unpleasant samples of London that you could offer to a foreigner. Bethnal Green is ragged, squalid, woe-begone, but it is quiet and industrious. Here, there is mingled with the poverty a flaunting, idle, vagabond, beggarly-fine don’t-care-a-centishness. Burkins in hold in Pentonville for his sins assures the chaplain that the wickedness of the New Cut is due solely to the proximity of the “Wictoriar Theayter, that ‘aunt of disypashion and the wust of karackters.” For my part, I think that if there were no such safety-valve as a theatre for the inhabitants of the “Cut,” it would become a mere Devil’s Acre, a Cour des Miracles, a modern edition of the Whitefriars Alsatia; and that the Cutites would fall to plundering, quarrelling, and fighting, through sheer _ennui_. It is horrible, dreadful, we know, to have such a place; but then, consider—the population of London is fast advancing towards three millions, and the wicked people must live somewhere—under a strictly constitutional government. There is a despot, now, over the water, who would make very short work of the New Cut. He would see, at a glance, the capacities of the place; in the twinkling of a decree the rotten tenements would be doomed to destruction; houses and shops like palaces would line the thoroughfare; trees would be planted along the pavement; and the Boulevard de Lambeth would be one of the stateliest avenues in the metropolis. But Britons never will be slaves, and we must submit to thorns (known as “vested interests”) in the constitutional rose, and pay somewhat dear for our liberty as well as for our whistle.