h and Glasgow readers must have often remarked
on the respective High Streets of these cities. The features are
generally bloated and overcharged, the profile lines usually concave,
the complexion coarse and high, and the expression that of a dissipation
and sensuality become chronic and inherent. And how this
class--constitutionally degraded, and with the moral sense, in most
instances, utterly undeveloped and blind--are ever to be reclaimed, it
is difficult to see. The immigrant Irish form also a very appreciable
element in the degradation of our large towns. They are, however,
_pagans_, not of the new, but of the old type: and are chiefly
formidable from the squalid wretchedness of a physical character which
they have transferred from their mud cabins into our streets and lanes,
and from the course of ruinous competition into which they have entered
with the unskilled labourers of the country, and which has had the
effect of reducing our lowlier countrymen to a humbler level than they
perhaps ever occupied before. Meanwhile, this course of degradation is
going on, in all our larger towns, in an ever-increasing ratio; and all
that philanthropy and the Churches are doing to counteract it is but as
the discharge of a few squirts on a conflagration. It is, I fear,
preparing terrible convulsions for the future. When the dangerous
classes of a country were located in its remote districts, as in
Scotland in the early half of the last century, it was comparatively
easy to deal with them: but the _sans culottes_ of Paris in its First
Revolution, placed side by side with its executive Government, proved
very formidable indeed; nor is it, alas! very improbable that the
ever-growing masses of our large towns, broken loose from the sanction
of religion and morals, may yet terribly avenge on the upper classes and
the Churches of the country the indifferency with which they have been
suffered to sink.

I was informed by Cousin George, shortly after my arrival, that my old
friend of the Doocot Cave, after keeping shop as a grocer for two years,
had given up business, and gone to college to prepare himself for the
Church. He had just returned home, added George, after completing his
first session, and had expressed a strong desire to meet with me. His
mother, too, had joined in the invitation--would I not take tea with
them that evening?--and Cousin George had been asked to accompany me. I
demurred; but at length set out with George,