choosing their ground, and choose it upon some principle that I am unable to understand.
I have a sensitive horror of regularity, of uniformity, of straight lines, of obtrusive geometrical forms. I prefer a winding alley to a direct street. I detest a modern, well-advertised building estate. The water-*colour sketch of such a place is meant to be very fascinating and attractive as it hangs in the great house-agent's office or window, but it has no charms for me. My theory is that a man must be perpetually struggling if he wishes to preserve his individuality in such a settlement. The water may be pure; the soil may be gravelly; the neighbourhood may be well supplied with all kinds of churches and chapels; the "red book" may not pass it by as being out of the fashionable circle; blue books may refer to it approvingly as a model of perfect drainage; it may be warmed up by thorough occupation; perambulators may be seen in its bare new squares; broughams may stand by the side of its bright level kerbstones; but the demon of sameness, in my eyes, would always be brooding over it. I should feel that when I retired to rest, perhaps eight hundred masters of households were slumbering in eight hundred bedchambers exactly the same size and the same shape as my own. When I took a bath, or lingered over the breakfast-table, I should be haunted by the knowledge that eight hundred people might probably be taking similar baths and similar breakfasts in precisely similar apartments. My library, my dining-room, and my drawing-room would correspond in shape and size with eight hundred other receptacles devoted to study, refreshment, and recreation. If I gazed from a window, or stood at a doorway, I should see hundreds of other windows, and hundreds of other doorways, that matched mine in relative position and design. I should look down upon the same infant shrubs, and the same even, level walls, or up at the same long, level parapets, without break, the same regular army of chimney-pots, without variety,—until I should feel as if I had settled in a fashionable penitentiary, to feed upon monotony for the rest of my days. My dreams at night would probably be a mixture of the past and the present, of my old tastes and my new sufferings. The builder, whose trowel seemed ever ringing in my ears, would dance over me in hoops and patches; and the whitewasher, whose brush seemed always flopping above my head, would be mixing his composition in my favourite punch-bowl. My old books, my old prints, my old china, my old furniture, my old servants, would pine away in such a habitation; and I should have to surround myself with fresh faces and fresh voices, according to the latest model. Finally, I should die of a surfeit of stucco, and be the first lodger entered in the records of the adjoining bleak, unfinished cemetery.
If I have little sympathy with those people who dwell in such tents as these,—who neither belong to the town nor the country,—who hang upon the skirts of London in mushroom suburbs that blend as inharmoniously with the great old city as a Wandsworth villa would blend with Rochester Castle,—I am totally unable to understand the character of those other
