tecture it is deficient and bare. It possesses learned men and learned societies as learning goes-and the arts are not neglected there. As for poetry, it has its poets. One of its merchants or else it was a Liverpool merchant, we forget which has lately written a volume of poems; which nobody had the courage to buy, after reading the four lines presented in the advertisement, in the deluded hope that they were enticing. But the town lacks the graceful and the pleasing to the common eye and the common mind. We use the word 66 common in the sense of general. And we are afraid that the attractive letters, L. S. D., are so much thought about and stared at, and have such an influence over the life, manners, and customs of the people, that the merchant's poems (good gracious! poems!) come fairly up to the average of the poetry that enters into the composition of the Manchester people. We would not willingly be a " Manchester man," whether rich or poor. The moral and physical enjoyments of the poor in London are, heaven knows, scant and low and bad enough; and great humbugs, with Sunday legislation uppermost in their dull heads, would make them more scant, lower and worse. But still the atmosphere of the metropolis is more refined, life is more varied; people there make money, it is true, but they make it more pleasantly, or seem to do so, which is nearly as good; and more that is pleasant, and less of the grindstone enters, or seems to enter, into the general system. At all events, we had much rather be a working man in London than a working man in Manchester. Talking of Sundays-take a Manchester one. On that day the whole town is a dull street; with the exception that where it is not dull it is much worse, being what we may call Billingsgate in its Sunday clothes. We Londoners abuse the Thames, and it deserves all the abuse we can give it-the poor old river! We want to better it, and there is plenty of room for improvement. But, even in the state it now is, a threepenny go to Greenwich, or a trip to Hampton Court, or to one of those jolly tea-gardens, is an excellent thing for a poor man and his family once a week. It saves them from turning acid on the world's stomach, and growing miserable and ugly. It is something, again, to live in London-Dr. Johnson was right, and so was his præsidium, James Boswell, of Auchinleck-and, laugh as we may at our poor Cockney, he is a pleasant, conceited, harmless fellow (up to a thing or two notwithstanding), who forms a very favourable contrast with a man, in the same position as regards social importance, in a manufacturing provincial town. Take a Manchester Sunday, we say no Thames, no, Greenwich, no Hampton Court, and a casino instead of a tea-garden. In Manchester there are three rivers, so called the Irwell, the Medlock, and the Irk; each one a Styx in appearance, and filthy in reality, which no one would row across that was not paid for it, and which no one would travel upon who was neither mad nor compelled to do so. If any of the Sunday legislators want to do good, let them go to Manchester, and endeavour to place some recreation, rational and pleasant, within reach of the thousands of anxious, toiling, and smoke-dried beings, with whom life is so real that a little fiction, that should make them forget their hard fate a few hours every week, would do more good in the right direction than can easily be told. But, after all, we do not think that this could easily be done. We progress so much! We keep our men's minds under, stunt their bodies, build factories and make smoke, and show long figures illustrative of our foreign trade; and we call this civilization. Who can promise a change for the better? Not that the Manchester people are illiberal or bad, as the world goes. The readiness and the spirit with which they enter upon any good project fairly mooted amongst them shows the contrary. But in their best moments Trade-Trade, their familiar-haunts them; and you cannot go to a meeting whose object is to raise a new hospital, or a new library, without being told how many pounds' worth of cotton goods were exported last year, and what an important affair the cotton manufacture is. Now it is, we know, rather late in the day to say anything against commerce, machinery, and that kind of thing; and we should not be particularly inclined to take that course even if the day was not so far spent. But we would see the sunny side of that commerce-for there must be one-turned towards its most humble employés. We could like to see something of the gentle, to vary the hard-something that is pleasant, as an antidote to the baneful grim. Money is not the most important thing in the world; ten hours a day are not too little for a day's work; and if some men who pretend to much charity and philanthropy, and who have some influence, would turn their powers towards improving the condition of the operative in the town they are connected with, it would be well. If they would not forget him as soon as he has done his work; if they would place such amusement in his way as would make him a happy as well as a hardworking man, it would be well. They have built a free library at Manchester. That is good, but not all-sufficient. It is no easy thing to go from the wheel of the factory in search of useful knowledge. There is a relish that wants instilling. The avenues to the library and the lecture-rooms should be made pleasant and enticing. Good and cheap recreation being refused, and working men generally not being so far advanced as to go from working with the hands to labour with the head, morbid pastime-pastime vicious and low-is seized upon, and so men spend their time between hard working and it. If we were to attempt to allude to half of the conspicuous erections, or a tithe of them, our space would allow us to give but a bare and uninteresting catalogue. There are the Exchange (one of the finest structures in the kingdom) and the Town Hall, the style of architecture of which is taken from the Temple of Erechtheus at Athens, with a dome in the centre after that in the Athenian Temple of the Winds. The portico is grand and massive, and in niches on each side of it are medallion portraits of Locke and others. The Royal Infirmary is an institution noble in appearance, as well as in its objects. It forms three sides of a quadrangle, in the centre of each of which sides is a fine portico, with a pediment supported by four fluted Ionic columns. It was opened in 1785. For the north wing of the erection thanks are due to Jenny Lind, who gave two concerts in aid of the building-fund, realizing £2,500. The Theatre Royal will bear comparison, as regards its interior appearance and arrangements, with any out of London; and its exterior frontage, in the modern Italian style, with a good statue of Shakspeare over the door, is extremely neat and pretty. The theatre is calculated to hold 2,147 persons; and the stage, as regards size, ranks about the third in England. There is one excellent contrivance, in the shape of a large reservoir on the roof of the building, holding 20,000 gallons, and communicating by means of pipes with many parts of the theatre, so that fire would have very little chance, Talking about theatres, think of actors building a bridge across a river-not a stage river, but a real one! Well, in 1760 some London actors visited Manchester, and not finding a suitable place there to erect a theatre, they stepped across to Salford, which then could communicate with Manchester over Salford Old Bridge only. They erected a theatre in Waterstreet, Salford; and the old bridge not being convenient for parties visiting their performances from Manchester, they built a wooden bridge across the Irwell, and called it Blackfriars Bridge. The chief buildings of general attraction in Manchester are the mills and warehouses, which are of a number and a magnitude that a short visit, or a casual run through the streets, does not afford time to conceive. Some of the very best streets consist of nothing but warehouses-lofty, roomy, well-built structures, wanting neither in conveniences inside, nor lacking architectural beauties and enrichments without. Mosley-street, for instance, is one of the finest in the town-they call it a city now, but it hardly looks like one-and Mosley-street consists for the most part of warehouses. Besides them, it contains the Portico Library, the Union Club, and the Royal Institution-all capital buildings; and yet they do not throw the warehouses so very much into the shade. Indeed, trade is the staple of the place, and it is petted, and worshipped, and has monuments built in its honour, all over. These mills and warehouses are as full of windows as the top of a pepper-castor is full of holes; and they contain perhaps twenty times as many gas-lights as they contain windows that is, the mills do. The probability is, that if you are a studious man, caring little or nothing about trade practically, you may be in Manchester a few weeks, walk about every day with a head fuller of Goethe and Shelley than of cotton and yarn; and you may actually walk half-days amidst mills and warehouses, and neither think about them nor see them to remember. But this you cannot do in the evening at that period of the year when it is dark at four or five o'clock, unless you are blind as well as studious, any more than you could walk along Pall Mall when there was an illumination, without knowing that there was one; for then many parts of the town look for all the world as though there was a general illumination, with full lights in hundreds of windows in numbers of mills and warehouses, extending down whole streets. To say that these places employ scores, and some of them hundreds of hands, would be supererogatory. To attempt to let the reader into a detail of their mysteries would, in the limits of this paper, be too idle for the Idler; and it would be beside our present purpose. THE POLITICAL LOTOS. No one denies that. PEACE is undoubtedly pleasanter than war. Even our friend Frinkinbanks, who has as great a passion for argument as he has aptitude for getting the worst of every question, will agree with us there. It is pleasanter to doze on a hill-slope, imbedded in soft grass, while the winds rustle gently by, and the odorous day passes imperceptibly, than to march up the same slope in the teeth of a murderous cannonade, or to fly across it with your least valuable household goods on your back, having left, with your usual coolness and presence of mind, your best things to be devoured by the enemy. The Lotos-eaters would all vote for peace, and if this world was so constituted that Lotos-eating could be achieved at a trifling cost, peace might be readily established. But unfortunately, the Lotos, as an article of consumption, is very dear: green peas in the depth of winter are cheap in comparison. Let England eat the Lotos during a month, and see what a stride will be taken by Russia or America, what expense will be caused by pushing back those ambitious states, and you may conjecture what is the general cost of the delectable food. If Brown, of the firm of Brown, Jones, and Robinson, treats himself and his partners to a month's yachting, during which they come to a land where it is always afternoon, is not the business for a time neglected? does not the respectable and grey-haired chief clerk drop one respectable tear? and do not all the younger clerks rush off to Simpson's and Cremorne, and eat the Lotos on a smaller scale? We may be certain that the A. B.'s in H.M.S. Ithacensis, bearing the flag of Admiral Ulysses, who yielded to the temptations of" that enchanted stern laden with flower and fruit," were brought to the gratings as soon as the ship had gained an offing. And Lotos-eating costs just as much now as it did in the time of Ulysses. True, the form of the Lotos has somewhat changed since that day, as one of our own contributors shows in the following graceful and pleasant poem, which we extract from his recently-published volume :* LOTOS-EATING. I. Who would care to pass his life away Sung by Alfred Tennyson? * Idyls and Rhymes. By Mortimer Collins. Dublin: McGlashan. II. Who would care to be a dull new-comer III. Rather give me coffee, art, a book, From my windows a delicious sea-view, IV. Strawberry icebergs in the summer time— V. Now and then a friend and some Sauterne, Now and then a haunch of Highland venison: Maugre Alfred Tennyson. But it matters little what form the Lotos bears. We can find great pleasure, when we have perused our budget of letters and MSS., have answered our correspondents, and informed some dozen anxious querists that our pages are open to voluntary contributions, in pitching the Idler to the other side of the room, and taking up the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, to find the things we have been attempting to hint, by means of satire and ridicule, plainly and excellently expressed with philosophic calmness;-to find the able writers of that periodical pointing out those faults on the part of Macaulay against which we levelled our last month's parody, and speaking with just contempt of those critics of "Maud" on whom we have exercised the lash, incidentally and sparingly. We can find pleasure in being abused by the Era, because a paper that chronicles the deeds of the horse in the manner of an humbler animal, can hardly be considered a good judge of literature. We can find pleasure in reading Sir Arthur Hallam Elton's Tracts for the Present Crisis, although we hold entirely different views, and do not believe the present moment in any way worthy of being distinguished as a crisis. We consider that there have been, within the recollection of the youngest inhabitant, periods infinitely more critical. The day that witnessed the formation of the Aberdeen Cabinet, and thus brought on the Russian war, and the day on which that Cabinet received its death-blow, might be considered crises. But the present time, when we are drifting either into active peace, or inactive war, -a war which might be called peace but for the doubled taxation, a peace which will give rise to all the strife of war on civil grounds of polity, is a most common-place epoch, and one that has every chance. of frequent recurrence. The chief merits of Sir Arthur H. Elton's Tracts are, the exposure |