and the rattling of tongues. I rejoice at last to find London _en deshabille_--I can then do as I please without any fear of losing my character as a fashionable man. I consider that I can in London extract more amusement in a given quantity of ground than at any other place. A street will occupy me for a whole day: with an indifferent coat, and nothing but silver in my waistcoat pocket, I stop at every shop-window and examine every thing. Should it so happen that the prices are affixed to every article displayed, I make it a rule to read every one of them. I know therefore when Urling's lace is remarkably cheap, the value of most articles of millinery, the relative demands for boots, shoes, and hats, and prices of 'reach-me-downs' at a ready-made warehouse. At a pawn-broker's shop-window I have passed two or three hours very agreeably in ascertaining the sums at which every variety of second-hand goods are 'remarkably cheap,' from a large folio Bible as divinity, flutes and flageolets as music, pictures and china as taste, gold and silver articles as luxury, wedding rings as happiness, and duelling pistols as death. I could not of course indulge in these peripatetic fancies during the season without losing caste, but there is a season for all things." * * * * * "Talking of pictures, by the way, what a marvellous falling off is there in Wilkie!--a misfortune arising, as I take it, from a struggle after novelty of style. There is a portrait of the King by him in Somerset House Exhibition, like nothing on earth but a White Lion on its hinder legs, and there was one a year or two since of George the Fourth in a Highland dress--a powerful representation of Lady Charlotte Bury, dressed for Norval. Look at that gem of art, his Blind Fiddler, now in the National Gallery, or at his Waterloo Gazette, or at the Rent Day, and compare any one of them with the senseless stuff he now produces, and grieve. His John Knox--ill placed for effect, as relates to its height from the ground, I admit; but look at that--flat as a teaboard--neither depth nor brilliancy. Knox himself strongly resembling in attitude the dragon weathercock on Bow steeple painted black. Has Wilkie become thus demented in compliment to Turner, the Prince of Orange (colour) of artists? Never did man suffer so severely under a yellow fever, and yet live so long. I dare say it is extremely bad taste to object to his efforts; but I am foolish enough to think that one of the chief ends of art is to imitate nature as closely as possible. Look, for instance, at Copley Fielding's splendid drawing in the Water Colour Exhibition, of vessels in a gale off Calshot; and certainly I have never yet seen any thing either animal or vegetable at all like the men, women, trees, grass, mountains, which appear in Mr. Turner's works.