usefulness, a great deal worse. But the
mistaken notion which most strips the country of its natural guardians,
is the fallacy, on the part of young and sanguine dispositions, of
believing that the motives and sphere of individual action rise in
proportion to the apparent magnitude of the scene. These are the
absentees most to be regretted. In the single line of professional
practice, and in its most successful instances, that may be the case.
But in taking ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, and in every other of
the varied departments of social duty, the sphere of useful action,
however nominally extended, will be found to be strictly and
substantially reduced.

There can be as little fear that London will ever want any of the
elements of an enlightened and well-constituted community, as that it
will not be large enough. It is very different with the provinces. The
capital offers so many real, and still more, so many plausible
attractions to all that is active and refined, as well as to all that is
idle and selfish in human nature, that a long list of supernumaries and
expectants is sure, in every case, always to be at hand. It is the
lottery into which the credulous are eager to put in;--it is the theatre
on whose stage ambition and vanity are impatient to appear;--it is the
land of Cockayne, in whose crowded mazes the selfish escape from every
duty, and reduce their intercourse with their fellow-creatures to the
sympathies of visiting and of shopping. It is the seat also of liberal
society, and independent existence, among the friends and occupations of
one's choice. Lord Falkland, the love of his age, admitted, that
quitting London was the only thing which he was not sufficiently master
of himself ever to manage without a struggle. In this state of things,
it is plain that nobody can be of such consequence there but that he is
easily spared. The death of a town wit is handsomely celebrated, if it
furnishes five minutes' conversation for the table where he dined the
day before. He is replaced with the same regularity and indifference as
fresh snuff is put into a snuff-box, or fresh flowers are set out upon
the epergne. Nobody misses him. The machine goes on without perceiving
that the blue-bottle or the gnat has fallen from its wheel.

The vastness and multiplicity and complexity of the organization by
which the movements of the capital proceed, as it were mechanically, do
not act merely by diminishing the general