follows, the patients should sometimes believe themselves cured at once and entirely! But the effusion again and again returns, and requires again and again to be abated.'-pp. 266-273.

Thus we have presented to the general reader an outline of one of the greatest modern improvements in our means of investigating diseases. The English press had hitherto afforded on this subject of auscultation only translations from, or loose commentaries on, a French text. But Dr. Latham has worked out the matter afresh for himself, and illustrated it by his own instances, put it in an English garb of thought and language, and adapted it to English common sense. Our account might have been rendered more accurate by being made more minute; but what it then would have gained in exactness, it would have lost in intelligibility to those who are uninitiated in the barbarisms of medical nomenclature. To those who are fascinated with the details of medicine, and who love to attribute to themselves all the ills that flesh is heir to, the perusal of Dr. Latham's work will be good mental discipline. The unpretending good sense which pervades it, and the just estimate he has made of the objects, the means, and the powers of medicine, may serve to unload the imaginations of such medical dilettanti of the perilous stuff which they have gathered up for their own discomfort. As to those who are tortured by uncertainty-who know not what to hope nor what to fear-for some friend stricken with malady, this little volume will remove from them the infinite vague,' and steady the mind and clear away all the mists which obscure the paths to action; and, though its perusal may sometimes remove cheating hopes and baseless expectations, it will oftener rouse the anxious inquirer to economise those hours of life which seemed disputed by health and disease. We can wish nothing better for Dr. Latham's fame, than that his succeeding volumes should equal, in the investigation of other diseases, the strength and simplicity with which that we now close has investigated the affections of the chest.

ART. XI.-Glances at Life in City and Suburb. By Cornelius Webbe. 12mo. London. 1836.

THE E author of this little work has sent us a copy of it, with a letter, in which he informs us that he has for many years been employed by our printer, Mr. Clowes, as the reader'—that is to say, the final corrector of the proof-sheets of the Quarterly Review.' This circumstance, we fairly confess, seemed to give Mr. Webbe

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a particular claim on our attention; and we think the good-natured public will agree with us; but on opening the book we discovered a degree of literary merit which might well depend upon itself. Mr. Cornelius Webbe has, in the intervals of his professional labour, walked the steets and lanes of this great town and its suburbs, with an observant eye and a benevolent heart; and he has recorded his impressions in a style of picturesque liveliness which reminds us (and this is no slender praise) of Charles Lamb. The places and persons described by him are, for the most part, as new to us as if we had never lived in London; and so they will be to the great majority even of our London readers. But there is the inimitable stamp of truth on his delineations; and the unaffected good humour and contentedness of disposition which he carries with him wherever he goes, give them a charm which recalls the effect of some of Goldsmith's early essays in the Citizen of the World.' In the days, by-the-bye, when Goldsmith made acquaintance with Beau Tibbs, and performed those tours about Islington and Hornsey, which his Chinese Philosopher is made to paint so deliciously;-in not a few of those days poor Goldsmith was content to earn his bread by the same humble toils to which Mr. Webbe has hitherto been devoted. The Doctor, on his first arrival in this metropolis, was too happy to find an engagement as reader in the printing-office of Richardson, the author of Clarissa Harlowe.'

A few short quotations will show the sort of amusement which may be expected from Mr. Webbe, who, if like other printers he observes the festival of St. Monday, has certainly made a very laudable use of his holidays. We take the following from an essay entitled, Four Views of London:'

'It has perhaps never struck many persons that the four ends of this mighty metropolis present to the eye of a student of mankind four distinct classes of citizens, with habits and manners as different from each other as though they were so many various races of men. Enter Spitalfields, and you will find yourself among thronging thousands of human beings, varying as much in size and appearance from the thousands living on the north side of London, as the stunted Laplander from the loftystatured American savage. The young men of this dismal region of distress and excessive labour have, at the age of twenty, the apparent wear of thirty the men of forty look as if sixty winters had withered them: the men of sixty are few indeed, unnaturally old, and horribly bowed and bent into all attitudes of deformity:-crooked spines, round shoulders, and heads drooping unusually forward, are the common marks of labour pursued beyond the strength of man: inquire what they are; they are that worst-paid and worst-fed class of artizans, the silk-weavers of that industrious neighbourhood. But what strikes you with melancholy wonder is the shortness of stature of the major part: five feet two is the common height of these decrepit beings; a man of six feet, if you

meet

meet with such a resident, is not "native and to the manner born," and follows not the staple business of the district. Three or four years since, a procession of some hundreds of these poor fellows passed through the city to watch some question on silk manufactures, then before the House of Commons: it was the most wretched sight ever beheld in this wealthy metropolis! I felt curious to see these unfortunate beings in their own quarter, and took the first leisure day I had to wander amongst them. Everything seemed as new to me as if I had dropt into an alien city, and among men and things new and strange. It was the season of one of our holiday festivals, and this afforded me an opportunity to trace them to their haunts for such poor amusements and enjoyments as they could find time to take and money to purchase. Nothing could be more melancholy than their mirth: the wretched tea-garden, (or rather a place so called, where, at two-pence a head, hot water and crockery are supplied to such parties as bring their own tea, sugar, &c.) with its soot-black grass-plat and a swing for the children, the publichouse and its covered skittle-ground, were the alpha and the omega of their amusements. At one place an attempt was made at a soaped pole and a leg of mutton, as a lure to draw company; but no one that I could see was inclined to try "how hard it was to climb." At another part a sickly-looking lad was engaged by a publican, as a Whitsuntide attraction, to pick up a hundred stones in a given time. A few gathered together, porter and pipes were indulged in, but there was an entire absence of all mirth and enjoyment. One day, though a holiday, was not sufficient to make them forget all their privations and poverty. See them, again, straggling from church or chapel on the Sunday: cleanly rags are their raiment, and squalor still saddens their faces, which even "the light from heaven" cannot brighten into cheerfulness. Enter their houses, or content yourself with merely looking at them or into them wretchedness is there, and is the hard landlord of their hearths. If there is one portion of this metropolis which more than another requires a thorough investigation into the comforts and wants of its working classes, it is Spitalfields.'-pp. 147–150.

In the same chapter we have this view of that Boeotia of thriving blackguardism, Whitechapel :'—

'Here you lose sight of the dwarfish and dwindled weavers, and are moving among men of might-fellows of thews and sinews, genuine specimens of the stuff of which common men are made-no porcelain and brittle ware, but unqualified English clay and flint-stone, roughly annealed, but strong, solid, and serviceable. "A Whitechapel bird" was once a well-understood designation of a thorough-paced rascal-one versed in all the accomplishments of bull-baiting, dogfancying and dog-stealing, Sunday-morning boxing-matches, larcenies great and small, duffing, chaffering, and all other kinds and degrees of low and high villany. Thirty years ago no Smithfield marketday passed over without what is called a "bull-hank," which consisted in selecting a likely beast to afford sport from any drove entering Whitechapel, and hunting him through the streets till he became infuriated :when the ruffians had had their fun out, and enough fright and alarm

were spread around to satisfy them, the poor beast was knocked on the head and delivered over to its owner, if they could find him. These atrocities are now beaten out of them by the strong arm of the law; but the "natives" are still great pigeon-fanciers. This is an expensive hobby, when much indulged, for the collection of a connoisseur is nothing if not large, and containing specimens of the choicest birds. It is not uncommon for an amateur, looking at whose rags you would think him pennyless, to be possessed of property of this kind worth from forty to fifty pounds. Every thing is sacrificed to this taste-clothes, comfort, and even his own and his children's bread. .

'Whitechapel and vulgarity have long been synonyms, and the professors of "that ilk" are, one would think, guardedly jealous to preserve its character for coarseness, and keep it intact. And yet, strange as it may appear, at the theatre of its neighbourhood, the Pavilion, Shakspeare's plays are performed more frequently, and to fuller and more absorbed audiences than the patent theatres can boast! "The poetry of earth is never dead!"—if it fades where it flourished, "grows dim and dies," in the West, it shifts its soil, takes root, and lifts up its head again in the East: a Garrick was given to the stage by this people: that is something to their honour, and makes them classical.'-pp. 151-153.

Somewhere near Pentonville also Mr. Webbe discovers a minor (or minimum) theatre, where the tragedies of Shakspeare are played now as regularly as they were at the Globe two hundred years ago. We partake his pleasure in this discovery. A third scene is on our reader's' own side of the river; and its description may well excite many grave thoughts:

'St. George's Fields is the Surrey College of Crime. If the dispensers of justice doubt this fact, let them drop into the public-houses surrounding the Obelisk. They will there find rooms full of women of a certain sort, and fancy-men who live on them. The usual gallantry is here reversed; for the "ladies" treat the "gemmen," and the courting, if you may call it such, comes from the same fair quarter. Pulling of caps and destroying of bonnets are as common in these houses as gin and beer. Miss A. suspects Miss B. of a design to "circumwent" her in the manly bosom of Sam Simpson, who is her " dear friend,"—that is, he shares two-thirds of all she obtains in her vocation, as lawful compliment or lawless booty, besides other perquisites. Sam is out of place, and no wonder: his last employer marked some money put into his till, which Sam was somehow detected in taking. He was not prosecuted because he had respectable friends, a heart-broken mother, and a benevolent master. As Sam stole this and other monies to supply the necessities of Miss A., the least she can do is to support him till he can find another master, not so particular in marking his half-sovereigns. Such men are not met with every day; and in the mean time Sam is in no hurry idleness is not so unpleasant as moralists have said it is. . . . There are a thousand Simpsons on the Surrey side of the water, but it is nobody's business to know them till they make themselves notorious. They may not all pursue the same path to the same centre, nor would seven or seventy persons making for the middle ground of the

Seven Dials take the same road to it, but they arrive there in the end. Other flash-houses in the same vicinity have their Simpsons too, but they are of a still lower grade. These are the young apes of greater rascals-boys of fourteen or fifteen, who have studied that ArabianNights-Entertainment of the willing to be vile and already half-depraved, the Newgate Calendar, till they are enamoured of its crimes and criminals, and long to revive some forgotten page of its corrupting history. These juvenile Jonathan Wilds and Dick Turpins assume the man, smoke their pipes in-doors and out, drink gin enough to poison a Dutchman, swear surprisingly well, and "keep their girls!" Every one of these boys is destined "to smell rue," as they call being put upon trial-that plant and others being commonly spread over the ledges of the prisoner's dock, the jury-box, and the tables of criminal courts, as disinfectants. The police know these haunts of young depravity well, and there their intelligence stops. There are men now moving about this city, reputed thieves for thirty or forty years, who have never got further into the labyrinths of limbo than the bar of Bow-street, where some honest attorney, or their own cunning and ingenuity, stayed further progress, and returned them among society, admonished but not amended, only made more circumspect for the future. The liberty of the thief is sacred!'-pp. 158-162.

Another chapter is entitled A London Sunday;' and it contains, with some painful passages, more that are in all respects agreeable. After certain reminiscences of the London Sunday of thirty years back, he says

'London is now, thanks to whatever has made it so, a better-behaved city, with better-behaved citizens, entertaining more wishes to be decent, and struggling more for the decencies, than did their working fathers. Despite of the continual cry about poverty, there is more apparent comfort, smartness, nay, even elegance, to be observed among the population which swarms along the roads leading out of town on Sundays, than our grandfathers dreamt of, or the grumblers of our day will acknowledge. That there is poverty no one can deny; but that it bears any sort of comparison with the real increase in comforts of the working classes I do most advisedly deny. Thousands of working men now wear such clothes as the gentlemen of the last century thought "the outward and visible sign" of wealth and fashion: with this superiority in dress, there is also a superiority in the carriage, conversation, and tastes of these men: they patronize amusements, and visit such places, and mix up and blend harmoniously with such society, as men of the same rank in the seventeenth century would have thought a man mad if he had said they would cultivate and enjoy.'-pp. 77, 78.

He proceeds to sketch various groups among the class of artisans; and concludes with this pleasing little picture of the maid of all work.

"It is Betty's "Sunday out." Betty is a good girl; and what's more, good-looking; and moreover dresses well; and further is wellshaped; and eke respectable; and, in addition, is beloved by every

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body,