tremble at a gallopade, or fall prostrate under the inflictions of “the parson’s farewell,” or “the wind that shakes the barley.”  The system of building, or rather “running up” a house first, and afterwards providing it with a false exterior, meant to deceive the eye with the semblance of curved stone, is in itself an absolute abomination.  Besides, Greek architecture, so magnificent when on a large scale, becomes perfectly ridiculous when applied to a private street-mansion, or a haberdasher’s warehouse.  St. Paul’s Church, Covent-Garden, is an instance of the unhappy effect produced by a combination of a similar kind; great in all its parts, with its original littleness, it very nearly approximates to the character of a barn.  Inigo Jones doubtless desired to erect an edifice of stately Roman aspect, but he was cramped in his design, and, therefore, only aspired to make a first-rate barn; so far unquestionably the great architect has succeeded.  Then looking to those details of London architecture, which appear more peculiarly connected with the dignity of the nation, what can we say of it, but that the King of Great Britain is worse lodged than the chief magistrate of Claris or Zug, while the debates of the most powerful assembly in the world are carried on in a building, (or, a return to Westminster Hall,) which will bear no comparison with the Stadthouse at Amsterdam!  The city, however, as a whole, presents a combination of magnitude and grandeur, which we should in vain look for elsewhere, although with all its immensity it has not yet realized the quaint prediction of James the First,—­that London would shortly be England, and England would be London.

Morning.

The metropolis presents certain features of peculiar interest just at that unpopular dreamy hour when stars “begin to pale their ineffectual fires,” and the drowsy twilight of the doubtful day brightens apace into the fulness of morning, “blushing like an Eastern bride.”  Then it is that the extremes of society first meet under circumstances well calculated to indicate the moral width between their several conditions.  The gilded chariot bowls along from square to square with its delicate patrimonial possessor, bearing him homeward in celerity and silence, worn with lassitude, and heated with wine quaffed at his third rout, after having deserted the oft-seen ballet, or withdrawn in pettish disgust at the utterance of a false harmony in the opera.  A cabriolet hurries past him still more rapidly, bearing a fashionable physician, on the fret at having been summoned prematurely from the comforts of a second sleep in a voluptuous chamber, on an experimental visit to

  “Raise the weak head, and stay the parting sigh,
  Or with new life relume the swimming eye.”

At the corners of streets of traffic, and more especially

  “Where fam’d St. Giles’s ancient limits spread,”