Those bricky towers, The which on Thames' broad aged back doe ride.

Once, indeed, you could

Stand in Temple Gardens and behold
London herself on her proud stream afloat,

and here Shakespeare places the scene
of the choosing of the red and white
rose as the respective badges of the
houses of York and Lancaster. Then,
again, we think of Ruth Pinch waiting
for her lover there where

The fountain's low singing is heard in the wind

Like a melody bringing sweet fancies to mind,

Some to grieve, some to gladden, while

Away in the distance is heard the far sound From the streets of the city that compass it round.

Where all that passes inter nos,
May be proclaim'd at Charing Cross.
Even to-day there are a few links
left to bind the present to the past:
In the midst of the busy and roaring
Strand,

Dividing life's current on either hand,
A time-worn city church, sombre and grey,
Waits while the multitude pass away.

The majesty of London asleep, with

With him we can imagine the great city "not as full of noise and dust and confusion, but as something silent, grand, and everlasting: "

its "mighty heart lying still," has never been more eloquently described than by Wordsworth in the well-known "Sonnet on Westminster Bridge," in Leaving the "Temple's silent walls" which the quiet spirit of the country we may lament with Gay the change in seems to breathe and give a touch of the thoroughfare once described by nature to the piles of buildings stretchMiddleton, the dramatist, as "the lux-ing away as far as eye can reach. urious Strand," the home of many a bishop, graced by the palaces of the Protector Somerset and the great Lord Burleigh; where "Arundel's fam'd structure rear'd its frame," famous for its splendid collection of works of art as far back as the days of James the First, when Thomas Howard was restored to the earldom of Arundel "The street alone retains an empty name.' The same fate has overtaken many other famous dwellings in this locality.

There Essex' stately pile adorn'd the shore,
There Cecil's, Bedford's, Villiers' now no

more.

The Strand seems to have been one of the most crowded parts of London from comparatively early times. George Wither, the Puritan poet, writing in 1628, speaks of it as

that goodly throwfare betweene The court and city, and where I have seene Well-nigh a million passing in one day.

When Boswell talked of the cheerfulness of Fleet Street owing to the constant quick succession of people passing through it, Johnson replied:

:"

Earth has not anything to show more fair :
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty.

Many other parts of the town are touched upon by the poets; but to enumerate them all would prove an overlong tale. Thus tavern life has a poetry or versification of its own. Who does not remember the Tabard Inn in Southwark, and the pilgrims, "well nine-and-twentie in a companie," who would ride to Canterbury? Or, again, the association of Tennyson with the tavern in Fleet Street, pulled down, alas! in 1881:

O plump head waiter at the Cock,
To which I most resort,
How goes the time? 'Tis five o'clock.
Go fetch a pint of port.

Andrew Marvel's verses remind us of the sundial which once stood in the Privy Garden at Whitehall, and of the escapades of the Merry Monarch's courtiers :

From The Month.

THE MOUTH OF AVERNUS.

A LITTLE beyond Baja there are what are called the Stufe di Nerone, the ancient Thermæ Neronianæ. The

entrance is through rooms cut in the tufa rock, and at the furthest bend of a

Much has been written of Westmins- long, low, dark, semicircular passage

ter Abbey :

are the springs of boiling water, boiling from some source of not very distant volcanic agency. The passage is unpleasantly hot and full of steam, but on stooping near the ground it is possible to crawl in cool air some way into its narrow windings. We believe these rooms are even still The great proof here to the native used by peasant invalids as a cure. mind of the fact that the water is boiling seems to be to boil an egg in the spring. The egg is first shown cold and uncooked, and then put in a bucket; then two little boys, one carrying a torch, run round with it to the springs and return by the other passage in three minutes. The egg is boiled, and the little fellows are seen to be perspiring profusely from the great heat and steam to which they

goes the old ballad. A modern poet have been exposed. Further on is the

We're clad to climb a Perthshire glen,
There's nothing of the haute école
In Rotten Row from eight to ten.
Matthew Arnold loved the countri-
fied aspect of Kensington Gardens :

Lago di Averno, where another of Turner's fascinating pictures was painted, "Aneas with the Sibyl.” Virgil places this as the spot where the Sibyl conducted Eneas to the infernal regions in order to speak with the old Anchises; and certainly it is the crater of an extinct volcano, though now filled with water. It is a large pond, or lake, beautiful in spring, and in autumn sometimes sombre, dark, and terrible; sometimes bright and shining, but ever solitary. The neighborpine-ing woods, ravines, and caves were the abode of the dismal, sunless Cimmerii mentioned by Homer. Like so many of the surrounding lakes, it also at one time gave out poisonous exhalations, so much so that, before the Emperor Augustus made it into a harbor in conjunction with the Lucrine Lake, it was said that no bird could fly over it without perishing.

In this lone open glade I lie,
Screened by deep boughs on either hand,
And at its end to stay the eye

Those black-crowned, red-boled
trees stand.

As a contrast to this rural calm we have another poet praising Piccadilly: Shops, palaces, bustle, and breeze,

The whirring of wheels and the murmur of
trees,

By night or by day, whether noisy or stilly,
Whatever my mood is, I love Piccadilly.
Thus have "Ballads of Babylon” been
sung in all ages in various keys.

It is a most melancholy spot; the smooth, dark surface of the large round

pool filling the ancient crater, whose | rock, where nolens volens he has to edges covered with low chestnut-trees listen to this harangue of nonsense. overshadow it, breeds in one an unac- There is a great staircase going up countable feeling that death is hover- from these rooms to levels above, but ing somewhere about in its precincts. blocked at the upper end by lava or The brown water laps the muddy bank | volcanic ash, which is supposed to have in a sullen way, as if conscious of come from the eruption of the Monte its baneful power. Bright cyclamens Nuova in 1538, which destroyed many show their heads amidst the light un- of these passages and greatly altered dergrowth on the banks, whose chief the surrounding country. Of two other shade, besides bare - looking willow dark passages within this cave, the stems, is that of the dark-leaved chest-so-called bed of the Styx is the only nut-tree. A deathly silence oppresses one up which we could force the guide one. On the further side of the lake to take us, and that was black with are the picturesque ruins of old baths, the soot from the torches and full of which are better known however as scoriæ, which appeared to block it up the Temple of Apollo. They are half further on than we could advance, hidden amongst the trees, and are built owing to the diminishing height of the to the very edge of the dark, stagnant passage. All these, as well as the waters. The lake is supposed to be rooms, it must be remembered, are in one hundred and thirty-eight feet deep, pitch darkness. Having to be carried or, according to another authority, two through knee-deep pools of water, by hundred and ten feet. Its circumfer- the light of a torch, we were completely ence is nearly two miles. Separated at the mercy of our bearer, and at one from it by a low hill of tufa formation, spot he has always refused to move riddled with passages and galleries, as further, although only four feet covers indeed seems to be this whole district the distance to the dark passage at of mysteries, is the Lacus Lucrinus. which we have wished to arrive. He Amongst these passages is the Sibyl's excuses himself each time by declaring Grotto, containing the so-called bed of that the ground is too muddy to supthe Styx. There are rooms and pas- port him, and that the passage is sages here said to be unexplored, though we have our doubts as to whether they are not used for smuggling, and therefore never shown to the curious traveller. The guide points out the rooms named after Nero and the Sibyl, and the place, like a huge oven, where he again gravely informs his audience that the dog Cerberus used to lie and guard the entrance to the regions of Pluto.

It is useless to protest against these lectures, since the tourist finds himself carried on the guide's back through the pools of water that fill the floors of the rooms and deposited on a ledge of

blocked up. Since our last visit we are more fully persuaded than ever that that passage holds some illicit secret. It is possible that some thousands of years ago there were natural passages here, volcanic rents in the rock; since when a race of men, supposed half supernatural — the Cimmerii - probably took possession of these then desolate spots, possibly before the Greek settlement of Cumæ, and living beneath the shade of forests, in the vales and amidst the lakes, and in many caverns, enlarged the latter and made galleries and rooms.

WALNUTS ANd Salt TraDE IN INDIA. | blocks, and were it not that there is a - Walnuts are brought across the Jheelum pinkish hue about it would look like ice. by nations who trade with the people on The territory on the other side of the river this side, and take back salt and other is a native State which is said to be tribuarticles of commerce. The salt is native-tary to Kashmir.

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