cied him to be sentimental or otherwise. And who has not noticed the infinite mysteries that lurk in the female voice? Who has not felt its witcheries? Who has not trembled as it has poured around him, operating like a spell for good or evil! Who has not marked some voice, harsh, perhaps, and untunable to others, grow soft at its approach, and swell into liquid sweetness, indescribably fascinating? Generally, throughout Italy, the women have not pleasant voices in conversation, especially those who sing most exquisitely. It is in England that the female voice appears to acquire perfection for the intercourse of life. Nowhere else is this daily household music so de

everything else, with different eyes before and after breakfast. When you are hungry, you are savage, and nothing pleases you-you outrage earth and sky, and are angry with the breeze for blowing in your face. But when the hot rolls, coffee, butter, and honey are before you; when you have eaten a certain quantity; when you have sipped your coffee, your good humor returns, you are reconciled with the world, and you recline at your ease, and think of happiness and cigars. On the present occasion, everything around was calculated to please. Before and below us, the Apennines stretched out their arms into a vast amphitheatre of mountains, covered with waving woods,

and thus perhaps spoil their voices; originally, I suspect, none of the sweetest. It is the same in France, and every other country I have visited, save Turkey. Among the Turkish women you hear voices like those you have heard in Englandsoft, gentle, flexible-full of melody and sweetness. Madame B had not, in this respect, been favored by nature; but, such as her powers were, she determined to exercise them to the utmost upon the heart of our gallant friend the captain. But from his round jolly face I could discover no symptoms that any execution had been done upon his heart. In fact, he was too much in love with himself to have much affection to spare for any one else-except his own family, towards whom he was kindness itself.

There is one quality in mountain air which most persons, I dare say, have noticed-it makes one desperately hungry. This confession will, I dare say, lower me many degrees in the estimation of young ladies. But the truth must be told. In spite of Carlotta's voice, in spite of the landscape, in spite of everything, I found myself in possession of so ravenous an appetite that I scarcely knew how to pacify it till we should arrive at the place where we were to breakfast. Imagine me, then, oh, reader! going up to Carlotta, in one of the most romantic scenes in the world, and saying to her, "Are you not hungry, Carlotta?" "Yes, very," was her reply; "but, luckily, I have got some biscuits here in my bag."

She took some out, and gave me two or three; so we went on chatting and eating, to enable me to keep my temper till we reached the little roadside inn, where we all fully determined to make up for lost time. In the garden of the inn a round table had been placed beneath a spreading chestnut tree, which formed a green roof overhead; not the less pleasant because it was studded with ripe fruit which, while waiting, we picked and ate. Here the Milanese, the Dalmatian, and Semler, once more joined our party, and thus assisted us in keeping off the German Swiss, whose company I literally detested. They, therefore, breakfasted at another table by themselves. It is a sad thing to acknowledge that one looks at a landscape, and

canopied by a sky of the most brilliant blue. Close at hand were agreeable faces, and nice, dry, clean turf to recline upon. So as many of us as smoked stretched ourselves on the grass, lighted our cigars, and puffed up clouds of fragrance, which the ladies did not dislike in the open air. The reader will, of course, know what I mean by that drowsy, dreamy state of existence which is induced by smoking after breakfast or dinner. Your whole nervous system is brought into complete harmony. Not a single fibre is too tightly braced, or too relaxed; and, like the opium-eater of Lebanon, you fancy yourself in Paradise, or the Indies. But the happiness of one of our party, at least, was suddenly disturbed by the entrance of a man in military costume, who took a chair, and sat down by himself to breakfast. He wore the Austrian uniform, and appeared to eye us with so much attention that my Milanese friend became alarmed, and turned very pale. He did not doubt that he should be arrested in a few minutes, and marched back towards Milan. His lips, therefore, while they held the cigar, trembled visibly, though he puffed away fiercely in order to hide his agitation. To help him out as far as possible, I talked to him of things indifferent; and, with the aid of my friend the English captain, betrayed him occasionally into a laugh, which, however, was only one of those laughs that pass over the surface of the mind when it is filled with bitterness to the core. The Austrian ate on, occasionally playing with the pommel of his sword, but seldom withdrawing his eyes from us, not even while stirring his coffee. When breakfast was over, he also lighted a cigar, and, taking up his chair, he drew near us, politely requesting to be allowed to join our circle. This was the unkindest cut of all; for my friend the Carbonaro now felt sure it was all over with him, and looked incessantly round, with the utmost anxiety, to see in what direction he could best make a bolt of it. The Austrian, meanwhile, took no notice of his perturbation, but smoked and talked in the phlegmatic manner characteristic of his countrymen. Presently he rose to take his leave, and went away without having diminished the number of our circle.

From the Spectator.

GROWTH OF THE METROPOLIS.

THE Parliamentary Paper No. 614 forcibly calls for reflection on the good and evil likely to ensue from the rapid increase of the capital of the empire. According to this return, which appears under the authority of Mr. Mayne, the Police Commissioner, the following augmentations in houses, streets, and inhabitants, have taken place during the last ten years, within the limits of the Metropolitan Police District; that is, within the limits of a district extending to any place not exceeding in a direct line fifteen miles from Charing

Cross

Population in 1839, 2,011,056; in 1849, 2,336,960: increase of inhabitants in ten years, 325,904. Number of new houses built since 1839, 64,058; number of new streets formed, 1,642; length of new streets, 200 miles. Number of houses building, July 1849, 3,485.

It may be thought that London cannot grow too big; that it may continue spreading round interminably, like the famed banyan tree of the East, every expansion of whose widening circuit yields grateful shade and shelter; or that, as the empire itself has acquired greatness by adding colony to colony and dependency to dependency, so may its capital progress, eating up hamlet after hamlet, vill after vill, and parish after parish, unstintedly. But this would be a delusive forecast of the destiny of the modern Babylon. Like all great consolidations of power, the British capital contains within itself the germs of disintegration. Already it has ceased to be a unity; it is no longer one and indivisible-a compact burgh, of which his worship the mayor can at night close the gates, raise up the portcullis, and carry home in his pocket the keys of the citizens till next morning. It is more of a constellation or cluster of cities, each having its separate district and conditions of existence-physical, moral, and political. The East-end is wholly different from and partly antagonistic to the West-end; on the opposite flanks, separated by the bed of the Thames, are vast masses of population alien to each other in speech, social culture, and occupation; next, at two opposite corners of the vast parallelogram, at the extremities of one diagonal line, are the remote and densely-peopled regions of Bethnal Green and Tothill Fields, while the crossing diagonal has Paddington and St. John's Wood at one end, balanced, and perhaps also partly fed and sustained, by Bermondsey and Rotherhithe at the other end; all these separate locales of inhabitants being nearly as diversely marked and caste as so many distinct nationalities. So that for any oneness of purpose, any concerted action or expression of sentiment or interest, the metropolis has become weaker and less consentaneous in force and outpouring than some of the second-rate or third-rate towns of the kingdom.

A second noticeable element of debility or break-up in the status of the capital, is of the

same nature as that usually held to portend death or disorder in an individual by too copious a flow of blood to the head. That the living streams which daily flood into the city have become too numerous and swollen for it to receive-that the heart is really not large enough for its great body and outlying members are facts patent to all observers. For proof of this oppression on the metropolitan brain, it is sufficient to witness the intensity of action in the central confluence of business and traffic at mid-day; or traverse the adjacent approaches to the whirlpool of the Bank, the Exchange, Insurance-offices, Auction Mart, Capel Court, and the other foci of sale, transfer,

and negotiation, and see the utter confusion, and all but impassable throng of men, horses, and vehicles, that choke up the thoroughfares. For all this pressure and jumble, from Temple Bar to Aldgate Pump, and from Holborn Bars to the India House, relief is immediately required; and on a much wider scale ought provision to be made for future increase. Neither the population nor trade of London is likely to diminish, but largely to augment for years, probably ages, to come. The world is only just entering with unanimity of impulse on the first stages of peaceful development. From the natural growth of the inland trade of the country, from the increase of foreign trade by the progress of industry and capital in the north and east of Europe, in the New World, and in the limitless regions of Australia and the Polynesian Islands, vast accessions must accrue to the crowd and traffic of the capital, for which accommodation must be provided Neither subways below the streets nor atmospheric ways above them would be adequate to meet the contingency; for it is not only that the streets would be too few or too narrow for transit, but the central area of the city itself would be too confined a space for its business transactions; and this difficulty could hardly be more easily met in the city nidus than the insular bounds of Great Britain could be extended.

Therefore this urgency, growing out of the further increase of the trade and population of the metropolis, is likely, by diffusion, to operate a further diversion of its central energies. The precise course the relief needed will take, it may not be easy to foresee. Possibly a new London adjacent to the old may spring up for the aid of its parent; possibly Smithfield or Islington may become the site of a new Bank of England, new Royal Exchange, new India House, or new Jones Loyd and Co., Smith, Payne and Co., or new Colvin and Co., connected with and chiefly managing the trade of the northern and eastern counties; or the foreign commerce of London and navigation of the river may be relieved, as that of Liverpool and the Mersey are likely to be through Birkenhead, by the establishment of an outport nearer to the mouth of the Thames, at Southend, the Naze, or Margate, for which railway communications offer inviting facilities. Whatever direction further progress may necessitate, enough has elevation; to which may be added the auxiliary adjunct of the long peace, riveted on nations by the victory of Waterloo.

Of these, that which is the most patent to observance, and most frequently dwelt upon, is the enormous increase in the ground-rental of the capital, which, within a century, has expanded into gorgeous affluence the patrician families of Cadogan, Portman, Grosvenor, Fox, and Northampton; and East of Temple Bar has enabled those lords of the soil the City Companies, as trustees of the poor, to riot in sumptuous banquets all the year round. Not dwelling on these familiar facts, we may remark that there are chattel interests that have swollen with the great

All interests, however, have not grown with the growth of London. Churches and chapels have multiplied; infant schools, national schools, and schools of the British and Foreign Society, have largely increased; but there has been no marked increase of great charitable, collegiate, or sanatory foundations. Still, the revenues of the Charterhouse, Christ's Hospital, St. Paul's School, Westminster School, and other old endowments, are known to have enormously augmented; and why the objects for which they were intended have not been pari passu multiplied, and what new channels have been found for the dissipation of the surplus incomes accruing, would doubtless open curious avenues for exploration, did time or space permit. The order of clubs too must be passed; indeed, the species or class of interests to which they per

ity. Of this order are the banking firms; though some of these, as Child's, Fuller's, and others, are not of fungous or local growth-they struck their roots early, and with other houses have been fed by provincial and colonial progress, as well as that which is metropolitan. But the big brewers are strictly native-have drawn their nutriment from the soil, and are to the " manner born." Every new street, square, court, or alley, is as certain to create new demands for butts of Barclay and Bevan, Meux and Co., Whitbread and Co., or Hanbury and Co., as of batches of loaves from the bakers', or joints from the butchers'. The booksellers form a progressive and ancient fraternity; of a "Thomas Longman, stationer," a predecessor in the great house of the name, we read that he was fined for not serving the office of sheriff, above a century past. Intimately connected with type is the newspaper interest, which is closely identified with metropolitan demonstrations. In the provinces has been working a similar and almost contemporaneous, though not so potent, an impetus. The Mercury of Leeds, and other old country journals, are the natural adjuncts of the expanding wealth and population of their respective localities. But the great Times is the most impressive fact; allowing for the shrewd ability and untiring vigilance with which it has been conducted for half a century, still its prosperousness may be ascribed, in even a greater degree, to the multiplication of metropolitan people and buildings; for it may be safely affirmed, that not a tenpound or a twenty-pound house is erected that does not bring a customer, or at least a fraction of a customer, to Printing House Square. Indeed, the remark applies to all the magnate interests enumerated, from those of bankers, brewers, and bakers, to booksellers and littérateurs; their rise has been spontaneous, and less of their own shaping of means to ends than of natural causes, as vessels rise by the swell of the tidal flood. Material impulses

too recent and palpable an insertion in the metropolitan polypus to require exposition. So we hasten to a new topic.

The sage Lord Burleigh, much perplexed, shook his wise head, and wondered how London, with its gathering of some 100,000 people, could be "lodged and fed." That ditch, however, has been cleared, and the great difficulty now is, less in feeding even twenty times the population of the Elizabethan age, than in having them thoroughly cleaned and aired. But, in the unlooked-for vicissitude, it is singular to remark how material causes, unaided by human thought and contrivance, have operated to our deliverance. It would naturally have been anticipated, a hundred and fifty or two hundred years past, that the city-that is, the limited compartment within the ancient wallswould by this time have become the greatest concentration of pestilent venom, squalor, and populousness, imaginable. How opposite the actual result!-as superb and salubrious, more open, and less densely peopled, than any part of the metropolis! How could anybody have foreseen that the population would be fewer now than at the commencement of the last century, and that narrow, filthy streets, courts, and alleys, would be replaced by spacious areas, offices, Manchester warehouses, and noble public edifices? Yet so it is. In 1700, the city of London within the walls contained 139,000 inhabitants; in 1750, 87,000; in 1801, 78,000; in 1821, 58,400; in 1841, 54,626. So that the citizens have been undergoing a gradual displacement or extrusion outwards from the centre towards the circumference, to make way for mercantile and shipping conveniences, for dock-houses, clearinghouses, electric-telegraph houses, and other needs of commerce, science, and riches.

And the end is not yet come; there must be further evictions, and further local improvements, to meet growing wants. That which seems most urgently to press, is the disposal, living and dead,