the lights spring forth towards evening, and sparkle on the
great dull masses, it seems as if the buildings had been there forever,
and forever would be, endowed with some elemental process which puts
forth the lighting. Newgate itself, without windows towards the street,
a huge angle of dead walls, with heavy iron fetters suspended over the
gateways, and statues so blackened in their niches as to dispel the
illusion that they ever did or could suggest humanity, is a settled
gloom in the midst of the city, like the thought of a discouraged and
defeated man. It has a terrible suggestion that crime is established in
London,--immutable methods of being guilty and of being condemned--all
old, old, and irrepealable.

From Primrose Hill, beyond Regent's Park, and towards the open country,
the profile of the city can be seen at one view, as it emerges from the
smoke, is heavily described athwart it, and plunges into it again, like
a great, silent feature of the earth itself, lifted in an atmosphere
whose density seems to be a part of the antiquity. Hidden in that smoke
the streets roll night and day, like great arteries, to feed, replace,
repair, business, pleasure, and misery, but to change it no more than
the blood changes the tricks of an old brain or the settled beating of a
stubborn heart.

These are some of the physical aspects which seduce a traveller into the
impression that the vigor and glory of England have culminated, and
would fall apart sooner than take on new forms or yield to the moulding
power of popular ideas.

The impression is deepened by the feeling of hostility to American
institutions, and by the special dislike of the North, which the past
four years have betrayed. The commercial and ruling classes had been
skilfully prepared, by applications of Southern sentiment, for the
declaration of neutrality, which was supposed to contain the triple
chance of destroying a dangerous republic, of securing unlimited
supplies of cotton by free-trade, and of erecting in the South an
oligarchic form of government. Under the circumstances, they felt that
neutrality was a kind of merit in them, and a magnanimity which the
declining North ought to have hailed with enthusiasm, as it showed that
England scorned to take a more deadly advantage of our perilous
position. This anti-Northern feeling is, and always has been, confined
to the Tory classes, in and out of the Government, to the rich and their
dependants, to the c