that drop in to smoke a pipe, and the various tribes of gents and bagsmen on their way home from the city. Let me say a word on our domestic life. When there is so little difference between the majority of men and women, why should the line of demarcation be so severely drawn? We talk very prettily about home, sweet home, and poets sing its love and purity and charms; and a popular picture is that which the artist draws when he groups together the gray-haired grandfather and grandmother, seated by the fire, and father and mother by their side, and brave lads and graceful girls around listening, by the warm light of the lamp, to some tale of manly struggle or Christian chivalry, or lifting up together the glad voice of song. But why should your son or mine, immediately he goes out into the world and leaves the parental roof, become a stranger to all this? If the Englishman’s home be his castle, why should we cast out into the ditch, to lie down and die in its mire, all who are not of the family? Think of the thousands and thousands of young men who yearly come up to town, strangers to every one, and with no chance of getting into female society, except such as they find at such places as the Eagle. These women are not lovelier than you meet with in respectable houses—not better educated nor more correct in their principles; yet, as by natural instinct one sex seeks the society of the other, we condemn our youth to the company of such. Paterfamilias is afraid the young men will pay attention to his daughters. Perhaps the young lady-daughters fancy it to be beneath them to be civil to their father’s young men. Perhaps the young men themselves believe that an honourable connexion is beyond their means, and deliberately pursue a career of vice. In all these cases, in my humble opinion, very serious blunders are involved. The life of a bachelor under the circumstances I here allude to is quite as costly as that of a married man, without the stimulus to exertion which the latter has. Paterfamilias forgets that the young man he fears may be the suitor for his daughter’s hand, though he is poor to-day, may be comparatively rich to-morrow; and the young ladies should remember that it is rather too much to expect that a young man just entering upon life will be able to launch out in the same style as those who for thirty or forty years have been pursuing a successful commercial career. It is our false pride that eats us up,—that makes us sneer at love in a cottage,—that turns our women into cross old maids, and our men into gay Lotharios, very disreputable and, to a certain extent, deliriously gay. I admit that we have much more outside respectability, but is society the better? Have we more true happiness? If Wordsworth is correct, “plain living and high thinking” go together. But our aim is high living, and I fear the thinking is very, very plain in consequence. We nurse up in our midst,