with many others in a row to await his turn for medical inspection, and it gives him an immediate bad opinion of the Service.

I am sure that every one has the welfare of a soldier at heart, and I sincerely hope that something will be done so that the soldier will no longer leave the Army with regret, but cling fondly to his military life, and speak affectionately of all the glories he has left behind him.

Until now there have only been two points in his career that interested him-the possibility of seeing active service, and the prospect of getting his deferred pay. With everything else he is dissatisfied, and carries dissatisfaction into civil life with him.

ARTHUR V. PALMER

(late 79th Highlanders).

A WALK THROUGH DESERTED LONDON

WHEN some grumbler met 'that polished sin-worn fragment of the Court,' the Duke of Queensberry, 'old Q.,' one September afternoon, and asked whether he was not bored with the emptiness of London'Yes,' he said; but, at all events, there are more people here than there are in the country.' This may be so, yet with its millions of living souls moments will come when the true Londoner discovers that a crowd is not company. His season is over, his Clubs are shut, his streets under repair, his friends fled, and their houses dismantled.

The baffled hopes have gone to Cowes, the broken hearts to Baden.

It is not pleasant, for we know that whoever delights in solitude is either a wild beast or a god. I am neither; but, as Rogers said, 'to any one who has reached a very advanced age a walk through the streets of London is like a walk in a cemetery. How many houses do I pass, now inhabited by strangers, in which I used to spend such happy hours with those who have been long dead and gone!'

To be alone was my sad fate for some days of the autumn that is past. I had been engaged in the City, and about four o'clock I found myself walking westwards along a noble embankment, which had not been commenced in my youth, and of which I had watched the construction and the planting; for in my early official days the Thames washed in under the arches of Somerset House, the finest building in England—a building in which, later on, I was destined to pass the best years of my life. My memory, from old habit of the mind, went dreamily back to those times when a graceful suspension bridge of immense span, now connecting Gloucestershire and Somersetshire, existed in the place of the hideous railway line which runs from Charing Cross to Waterloo. I well remember my father prophesying the fulfilment of Sir Frederick Trench's plans, of which he was an enthusiastic admirer. Hungerford Market then flourished. No underground railway, no gigantic hotels, no political clubs had been built, and the proud lion of the Northumberlands, turning his tail contemptuously towards the City I had just left, had not been banished to Sion. No Whitehall Ccurt or Landseer's lions existed, and no miserable fountains, which, it was said at the time of their creation, were to rival the Grandes Eaux of Versailles.

Being in the humour to note changes that had taken place in my lifetime, I was relieved to find on crossing Whitehall that the dear old Admiralty still remained intact. Coming out of the gates, there is the great First Lord, Sir James Graham, to whom I owed my place in the office, and whom, not only for that reason, I look on with profound respect and admiration. His magnificent figure and height made even the tall sentry of pre-Crimean days at the door a small man. Mr. Gladstone has frequently told me he considered Sir James the greatest administrator of his time and the only statesman whose merits never received due recognition from the press.

When I was a clerk in the office we used constantly to observe an old gentleman who daily came into the courtyard and took off his hat to the fouled anchor which is carved over the door, through which so many brave men and palpitating hearts have passed. I feel as if I could play the part of that old gentleman now, who has doubtless long ago preceded me. Now the Salamanca mortar and the Egyptian guns have been pushed away from the parade and put in the corner, like naughty children, and the garden is desecrated with a horrible half-French, half-English nondescript building which is grotesquely commonplace. The Horse Guards still, happily, remain; and here are the Life Guards without the grim bearskins-the awe and admiration of my childhood. Here, too, are the Foot Guards, but how changed from those of my early recollections! No white duck trousers, no swallow-tail coats faced with white; no worsted epaulettes, no cross-belts, no long muskets and pointed bayonets. In my mind's eye, I see the Guard turning out to salute the hero of a hundred fights, who lifts his two fingers to his hat in acknowledgment as he rides by. There is the house of the First Lord of the Treasury, so full of historical associations; and the little garden gate through which the Duke of Wellington escaped from a mob who had forgotten that his services as a soldier should have outweighed the shortcomings of a statesman. Only one cow-stand still remains to remind me of the happy moments in my childhood of curds and whey and soft biscuits. Walking up the Duke of York's steps, and forgetting that the column was said to be built so high to get him out of reach of his creditors, I wonder why so great a monument had been erected in honour of so small a man. It occurs to me how few people could tell whether at the top of the steps there are, or are not, gates. I remember putting the question at a dinner party in Carlton Gardens, which for the main consisted of guests who either lived there or whose avocations took them down those steps every day of their lives, and only one person answered correctly. Could you do so, oh, my reader? From the top of the steps I espy Maurice Drummond striding towards the Green Park with an occasional puff at the pipe concealed in his hand, for smoking in public was then a crime.

Tennyson said to the Editor of this Review, when revisiting

Cambridge with him, that he saw the ghost of a man in every corner. Carlton House Terrace is to me indeed a very land of ghosts. I looked wistfully up at the shuttered windows of the room where, nearly thirty years ago, I had the honour and happiness of making my first acquaintance with Mr. Gladstone, and the darkened doors where I had enjoyed the friendship of George Glyn and his lovely wife; where I had known Lord and Lady Granville, with whom I had spent so many happy hours, and the house in which I had held such long official talks and friendly conversations with Freddy Cavendish, whose tragic fate had closed the brilliant political career which those who knew him best had prophesied. There, too, in my imagination, I saw Lord Grey riding his black cob, and Mr. Russell Sturgis, who gave us such sumptuous and constant hospitality, mounting his coach. As Thackeray says, savoury odours emanate from the kitchen borne across I don't know what streams and deserts, struggles, passions, poverties, hopes, hopeless loves, and useless loves of thirty years. Towards the west I passed Count Bernstorff's house, and pictured myself entering the wide-open doors of Lady de Grey and Lady Palmerston, before she had migrated to Piccadilly, or struggling in a crowd to enter where Lady Waldegrave, with profuse hospitality, collected all the political and social society of her day.

I walk through a perfect campo santo of departed heroes who have lived and died since I was a boy and pass the empty Athenæum, recently decorated by the artistic hands of Alma Tadema and Sir Edward Poynter-a comparatively modern club built on the ground of Carlton House, under the auspices of John Wilson Croker. The more luxurious of its members wished for an ice-house, but Croker insisted on decoration, and put up the frieze copied from the Parthenon. A wit of the day wrote:

I am John Wilson Croker,

I will do as I please;
They ask for an ice-house,
I'll give them a frieze.

Here in the porch I see Charles Bowen, George Dasent, and Rogers, the beloved rector of Bishopsgate, and I long to join them in the flesh and hear all the good things they are saying. It was not from Rogers that the name of Bishopsgate was given to the Club, but from the fact that it stands opposite the Senior United Service, which is irreverently called Cripplegate. In its hall the reconciliation of Thackeray and Dickens took place, and there poor Dicky Doyle, too early for us who loved him, breathed his last.

Turning into Pall Mall, I glance in imagination at the rooms where Sir Edward Walpole, son of the great minister, was about to entertain a party of musical men-friends at dinner when the lovely Mary Clements, with whom he had formed a great friendship, rushed

in, saying her angered father had cast her out of his house on account of their intimacy, upon which Sir Edward, with an oldworld courtesy, took her hand and led her to the bottom of the table, saying: 'This, henceforth, is your proper place.'

Three fair children first she bore him,

Then before her time she died.

From one of these daughters-Lady Waldegrave, afterwards the Duchess of Gloucester-descended the three Ladies Waldegrave (Lady Hugh Seymour, Lady Euston, and Lady Waldegrave), whose faces and figures, bending over their embroidery frames, are familiar to us in the lovely picture by Sir Joshua Reynolds which, till Lady Waldegrave's death, adorned the walls of Strawberry Hill.

The Reform Club, built on the model of the Farnese Palace by Sir Charles Barry, reminds me of Mr. Bright telling me that at the time of the Corn-Law agitation he took Mr. Rauston, the Secretary of the League, there, who put his hand on his arm and said, John, John, how can we remain honest if we live in such palaces as this?'

Here, too, I see Lord Clarendon, and with him Charles Greville arm-in-arm, hearing some secrets and inventing more,' and a knot of eager politicians at the Carlton discussing whether the Peelites will join the Tories or the Whigs, and a few steps further on a brougham, which was then a novelty, with a very tall well-drilled powdered footman at the door, from which emerges a lady beloved by many generations of society, and familiarly called Lady A.' She possessed a low deep voice which was never used to say an unkind word of or to anybody, large curls on each side of a fine-featured face, and an appearance of everlasting youth.

Lord Sydney, with his hat well tilted over his eyes, rides from his house in Cleveland Square, now altered past recognition, while I am loitering at the corner of St. James's Street, to look into the window of Sams, the librarian, and study the last of Dighton's sketches; and while there, Lord Redesdale, Chairman of Committees in the House of Lords, in his swallow-tailed coat, his brass buttons, his buff waistcoat, white tie, and his low shoes with white stockings, no gloves and no stick, passes me with a jerk of recognition; while on the other side of the road I see Mr. Stephenson, the last wearer of Hessian boots, on his way to Brooks's.

Sailing along, I see Beauchamp Seymour, not then ennobled, but with an established reputation as the bravest of brave sailors, and the most popular of popular men- The swell of the Ocean,' as we called him then-always wearing an extensive shirt-front and white gloves, never buttoned, on his unaccustomed hands. After the bombardment of Alexandria I asked him if he would mind telling me as an old friend whether he felt any fear. 'None whatever,' he said, 'except a terrible fear that I might be afraid.'

Walking by Marlborough House gate I see Andrew Cockerell,