uality of our nature, and
the varied other and more subtle means employed in later days, to awaken
our feelings of veneration and devotion, but it may be observed in
passing, that amid the floods of change that have swept across our
country's history, it is scarcely possible but that some good should have
been lost among the debris of decayed and shattered institutions. We
have now to take a sweeping glance at the general outline of the place
that has been chosen as the nucleus from which to spin our web, of light
and perhaps fanciful associations. A desultory ramble through the
streets and bye-ways of an old city, that owns six-and-thirty parish
churches, the ghosts of about twenty more defunct, the remains of four
large friaries and a nunnery, some twenty or thirty temples of worship
flourishing under the divers names and forms of "dissent," two Roman
branches of the Catholic Church, a Jewish synagogue, a hospital, museum,
libraries, and institutions of every possible name, and "refuges" for
blind, lame, halt, deaf, "incurable," and diseased in mind, body, or
estate; that is sprinkled with factories, bounded by crumbling ruins of
old rampart walls, and studded with broken and mutilated bastion
towers,--brings into view a series of objects so heterogeneous in order
and character, that to arrange the ideas suggested by them to the mind or
memory, is a task of no slight difficulty.

The great "lions" of interest to one, may rank the very lowest in the
scale of another's imagination or fancy. The philosopher, the poet, the
philanthropist, the antiquarian, the utilitarian, the man of the world,
and the man of the day, each may choose his separate path, and each find
for himself food for busy thought and active investigation.

The archaeologist may indulge his love of interpreting the chiselled
finger-writing of centuries gone by, upon many a richly decorated page of
sculpture, and, hand in hand with the historian and divine, may trace out
the pathway of art and religion, through the multiform records of genius,
devotional enthusiasm, taste, and beneficence, chronicled in writings of
stone, by its ecclesiastical remains; he may gratify himself to his
heart's content with "vis-a-vis" encounters with grim old faces, grinning
from ponderous old doorways, or watching as sentinels over dark and
obscure passages, leading to depths impenetrable to outward vision, and
find elaborately carved spandrils and canopies, gracing the e