The date of publication is not given; but internal evidence proves the Opuscule to have been written during the latter part of the reign of George the Second; and in the copy I now possess, and which I bought at a “rarity” price, at a sale where it was ignorantly labelled among the “_facetiæ_”—it is the saddest book, perhaps, that ever was written—in my copy, which is bound up among some rascally pamphlets, there is written on the fly-leaf the date 1759. Just one hundred years ago, you see. The work is anonymous; but in a manuscript table of contents to the collection of miscellanies of which it forms part, I find written “By Tom Legge.” The epigraph says that it “is printed for the author, and is to be sold by T. Legg, at the Parrot, Green Arbour Court, in the Little Old Bailey.” Was the authorship mere guess-work on the part of the owner of the book, or was “Tom Legge” really the writer of “Low Life,” and, if so, who was “Tom Legge?” Mr. Peter Cunningham, or a contributor to “Notes and Queries,” may be able to inform us. I have been thus particular, for a reason: that this thin octavo is one of the minutest, the most graphic—and while in parts coarse as a scene from the “Rake’s Progress,”—the most pathetic, picture of London life a century since that has ever been written. There are passages in it irresistibly reminding one of Goldsmith; but the offensive and gratuitous coarseness in the next page destroys _that_ theory. Our Oliver was pure. But for the dedicatory epistle to the great painter prefixed, and which is merely a screed of fulsome flattery, I could take an affidavit that “Low Life” was written by William Hogarth. And why not, granting even the fulsome dedication? Hogarth could have more easily written this calendar of Town Life than the “Analysis of Beauty;” and the sturdy grandiloquent little painter was vain enough to have employed some hack to write the prefatory epistle, if, in a work of satire, he had chosen to assume the anonymous. Perhaps, after all, the book was written by some clever, observant, deboshed man out of Grub Street, who had been wallowing in the weary London trough for years, and had eliminated at last some pearls which the other swine were too piggish to discern. There, however, is “Low Life.” If you want to know what London was really like in 1759, you should study it by night and study it by day; and then you may go with redoubled zest to your Fielding, Smollett, and Richardson, as one, after a vigorous grind at his Greek verbs, may go to his Euripides, refreshed. From this thin little octavo I need not say I borrowed the notion of “Twice Round the Clock.” I chose a week-day instead of a Sunday, partly for the sake of variety, partly because Sunday in London has become so decorous as to be simply dull, and many of the hours would have been utterly devoid of interest. I brooded fitfully over the scheme for many months. At first I proposed to take my stand (in imagination) at King