Bethnal Green, Somers Town, Clerkenwell, Hoxton, Hackney, Stepney, Bow, Rotherhithe, Horsleydown—places of which the great and titled may read every day in a newspaper, and ask, languidly, where they are,—we need no longer be surprised if the Docks are ignored by thousands, and if old men die every day who have never beheld their marvels. Coming home from abroad often, with an intelligent foreigner, I persuade him to renounce the Calais route and the South-Eastern Railway, and even to abjure the expeditious run from Newhaven. I decoy him on board one of the General Steam Navigation vessels at Boulogne, and when his agonies of sea-sickness have, in the course of half a dozen hours or so, subsided—when we have passed Margate, Gravesend, Erith, Woolwich, Greenwich even—when I have got him past the Isle of Dogs, and we are bearing swiftly on our way towards the Pool—I clap my intelligent foreigner on the back, and cry, “Now look around (Eugène or Alphonse, as the case may be); now look around, and see the glory of England. Not in huge armies, bristling with bayonets, and followed by monstrous guns; not in granite forts, grinning from the waters like ghoules from graves; not in lines of circumvallation, miles and miles in extent; not in earthworks, counter-scarps, bastions, ravelins, mamelons, casemates, and gunpowder magazines—shall be found our pride and our strength. Behold them, O intelligent person of foreign extraction! in yonder forest of masts, in the flags of every nation that fly from those tapering spars on the ships, in the great argosies of commerce that from every port in the world have congregated to do honour to the monarch of marts, London, and pour out the riches of the universe at her proud feet.” After this flourishing exordium—the sense of which you may have heard on a former occasion, for it forms part of my peroration on the grandeur of England, and, if my friends and acquaintances are to be believed, I bore them terribly with it sometimes—I enter into some rapid details concerning the tonnage and import dues of the port of London; and then permit the intelligent foreigner to dive down below again to his berth. Sometimes the foreign fellow turns out to be a cynic, and declares that he cannot see the forest of masts for the fog, if it be winter—for the smoke, if it be summer.