it bearable. Nay, more, as they must live in such a condition, can we hope that this summer-tide, or autumn-tide, or whatever tide it may be for that is only darkly conjectured-of the earth's existence, will be as delightful to them as was its green spring. tide to its young inhabitants?

First, let us look on what art has done, is doing, and may yet do to make the surface of the earth as a mere spectacle,-gratifying the eye, kindling the imagination, and filling the heart with poetry, kindliness, and love,-as agreeable to the future as to the past generations. Sunny glades, and shady lanes, green fields, and purling streams, a land carpeted with flowers, the air filled with music, balmy breezes and a clear sky,-all the poetic delights of our fathers and grandfathers-must be, it is assumed, unknown to our successors. A little examination of the subject may teach us a different and a more correct conclusion. Townborn arts, the steam-horse and the steam-ship, carry us in a short time, at a small expense and very often with great enjoyment while travelling, whithersoever we will. It is an undoubted fact, that the present town-bred population are better acquainted with the beauties and wonders of the country than were the most happy Arcadians of a former age, when confined within the limited spaces they could travel over on their own legs, or the legs not so easily tired of their dromedaries, or their horses.

To no inconsiderable part of our population, the beauties of Switzerland, Germany, and Italy are familiar. Many of them are acquainted with the charms of Greece and the Holy Land. An almost countless number disport themselves in the fine season, on our rolling or sporting streams, wander with delight over the pebbly beach and admire the magnificent ocean lulled in calm repose or roused by the storm into uncontrollable fury. To great multitudes, the soft downs of the South, the still lakes of Cumberland, with their hills softer than those of Italy, the mountains of Wales, Alps in grandeur but not in danger; the majestic hills and lakes of Scotland, and all the visible beauties of ever verdant Ireland, are accessible and are objects of delight and love. The sooty and fluffy denizens of our towns are habitually transported, though not nearly so frequently as enjoyment and health demand, into rural scenes unsurpassed for beauty. To their many natural charms many imparted by art, are added. The eye is refreshed by many splendid flowers, and the air is made fragrant by plants imported from abroad, and quite unknown to the dull and less

quickened people of former ages. It is to be anticipated that a similar condition will be enjoyed by our successors. They will make even a greater progress. They will have more facilities of conveyance and a still larger sphere of rural enjoyments than has been reached by us. Looking at the earth merely as a spectacle, the town population derive more enjoyment from it and have more reason to love the visible signs of universal goodness teeming from its surface, than the rural population of former ages.

Town-born arts, too, have done much even to improve the appearance of the earth. They have hemmed in the torrent, and converted its wide-spread arid bed into the green and fertile borders of a clear and rushing stream. They have bridged it over, and while they have made it safe, have added beauties of their own. They have divided its power, led it away in trundling rills, and have turned its devastation into teeming fertility. Townbred arts, too, have built the safe mole on the rocky shore of the stormy ocean, making of great sea walls and lofty lighthouses, which give safety to the mariner, picturesque objects. Even our railroads, so decried by the lovers of rural beauty for their barren banks, their deep cuttings, their dark tunnels, are beginning to assume very different characteristics. On them, as on all other great works, the useful must first be gained, the agreeable is won at leisure. After they are constructed, we can think of adorning them. Some of their great viaducts and their bridges lend even now a majesty to Nature herself. The shapeless heaps of earth at the sides of railways, the steep arid banks of the cuttings, are in many places, and probably may be, and in time will be in all, laid out in shrubberies or gardens, and will smile with blossoms, and rejoice us with fruits. Though our successors will be pent up in towns, we cannot agree with those who, living only in the sunshine of the past, being poorly gifted with hope, and wanting confidence in Nature, imagine the unknown future to be all clouds and storms. The prospects of succeeding generations, as seen in our telescope, are not so murky as the admirers of a country life and a rural population represent.

For the Fine Arts and for Artists the prospect is still more cheering. Their native place and their home is the city. The subjects of art are found sparingly in the rural wilderness, abundantly in the heart of civilization. History is written of men, not of mountains. Sculpture preserves the forms of heroes and of citizens more than of boors and farms. Poetry is too often

descriptive dulness when limited to the country, though Cowper contrasts that as God-made with the man-made town. Nature herself, as in the half-deserted countries of the East, seems to stagnate, or run into wild disorder, where there is wanting a brisk and active population. Ireland abounds with rural beauties; and the rural population, living amidst their own swine-when they have any are picturesque with rags and dirt; but the unvaried hovel, or varied only by the slated house, and a people all nearly in a similar condition of poverty, offer far fewer objects to the pencil of the artist, than the many-formed mansions and the varied buildings of the town-enriched population of England. When one dull clodhopper-one pursy, stalwart, bragging farmer-one beautifully limbed ox has been seen and painted, the subjects of art in the country are half exhausted. The endless succession of beings in towns, each curious in himself, and continual changes in the multitude, supply endless subjects for the pen and the pencil. Art, too, suggests and creates art. The sculptor and the painterboth inhabitants of towns-embody the inspirations of the poet, and the poet catches new inspiration from pictures and statues. History, which supplies to these artists so large a proportion of their subjects, is made in cities and amongst congregations of men. The rural population are the heavy ballast which steadies, rather than the bellying flapping sails which impel society. Progress begins amongst the multitude in towns, and he who would catch the dawn of improvement, must watch for its rising tints in crowded cities. Considered as our solace, the sources of enjoyment, after the bread of life has been gained and the day's work done, the Fine Arts will flourish more probably in the crowded hereafter than at present, and more than in any former ages.

The necessities of the present, and still more the necessities of the future, are now, happily, awakening attention to the condition of our towns, and compelling us to cleanse, enlarge, and beautify them. The accommodation designed for thousands has become hopelessly inadequate for millions. Our streets are nearly all too narrow for the busy streams which flow through them. Our towns must occupy more and more of the surface of the monopolised soil; and our food must come more and more from the yet unmonopolised soil of the new world. In comparison with the unadorned and unimproved wilderness our towns are already beautiful; but now that we have obtained room to enlarge them, by obtaining a free access to other countries for subsistence, imagina-

tion can scarcely conceive what they will become, and what they ust be made. Opened, ventilated, drained, filled with habitations at once comfortable and magnificent, and adorned with all that creative art can supply, they must be made worthy of intelligent beings. Compelled as we are to live compressed together, and compelled as we know future generations must be to live still more compressed, by their ever increasing numbers, it is not less an imperative duty to our descendants than to ourselves, to provide not only for the immediate but for the future improvement of the towns in which we and they must dwell.

It is pleasant to add that we are now likely to have the means of performing this duty. The people must first of all be fed and well fed. To have an assured command over the means of subsistence is essential to physical and moral well-being. The dread of starvation is incompatible with health of body and ease of mind; without which no great works can be done. When there is a general plenty, a large proportion of the most energetic minds being freed from the cares of providing subsistence, will diligently apply themselves to pioneering ways of improvement. All the obstacles interposed by the legislature between the people and abundance, being now removed, or destined in the course of a few months to rot away, we may rely with confidence on the unimpeded energies of commerce to procure an ample supply. We may be equally sure when the population are relieved from apprehensions of dearth and famine, that they will have time and thoughts for the improvement of their dwellings. We may now anticipate, therefore, that the very lowest classes will second the exertions of their benevolent leaders, and that improvement will be as great and as rapid as it is desirable.

Let the present and future generations, then, cease those vain murmurs we sometimes hear over the growth of towns, and the loss of green fields and sunny streams. For them the over-arched and almost hidden stream, that, dye-discoloured, serves a thousand factories, should be more endeared than the brightest rill that gurgles waste and unimpeded through the daisiest of meadows. Wheat fields and thick-sown turnips should be more agreeable to us than the fat wild pastures on which fed the venison of our ancestors. Boars, and oak forests in which they fattened, were naturally the delight of those who were scantily supplied with any other description of meat, but we can rejoice in the stall-fed ox and the pen-fed sheep. The shepherd's pipe might be charming

music to those who lazily reclining had only to watch their browsing sheep or grunting herds of swine, but to a town population, whose life is unbroken activity, the rush of the steam boat, or the whirl of the locomotive-even the scream of the railway whistle, which might perhaps be made more musical, and not less startling, should be more delightful than the sweetest toned flageolet. They are all the evidences of man's power. From all the circumstances connected with a crowded population we and our posterity cannot escape; let us try to enjoy them. Let the weaver as he plys his loom-and, if his labours be peculiarly irksome, let us hope that he will soon be better rewarded-think of its gorgeous products, which fascinate the fair and the stranger, and let him draw streams of delight from his own transcendant skill. Let the smith, as his hammer rings on the anvil and the sweat streams from his swarthy brow, remember that the meanest of his strokes contributes to the perfection of some one of the mighty machines that have made man the Lord of the Earth. And, not to multiply examples, which will readily occur to the reader, let the compositor, blackened with the ink of his well-used types, and the writer whose copy he is setting-up, complain no more of their town occupations, or envy those who work in the free air. them reflect that each in his sphere is performing his allotted task of keeping up communication and sympathy amongst all the other industrious classes, making the distant wine or cotton grower aware of the peaceful labours of the distant smith or weaver, that are carrying on for his advantage, diffusing amongst all the knowledge that must first be acquired by one, smoothing the asperities of each, and fusing the whole into one homogeneous kindly mass firmly cemented by interest and love, to the exclusion of terror and the gallows. Brief and few are the examples we quote as illustrations of the principle we desire to inculcate. Men must resolve to love the circumstances in which they are placed, and honour the work they are called upon to do. So will they make the crowded towns, in which future generations must live, a happier Arcadia than ever yet was known in the world.

Let