As, during the week which followed the mournful announcement that the _London_ had foundered, we looked each day into the first column of the _Times_, or as country newspapers reached us, we tried more and more vividly to realize how much that list of the drowned meant, and how names that we had read confusedly amidst a mass of others, became eloquent with interest as we caught snatches here and there of the life-history belonging to them. But we have no doubt that there was not one on board whose history was completely destitute of interest and charm, to some few at least, and that tears have been shed for many who were nothing more than plain, humble people, getting an honourable living by the sweat of their brow, and who will find no biographer to tell the unassuming story of their lives. In the scores of shipwrecks that occur every year, the worthy unknown should not be without the sympathy, if they are shut out from the recognition which well-known names immediately demand. Of late years, perhaps, if we may judge from the newspapers, from letters which have reached us, and from interviews with friends of the deceased, there has not often been a wreck in which such a variety of characters had each to act a most solemn part. On board the _London_ there was life beginning and life ending in the aged and the young who were going out to the new land. There was the competence which had come after arduous and successful toil, and there was the poverty whose only capital lay hidden in its hopeful industry: there was the lawyer and the divine, the merchant and the engineer, the man of letters and the rude brawny artisan; the actor and the banker; the experienced traveller and the humble villager from Cornwall. Something of the varied life of the world at large lay mirrored in that vessel that was preparing to steam away from Plymouth. The brief notices of deaths which appeared day after day revealed dark depths of sorrow, into which one was almost afraid to look,--tragedies enacted full of horror unspeakable. Let us glance for a moment at those of whom we know nothing beyond their names, before proceeding to notice those whose position in society and whose well-known histories speedily found biographers. On the 11th inst., lost at sea, on board the steamship _London_, James Thomas, Esq., late of London, formerly of Huddersfield, Yorkshire, together with his beloved wife and two children; also Elizabeth Hartley, for many years a most faithful servant of the above. On the 11th inst., lost at sea, in the steamship _London_, aged 23, John Ruskin Richardson, youngest son of the late John George Richardson, Esq., many years a resident of Sydney, New South Wales. On the 11th instant, in the steamship _London_, in his twenty-first year, Archibald, seventh son of Hellen Sandilands, of 56, Belsize-park, and of the late John Sandilands of Conduit-street.