Government could see its way to the initiation or encouragement of any local industries which would render the population of these congested districts less dependent upon the product of the soil, such a project would meet with my warmest approval.

I now pass to the question of the encumbered estates.' Mr. Russell proposes that these should be sold compulsorily to the tenants; but who is to fix the price, and how is it to be assessed? There is no standard in existence in Ireland upon which the fair number of years' purchase can be arrived at.

The poor law valuation is admittedly unequal, and this must be said in a greater degree of judicial rents, which vary enormously even upon the same class of land on adjacent holdings.

Mr. Russell refers to encumbered estates where the interest of the landlord is nil, and therefore the owner cannot gain much by the transfer. But under these circumstances what is the particular object in forcing the tenant to buy, who is at this moment amply protected by the various Land Acts?

If compulsion were to be used in such cases, it would certainly invite repudiation.

The existing receiver system,' no doubt, is a bad one for the landlord, but I do not see how it can be prejudicial to the tenantthe Act of 1881 having given him perfect security, and effectually stopped improvements being effected by the landlords, either solvent. or insolvent.

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There is no doubt, if a system could be devised which would induce the tenants of these encumbered estates' to buy out their landlords voluntarily, it would be of great advantage to get rid of the receiver system;' but I hold that the introduction of the element of compulsion must be attended with results fatal to the existing owners throughout Ireland and most dangerous to the State.

Finally as to the remainder of the country.' Mr. Russell hesitates to urge the compulsory expropriation of solvent Irish landlords just at present, but he states that he thinks the principle will have to be applied in the end, and cites a case in which a landlord (in his own constituency) sold a large property at a rate which gave the tenant purchaser a reduction of six shillings in the pound upon the judicial rent, adding that, in consequence of this, the tenants on the adjoining properties are discontented, and compulsory sale is mentioned in every market-place in the district.

I have been unable to ascertain what large property in Mr. Russell's constituency answers exactly to the description he has given, but I think I am right in believing that it is an exceptional, not a typical case, and must have belonged to either an absentee or an owner who did not reside in the district.

If I am correct in this supposition, could there be a greater argument against the equity of compulsory purchase? For evidently

these tenants desire to acquire their holdings at the same low figure as their neighbours who have purchased upon the property in question.

In other words the value of an estate of a resident Irish landlord who has spent his income in the district, and who wishes to continue to reside on his property, is to be assessed by reference to the amount accepted by an absentee or non-resident owner who is only too anxious to get rid of a troublesome property on any terms.

My belief is that compulsory sales to tenants in any case would have a most injurious effect, and would go far to counteract the good results of Lord Ashbourne's Act, by making the purchasers under that measure thoroughly discontented, and inviting them to repudiate their contracts unless they got a similar reduction to that given to tenants who were compulsorily made owners.

In conclusion I would ask, what then is the necessity for introducing the heroic remedy of compulsion?

I see it continually stated by politicians, that the dual ownership established by the Act of 1881 must be abolished;' but what does the phrase dual ownership mean?

It appears to me that what is called dual ownership is almost identical with the old Ulster tenant-right custom, which I believe has been in existence since the plantation, and under which that part of Ireland has been so exceptionally prosperous.

And again, if dual ownership is to be abolished, I would ask in whose interest? Is it for the benefit of the tenant, who at the moment stands in a far better position than that of any other tenant in the world; or is it for the benefit of the landlord, whose remaining interests were guaranteed by the Act of 1881, and who, instead of seeking to be compulsorily bought out, would, as far as I am informed, in the vast majority of cases, oppose so injurious a project to the very ut most?

Free contract such as exists under Lord Ashbourne's Act is the only means by which the Land Question, outside the congested districts, can be fairly settled, by the gradual establishment of a peasant proprietary.

The existing system is fair to both parties; it subjects the State to no appreciable risk, and can already show unexampled results most gratifying and satisfactory to all who desire to see Ireland loyal, law-abiding, and prosperous.

WATERFORD.

IN PRAISE OF LONDON FOG.

IT has been said that no city in the world is so beautiful as London on a fine day. Whether this is true or not seems very doubtful. But the converse of this proposition, viz.-that nothing is like the beauty of London at night, or during a foggy day-though apparently paradoxical, is most certainly true. Such beauty does not indeed come under the received classical forms and types, and, should we turn to the old Latin adage, Pulchra sunt, quæ visa placent, we might find much difficulty in bringing it within the scope of that definition. There is nothing at all agreeable in being out in the fog; neither the man of business nor the man of pleasure can possibly help disliking it; and as for the artist (taking the term now and for the whole of this paper as equivalent to the Seeker of the Picturesque), accustomed as he is to look for beauty along certain fixed lines, he scarcely ever suspects that he can find anything to please his æsthetic sense in other directions. He will go into ecstasies over a starry night, or the pale crescent of the moon shining through the jet black fir trees in the forest; but the Beautiful, as it reveals itself in a London street by night, will too often escape his attention.

And yet this ought surely not to be so. Dead nature, landscape nature, attracts us by far too much. Real as its charms indubitably are, they belong to the superficial rather than to the internal order of things. And hence it comes that their study is so frequently carried to excess, and that their descriptions are so hackneyed as to become ridiculously trite; so much so, that a writer who seeks to be original and graphic in his delineations of scenery is almost forced to be unintelligible at times.

While, therefore, these inferior manifestations of loveliness in colour and in form are so much sought after, living human nature, which is always new, which never can become the stale and hackneyed object of the artist's toil, both on account of its infinite variety and of its being so close at hand, so near to us-Man, with his works and thoughts, as typified in this vast city of the world— is comparatively given over to oblivion; I mean, of course, from one particular point of view, sufficiently pointed out in the foregoing lines. Yet it is but the merest truism to say that there is

more of real beauty in a human face, in a stone carved by a human hand, in a toy invented for a child by a human mind, than in the cataract of Niagara or the most dazzling snow-clad summits of the Alps. And if so, what of London? Life is in movement, and here, what movement, what life! Beauty is in life; and here, therefore, what beauty! Artistic natures, that love whatever is colossal, magnificent, and sublime, could not fail to love London if they would only open their eyes and look around them on every side. Samuel Johnson would have willingly given up the country, with all its verdurous and smiling landscapes, for the scenery that his dear Fleet Street offered to his view. And the present writer, without, however, thus restricting his preference to any one part of the great metropolis, ventures to hold a similar opinion.

In many respects, London has no advantage over other cities; in several points, it is even inferior to some. The good taste shown in the architecture of its palaces and public buildings is not unfrequently questionable, to say the least. The West End itself contains few mansions that would not find their equals in Paris, Vienna, or Berlin. The old monuments, scattered here and there about the town, are hardly more curious than those of most other nations, and sink into complete insignificance when we remember those of Rome. The public gardens and parks, trim and well-kept as they are, exhibit nothing that, to a greater or less extent, is not to be found in every wealthy capital in Europe. But that which can be seen nowhere but in London-that which gives it its peculiar stamp and its special beauty is its night and its fog.

Night in London !

Stand upon Westminster Bridge, and gaze at the innumerable glories reflected back by the Thames; the avenues of gas lights and rows of illuminated windows, repeated in the heaving waters, and trembling and undulating as the waters heave; the solitary electric lamp that shines out from the immense station of Charing Cross; the red, blue, and emerald green lanterns on the railway bridge far away, and the long cloud of white smoke that, iris-like, takes the colour of each lantern over which it rolls, while it marks the passage of a fiery messenger along the rails; the lights of the swift, graceful steamboats below, plying upwards against the tide, or downwards with it, and making the brown waters foam and sparkle; the factories on the south side of the river, all ablaze with a thousand radiances; the long straight line of lamps, that stretches as far as the eye can see, above Westminster Bridge, where Lambeth Hospital faces, not unworthily, the great Houses of Parliament: and with all these splendours surrounding you, and in the midst of this whirlpool movement ever more and more rapid, ever louder and louder, as the great city swells to vaster dimensions year by year-go and talk nonsense about the stars and the light of the moon! Prate about

Cornfields and green grass, sheep and oxen, when you see, streaming past you over the bridge-out of the darkness, into the darknessthousands of living fellow-creatures, all of them thinking and willing, many of them loving and hating, some of them like unto holy angels, and some like fiends from hell! Oh, the dread intensity, the wonderful meaning, the turbulent grandeur of the scene! Starlight and moonlight may indeed embellish it; the towers of Westminster, silvered with celestial radiance, may indeed look more splendid than when they loom, black and solemn, out of the lamp-light and the starless obscurity; still, to my mind, these occasional interferences add but little to the scenery, and their absence does not matter much. But what would the fairest of capitals-Venice, for instance-be at night, without those lamps of Heaven? Only London gives out enough light to be, like the Medusa, beautiful by its own phosphorescence.

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But still, this beauty is of a sort that the common mind, accustomed to judge of all things by precedent, is able to understand without any very great difficulty. Let us now turn to another part of the town, and walk through Drury Lane on the evening of a Bank Holiday, or on Saturday night. We find ourselves transported at once to an unutterably strange region, dismal to dwell in, squalid beyond description, and inhabited by a population of tame savages. An Orpheus, in the shape of an organ-grinder, makes his appearance and metaphorically strikes the lyre,' and behold, ragged and tawdry beings of all sizes, from the three-year-old child to the girl of sixteen and more, come trooping out of their unsavoury wigwams, and hop about in the murky open air, under the flaring gas. Music hath charms,' it would appear; and whether this can or cannot be called music, it has indescribable charms for them. The rain begins to fall; a thin drizzle at first, it quickly becomes a heavy shower; but the dancers will not be baulked of their enjoyment. So that they get all the benefit of the ball, what do these children of nature care for a drop of rain or a splash of mud more or less? And indeed the ball-room is most brilliantly lighted, and there is no want of partners; no glacial coldness, or polite ceremonial, or questions of etiquette, come in here to make the party a failure. They enjoy themselves as thoroughly and as wildly as it is possible to do. On the begrimed (but not painted) faces; on the scowling, laughing, saucy, devil-may-care (but never languid) countenances that move to and fro in time with the music, the fitful flickering of the gas-flames tells with admirable effect. Rembrandt might perhaps do justice to the scene. For my part, I have often stopped in my way to look at it, and would quite as willingly see that as any wardance or bear-dance, with torches, and screams, and whoops, such as travellers tell us are to be witnessed among the Choctaws and the Kickapoos. And yet who would care to step out of his way and