e rest of
the kingdom." The speculations on the Stock Exchange embrace a national
debt of 800 millions, railway shares to the extent of 300 millions,
besides foreign stock, foreign railway shares, and miscellaneous
investments of all kinds. Land has been sold in the neighbourhood of the
Exchange and the Bank at the rate of a million pounds an acre. The
rateable value of the property assessed to the poor rates in the
districts of the metropolis in 1857 amounted to 11,167,678 pounds. A
Parliamentary Return shows that the total ordinary receipts of the
Corporation of the city for the year 1857 amounted to 905,298 pounds, the
largest item being the coal duty, 64,238 pounds. The London omnibuses
pay government a duty of no less than 70,200 pounds a year. The Thames
even, dirty and stinking as it is, is full of gold. One fact will place
its commercial value in the clearest light. In 1856 the Customs' duties
entered as collected from all parts of the United Kingdom were 19,813,622
pounds, and of this large sum considerably more than half was collected
in the port of London,--the Customs' duties paid in the port of London
alone being 12,287,591 pounds, a much larger sum than paid by all the
remaining ports of the United Kingdom put together. No wonder that the
Londoners are proud of the Thames. Why, even the very mudlarks--the boys
who prowl in its mud on behalf of treasure-trove--earn, it is said, as
much as 2,000 to 3,000 pounds by that miserable employment in the course
of a year.

But we stop. The magnitude of Loudon wealth and even crime can never be
fully estimated. It is a boundless ocean, in which the brave, sturdy,
steady swimmer--while the weak are borne away rapidly to destruction--may
pick up precious pearls.

CHAPTER VI.
WESTMINSTER ABBEY.

On Monday, Jan. 9, 1860, we formed part of a crowd who had assembled in
the Poet's Corner, Westminster Abbey, to view the burial of the only man
of our generation who, by means of his literary and oratorical efforts,
has won for his brow a coronet. Of Babington Macaulay, as essayist,
poet, orator, historian, statesman, we need not speak. What he was, and
what he did, are patent to all the world. Born in 1800, the son of
Zachary Macaulay, one of the brilliant band of anti-slavery agitators of
which Mr. Wilberforce was the head, young Babington commenced life under
favourable circumstances. At Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was
educated, the world