to all the world apparently an idle and unconcerned spectator, how his fancy may be charmed, his sensibility awakened, his emulation excited, and his patriotism warmed by the recollection, that here in this alley lived a poet; there in that lane a great man died in want and sorrow; here in this street another great man surmounted difficulties that to weaker minds would have been insurmountable; and here in this square lived the friend of his country and of his kind, whose name is a household word of love and admiration.
To the man who strolls through London in this spirit, the great city becomes, indeed, a world of itself, and he may travel over it with more delight and instruction than many gather in the whole of Europe, by railroads, remembering nothing but that they have gone over a certain number of leagues, and seen a certain number of capital cities, and returning home again with the same quantity of ideas with which they set out.
The inhabitant of this great city, who looks a little deeper than the surface of things, need never lack amusement in his leisure hours. He has only to extend his map before him, and consider the various tribes and nations who inhabit his little world, and then take a journey among them, and study the difference of their manners, appearance, mode of life, and even language, and he will be surprised at the immense variety. There is scarcely more difference between Englishmen and Frenchmen than there is between the inhabitants of St. James's and Whitechapel, St. Giles's and Spitalfields, Islington and Gravel Lane: and then the history of those various regions-their separate laws, religions, characteristics, occupations, amusements: why, it is like studying the geography of a continent!
What a fearful romance is a great city! Could we get at the secrets of each house, whether of the past or the present, what pictures of human strife, misery, cruelty, self-immolation, madness, and despair, we might unfold! How many, too, of a brighter aspect we might discover ;--pictures of ardent struggle for the right, of patient suffering, of virtue strong amid temptation, of unwearying benevolence, and of Christian loving-kindness! But without endeavouring to penetrate so far, we purpose to make a few journeys of discovery through some of the principal thoroughfares or arteries of this "mighty heart of England;" noting, as we pass, the various. memorabilia of each spot, conjuring up reminiscences of the great and the good, the wise and the witty of former ages; remarking the physical changes each spot has undergone, and comparing the elegance