtained windows, Where the flaming gaslights glow, I see 'mid the flitting shadows Of the guests that come and go, The paler and dimmer shadows Of the ghosts of the Long Ago. CHARLES MACKAY. Once upon a time, as the charmed books tell, there was a mountain covered with stones, of which each particular flint or pebble had been, "upon a time," a live and sentient man or woman. The stones lay, with no attribute of life except a power to appeal in such wise to passers-by as to compel them to remain. But there came, one happy day, a beauteous maiden with a pitcher full of the Water of Life, and she, sprinkling the precious fluid over the stones, transformed them again into animated creatures of flesh and blood--"a great company of youths and maidens who followed her down the mountain." As I take my walks in London-town, I think of that story and long for a pitcher of the magic Water of Life. For if imagination may trace the noble dust of Alexander till he find it stopping a bung-hole, and if, as biologists tell us, the whole of our mortal tissue is unceasingly being shed and renewed, every brick and stone in London pavement, church, inn, and dwelling-house must have in it some part of human greatness; for the flower of Britain's brain and valour, the heroes of her most glorious service and achievement--poets, philosophers, prelates, princes, statesmen, soldiers, scientists, explorers--the greatest of those who have "toiled and studied for mankind," have lived in London.