Stand on the steps of the Albert Memorial and feast your gaze on the woody vistas of Kensington Gardens; or, from the suspension bridge of fair St. James's Park, look over the water to the up-piled, towering white palaces of Whitehall; or, without exertion at all, lie down amongst the sheep in the wide green fields of Hyde Park, and listen to the hum of the traffic. Hyde Park's verdurous carpet is shot in its season with the golden lustre of the buttercup, dotted with the peeping white of the timorous daisy, and spangled with the flaunting, extravagant dandelion. Every tree is in spring a gorgeous picture, and every thorn bush a bouquet of fragrant flower. As for London's outside suburbs, no English town can show such charming variety of wood and meadow, of hill and plain. Smiling uplands and blooming slopes; bushy lanes, flowered hedges, and crystal streams; cottages overgrown, according to the season, with honeysuckle, roses, and creeping plants of gorgeous varying hues; smooth green lawns bedecked with flowers; bracken and woods upon the hills; scampering rabbits, scattered meditative cattle, placid sheep, singing birds, swifts and swallows, rooks high sailing o'er tufted elms; and, above all, the sweet, blue, cloudless, southern sky;--all these may be found on a fine summer's day within an easy cycle-ride in any direction from London. Where shall we find nobler views than those exposed from Muswell's woody slopes, or Sydenham's stately terraces; from happy Hampstead, or haughty Highgate; from rare Richmond, or, best of all, from glorious Leith? Where are sweeter woods than those of Epping or Hadley? Where such glades as at Bushey or Windsor? Where so sweet a garden, or so gracious a stream to water it, as lies open to the excursionist in the valley of the Thames between Maidenhead and beautiful Oxford? To hear the lark's song gushing forth to the sun on Hampstead's golden heath, to see the bluebells making soft haze in the Hadley woods, to watch the children returning through Highgate to their feculent rookeries laden with the fair bloom of hawthorn hedges, to lie on Hyde Park's soft green velvet, is to bring home the knowledge to our tarnished hearts that even this city of fretful stir, weariness, and leaden-eyed despair, might be sweet and of goodly flavour--that even London's cruel face might be made to beam upon all her children like a maternal benediction, if they were wise enough to deserve and demand it! But-- Mammon is their chief and lord, Monarch slavishly adored; Mammon sitting side by side With Pomp and Luxury and Pride, Who call his large dominion theirs, Nor dream a portion is Despair's. The wealth and the poverty! the grandeur and the wretchedness! Sir Howard Vincent, a Conservative M.P., lately told his Sheffield constituents, after a round of visits paid to "almost every state in Europe," that--