moralists describe, there may be an almost unbroken peace arising from the absence of temptation; instead of the gradual formation of virtuous habits, there may be the gradual disuse of all habits except the habit of thought and study; there may be perpetual selfabsorption without what is commonly called selfishness, total disregard of other people, together with an unceasing labour for the human race: a life, in short, like that of the vestal, "the world forgetting, by the world forgot," yet without any love or heavenly communion.'

But, after all, it is so-called Philistinism which is our author's favourite target, whether it shows itself as 'cant in religion, dilettantism in art, shams in society, or party common-places in politics.' The age abounds, he complains, in literary charlatanry, which accepts the maxim, that the greatest author, or at any rate the greatest poet, is he who writes what the greatest number of people like to read, and takes for its watchword, The greatest pleasure of the greatest number. All seems lively and busy in the literary world while "Waverley Novels" and "Childe Harolds" take the public by storm, while we remark with admiration that this author's characters are as familiar to every one as his own personal friends, and that author's sayings become proverbs in the general mouth.' Of English life, secularity in the form of a heavy materialism' seems to him to be the peculiar vice.

'We have been aware only of an energetic industrialism. We have been proud of our national "self-help," of our industry and solvency, and have taken as but the due reward of these virtues our good fortune in politics and colonisation. We have even framed for ourselves a sort of Deuteronomic religion which is a great comfort to us; it teaches that because we are honest and peaceable and industrious, therefore our Jehovah gives us wealth in abundance, and our exports and imports swell and our debt diminishes and our emigrants people half the globe. The creed is too primitive!'

In the prevalent aims of parents for their children another illustration is found of the canker of a Philistinism, which has no ideals, no sense of culture, and never seeks to rise above the level of a stagnant, inert, mechanical conventionalism.

'What do they wish their children to aim at? What pursuits do they desire for them? Except that when they grow up they are tǝ make or have a livelihood, and take a satisfactory position in society, and in the meanwhile that it would be hard for them not to enjoy themselves heartily, most parents would be puzzled to say what they wish for their children. And, whatever they wish, they wish so languidly that they entrust the realization of it almost entirely to strangers, being themselves, so they say-and indeed the Philistine or irreligious person always is-much engaged. The parent, from

sheer

sheer embarrassment and want of an ideal, has in a manner abdicated, and it has become necessary to set apart a special class for the cultivation of parental feelings and duties. The modern schoolmaster should change his name, for he has become a kind of standing or professional parent.'

These portrait-sketches, and others that might be quoted, are inspired by the spirit of caricature, and are grossly exaggerated; but we willingly admit that they are suggestive as well as entertaining, and that, while they impart brightness to the volume, they also give occasion for salutary reflection to its readers. Yet we cannot bring our task to a close without confessing that it has been, on the whole, a sad one. There is no concealing the fact that the book is terribly disappointing. For sixteen years we have been waiting for the fulfilment of the promise held out in Ecce Homo,' that 'Christ, as the creator of modern theology and religion, will make the subject of another volume,' and at last we are put off with a farrago of science and culture, a pseudo-religion, from which Christ and God have been ejected to make room for Humanity and Nature. Instead of the bread we hoped for, a stone has been thrown to us; instead of a fish we have been mocked with a serpent. The inference, we fear, is inevitable, that the author's own faith has meanwhile receded. True, he disclaims a personal interest in the new religion, and avows himself unable to be satisfied with it; but to have propounded it seems to us to argue a despair of anything better surviving the conflict of Christianity with modern speculation; and despair in such a case is within a measurable distance of disbelief. Faith, whatever be our modern confusions and negations, can confidently anticipate the ultimate triumph of the doctrine of Christ, and say, 'Magna est veritas et prævalebit; but the converse is also true, that to doubt of the triumph is also to doubt of the truth of the doctrine.

ART.

ART. VI.-1. Report of Spencer Walpole, Esq., Inspector of Fisheries to the Home Office, on the destruction of Fish at Billingsgate, in consequence of the alleged inadequate accommodation at Billingsgate Market. Ordered by House of Commons to be printed 20th July, 1881.

2. Report to the Common Council from the Fish Supply Committee appointed by the Corporation of the City of London. 31st October, 1881.

3. Minutes of Evidence taken before Special Committees of the Lords and Commons upon the London Riverside Fish Market Bill.' Session of 1882.

NEA

TEARLY thirty years have passed since the publication in our pages of an article which produced no ordinary impression at the time of its appearance. In that article, having for its subject The Commissariat of London,' we asked our readers to imagine that the principal meal of the day was proceeding in a well-to-do metropolitan home, and we

endeavoured to trace to their sources the various edibles consecutively put upon the table: the fish to its ocean-bed; the flocks and herds to their downs and pastures; the wild animal to its lair; the game to its covert; the fruit to its orchard; the bread to its parent cornfield; in order to point out how they are fattened, netted, trapped, captured, bagged, gathered, harvested, and conveyed to their ultimate destination, the great red lane of London humanity.'

It was natural under these circumstances that we should begin with fish. Although we devoted no more than nine pages to chronicling the operations then carried on in Mr. Bunning's new market at Billingsgate,' it could hardly have escaped the notice of an intelligent reader, that the harvest of the sea,' being, as Mr. Spencer Walpole and Professor Huxley assure us, 'practically inexhaustible,' could not be thoroughly described, or indeed, be more than glanced at within so brief a compass. We told our readers what fish were ordinarily brought to Billingsgate at that time; but of the fish which, were it not for the limited area and inaccessibility of London's only market, might be brought there, we said nothing. The total supply of fish sent annually to Billingsgate about the year 1853, as given in Mr. Horace Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor,' seemed to us so enormous, that we submitted the table to an undeniable authority, who assured us that it was no over-statement. What would he now have said, if told that the volume of fish sent to Billingsgate

Billingsgate was nearly three times larger in 1880 than in 1853; that within the last six years it has increased from 95,000 to 130,000 tons per annum; and that this latter figure means a supply of 400 tons of fish for every working day, being, according to Mr. Edward Birkbeck, M.P., equivalent to a drove of 1000 fat oxen entering London upon every one of 313 days in each current year?

Surprising as the statement may appear to many, it is nevertheless beyond a peradventure that of the cheaper and coarser kinds of fish which would enter directly into the consumption of the poorer classes, an absolutely illimitable supply might be poured into the Metropolis by river, if a suitable market, open at all hours, and accessible at all states of the tide, were available to receive it. Before showing what sort of fish-market it is absolutely necessary that London should have, we propose to reveal what, at this moment, Billingsgate is. The materials for describing it lie close at hand. They may be gathered in abundance from Mr. Spencer Walpole's Report to the Home Office; from that of the Fish Committee appointed by the Corporation of the City of London, to which Billingsgate belongs; and, passim, from the evidence given before the two Special Committees of the Lords and Commons, which sat last Session, to consider the London Riverside Fish Market Bill.' Better, however, than any description, would be the practical experience gained by a Londoner who had sufficient energy and curiosity to pay Billingsgate a visit between the hours of five and nine upon a Friday morning-the best day in the week for seeing it to advantage. There is an Eastern saying, to the effect that the distance between the ear and the eye is very small, but the difference between hearing and seeing very great. Reading is but another form of hearing, and to those who care to understand what the Billingsgate monopoly means, we would recommend a visit to the famous market upon the first morning of a week-day that may suit their convenience.

Billingsgate Market—(concerning the antiquity of which there is a difference of opinion between those who hold, with Mr. Walter Thornbury, that it owes its origin to Belin, a king of the native Britons, who flourished four hundred years B.C., and others who maintain with Stow, that a man called Billing, or Beling, owned a wharf upon the same spot, presumably in Queen Elizabeth's reign)—is now, and has been the property of the City of London for so long a time, that it is not easy to calculate the amount of revenue already brought in by it. It has a frontage to the river of 200 feet, and a superficial area of 40,000 square feet, which area affords sites to seventeen shops,

and

and to two large public-houses, although, since the 'Riverside Fish Market Bill' came before Parliament, the site of one of these public-houses has been voluntarily thrown into the market.

The interior of this Metropolitan emporium of fish, being obviously far too narrow for the business transacted there, is divided into spaces or 'forms' placed in such close contiguity to each other, that the customers purchasing at one form interfere with those who would fain approach its neighbour. The price charged for the forms is excessively high, being at the rate of 9d. a square foot per week for each. Billingsgate is situated above that portion of the river, called 'the Upper Pool,' which carries more floating traffic than any other reach of water approaching it in size upon the face of the globe, so that the dangers of navigation to which cutters and steamers approaching the market by night are exposed exceed description. The width of the portion of the river, opposite to Billingsgate, left open for navigation, does not exceed 200 feet. In front of the market on the waterside, there is a large floating pontoon, but the steamers are not allowed to come alongside it in order to unload, being compelled to lie off at a distance of nearly 100 feet from the market-quay, and to land their fish along planks thrown out from the steamer to a barge, and from this barge to the floating-pontoon. Every pound of fish brought by steamer, and landed from the river at Billingsgate, is carried along these planks upon men's heads. Only two roads-one from, and one to the steamers-are permitted to exist, and as the men have no choice but to follow each other, it is evidently impossible to land a large quantity of fish before the market closes at nine in the morning. The result is, that fresh fish is often thrown away, because it will not keep until five o'clock upon the following morning. This being the plight to which fishcarrying steamers are reduced, the trials and difficulties awaiting sailing cutters entitle them to still greater commiseration. Being sharp-bottomed vessels, they have to lie out in the stream, and to land their fish, at considerable expense, in barges. There were once some piles in the river to which the cutters could make fast, but the market authorities drew them. It ought, in addition, to be mentioned, that the work of landing fish along the planks which we have just described is dangerous to the men engaged in it, and all the more so, because during half the year it is done in the dark. Accidents happen frequently, and occasionally there is a loss of life. The unnecessary expense entailed in this manner upon those who consign fish to Billingsgate may be inferred from the fact which came out in evidence, that the largest firm in the trade had, in