him so pre-eminent an air of wretchedness.

It is true that the over-population was at least as
dense in the epoch of lords and ladies, and that now-a-
days some customs which made Edinburgh notorious of yore
have been fortunately pretermitted. But an aggregation
of comfort is not distasteful like an aggregation of the
reverse. Nobody cares how many lords and ladies, and
divines and lawyers, may have been crowded into these
houses in the past - perhaps the more the merrier. The
glasses clink around the china punch-bowl, some one
touches the virginals, there are peacocks' feathers on
the chimney, and the tapers burn clear and pale in the
red firelight. That is not an ugly picture in itself,
nor will it become ugly upon repetition. All the better
if the like were going on in every second room; the LAND
would only look the more inviting. Times are changed.
In one house, perhaps, two-score families herd together;
and, perhaps, not one of them is wholly out of the reach
of want. The great hotel is given over to discomfort
from the foundation to the chimney-tops; everywhere a
pinching, narrow habit, scanty meals, and an air of
sluttishness and dirt. In the first room there is a
birth, in another a death, in a third a sordid drinking-
bout, and the detective and the Bible-reader cross upon
the stairs. High words are audible from dwelling to
dwelling, and children have a strange experience from the
first; only a robust soul, you would think, could grow up
in such conditions without hurt. And even if God tempers
His dispensations to the young, and all the ill does not