in grandeur; the river, previously about 3000 feet broad, is precipitated through a narrow rent in the basaltic rock not more than 75 feet wide, and then down a deep cleft, to a depth of about 105 feet. The plateau itself is in some parts a perfectly level plain, and the country near the great rivers is subject to periodical inundations, like Egypt. The land of Barotse (about Îat. 16° S., long. 23° 30' E.) is spoken of as growing sugar-cane, sweet potato, manioc, yams, bananas, millet, &c. In Angola, near the Cuenza, the coffee-shrub, which was introduced by the Jesuits from Mocha, has become naturalised, and spread itself to a distance of 300 miles from the coast. Cotton of mediocre quality thrives here excellently. Cassange, to the east of Angola (about lat. 9° 30′ N., long. 17° E.) is a very fruitful laud; and the Portuguese settlement there may be called the commercial capital of the interior. It has a brisk trade in ivory and wax, and English cotton fabrics are imported. But the climate of almost the whole country here described is extremely unhealthy, the region about Lake Ngami, on the river Chobe (about lat. 17° 30' S., long. 25° E.), and the land of Barotse, being swampy or exposed to inundation. Hence Dr. Livingstone was delighted to find a high ridge of land on the Zambesi from the embouchure of the Kafué (lat. 15° 50′ S., long. 28° 35′ E.) to Tete, without forests or swamps, perfectly healthy, and with immense capacities for tillage; wheat, maize, and other grains being grown there to great advantage. He regards it as a fitting site for a missionstation; but the stress laid upon the capacities of the country, and upon the communication with the ocean by the river, shows that he regards it also as a possible English colony, and the centre of a considerable commerce.

Dr. Livingstone's book has not yet appeared, and we are therefore not in possession of all the materials for forming a critical judgment on the scientific value of his discoveries, and the reasonableness of the expectations which he entertains. It may be permitted us, however, to suspect that these expectations are rather sanguine. The Zambesi forms a large delta, and it appears extremely doubtful whether vessels will find depth of water enough to enter the river at all. And the river itself has not been sufficiently examined to warrant an unhesitating belief that it presents no impediments to navigation. We have heard of the great falls of Mosiwatunya; and there are allusions to rapids even in the lower part of the Zambesi. If the junction of the Kafué and Zambesi be really 1530 feet above the sea, and that of the Loangua and Zambesi 1410, we do not see how this mean fall of three feet in a mile can be sustained for 600 miles without impediments to navigation. Dr. Livingstone's discoveries can, however, scarcely fail to cause these points sooner or later to be

ascertained; and there are other rivers besides the Zambesi which ought to be examined. We have heard of the promise of the land of Cassange; and the river Quango or Congo would probably form as good an outlet to the Western Ocean for the produce of this district as the Zambesi to the east for that of Barotse and the country on the Kafué. And the great affluent of the Congo, the Caseye or Casai, might apparently form a highway into the very centre of the land of Lobale. It is a question, however, whether the character of the natives would come in aid of such enterprises, or would frustrate them entirely. They appear a much lower and more savage race than the negroes of Sudan; and those above Angola think it their interest to stop all communication between the interior and the coast.

There is one other part of Africa which claims our attention, though it has as yet been visited by no European. A very large lake has for some years past been inserted in maps of Africa, on information received from the natives, and from travelling Arab merchants. It is generally marked Nyassa, which turns out to be a corruption of the real name, Nyanja; and it is also known by the names Uniamési and Ukeréve. Its southern extremity is about lat. 12° S., long. 36° E., and its general direction N.W. Its northern end is generally left open upon maps, being quite unknown. Recent information seems to have proved this lake to have a far greater extent than was previously imagined. It extends northwards to at least lat. 2° S., if not beyond the equator itself; and its shape is nearly that of a pear, the breadth of the northern half exceeding 150 miles, while the southern becomes gradually exceedingly narrow. The watershed between the Indian and Atlantic Oceans lies between this lake and the Indian Ocean; when this has been passed by a traveller going from Kiloa or Pangani to the lake, the land slopes gradually down to the Atlantic. The physical configuration of this part of Africa is therefore quite different from that to the south and south-west of this explored by Dr. Livingstone. That was a plateau, or series of highlands; this is a kind of scoop, of probably no great elevation. Between the northern part of this lake and the Indian Ocean lies an alpine region containing peaks covered with perpetual snow. Three such are known,- Kilimanjaro (probable position, lat. 3° 20′ S., long. 37° E.); Kignea (ditto, lat. 1° S., long. 38° 30' E.); and Doengo Engai (ditto, lat. 4° S., long. 34° 30′ E.). The existence of snow-covered peaks in this equatorial region has been doubted, but the evidence is conclusive. The highlands to which these mountains belong are probably the southern extremity of the highlands of Abyssinia, and they must contain the sources of the Bahr-elAbiad, the principal branch of the Nile. Of feeders or outlet of

the great lake Uniamési we know nothing. The great range of Lupata seems to prevent its southern end having any outlet towards the Indian Ocean, and its extreme narrowness there agrees better with the upper than with the lower end of a lake. The northern end comes so very near the probable source of the westernmost branch of the Nile, the Keilak, that one cannot avoid giving expression to the idea that it may have its rise in this lake; although, till we have some knowledge of the height of the lake above the sea, this fancy can hardly be dignified with the name of a conjecture. And the larger the lake be proved to be, the less likely is it to have any outlet at all, unless the streams that feed it are of corresponding magnitude; and there does not seem to be room for a river of any size between the Lupata mountains and the southern end of Lake Uniamési. Certain it is that, with all these questions open, -the extent of the Lake Uniamési, the direction of its flow, its feeders, its outlet, the relation in which its water-system stands to that of the Nile,any searching explorations which might be undertaken in that direction would be crowned with results as brilliant as those attending Dr. Livingstone's investigations further south.

ART. III.-LONDON STREET ARCHITECTURE.

London in 1856. By Peter Cunningham. London: 1856. FOR Some years past, books, reviews, and newspapers have teemed with denunciations of modern urban architecture. The late Mr. Pugin, who-notwithstanding Mr. Ruskin's eloquent attacks upon him-in reality long preceded Mr. Ruskin as a chief originator of the great new movement in favour of pointed architecture, lived to see London and its suburbs rife with symptoms, in brick, stone, and plaster, of the repentance which he so vigorously preached. Antecedent to this movement, and lately proceeding side by side with it, was the movement, which may perhaps be dated from the publication of Stewart and Revett's Antiquities of Greece, in favour of the restoration of the classical styles. Between one and the other, scarcely a house is now built without some pretence, in its details, to an amount of architectural character such as, five-and-twenty years ago, was aspired to only by the architects of public edifices. It is often the misfortune of even the most sincere repentance to be very absurd in its more immediate results. The state repented of is almost certain to have had one meritorious feature which

is almost as certainly wanting in the penitential condition, namely, consistency. The mere man of the world is a perfectly intelligible, and, in his inferior kind, a satisfactory spectacle. He acknowledges certain plain utilitarian motives, and acts up to them with artistic thoroughness and simplicity. But "convert" him, convince him that his way of life has been wholly a mistake, and, unless he is a man of uncommonly strong understanding, he will commit all sorts of absurdities in the first uninstructed heat of his desire to be better. It seems, in its verbal statement, a very plain truth, and yet it is one of which few persons are practically cognisant, that, in order to do the right, one must first know what the right is. Now it seems to us that the repentance of metropolitan architecture has hitherto been, for the most part, of that unintelligent kind which does not content itself with crying, "What shall I do?" until it receives some practicable answer, but at once sets about doing something, in the hope that that proceeding, whatever it may be, will be right, which is sufficiently unlike its previous modes of procedure, and in forgetfulness of the fact that there are some conditions which do not require the exercise of any virtue or effort at all.

The results of the latter species of error in our London builders are lamentable and absurd in the extreme.

Architecturally speaking, perhaps the most melancholy sights on the face of the earth are the recently built metropolitan suburbs of the poorer sort, and the batches of edifices raised on the estates of the "Freehold-Land Societies." There is as much architectural pretence about almost every wretched little tenement, of twenty pounds rental, now built, as of old went to a temple or a palace; and yet the very existence of these edifices, in large and simultaneously constructed groups or streets, involves an idea so eminently unartistic, that the more carefully the architecture is carried out in them the worse must be their architectural effect. An assemblage of thatched cottages, with mouldering clay-walls, supplementary pigsties, and adjoining dungheaps, look picturesque-which is a step towards the architectural-because they are real. They have risen one by one; their internal discomforts are recognised facts, which are not unartistical in their aspect, because they are unavoidable; they are the best kind of habitations which the circumstance of successive construction and the means of the builders admitted of; clay floors, wet walls, bad atmosphere, and their consequences, are of a piece with the whole picture; and there is nothing discordant, though much that is melancholy, in the aspect of such a village. There may, indeed, be much of humble beauty in it, notwithstanding its sadness, if the inhabitants

have plainly done their best, by the help of care, cleanliness, and flowers, to alleviate the evils of close air, damp walls, and the rest. But how is it that our new "model villages," and scores of miles of four and six roomed tenements in Palladian plaster, look so unspeakably more mean and miserable than the most wretched of mud hamlets? Because the wretchedness of the latter strikes the spectator as being simply material, and the result of inevitable circumstances, whereas the wretchedness of their pert and pretentious rivals is moral. And whence comes this effect of moral wretchedness-an effect which, whether truly expressive of the actual condition of the inhabitants or not, is equally fatal to all possibility of artistic character? Are we not right in answering, that the spectacle of a row or group of such edifices, all so small as to be necessarily unwholesome as compared with the spacious edifice which might have been raised with the same means and with infinitely better accommodation for the same number of persons, at once conveys to the beholder a feeling made up of various more or less vague perceptions or suspicions of selfishness, mistaken policy, unchristian incompatibility of characters, and other moral deficiencies, resulting in a deliberate preference of a sulky and insalubrious isolation in a petty brick-and-mortar cabin, to a combination of means which would have produced an edifice and appliances of comfort such as would have enabled the inhabitants, at the extra cost of a little common sociability and compliance, to live almost as wholesomely and luxuriantlyfor perfect wholesomeness is much the same thing in the end as perfect luxury-as any set of gentlemen and ladies in the land? Far be it from us to charge the numerous provident and right-minded persons who have availed themselves of the system of Freehold-Land Societies in order to invest their savings or improve on their former dwellings, or any of the scores of thousands who are inhabitants of the "great dismal swamp of mean and at the same time pretentious abodes that now surrounds the metropolis, with any actual moral participation in the evils which the artistic eye detects, or (which is just as fatal for architectural effect) seems to detect in these cases. The system alone is the necessary culprit, and this we positively assert to be entirely opposed to the possibility of architectural effect. There is the essentially savage idea of unsociability involved in it. Moreover no good artistic effect can coexist with a manifest perversion or waste of means. There may be sufficing reasons why such and such a row or batch of Palladian or Elizabethan hovels should have been built; but beautiful effects are not to be brought about by particular and unobvious excuses; the system is bad, and the architecture declares the