A

is much better than Golden, for it has trees.* great improvement has been made of late years in this respect in most of the squares; but the two just mentioned together certainly bear the palm. They are all great ornaments to the town, and serve to keep it healthy. In some parts of Italy they have a pretty custom of putting inscriptions over the doors and gateways, both in town and country. I have often thought that mottoes would be an addition both agreeable and useful to the doors of our fine houses at the West End. The spaces over the entrances seem to invite them. The passengers would be amused; and the householder who put up the inscription (for every new possessor should have his own) would feel it a sort of tie on his character. Devices of all kinds are useful in this point of view, except hereditary ones; for those are not a man's own, and remind him of nothing but the antiquity of his family. Once and away, they may give him a just pride or as just a qualm. A curious list of contrasts might be made out between modern lands and the mottoes to their

arms.

The long streets without shops to them, in this part of the town, and with brick houses all built in the same manner, have a strange look to persons who have resided in Italy. In the cities there, the houses vary at every step, and are faced with stucco. The advantage is on the side of the London houses in point

Sir Roger De Coverley lived in Soho Square during his visits to London in his "fine-gentleman days;" but later in life he preferred humbler quarters when in town. When he came up to London to get a sight of Prince Eugene, he lodged in Norfolk Street.ED.

of snugness, especially on the ground floors, which in Italy have the windows barred over with iron, which gives them a prison look. It is impossible also for an Englishman, at least in winter time, to divest himself of the preference due to the snug curtains and carpets all over the house inside, things which do not abound in the south. But in point of architecture and general appearance, there is no comparison. The houses in Italy are on a larger scale, the variety interesting, and the proportions very often beautiful and in high taste. The stucco and marble also suit the blue sky. You see that the houses belong to a country of artists. Nevertheless, give me the West End of my old metropolis with its world of comfort, its firesides, and its fair faces. I flit from drawing-room to drawing-room, delighted with the endless succession of wealth, beauty, and elegance, the music, the books, the graceful sisterhoods, the respectable parents, — in short, with everything except the climate over their heads, and the spleen too often in their faces. What a pity the whole world cannot exchange their advantages with one another!

In Marylebone, Pope went for a short time to school. There was a house and bowling-green there in his time, similar to the one in Piccadilly, which I suppose it succeeded. It was frequented by the best company, bowls at that time being a game justly held in estimation. Sheffield, Duke of Buckingham, was so constant a visitor, that he was said to live there. Marylebone Gardens afterwards became celebrated for the same entertainments as the modern Vauxhall. They existed up to a late period. Chat

terton wrote a cantata for them; a burlesque (if I remember) of the quarrels and amours of the pagan heaven. The Thrales had a house in Hanover Square, where Johnson visited.

The West End of London, for an obvious reason, is of little interest in a classical point of view, compared with other parts of the town. One or two writers like Gibbon do nothing for so great a quarter. Even Covent Garden is not the most inspired ground. The most sacred places are now occupied by the money-changers of Cornhill and the Borough. Of these in my next. But O for the evenings again that I have passed there, especially at a house at the other end of Oxford Street! The N.'s lived there, the most Catholic of Catholics, for their spirit embraced the whole world.* There we should have waked the night-owl with a catch, had an owl been within hearing. The watchman did instead. The solitary passenger who was astonished at our Laughing Trios, was not the less so at the majestic rolling of the organ that would follow it; just emblem of the devotion for all good things which we had in our hearts. There came J. G., a set of airy crotchets in the shape of a man; and H. R. (always ready with his tenor, his joke, and his breathing nod of acquiescence), for whom I shall have another pang in my conscience if I do not write to him (not because he will die, but because he will think my friendship is dead, which it can never be), and C. C., who groaned a hundred times of an evening in the fullness of his satisfaction (I

* The Novellos. See Charles Lamb's letter to Hunt, and the Chapter on Ears in the Essays of Elia. - En.

hope to hear shortly that benevolent grind of his epiglottis); and the G.s' pleasant specimens of humanity; and Kate H., a beauty fit to take coffee with the party in the Rape of the Lock:

"On her white breast a sparkling cross she wore,
Which Jews might kiss, and infidels adore."

And it was as Catholic too as that of Belinda.
Kate was tall, had a fine black head of hair, with
eyes to match, and a face made for a portrait. When
she came home from the play, and sat down in her
long scarlet mantle, showing only her throat and fine
curls, and sparkling smiles, you saw how many eyes
had been looking at her from the pit. A husband
carried her off to a distance, and we never saw her
again, which was unfair: I wonder how these hus-
bands reconcile it to their consciences. C. L. came
there sometimes "to wonder at our quaint spirits,"
with a quainter spirit of his own.
He would put up
with no anthems but Kent's, and with no songs but
Water parted from the Sea. His sister humbly sug-
gested, at a beautiful passage in Mozart, that she
thought there was some merit in that. He would
not hear of it. What was the consequence? Why,
that he got loved by everybody in spite of his in-
tolerance; which, with him, is apt to have more hu-
manity in it than the liberality of other men.

No. IV.

A WALK IN THE CITY.

W

Rursus et urbe frui.- OVID.

Again to enjoy the city.

WHEN I entered the metropolis on my present visit, I lighted with my Wishing-Cap on St. Paul's Cathedral. Could I have fancied a devil with me on so sacred a place, I should have taken myself for Don Cleofas in the novel; for roofs and walls fly open before me, as easily as I fly over them; and I saw in an instant the whole neighborhood, with all that was going on inside the houses. The inhabitants need not be alarmed, as it is not my intention to pursue the likeness between this paper and the Devil on Two Sticks any farther at present. I shall content myself with expressing the agreeable surprise that seized me on observing a little room, the inhabitant of which was nursing an abundance of plants and flowers against the spring. Among them was even an orange tree. The very spirit of the Flora Domestica seemed to be there. Surely, thought I, Nature must love those who have so much love for her. If they have joy, the joy must be doubled; and though they be full of sorrow, there must be still room, as in the cup of the Arabian, for the rose-leaf to swim at top.

At their old place of resort in St. Paul's Churchyard, I used to meet the survivors of the dinner par