while writing his reminiscences that a life of my late brother editor would be published. I learn that no such work is in contemplation. "With a Show in the North" is not only a sketch of Mark Lemon's career, but it is the only account of the modern "Falstaff" likely to be published. The work includes Mark Lemon's adaptation of the story of the fat knight, and should be valued on this account, to say nothing of the ballad-maker's last song set to music, and John Tenniel's picture of his late chief. I notice several additions to the original papers.

THE most distinguished of my contributors a hundred and twenty years ago thought the arm-chair of the Mitre Tavern the seat of the highest human felicity; and in the course of my career I have passed MSS. from the pens of some of my "most eminent hands" extolling the pleasure of travelling by post-chaise with four horses along a turnpike road at fifteen or twenty miles an hour, and still later of travelling in an arm-chair as soft as the woolsack upon four wheels with the aid of the Iron Horse, reading "Pickwick" or "Ixion in Heaven" over a cigar, with the prospect of a basin of soup or a glass of sherry and a pork pie at Rugby or Swindon or Carlisle. But we are fast leaving all these ideals of happiness behind us; and in a year or two more I expect to find one of my light hands flippantly contrasting the comfort of dining off a haunch of venison and a bottle of Chablis in the gilded saloon of a travelling hotel, flying through the Valley of the White Horse or across Chat-Moss at the rate of sixty or seventy miles a minute, with the untutored notions of luxury which his grandfathers associated with a mail coach carpetted with a bundle of straw, and stuffed to the ceiling with passengers of every description reeking with beer and tobacco. We must come to this soon; for the railway hero of America, Mr. Pullman, is fitting up carriages in which you may travel from New York to San Francisco with as little inconvenience as you would feel from shutting yourself up for a fortnight in a suite of rooms at Delmonico's Hotel or the Langham. Of course at present we are a long way from luxuries of this sort; for there is now only a few miles of road on all our British lines of rail where you can take in a chick and a slice of ham, a bit of bread and butter, and a pint of sherry in a hamper, pay your halfcrown, and hand out the relics at the next station-and that is on the Midland line; and travelling as we do from Paddington to Penzance, and from Euston to Edinburgh, in the time that it generally takes one to go from Hammersmith to the Haymarket to see an opera and the ballet, perhaps it is not necessary that we should attempt to reproduce the travelling hotels upon our lines. All we want is a section or two of the hotel a morning room for the ladies, where they may do a bit of embroidery or chat and call for a cup of tea and a slice of bread and butter; and a sort of commercial room for us men, where we may read the papers or a book, sleep or write or talk, without trampling on each other's toes. With the help of a gas stove, I believe there is no more reason, in the nature of things, why we should not dine in a saloon of the

Great Western Express or of the North Mail as pleasantly as we now do in the P. and O. steamers in the Chops of the Channel. But perhaps at present we may as well content ourselves with cold fowl and ham and a glass of sherry in a commercial room upon wheels. I leave the rest of my suggestions, as Bacon left his fame, to the next generation and to foreign countries.

AND talking of a hundred and twenty years ago, I was struck a few days since, in revisiting my old haunts in the Gallery of the House of Commons, where I used to sit out the tournaments of Pitt and Fox, and Burke and Wyndham, with boiled eggs in my pocket, to find that the custom I introduced of nicknaming My Lords and Gentlemen from their physical peculiarities still lingers among the habitués of that region. One distinguished member is the Goat. An Irish patriot is the Panther. One passes as the Crow; another as the Giraffe. But the House itself is not apparently as happy in the invention of its characteristic adjectives as it was in its racier days, when The Gentleman was the only reporter of its eloquence. "The People's William" is a sneer, not a description, and even as a sneer is not as happy as Canning's soubriquet for Addington as the Doctor. And the House has no counterpart now to the Single-speech Hamiltons and Angry Boys of my youth, except perhaps the title recently conferred upon a sparkling Tory from a pretty little pocket borough in the North who is very fond of drawing out Mr. Gladstone, and of extinguishing more bores than any one else in the assembly by plotting counts-out. This gentleman is distinguished by the title of Red Terror, a description which takes in at once his most distinguishing personal and Parliamentary characteristics. Why not upon the same plan call Mr. Lowe the White Terror?

THE question has, I suppose, often been asked-but every question that is worth asking at all must often be asked in this country, and now and then asked at the top of the voice-why a city with a population of three and a half millions has no place to get a dip in a stream of fresh water without taking your turn in the Serpentine with the ducks and the pickpockets of the Park, and dressing on the grass. On most of the Belgian, French, and German rivers you may find floating baths moored in the centre of the stream, where you may enjoy yourself to your heart's content. But the only substitute that we possess for these continental conveniences are those hideous "swimming baths" which chill your blood to the tips of your fingers to think of; and the Arabs of the streets who cannot raise sixpence for a turn into these swamped cellars must bathe with the mudlarks in the Thames, or the Regent's Canal, or in the pit of a tanyard, like the "Amateur Casual" in his pea soup, to the perplexity of women out for an evening stroll, and to the disgust of all the rest of us. Now all this might be avoided by the construction of a few floating baths upon the plan of those long

wooden frameworks on the Rhine and the Seine, which at the first blush most people believe to be built to puzzle Cook's troops of tourists. A hundred of them might be fitted up at less cost than a Thames steam packet, and I am risking nothing in promising the capitalist who will take the work in hand 10 per cent. upon his investment. All that is needed is a sort of Noah's Ark open to the sky, and with a false bottom of wood and iron work, shelving off like the sea beach from two or three feet to a dozen. The river running through the bath makes the bathing as pleasant and exhilarating as a plunge from a boat in the middle of the stream.

PIUS THE NINTH has broken the tradition of the Roman Catholic Church by outliving the Pontificate of St. Peter. He attained the twentyfifth year of his reign on the 16th of June. I hardly know whether I ought to congratulate my Roman Catholic readers on this fact, or to condole with them. But the fact that no Pontiff out of that long and illustrious line of Kings which takes the mind back to the time when the smoke of sacrifice rose from the Pantheon, and when cameleopards and tigers bounded in the Flavian amphitheatre, has outlived the founder of the dynasty by keeping his seat as long as dozens of temporal Sovereigns, is one that at least calls for a note. Turning to Von Ranke, I find that only five Popes have come within a year of the period of Pius the Ninth's Pontificate. The first of these was Sylvester I., a Pope of the fourth century, who reigned twentyfour years. Four centuries afterwards Adrian the First completed a reign which fell only ten days short of Sylvester's. But ten centuries elapsed before another Pope cleared his twenty-fourth year. This was Pius the Sixth. He reigned within three months of his twenty-fifth year; and his successor, Pius the Seventh, took off the fisherman's ring after a reign of twenty-three years and a half. Pius the Ninth has completed his twentyfifth year; but to break the charm of the tradition, "Non Videbis annos Petri," absolutely, he must, I believe, contrive to lengthen out the Pontificate about two months longer, for one of the accounts of Peter's reign gives him a margin of two months and seven days against the twenty-five years of his successor.

AND then-what then? That is the next question; and a puzzling question it is for the Sacred College, for the election rests in their hands, and, with two or three vetos upon their original selection, in their hands alone; and every Prince of the Church carries the keys of St. Peter at his girdle, at least in the sense in which every French soldier carries a marshal's baton in his knapsack. The election is by ballot, and the cardinals on the day of election are locked up in the Vatican like an English jury in Westminster Hall, till they have delivered themselves of their verdict. Of course what takes place here is as great a mystery to the mass of outsiders as what takes place in a Freemason's Lodge upon the election of a P. G. M. But the rules of the conclave are known; and

according to these rules no name is to be proposed, no speech is to be made. In the centre of the room stands a chalice; and into this each cardinal in turn casts a strip of paper containing the name of the candidate for whom he votes. These votes are then taken out, read, and counted; for the Pope must be elected by a majority of two-thirds of the College, and the process is repeated again and again till this proportion is attained. It is the common process of casting out. A year or two ago the popular candidate was Lucien Bonaparte; but the star of the Bonapartes to-day is in eclipse, and the chances are accordingly against the dark-browed and silent young prelate who, till Sedan, was the hope of the Church. The vetos upon the vote of the College are three, and these vetos are in the hands of the Courts of France, Spain, and Austria. It is with each of these a simple case of black-balling; for they may all three reject the Pope in turn, but they can only black-ball one Pope, elect each, and after they have cast their veto the power of election returns into the hands of the cardinals. The last case of black-balling was in 1830, when the Court of Madrid set aside the election of Cardinal Guistiniani.

WHAT a contempt History has for epigrams! It is repeating itself under our eyes every day; and the insurrection which has been suppressed in Paris is, after all, little more than a repetition of the scenes which startled us all from our propriety in my roystering days. These reflections, common-place enough in themselves, have of course suggested themselves to all of us in turn in looking through the correspondence of the newspapers and comparing it with our recollections of Carlyle's graphic and powerful narrative. But so far I have not noticed any allusion to that startlingly suggestive dream of the Count de Lavalette which prefigured in allegory the scenes which have marked every French revolution that we have yet witnessed, and all apparently that we are destined to witness. But it is worth recalling, hideous as it is :-" One night, while I was asleep”—I take the Count's own version-"the clock of the Palais de Justice struck twelve and awoke me. I heard the gate open to relieve the sentry, but I fell asleep again immediately. In this sleep I dreamed that I was standing in the Rue St. Honoré, at the corner of the Rue d'Echelle. A melancholy darkness spread around. All was still. Nevertheless, a low and uncertain sound soon arose. All of a sudden I perceived at the bottom of the street, and advancing towards me, a troop of cavalry; the men and horses, however, all flayed. The men held torches in their hands, the flames of which illuminated faces without skin and with bloody muscles. Their hollow eyes rolled in their large sockets, their mouths opened from ear to ear, and helmets of hanging flesh covered their hideous heads. The horses dragged along their own skins in the kennels, which overflowed with blood on both sides. Pale and dishevelled women appeared and disappeared alternately at the windows in dismal silence; low, inarticulate groans filled the air; and I remained in the street alone, petrified with horror, and deprived of strength sufficient to seek

safety in flight.

This horrible troop continued passing in full gallop for five hours, and they were followed by an immense number of artillery waggons, full of bleeding corpses, whose limbs still quivered. A disgusting smell of blood and bitumen almost choked me." Has this phantasmagoria been as yet fully realised?

THE Registrar-General has grown slightly communicative since the publication, in the June number of this magazine, of the Approximate Results of the Census. He has taken us into his confidence in the matter of the gross population of London. Our numbers, on the night of the 2nd of April, were 3,251,804. These are as yet the only official figures published. They prove that the metropolis continues to grow at a much more rapid rate than any other considerable part of the kingdom. The population in 1861 was 2,803,989, and the increase in the ten years has been 447,815. It would be tolerably safe to assert that never before in history were nearly half a million persons added to the number of the inhabitants of a city in ten years. When the Registrar-General says that the population of London is "increasing at a decreasing rate," he is looking at the problem solely as one of proportion. Between 1851 and 1861 the increase was 441,753, against the 447,815 between 1861 and 1871. The percentage of growth was therefore considerably greater in the preceding than in the last ten years, though the actual accretion was smaller. It is worth while setting down these decennial additions. The population of London at the several dates of the census returns is :

The increase in these decennial periods of ten years has been :—

So that, although never before was so large an addition made to our population as in the last ten years, never before since 1801 was the rate of progress so slow. The process of expansion reached its climax between 1841 and 1851, the increase being greater by upwards of 120,000 in the second than in the first of those two census terms. These figures, and many other facts and statistics, point to the working of an important change in the conditions of national life at about the turn of the half-century, the real tendency of which we are hardly able as yet to discern. The immediate attendants of the change are certainly not all satisfactory. There have been hard times and sad episodes in these twenty years. We have passed through financial calamities hardly paralleled in history; branches