"Why, ma'am, I had sworn that if I didn't get a shilling afore ten o'clock, I would positively-go to work!" He did get the shilling, and instead of going to work, he went instantly to the Gin Palace. Another fair reader expostulates with me, urging that ladies may surely buy off an unfortunate beggar when no policeman is at hand, and they may, perhaps, be exposed to insult or maltreatment. Let them do so, but let them remember, that in this case they do not act from charity but from fear, or in plain English, from selfishness, which is the predominant motive in nine-tenths of all indiscriminate alms-giving. Ye who thus waste money to save trouble, to avoid persecution, or to get rid of an apprehension, in every instance to gratify yourselves, plead not the stale excuse that alms must sometimes be thrown away upon knaves and cheats, in order that no really deserving object may be left unrelieved, even as nature wastes a portion of her rain upon the ocean, lest any part of the dry land should remain unrefreshed? The cases are not parallel. Nature wastes nothing, for the sea gives back these showery tributes in the form of vapour, which, being wafted to its shores, descends in reviving dew upon the fields and flowers; while misapplied alms, yielding no such fertilising returns, impoverish the donor, without enriching the receiver. Nor are they less injurious to the former in a moral than in a pecuniary sense. His sympathies, not only blunted but perverted, have been so frequently excited by fictitious distress, that he loses all sensibility to real unobtrusive woe, and never dreams of extending succour to those obscure haunts Where hopeless anguish pours the sigh, His morbid appetite can only feed on coarse, visible, tangible woes. Wounds, sores, loathsome diseases, rags, nakedness, whining appeals, groans, squalor, feigned as they often are-for where shall we find more accomplished actors than professional beggars-have so completely engrossed his feelings, that they are dead to the genuine distress which is most delicate and undemonstrative when it is the most deep and desolating. His is the miscalled charity which Will sate itself in a celestial bed So much for the evils entailed upon undiscriminating alms-givers, the multipliers and fatteners of our street-beggars. Now for the manifold mischiefs that they inflict upon the recipients of their bounty. Of these the fullest and most authentic record is to be found in our police reports, which establish the fact that no culprit is so utterly irreclaimable, and few so profligate as the professional mendicant, many of which class after being repeatedly committed to prison, and even placed in situations where they could maintain themselves by honest industry, return to the trade in which they can earn ten times more wages than in any other. Why should they dig and toil when idleness will give them a profitable and a jolly life? What though they may have been arrested scores of times! London is large enough to furnish a district where they are still unknown to the police; and when they have rung the changes upon localities, they may perform the same transmutation upon their own persons. Our accommodating metropolis contains more than one masquerade-warehouse for beggars, where they may be furnished with complete disguises, from the disabled soldier or sailor, or railroad navvy, up to the decayed gentlewoman, and the demure white-stocked clergyman, soliciting subscriptions for the repair of some distant church. In this hospital for the healthy are also to be hired crutches, splints, wooden legs, bandages, arm-slings, eyepatches, every thing that can simulate disablement and decrepitude. Here, too, may be obtained the wigs, and dyes, and dresses that will metamorphose a pale denizen of St. Giles's into a tawny Hindoo, not forgetting his handful of religious tracts; or into any foreigner whose hue and garb may be most likely to attract attention and halfpence from wayfaring dupes. Places there are of dressed rehearsal, where may be seen congregated the counterfeit victims of every malady and misfortune that flesh is heir to, of "convulsions, epilepsies, fierce catarrhs; pining atrophy, marasmus and wide-wasting pestilence:" and here, too, let but a known policeman pounce upon the ghastly group, may be seen how instantly the lame cripple shall take to his heels, throwing away the crutches that impede his flight; how the dumb shall speak, the blind shall see, the deaf shall hear; and how the poor creature lying on the pavement in a fit, and foaming at the mouth with the assistance of soap, shall need no assistance to jump up and scamper out of sight with all the agility of a harlequin. Not the least ingenious of the many devices employed to fleece dupes and subsidise impostors are the obscure offices, well known to the craft, where vouchers and documents are forged, and pathetic begging-letters composed, and testimonials invented for authenticating falsehood and fraud. Here may be procured certificates of birth, marriage, death, verified by clerical signatures; magisterial attestations to the ruinous losses which the uninsured bearer has sustained from fire, with a long appendage of subscriptions; documents showing how the seafaring applicant was shipwrecked at the Land's End, saving nothing but his life, and was begging his way to Leith, where he had a promise of another and a better berth, from the non-existing owner of the vessel that was never lost. Here, too, are registered the addresses, the ages, and the terms of the children ready to be hired by the street mendicant, who naturally giving a preference to the sickly and the half-starved, takes especial care to keep them in that interesting and pence-producing state. Curious and not uninstructive is it to trace the inevitable connection of effect and cause, as exemplified in the youngsters of the upper and lower classes. The lady mamma, with mistaken benevolence, seldom allows her boys to walk out unprovided with some halfpence to drop into the scrip held by the beggar's brat. "The child's the parent of the man ;" this youthful habit is continued in after-life, and the young gentleman becomes an undiscriminating alms-giver, responsible for all the evils we have been enumerating. The mendicant's offspring is not less irredeemably perverted from the right course. The first shilling that he has obtained without working for it, has enlisted him for life in the freebooting corps of the London Lazzaroni; the mistake and the vice of both parents have become hereditary, and mendicancy is aggravated and perpetuated by the misdirected efforts made for its relief. Come hither, ye who pay blind tribute to the idle prowlers in our highways and byeways, and if ye wish to know the fruits of the seed ye have scattered by the road-side, accompany me to yonder gin palace, whose gaudy gas lamps, flashing through windows of costly plate glass, cast an ominous and baleful glare upon the streets. Those brutalised creatures wearing the human form-those hideous combinations of filth, rags, disease, and wretchedness, that hang about the vestibule in every stage of degradation, from maudlin imbecility to incipient madness, are the victims of the great and terrible gin spirit-the worst of all demons before whom they would again prostrate themselves, but that they have laid their last farthing upon his altar. Let us enter this glittering pandemonium, wherein is enthroned the Moloch of the liquid fire, grim and bloated, and gilded, and encircled, to the mind's eye, by the worm of the still, not less tempting and malignant than the serpent that occasioned the first fall of man. Seated in her bar-shrine may be seen his Jezabel queen, a Judas smile upon her painted face, as she distributes poison for the body and the soul to a crowd of infatuated quaffers. The worshippers are worthy of the temple. Ribald jests are their Litany-their prayers are execrations-their psalms are licentious songs-their whole devotion is to drunkenness, and its influence is manifested in foul-mouthed abuse or savage violence. Hearken, O deluded alms-givers! to the incessant rattle of pence, and groats, and sixpences. All that money passed from your pockets into those of the beggars; they are now turning it into ardent spirits; those spirits, and the recklessness they engender, will be turned into a total demoralisation; and ye, the founders and paymasters of these bacchanalian orgies, will have turned the victim of your blind bounty, first, into a confirmed idler; secondly, into a confirmed drunkard; thirdly, into a confirmed malefactor! Ye have chosen to sow the wind. What could ye expect, but that ye should reap the whirlwind? Perhaps it may be urged that your bounty, however misapplied and perverted, was well meant. Alas! a good meaning is but a poor apology for a most mischievous consequence, especially when it has been shown that a morbid promiscuous tossing of alms to mendicants, is but selfishness assuming the garb of charity. But I will make one admission in your favour. As the drunkenness and vice which ye have unwittingly engendered and fostered, may possibly have increased the population of a certain place never mentioned "to ears polite," your good intentions may, perhaps, have been found useful in amending and enlarging its pavement! Before ye attempt any further defence, give me an answer to two questions. In a country like this, where so many millions are annually expended in poor's rates, where the state has made provision of some sort for all who are in absolute need of it; where private institutions for charitable purposes are to be found in almost every street; where the clergy rarely fail to give or procure assistance for such parishioners as require and deserve it; where district visitants, in the majority of our parishes, enter every house for the purpose of succouring the necessitous and the sick,in such a country what right has any man utterly to repudiate the great primary law of nature and of Scripture, that of eating bread in the sweat of his face,-what right has he to infest and obstruct our streets with his whining lies and useless sloth, and to imitate the life of a plundering Arab in the midst of a civilised and industrious community? If he have no such privilege, no such claim, what right has the undiscrimi nating almsgiver to encourage, to fatten, and to multiply a demoralised class, whose importunities or menaces are a nuisance to his fellow-creatures, and whose habits, it is to be feared, can seldom find much favour in the sight of Heaven.-I pause for a reply. KING ARTHUR. WHEN, after the lapse of centuries, the tomb of Ogier the Dane was discovered by some of his countrymen, the giant knight, awaking from his long, death-like slumber, demanded who they were who thus disturbed his repose? "We are Danes,” replied a voice. "Let one of your number give me his hand," returned the Paladin. There was a momentary hesitation amongst the crowd; at length one, bolder than the rest thrust forth the heavy crow-bar, which had served to break open the tomb. Ogier seized the iron in his tremendous grasp and gripped the unyielding metal. "Tis well," he cried, as he turned himself round to sleep through another cycle, "'tis well, there are yet men in Denmark!" A generation has well nigh passed away since the great æra of modern British poetry, when those whom we have lost, with the THREE who yet survive-though their voices are heard no more-compelled the wonder and admiration of all to whom our land's language is known; with their great names the spirit of song appeared to have flown; it seemed as if no more worlds were left for the poet to conquer, and that he had abandoned the earth. Small tinklers there have been on feeble harps, laborious metremongers, who with Their lean and flashy songs Grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw, making idiots dance to their dreary music; but of heart-stirring, soulelevating poets, none ! The loftiest aspirations of the rhymesters of the last twenty years"dulcet in contagion," as Sir Toby says, though, unlike the merry knight's catch, powerless to "draw three souls out of one weaver"-have been a strange chiming of "bells and pomegranates," melodious as the sounds which scared Belphegor from his wedding; rugged verses hammered out on the anvil to serve a political end; jingling lines to high-born ladies, and doleful ditties that made the reader as much "a-weary" as the subject of them was said to be; on these and on "such small deer" have praises been lavished and pensions been bestowed, but neither can flattery form, the corn-laws create, nor gold evoke the muse. The oracle still remains dumb. True poetry, however, like genius, never dies. She may slumber for awhile, but at length the trance is dissolved, and they who have watched and waited exclaim with Ogier, "There are yet men in Denmark!" It is scarcely a twelvemonth since a voice, which had already attracted many listeners to a theme as bold as it was original, again broke the silence whose cold chain had fettered the world so long, and proclaimed the advent of another poet. He was known only as "the author of the new Timon," but busy conjecture wore almost the aspect of certainty in ascribing the authorship of the first part of "King Arthur" to one who had achieved the greatest distinction as a novelist, and had taken a high place as a successful dramatist and accomplished scholar; to one who could alike recal the lore of the past and unfold the secrets of the present; in a word, to the only man, except Macaulay, capable of exhibiting in one person so many and sach varied acquirements. The concealed author must be found, and public opinion, eager to award the prize, bestowed the laurels on Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton. In ushering to the world the conclusion of his noble poem, he has affixed his name to a work which, he trusts, and not vainly, as we think, will be the least perishable monument of thoughts and labours which have made the life of his life. The reasons which led Sir Edward to launch his bark unnamed are thus satisfactorily set forth: · The motives that induced me to publish anonymously the first portion of 'Arthur,' as well as the New Timon,' are simple enough to be easily recognised. An author, who has been some time before the public, feels, in undertaking some new attempt in his vocation, as if released from an indescribable restraint, when he pre-resolves to hazard his experiment as that of one utterly unknown. That determination gives at once freedom and zest to his labours in the hours of composition, and on the anxious eve of publication, restores to him much of the interest and pleasurable excitement that charmed his earliest delusions. When he escapes from the judgment that has been passed on his manhood, he seems again to start fresh from the expectations of his youth. In my own case, too, I believed that my experiment would have a fairer chance of justice if it could be regarded without personal reference to the author; and, at all events it was clear, that I myself could the better judge how far the experiment had failed or succeeded, when freed from the partial kindness of those disposed to over-rate, or the pre-determined censure of those accustomed to despise, my former labours. He hazarded the experiment of the anonymous; it succeeded,-and in justice to the great name he has created he now claims his own, an offspring of which he may be truly proud. This is no moment to speak of discouragement; the task is accomplished; the battle is fought; the victory won. There must be an end now of misgiving; the author has taken his stand on the highest ground of the realms of poesy,-beyond the reach of the clamour of the snarling pack whose labour of love is the search of flaws and stains; of the critic Brisk as a flea and ignorant as dirt, who curiously examines the amber, not for the sake of its brightness, but to discover the straw which, haply, may have found its way there; who finds no savour in herbs that distil not bitterness. Let us now speak of the poem which has excited so strong an interest. To describe it at length, or attempt by numerous extracts to exhibit its pervading beauties, would, with the limited space allotted to us, be impossible. We must be content rather to indicate the theme than dwell upon it,-to cull a few flowers at random than display a broad and brilliant parterre. "King Arthur," as the title at once leads us to expect, is an Epic of Chivalry, constructed, in obedience to Pope's definition, of three necessary elements, the Probable, the Allegorical, and the Marvellous. These are all made subservient to one great end; the development of the sublimest truths that reward the toil of the patient, the trustful, the self-denying and self-relying man. Freedom for his country and the establishment of a pure faith, the faith of the Christian, are the great objects of |