cy
of its solitude is changed into a straight, and evenly macadamised
carriage drive, between new houses of extreme respectability, with good
attached gardens and offices--most of these tenements being larger--all
more pretentious, and many, I imagine, held at greatly higher rent than
my father's, tenanted for twenty years at Herne Hill. And it became
matter of curious meditation to me what must here become of children
resembling my poor little dreamy quondam self in temper, and thus
brought up at the same distance from London, and in the same or better
circumstances of worldly fortune; but with only Croxsted Lane in its
present condition for their country walk. The trimly kept road before
their doors, such as one used to see in the fashionable suburbs of
Cheltenham or Leamington, presents nothing to their study but gravel,
and gas-lamp posts; the modern addition of a vermilion letter-pillar
contributing indeed to the splendour, but scarcely to the interest of
the scene; and a child of any sense or fancy would hastily contrive
escape from such a barren desert of politeness, and betake itself to
investigation, such as might be feasible, of the natural history of
Croxsted Lane.

But, for its sense or fancy, what food, or stimulus, can it find, in
that foul causeway of its youthful pilgrimage? What would have happened
to myself, so directed, I cannot clearly imagine. Possibly, I might have
got interested in the old iron and wood-shavings; and become an engineer
or a carpenter: but for the children of to-day, accustomed from the
instant they are out of their cradles, to the sight of this infinite
nastiness, prevailing as a fixed condition of the universe, over the
face of nature, and accompanying all the operations of industrious man,
what is to be the scholastic issue? unless, indeed, the thrill of
scientific vanity in the primary analysis of some unheard-of process of
corruption--or the reward of microscopic research in the sight of worms
with more legs, and acari of more curious generation than ever vivified
the more simply smelling plasma of antiquity.

One result of such elementary education is, however, already certain;
namely, that the pleasure which we may conceive taken by the children of
the coming time, in the analysis of physical corruption, guides, into
fields more dangerous and desolate, the expatiation of imaginative
literature: and that the reactions of moral disease upon itself, and the
conditions of lang