TH

FIRST IMPRESSIONS.

HE great orator, Mr. John Bright, once said, in the writer's hearing, in the course of a famous speech: 'A great many of you have been to London, but you know nothing about it. I have spent six months there every year for nearly forty years, and I know nothing about it. It is so large that nobody knows much about it. I don't believe there is a man in it who is fairly acquainted with all the parts and districts of that vast city. You have over four millions of people there.'

In these words the speaker touches upon those phenomena connected with London which are the first to strike the most superficial observer, and which also appear even more impressive and more marvellous to the observer who has spent many years in their close contemplation and study. We may study the enormous figures that represent the population of London; we may know in square miles the area occupied by its palaces and mansions and hovels; we may cull whole galleries of pictures, either from the endless panorama of human life, with all its strange vicissitudes and contrasts, or from the succession of famous buildings extending from the Tower of William the Norman, down to the great buildings of the Victorian era; we may scan the history of social development as expressed in Act after Act of Parliament passed with this object in view; and yet with those who think they know it best, and who have passed long years of their life. in the very centre of its ceaseless struggle and turmoil, we shall have at last to admit, like John Bright, that in the sense of full and adequate knowledge we know nothing about it.