It is the height of the London season, and all the great town is filled with the pomp and glitter of high life. Everything looks bright, even poverty has a smile. The beggar is in clover, and the wretched are at least warm. There are no snowstorms, no cold cutting winds to torture the body and make cheerless hearths still more dismal. London wears her fairest smiles; the sun with one broad depth of light clasps the great world in a fond embrace. The great town is a whirl of life. Royalty, nobility, commonalty, roll along the glowing thoroughfares in glitter of gold and silver. The Thames is alive with pleasure-boats, and the steamers go skimming along past the Houses of Parliament, where the business of the nation is going on despite those everlasting reform debates, and that continual stream of talk which flows from lip to pencil, from short-hand notes to type, and stares us in the face every morning in long columns of print that are never read from beginning to end, except by those professional readers who corrected them in the garish glare of the gas when we were all abed. It is the gay time of the year entirely, for the rich more particularly, for beauty, for the young commencing their first season; it is the gay time of the year for those dashing gentlemen on prancing horses, for those blooming ladies in the open carriages; those loungers in the parks; for artists whose pictures are marked “sold” in the Exhibitions; for opera and theatrical people in the full tide of success; for West End tradesmen and hotel-keepers; for strolling musicians; for everybody in fact; the hot, gay, bustling, brilliant London season. There was a time, at this period of the year, when Richard Tallant rode about amongst the best of those gallants at Tattenham Corner; and when Mr. Gibbs wore the lightest of light gloves and the tightest of fancy boots that you would see in all the park. Christopher Tallant too, in his cut-away coat and checked trousers,--he had stood by those railings, in the sunshine, to see his fine son pass by. The Right Hon. Lionel Hammerton had many a time and oft been in the midst of that glittering stream of humanity. Surely all this pomp and pageantry cometh not so soon again after that financial earthquake which swallowed up so many heaps of gold and houses and horses and carriages! Does anything ever make any change in that magnificent show of national wealth in the London season? Do all those railways over the house-tops and under the houses, spanning streets, and burrowing beneath the cellars--do they make any difference to those everlasting rows of cabs and ’busses and carts and carriages, and the blocks in Fleet Street and Ludgate Hill? Does anything ever alter the social aspect of London, the busy, bustling, gorgeous, golden, seething aspect of the streets?