atmosphere which we have to bear up against with those which afflict the natives of other, and nominally more favoured lands.

East wind is a great bugbear amongst us, and it certainly nips shrewdly. Moreover it is chilly, and has a bleak, inhospitable, ungenial feel. We admit it. But take some of the more unpleasant breezes of other climes. Take the scorching land winds which blow in low latitudes, with breath withering as though it rushed from an oven's mouth. Take the sirocco, if you like it, and try how your lungs feel under its influence. Think you are gasping in the furnace of the simoom, and what you would give for a good mouthful of wholesome home-brewed east wind. Talk of our sou-westers, no doubt they are terrible, but not so bad as the whirlwinds which wrench up dwellings, and uproot trees, and twist the masts out of sinking ships. Our squalls are fierce, but white squalls are fiercer: the home hurricane is not generally so furious as the foreign tornado, and no wind sweeps our stormy channel with the iron rush of the Levanter over the sunny Medi

terranean.

Fog is another bugbear. In the first place, its prevalence is grossly exaggerated. It comes neither so thick nor so often as people say. Particular localities are certainly infested with it. London is-but as the marshes between it and the sea are more and more drained, our old drab-coloured friends (fogs, not quakers) are becoming every season thinner and more like angelic morning calls. But, even when fog does come-what then? It is only a carriage panel or two smashed in bad instances, and an inability to see down-say Baker-street-in slighter cases. Now, after all the number of people who build their happiness on escaping being run over, or running over somebody else or on the ability to look down all Baker-street, is really comparatively small. Besides, there is nothing unhealthy in our fogs. After all they are composed of good-thick-homely-wholesome-unpretending air. Are they like the miasma of your lauded Italian climate, the fever-laden mists of your adored tropical skiesdo they waft ague from undrained swamps as on the Mississippido they bewilder and lead wayfarers to destruction, as in Alpine solitudes do they brood for months of leaden darkness, as over northern forests-are they, in short, pestilential or dangerous, or constant? Neither one nor the other. They come and go, leaving neither raving fever nor shaking ague to mark their progress, or anything in fact to prate of their whereabouts

except a penny-a-line acknowledgment in the newspapers to the effect that "The Metropolis was yesterday visited by a dense fog.' Thank heaven, it does not leave its cards in the shape of doctors' bills!

And now, for the changes in the temperature and the weather. This is perhaps my weakest point, but it is far from being a breach in the wall of the argument; our climate is certainly fickle. What then? If it be foul, you have the more hope that it will soon be fair; and if it be fair, you have every reason to hope that it will not get foul. You may sometimes be disappointed. But in what are we not? Life is not bad because all our hopes do not always become certainties-all our expectations are not invariably realised. Can anything be conceived more dismal than the opening of the rainy season in a climate cursed with one. To look up at the sky as you hear the first drops, and to know that for month-and month-and month-there is no hope-can be no intermission-rain-rain—rain. I remember how I used to pity Robinson Crusoe when I came to the oft-repeated phrase, "It being now the commencement of the rainy season." It quite counterbalanced the joyous anticipations of the dry. For my own part, I should like best to have the weather as it is, mingled good and bad, sunny and showery. There is always hope in this, and novelty, and the prospect of continued change. If rainy days come altogether in a lump, like misfortunes, they are hard to bear. But as to our jumps from heat to cold, I fear we are no worse than those many other places with a much better name. In eastern deserts, travellers tell us that the nights are often as cold as the days are hot; that they gasp through the one, and shiver out the other. There is hot work in Madrid, yet some sentinels there were lately found frozen in their boxes. I never knew of such a catastrophe befalling the conquering heroes who guard the avenues of the Horse Guards. All English invalids rush to Pau, yet I have heard of the ground there being baked by the morning's sun, while hoar-frost yet lay in the shade.

In fact, to prove that our atmospherical variations are not so great, or if they are, that they are not so injurious as people think, I appeal to the bills of mortality of this and other countries-I appeal to the well-known fact, that the value of life is greater in London than in any other great city in the world; and I believe that the statistics of health of Britain, in general,

will not show it behind its capital. Now, this is a very strong argument against, a very lusty knock-down blow to all the declamations indulged in to the detriment of our atmospherical character. It is a fact which there is no disputing-talk as you please of English climate-you live the longest in it. Talk as you please of our fogs as poison, they are at least wonderfully slow ones. Talk as you please of our east winds as life-exterminating; something else must have given us wonderful toughness to hold out so gallantly against them.

66

And we not only do hold out against all these adverse influences, but it strikes me, that on the whole, we manage under our derided firmament to rear up as respectable a race of men and women, in spite both of fogs and east winds, as we meet in countries unblotted by the one, and unscourged by the other. Mentally and physically, England has at least held her own against all challenges. On sea and shore, in mind and muscle battles, our colours have generally been flying when we came off. Invincible armadas and grand armies have alike had reason to doubt their invincibility and their grandeur after full experience of our wooden men of war on water, and our flesh and blood men of war upon land. So far as physical beauty and symmetry go too, I believe we keep up the character of the human face divine," and the human figure, which looks sometimes quite as divine as the face: of course I do not stand up for monopoly in female beauty, or in anything else. I grant to Spain and Italy their lustrous eyes, and jetty ringlets-albeit the former are somewhat too apt to light up upon certain jealous considerations. I give to France all the coquettish gentilesse of her daughtersmerely remarking in passing that as in the case of certain books, their attractions lie in the manner more than the matter. I willingly surrender to America all the loveliness, all the fawnlike graces which her authors are so fond of claiming for their countrywomen, although 'tis a pity that such charms should be so transient. No one denies that Germany and Holland can muster a fair array of plump white-skinned vrows, though, after all, they are a somewhat torpid race,-nor that the still more northerly nations of Europe have not, by all accounts, a very comfortable female population scattered amid their pine forests, and on the banks of their inland fiords; but, after all, I think we may very fairly challenge Italy, France, America, Germany, and Norway, to bring together such a display as may be sometimes seen in

London, when the glory of Hyde Park rules the day, and that of the Opera the night. We have symmetry of feature which need not yield the palm to that of the lands of the olive and. the myrtle-we have a fraîcheur of complexion, a clear ruddy transparency of skin, which are the envy of the bloodless-faced dames of France, and the somewhat tallowy-cheeked ladies of the States. I do not say that there may not be a finer combination of soul and body than we find in the high-bred, welleducated, frank English girl, with eyes all liquid blue, a voice all silver ring, and a heart as warm as it is pure. I repeat, there may be a finer marriage of spirit and flesh, but I never saw one.

And has climate nothing to do with the blooming cheeks, the well-developed proportions of the women of England? Undoubtedly. It exercises its influence for good or evil. Climate blackens the Negro-climate stunts the Esquimaux-the accidents of climate produce the goître of the Alps, and the plague of Egypt. If our skies then rain down such beautifying influences-if health falls from them as the "gentle dew from heaven," shall we quarrel with the firmament for being a thought too cloudy-for not continually afflicting us with that unvaried blue, which I suspect would soon produce an abundant crop of synonymous expressions to the famed " toujours perdrix ?"

Having then, for the present, disposed of our men and women— the animal fruits of our climate-let us come to its actual vegetable productions; climate has certainly a good deal to do with them. Let us see then how we have been treated in this respect. "God," said Fuller in his quaint way, "might have made a better fruit than the strawberry-but certainly he never did." We quite agree with the old divine, and add, moreover, that it is in our latitudes only that the delicious little morsel can be plucked in highest perfection from its bed. The rasp-the strawberry's first cousin, is by no means unworthy of the relationship. Then come our rich-cheeked apples,-little and big-sweet and gratefully acid -pleasant for eating under the tree-at dinner in your puddingafter dinner with your wine. The apple is a fruit of sterling excellence, and with the exception, perhaps, of the orchards of New Jersey, we can vie with the world in its production. People talk of Normandy rennets, they are very good-for cyder. If the rasp be the cousin of the strawberry, the pear is the brother of the apple. And here we feel we are strong. Never were there such juicy masses of sweety ripeness, as hang in well-sunned clusters

from our spreading jargonelles. The gooseberry is a humble globule of vegetable deliciousness, but like other things, humble, it deserves to be exalted. We have got into a habit of comparing it with the grape, always to the disadvantage of our own production. And yet I doubt much whether the grape be, after all, the finest fruit. Of course, as it is the rarer, and consequently the most expensive, it gets all the credit. People go into extasies at the romantic glory of a vine, and almost into fits at the vulgar horror of a gooseberry bush. But so far as beauty goes, the northern plant has just as much to boast of as the southern-while, as to taste, although the subject be one on which there is proverbially no disputing, it has always struck me that our own respectable berry has more pleasant palate-tickling qualities than the clusters of the sunny south. Of course, its fermented life-blood-wine, is the strong point of the grape. The making better champagne than the gooseberry, however, is no proof that it affords better eating, and I may be allowed just to hint that were as much care bestowed upon the gooseberry as the grape, were it as scientifically cultivated and its juice as skilfully prepared, there is no saying what the vinous results might be.. This I know is quite an heretical hint, nevertheless truth has on one or two occasions been costumed in autoda-fé fashion, and sent, labelled "heresy," out of the world. I need not now run over the catalogue of the kitchen garden, but I put it to anybody, whether with our strawberries, rasps, apples, pears, gooseberries, cherries, and nuts, (as plums and peaches are somehow associated with British cholera, I have less hesitation in giving up to other countries the palm in their production), but I repeat, with the productions I have just named, may we not afford to give up the generally coarsely-flavoured fruit of the tropicstheir squashy melons and oily cocoa-nuts-the turpentine-flavoured mango-and harsh shaddock of the West Indies the dates and olives (and the locusts which eat them) of Africa and Asia? But after all, the best fruits of low latitudes we have, either grown in our hot-houses or imported by our fast-going steamers. Pineapples are as common as turnips now-a-days. Even before the late inundation which has poured upon us across the Atlantic, a distinguished authority said there was a better chance of getting a pineapple any day of the year in Covent Garden than in Calcutta. No doubt they do not grow wild in our hedges; our climate has certainly barred that; but has it barred the development of those enterprising qualities in ourselves, which have rendered the purchase of