LONDON HOUSES.

Entry into London-Architecture-Economy of BuildingIndependence Habits-Crowded Streets---Servants.Punctuality and Activity of Tradesmen-Clocks-Division

of Time.

If the sky is dark, not less gloomy is the whole first appearance of London to him who enters it by the Dover road. The smoky colour of the houses gives it the appearance of a city that has been burnt. If to this be added the silence which prevails in the midst of a population of, perhaps, one million four hundred thousand persons, all in motion (so that one seems

to be in a theatre of Chinese shades), and the wearisome uniformity of the houses, almost all built in the same style, like a city of the beavers, it will be easy to imagine, that on first entering this darksome hive, the smile of pleased surprise soon gives way to a gloomy wonder. This was the old English style of building, which still prevails in the country. But, since the English have substituted the blue pill for suicide, or, still better, a journey to Paris; and, instead of Young's Night Thoughts, read the romances of Walter Scott, they have cheered up their houses with a coat of white, and have recently rebuilt the western part of the capital "west end" in a gayer and more varied style of architecture. I do not mean to assert that the English have become a tribe of skippers and laughers, like the

young Parisian of eighteen-they still delight in ghosts, witches, haunted churchyards, and a whole host of monstrosities. Woe be to him who should venture to write a romance without some apparition fitted to make "each particular hair stand on end!"

The houses are small and fragile. The first night I spent in a lodging-house, I seemed to myself still on board the vessel; the walls were equally slender, and, in great part, of wood, the chambers small, and the staircase like a companion ladder; the walls are generally so thin, that they allow the passage of sounds without interruption. The lodgers would hear one another talking, but that they are accustomed to speak in an under tone. I could hear the murmur of the conversation of my neighbour overhead,-my zenith, as well

as that of the other neighbour beneath my feet, like the opposite point Nadir; and I distinguished, at intervals, the words, "Very fine weather,—indeed-very fine -comfort-comfortable-great comfort" -words which occur as often in their conversation, as stops and commas in a book. In a word, the houses are ventriloquous. As I said before, they are all uniform. In a three-story house, there are three bedrooms, one over the other, and three parlours in the same situation, so that the population is as it were warehoused in layers like merchandise-like the cheese in the storehouses at Lodi and Codogno. The English have not chosen without design this (I will venture to call it) naval architecture. The advantages they derive from living in houses of small size and little durability are these: in general, a