I was constantly meeting in London evidences of the miserable condition of the poor. Though there is a law forbidding street begging, it cannot prevent the poor wretches from asking for bread. I was struck with the character of many of the beggars that accosted me, so unlike those I had been accustomed to meet. I had just come from Italy, where the whining tone, pitiful look, and drawling “me miserabile "fame!" "per carita!" and the ostentatious display of deformed limbs, had rendered me somewhat hardened to all such appeals. But here it was quite different. Men of stout frames, upright bearing, and manly voices, would tell me in a few plain words that they were out of work, and that their families were starving!

One pleasant afternoon, as I was strolling up Ludgate Hill, filled with the multitude, I saw a sight I shall never forget; it even arrested the Londoners, accustomed as they are to all kinds of misery, and a group was collected on the walk. Two children, a boy and a girl, the latter I should judge about eight and the former five or six years of age, sat on the flagging, pressed close against the wall, wholly unconscious of the passing multitude.

In their dress, appearance, and all, they seemed to have been just taken from some damp, dark cellar, where they had been for months deprived of light and almost of sustenance. Their clothes were in rags, black, damp, and ready to drop from their crouching bodies; their cheeks were perfectly colorless, as if bleached for a long time in the dews of a dungeon, and the little boy was evidently dying. How they came there, no one could tell; but there sat the sister struggling feebly to sustain her sinking brother. The poor little fellow sat with his head waving to and fro, and his eyes closed, while his sister, to whom some one had given a morsel of bread, was crowding the food into his mouth, conscious that famine was the cause of his illness. The spectators, moved by the touching spectacle, rained money into her lap; but she did not even deign to pick it up, or thank them, but, with her pale face bent in the deepest anxiety on her brother, kept forcing the bread into his mouth. The tears came unbidden to my eyes, and I also threw my mite of charity into her lap and hastened away. Oh! how strange it is that men will roll in wealth, and every day throw away what would make hundreds hap

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py, and yet feel no reproaches of conscience for their acts! We hear much now-a-days of the horrors of war; but there is no battlefield which exhibits such woe, and suffering, and mortality, as the streets, and lanes, and cellars of London. Even our preachers are on the wrong track in their efforts to ameliorate the condition of our race. It is not war, nor ambition, nor intemperance, nor any of the great vices so openly condemned, that lies at the bottom of human misery. It is covetousness the thirst for gold, which fills the church too much, as it does the world-aye, so much that it cannot be touched by the hand of discipline-that makes our earth a place of tears. These very vices, against which such anathemas are hurled, grow out of this very covetousness, that is treated as an imperfection rather than a crime. The place that Christ gave it no one dare now give it, and man is left to mourn in poverty and want, and all the hateful passions of the wretched left to rise up in rebellion and scorn against the heartless religion, that condemns their vices and urges them to repentance, while it leaves them and their children to starve. The church," par excellence, of England may treble her prelates and her incomes, build countless cathedrals, and pray for the salvation of the world till doomsday; but so long as she robs the poor and neglects the physical condition of the suffering, she will pray to a deaf God. "To visit the widow and the fatherless in their distress" is one of the chief duties of religion, and yet the Church of Eng'and never does it: on the contrary, she sends the tithe collector in her place. But I have not yet given a general description of London. Well, this city of more than a million of inhabitants occupies about 1,400 square acres packed with houses. It is about eight miles long and between four and five broad; so that, you see, Harlem Island will have to be packed pretty close before New York equals London in its population. It is divided into West End, occupied by the noble and wealthy; the City Proper, embracing the central portion, which constituted old London; the East End, devoted to commerce and trade, and business of every kind, and hence filled with dust and filth; Southwark, made up in a great measure of manufactories and the houses of the operatives; and Westminster, containing the royal palace, parks, two Houses of Parliament, and the old Abbey. There are two hundred thousand houses in this mammoth city, eighty

squares, and ten thousand streets, lanes, rows, &c.

The bridges, to which I referred in my former article, constitute one of the chief beauties of London. There are six of them, and magnificent structures they are. A suspension. bridge is also in contemplation; and then there is Thames' Tunnel, the wonder of the world, of which I will say something more by and by. Of these six bridges, New London is by far the finest. Vauxhall, about seven hundred feet long, is made of cast iron, and composed of nine arches of seventy-eight feet span. Westminster is of stone, over a

thousand feet long, and cost nearly $2,000,000. Blackfriars is a thousand feet in length, and has nine arches. This is also of stone. Southwark is of cast iron, and though nearly seven hundred feet in length is composed of but three arches, the middle one being two hundred and forty feet span, the largest in the world. The effect of this central arch is beautiful, especially when a whole fleet of boats is beneath it and a whole crowd of people streaming across it. The New London, which has taken the place of the Old London Bridge, is indeed a noble structure It is built of Scotch granite, and goes stepping across the Thames in five beautiful arches, completing this wonderful group of bridges, the like of which no city in the world cau furnish. It cost seven and a half millions of dollars, while the six together were built at the enormous expense of over fourteen and a half millions. Across them is a constant stream of people, and a hundred and fifty thousand are supposed to pass New London alone daily. One is amazed the moment he begins to compute the enormous wealth laid out on public works in this great city. The finest buildings it contains are St. Paul's Cathedral, Westminster Abbey, and Buckingham Palace. There are other magnificent buildings, but these are the most prominent. St. Paul's is a noble structure, and as you stand under the magnificent dome, it seems higher than that of St. Peter's, in Rome. The grand scale on which everything in the latter is built, deceives the eye when attempting to measure any one object in particular. But the dome of St. Paul's is so much larger in proportion to other parts of the building, that you look at it almost as if it stood by itself. Around the walls are monuments to the dead warriors, statesmen, &c., some of them being fine specimens of sculp

ture.