rpetrated his
detestable act on the North London Railway, close by. The English middle
class, of which I am myself a feeble unit, travel on the Woodford branch
in large numbers. Well, the demoralization of our class,--which (the
newspapers are constantly saying it, so I may repeat it without vanity)
has done all the great things which have ever been done in England,--the
demoralization of our class caused, I say, by the Bow tragedy, was
something bewildering. Myself a transcendentalist (as the _Saturday
Review_ knows), I escaped the infection; and day after day I used to ply
my agitated fellow-travellers with all the consolations which my
transcendentalism and my turn for French would naturally suggest to me.
I reminded them how Julius Caesar refused to take precautions against
assassination, because life was not worth having at the price of an
ignoble solicitude for it. I reminded them what insignificant atoms we
all are in the life of the world. Suppose the worse to happen, I said,
addressing a portly jeweller from Cheapside,--suppose even yourself to be
the victim, _il n'y a pas d'homme necessaire_. We should miss you for a
day or two on the Woodford Branch; but the great mundane movement would
still go on, the gravel walks of your villa would still be rolled,
dividends would still be paid at the bank, omnibuses would still run,
there would still be the old crush at the corner of Fenchurch street.
All was of no avail. Nothing could moderate in the bosom of the great
English middle class their passionate, absorbing, almost blood-thirsty
clinging to life.

--Matthew Arnold's _Essays in Criticism_.

AN EXTRAORDINARY BLUNDER.

A correspondent, writing from Amelia les Bains, says:--A very singular
blunder was committed the other day by the officials of a railway station
between Prepignan and Toulon. A gentleman who had been spending the
winter here with his family, left last week for Marseilles, taking with
him the body of his mother-in-law, who died six weeks ago, and who had
expressed a wish to be buried in the family vault at Marseilles. When he
reached Marseilles and went with the commissioner of police--whose
presence is required upon these occasions--to receive the body from the
railway officials, he noticed to his great surprise that the coffin was
of a different shape and construction from that which he had brought from
here. It turned out upon further inquiry t