which is considered necessary for London. The Peruvian Incas constructed aqueducts of 120 and 150 leagues in length. In Spain, both the Moors and Romans have left traces of their power in the form of enormous aqueducts and reservoirs to supply cities insignificant in comparison to London. The canals of Semiramis, and those of Egypt, are world-famous. Assyria and Mesopotamia are intersected by the ruins of vast water-courses; and through great part of the East, even at this day, the inhabitants are supplied with fresh and pure water by the beneficent will of their despots. Surely a free country ought to be able to do more, not less. It remains for England to show that her boasted civilization and liberty has a practical power of self-development, which can meet and satisfy the wants of an increasing population, and cleanse from her fair face such plague-spots as we have been— not describing, for too many of them are past description, but hinting at, as delicately as the nature of the subject will allow. Unless some practical proof is given to the suffering masses who inhabit our courts and alleys-one single savage and heathen tribe of them, the costermongers, numbering, according to Mr. Mayhew, thirty thousand souls-that a constitutional government can secure more palpable benefits to the many than a tyranny; unless anarchy ceases to be considered identical with freedom, and human beings to be sacrificed to a proposition in a yet infant and tentative science ;—we must expect to see, in the course of events, a revulsion in favour of despotism, such as seized France when she raised Napoleon to the Empire: a revulsion which is more possible even in Britain, to judge by certain ugly signs on both extremes of the political horizon, than the pedants of 'constitutionalism' are inclined to suppose.

And though these permitted evils should not avenge

themselves by any political retribution, yet avenge themselves, if unredressed, they surely will. They affect masses too large, interests too serious, not to make themselves bitterly felt some day or other. This is no question,' as Mr. Mill well says, ' of political economy, but of general policy:' we should go farther and say-of common right and justice. Therefore it is that we make no apology for any foul details through which we have led our readers. We only wish that we could show them the realities amid which thousands of their fellow-subjects are born and die. It is right that one half of the world should know how the other half live.' Neither do we apologize for having made use of severe expressions of condemnation. Such questions as these, involving not merely profits, but health, sobriety, decency, life, are to be judged of not by the code or in the language of the market, but of the Bible. Acts concerning them are not merely expedient or inexpedient, fortunate or unfortunate, but right or wrong, the wrong may be excused by igno rance; but a wrong, and therefore a self-avenging act, it remains till amended. Even the hard and soft water controversy is not a mere matter of soap and tea expenditure, but of humanity and morality. As Hood said of the slop-sellers, so we say of the hard-waterand-animalcule-sellers,

It's not trousers and shirts you're wearing out;

It's human creatures' lives.

We may choose to look at the masses in the gross, as subjects for statistics—and of course, where possible, for profits. There is One above who knows every thirst, and ache, and sorrow, and temptation of each slattern, and gin-drinker, and street-boy. The day will come when he will require an account of these neglects of ours-not in the gross.

NORTH DEVON.*

A PROSE IDYL.

WE

I.-EXMOOR.

E were riding up from Lynmouth, on a pair of ragged ponies, Claude Mellott and I, along the gorge of Watersmeet. And as we went we talked of many things; and especially of some sporting book which we had found at the Lyndale Hotel the night before; and which we had not by any means admired. 'I do not

object,' said I, 'to sporting books in general, least of all to one on Exmoor. No place in England is more worthy of one. There is no place whose beauties and peculiarities are more likely to be thrown into strong relief by being looked at with a sportsman's eye. It is so with all forests and moor-lands. The spirit of Robin Hood and Johnny of Breadislee is theirs. They are remnants of the home of man's fierce youth, still consecrated to the genius of animal excitement and savage freedom; after all, not the least noble qualities of human nature. Besides, there is no better method of giving a living picture of a whole country than by taking some one feature of it as a guide, and bringing all other observations into harmony with that original key. Even in merely scientific books this is very possible. Look, for in

* FRASER'S MAGAZINE, July, 1849.

stance, at Hugh Miller's 'Old Red Sandstone,' 'The Voyage of the Beagle,' and Professor Forbes's work (we had almost said epic poem) on 'Glaciers.' Even an agricultural writer, if he have a real insight in him—if he have anything of that secret of the più nel' uno, 'the power of discovering the infinite in the finite;' of seeing, like a poet, trivial phenomena in their true relation to the whole of the great universe into which they are so cunningly fitted; if he has learned to look at all things and men, down to the meanest, as living lessons written with the finger of God; if, in short, he has any true dramatic power, then he may impart to that apparently muddiest of sciences a poetic or a humorous tone, and give the lie to Mephistopheles when he dissuades Faust from farming as an occupation too mean and filthy for a man of genius. The poetry of agriculture remains as yet, no doubt, unwritten, and the comedy of it also; though its farce-tragedy is being now, alas! very extensively enacted in practice-unconsciously to the players. As for the old 'pastoral' school, it only flourished before agriculture really existed; that is, before sound science, hard labour, and economy, were necessary, and has been for the last two hundred years simply a lie. Nevertheless, as signs of what may be done even now by a genial man with so stubborn a subject as turnips, barley, clover, wheat,' it is worth while to look at old Arthur Young's books, both travels and treatises; and also at certain very spirited Chronicles of a Clay Farm,' by Talpa, which teem with humour and wisdom.

'In sporting literature (a tenth muse, exclusively indigenous to England), the same observation holds good tenfold. Some of our most perfect topographical sketches have been the work of sportsmen. Old Izaac

Walton, and his friend Cotton, of Dovedale, whose names will last as long as their rivers, have been followed by a long train of worthy pupils. White's 'History of Selborne;' Sir Humphry Davy's 'Salmonia ;' 'The Wild Sports of the West;' Mr. St. John's charming little works on Highland Shooting; and, above all, Christopher North's' Recreations'-delightful book! to be read and re-read, the tenth time even as the first-an inexhaustible fairy well, springing out of the granite rock of the sturdy Scotch heart, through the tender green turf of a genial boyish old age.-No, Claude; sporting books, when they are not filled (as they need never be) with low slang, and ugly sketches of ugly characters, who hang on to the skirts of the sporting world, as they would to the skirts of any other world, in default of the sporting one, form an integral and significant, and, in my eyes, an honourable and useful part, of the English literature of this day; and, therefore, all shallowness, vulgarity, stupidity, or bookmaking in that class, must be as severely attacked as in novels and poems. We English owe too much to our field sports to allow people to talk nonsense about them.' -He smiled.

'You talk often of the poetry of sport. I can see nothing in it but animal excitement, and a certain quantity, I suppose, of that animal cunning which the Red Indian possesses in common with the wolf and the cat, and any other beast of prey. As a fact, the majority of sportsmen are of the most unpoetical type of manhood.'

'More unpoetical than the average man of business, or man of law, Claude? Or even than the average preacher? I believe, on the contrary, that for most of them it is sport which at once keeps alive and satisfies