church on Sundays." In town not only will their errors be overlooked, but they will find scores of pleasant and reputable persons who share the worst of them and go a great deal further, and in whose society they will soon begin to feel themselves by comparison quite orthodox, and perhaps rather conservative characters.
And lastly, beside all the other advantages of London which I have recapitulated, there is one of which very little note is ever taken. If many sweet and beautiful pleasures are lost by living there, many sharp and weary pains also therein find a strange anodyne. There is no time to be very unhappy in London. Past griefs are buried away under the surface, since we may not show them to the unsympathizing eyes around; and present cares and sorrows are driven into dark corners of the mind by the crowd of busy every-day thoughts which inevitably take their place. A man may feel the heart-ache in the country, and wander mourning by the solitary shore, or amid the silent woods. But let him go out of doors, after receiving a piece of sad intelligence, into the busy London streets, and be obliged to pick his way amid the crowd, to pass by a score of brilliant shops, avoid being run over by an omnibus, give a penny to a street-sweeper, push through the children looking at Punch, close his ears to a German band, hail a hansom and drive to his office or his chambers, and at the end of the hour how many thoughts will he have given to his sorrow? Before it has had time to sink into his mind many days of similar fuss and business will have intervened; and by that time the edge of the grief will be dulled, and he will never experience it in its sharpness. Of the influence of this process, continually repeated, on the character, a good deal might be said; and there may be certainly room to doubt whether thus perpetually shirking air the more serious and solemn passages of life is conducive to the higher welfare. After we have suffered a good deal, and the readiness of youth to encounter every new experience and drink every cup to the dregs, has been exchanged for the dread of strong emotions and the weariness of grief which belong to later years, there is an immense temptation to spare our own hearts as much as we can: and London offers the very easiest way without any failure of kindness, duty, or decorum, to effect such an end. Nevertheless, the sacred faculties of sympathy and unselfish sorrow are not things to be lightly tampered with, an is to be feared that the consequences of any conscious evasion of their claims must always be followed by that terrible Nemesis, the hardening of our hearts and the disbelief in the sympathy of our neighbours. We have made love and friendship unreal to ourselves, and it becomes impossible to continue to believe they are real to other people. Yet, I think, if the shelter be not wilfully or intentionally sought, if it merely come in the natural course of things, that the business and variety of town life prevent us from dwelling on sorrows which cannot be lightened by our care, it seems a better alternative than the almost infinite durability and emphasis given to grief in the monotonous life of the country.
If these be the advantages of town life, however, there are to be set against them many and grievous drawbacks. First, as the Country Mouse justly urges, half those quickly-following sensations and ideas which constitute the highly-prized rapidity of London life are essentially disagreeable in themselves, and might be dispensed with to our much greater comfort. In the country, for example, out of fifty sights, forty-nine at least are of pretty or beautiful objects, even where there is no particular scenery to boast. Woods, gardens, rivers, country roads, cottages, waggons, ploughs, cattle, sheep, and over all always a broad expanse of the blessed sky, with the pomps of sunrises and sunsets, and moonlight nights and snow-clad winter days — these are things on which everywhere (save in the Black Country, which is not the country at all) the eye rests, and finds peace and delight. In the town, out of the same number of glances of our tired eyeballs, we shall probably behold a score of huge advertisements, a line of hideous houses with a butcher's shop as the most prominent object, an omnibus and a brewer's dray, a score of bricklayers returning slightly drunk from dinner, and a handsome carriage with the unfortunate horses champing their gag-bits in agony from their tight bearing-reins, while the coachman flicks them with his whip. In the country, again, out of fifty odours the great majority will be of fresh herbage, or hay, or potato or bean fields, or of newly-ploughed ground, or burning weeds or turf. In the town we shall endure the sickly smell of drains, of stale fish, of raw meat, of carts laden with bones and offal, the insufferable
