And
this is a type of his inbred depravity. He has no rational amusements.
In the winter time shut up the casinos, and do away with the half-price
at the theatres, and the poor fellow is _hors de combat_, and has nothing
left him but suicide or delirium tremens. Literary and Scientific
Institutions don't answer in London--even a place like the Whittington
Club, where any respectable young man belonging to the middle classes may
find a home, is by no means (so I have understood) a success.

Tom Moore says there is not in the world so stupid or boorish a
congregation as the audience of an English play-house. I fear there is
some truth in this as regards London. The regular cockney is not a fine
sample of the genus homo, in the first place he is very conceited, and
when a man is that, it is little that will do him good; in the second
place, he thinks only of business and pleasure, he lives well, dresses
well, goes to church once on the Sunday, and laughs at new-fangled
opinions, and wonders why people grumble, and believes all he reads in
the _Times_. If you want to start any successful agitation you must
begin it in the provinces. The Anti-Corn Law League had its seat at
Manchester, the Reform agitation had its head quarters at Birmingham.
The wisest thing done by the United Kingdom-Alliance, was to plant
themselves in Manchester rather than in London. Sydney Smith said it
required a severe surgical operation to make a Scotchman understand a
joke, it is almost as difficult to get a Londoner to understand anything
new; he is slow to recognise worth or virtue, and if any of his own
connection rise, he exclaims, with the writing-master, who would not
believe Newton was a good mathematician, "the fool, he is an hour over a
sum in the rule of three."

The truth is we are a city of shopkeepers; and if intellectual pursuits
be denied to those engaged in trade, the consequence must be the popular
opinion must be that of those who know little else than the business of
the shop, and as a consequence a curse will go forth to the remotest
corner of the land. Bigotry, prejudice, falsehood, and passion will be
rampant and rife, and truth and reason will be trampled under foot. Just
as manhood is forming, just as the moral and intellectual parts of our
nature are developing themselves, just as life becomes a reality, and
glimpses of the work to be done, and of the blessedness of doing it,
catch and charm the youthful eye, the