senger to take an
early train; but few shutters are down at 7, and scarcely an omnibus is
to be seen till after 8. The aristocratic dinner hour is 8 P.
M. though I trust few are so unmerciful to themselves as to
postpone their chief meal to that late hour when they have no company.
The morning to sleep, the afternoon to business and the evening to
enjoyment, seems the usual routine with the favored classes.

Walking home from a soiree at the West-end through Regent-street,
Haymarket and the Strand once at midnight, I was struck, though
accustomed to all manner of late hours in New-York, with the relative
activity and wide-awake aspect of London at that hour. It seemed the
High Change of revelry and pleasure-seeking. The taverns, the clubs and
drinking-shops betrayed no symptoms of drowsiness; the theatres were
barely beginning to emit their jaded multitudes; the cabs and private
carriages were more plentiful than by day, and were briskly wheeling
hundreds from party to party; even the omnibuses rattled down the wide
streets as freshly and almost as numerously as at midday. The policemen
were alert on nearly every corner; sharpers and suspicious characters
stepped nimbly about the cross-streets in quest of prey, and innumerable
wrecks of Womanhood, God pity them! shed a deeper darkness over the
shaded and dusky lanes and byways whence they momently emerged to salute
the passer-by. Beneath the shelter of night, Misery stole forth from its
squalid lair, no longer awed by the Police, to beseech the compassion of
the stranger and pour its tale of woe and suffering into the rarely
willing ear. Serene and silvery in the clear night-air rose the nearly
full moon over Southwark, shedding a soft and mellow light on pillar and
edifice, column and spire, and enduing the placid bosom of the Thames
with a tranquil and spiritual beauty. Such was one glimpse of London at
midnight; I have not seen it so impressive by day.

XXXVI.

UNIVERSAL PEACE CONGRESS.

LONDON, July 25, 1851.

The fourth Annual Congress of the friends and champions of Peace,
universal and perpetual, was closed last evening, after a harmonious and
enthusiastic session of three full days. The number of Delegates in
attendance was between eight and nine hundred, while the spacious area
of Exeter Hall, which is said to hold comfortably thirty-five hundred
persons, was well filled throughout, and densely crowded for hours
together. Having been held at