have been established far within the sweep of the proposed boulevard; so that according to the ratio of progress and increase which has been witnessed for the last twenty or thirty years, the day is not far distant when, should Mr. Maslen's suggestions be overlooked till that time, a chained line of parks will have to be carried a great way farther out,—much enlarging the circle, and consequently rendering the said lungs and breathing spots still more inaccessible to the bulk of the metropolitan public.

Mr. Maslen's proposal is not so visionary as may at first appear; and for this among other reasons,-the necessity for some such large scheme of improvement and accommodation is pressing, and daily becoming more sternly urgent. How many miles may you walk from the west to the east end of the metropolis without meeting with one open spot, in the shape of garden or park, to which the public can resort for recreation; and how rapidly is the ocean of streets and brick walls extending and deepening around, to the forbiddance of all escape, except by persons who have time and money to enable them to coach or steam it far away from the smoke, the everlasting pavements, the din and turmoil of the metropolis! Give the people room, give them breathing space. Make it imperative that there be wider streets, better drainage, more direct and beautiful lines within and through the denser quarters; but do not stop there; present the masses with the means of having at their ready command healthful exercise, innocent relaxation, and unsullying recreation; with all which social comforts and moral susceptibility and practice are so naturally combined.

Mr. Maslen has much more to propose than a boulevard and a chain of parks; but we think, in so far as his voice and suggestions are concerned, his practicable and sensible views will have their proper effect neutralized, by the extremely visionary and enthusiastic notions of the major part of the book. He has been, the title-page of the book tells us, "many years a Lieutenant in the Army;" and in that capacity has witnessed more things than Old England can pretend to furnish to the observer. He has been in India, where he has narrowly surveyed the habitations of Mahomedan and Hindoo. He even went from home with a passion for studying street and house-building; but seems to have returned with an enlargement of the feeling in due proportion to the amount of his added studies. He accordingly set himself earnestly to the office of visiting the larger towns of England, of spying out their deformities, and of speculatively providing for their wants.

His schemes and proposals are stopped by no sort of difficulty in the shape of expense, the destruction of property, or the antagonism of rooted prejudices. Nay, utter impossibilities he minds not a straw. He would have a garden instantly provided for the Lord Mayor of London immediately in the rear of the Mansion House. He thus speaks and explains himself on this head:

:

It is a remarkable fact that the City within the walls cannot boast of a single garden and this leads us to the consideration of the privation suffered by the annual King of the City, the Lord Mayor, who has a palace indeed, but not a single rood of ground for the exercise of the right honourable legs. Every palace ought to have a garden adjoining it; and the Chief Magistrate of the City is as deserving of such an ornamental, pleasant, and healthful adjunct, as anybody in the world. We should recommend that all that block of houses in the rear of the Mansionhouse, enclosed between Cannon Street, Walbrook, and St. Swithin's Lane, be pulled down, and the whole space be planted with shrubbery and grass, and enclosed by a railing of musket-barrels on a low wall painted green.

There is no physical impossibility to the carrying out of this proposal. Neither is there to the widening of every street that does not agree with Mr. Maslen's standard; or of establishing magnificent promenades along the Thames, and of forcing the business transacted in them at present to be carried on in docks. There may be nothing but what convenience, expedience, expense, and a world of trading opposition would interpose, with which these wholesale and Utopian plans would have to contend prior to their prompt and complete execution. We think, however, that something beyond the conventional and the moral would have to be encountered ere our enthusiastic projector could have it enacted and carried out, that "no respectable house should be built without an entrance-hall, communicating with a central-hall, of thirty feet long by twenty broad; the latter open to the roof, lighted by a skylight, and having galleries five feet wide all around it on every story." Putting expense of building and fittings-up out of the question, what space would London occupy? or could it be London any longer? But the impossibilities do not stop here, for he would have every room fifteen feet square, and, as we understand him, in every town-house in the island. How rapidly would this encroach on grass lands and agricultural scope! How soon would Mr. Maslen have his towns to overtake and surround every suburban escape and removed nuisance, to the effect of stultifying his own scheme.

We have been fighting with shadows for some little space of time, or with a hero whose castles are in the air, chiefly within the atmosphere of the "Great Metropolis;" although had we followed the exlieutenant to other parts we should have found ourselves not seldom similarly drawn away from every-day life and the solid earth. But ere closing our paper, it may be desirable to bring our readers back to realities, and also to grievances that clamorously call for redress,redress that is practicable although long deferred; and London is still the grand theme.

The pamphlet named second at the head of the present article, being a reprint from the Westminster Review, and having "The Corporation of London, and Municipal Reform" for its subject, may be not disadvantageously used and cited.

What enormous sums, and what enormous abuses are identified, according to the statements before us, with the municipal history of the Corporation of London; the City, be it remembered, constituting about the fifteenth part of the metropolis, and being not so populous as the single parish of Marylebone! Why, it would appear that the city estates, held for public and charitable purposes, and professed to be appropriated to and for the benefit of the citizens, produce above 364,000l. annually, that the local rates amount to 272,7887.,-that the duties on coals, provisions, &c. are 202,5491.,-and that about 150,000l., for freedoms, licences, and other privileges, as well as dues, may be added, altogether reaching a sum not far short of One Million a year!

Now, how and by whom are these prodigious sums disbursed? For whose benefit, and according to what principle in regard to publicity and responsibility, at all consistent with the ordinary transactions of the world? It would require a perusal of the publication before us to fill the mind and imagination of any person with the otherwise incredible close burgherism and privileged abuse which attaches to, and must long have been inherent in, the system. The jobberies appear not only to be on a monstrous scale,-a scale which has no likeness, but to be practised with a prescriptive and unblushing pompousness. The great source of the evils seems to abide in the fact, that the disbursements are in the hands of persons that in reality are irresponsible, or who cannot be reached without extreme trouble, or almost the certainty that, when found out, the thing needed will be balked, and the persons urging it baffled.

We shall not go into details with anything that we may offer in the way of statement or remarks, in support of the charge, that oppressive exactions, and arbitrary wrong-doing to individuals and to classes, are quite common in the civic government, just as are constantly occuring on the part of the companies. We may succeed, however, in calling attention to the exposure, in the pamphlet, if we cite a case or two from the many strange and preposterous instances which abound in it.

First then, the City maintains a monopoly of labour, by the power the authorities possess or assume of having licensed labourers and porters. There may be nothing very unseemly or wrong in this; but, it is added, that the Corporation will force you to employ their measurers, their weighers, and porters, whether you require them or not, and even to your inconvenience and hindrance.

Messrs Combe, Delafield, and Co. malt their own barley in Norfolk, and import it, by the river, for the use of their brewery in Castle-street, Long-acre. They do not want to measure it, because the malt is not for sale; and they do not want City porters to carry it, because, in their own establishment, they have better porters for the work: yet, says the Corporation, our meters and our porters shall be employed, whether you want

them or not. Messrs. Combe, Delafield, and Co. refusing, Chancery proceedings were instituted against them; and this cause, which has been five years before the Court, is still pending. The case will appear the more striking, when we state that the wharf of Messrs. Combe, Delafield, and Co. is not in the City, but on the west side of Waterloo bridge, in the Savoy; but the Corporation is actually, at the present moment, contending for the right (which, if it ever existed, has at least been long in abeyance), and are enforcing their claim at Brentford and other places,—to send their own meters and porters into every wharf along ninety miles of river navigation between Staines bridge and Yantlett Creek beyond Gravesend.

There is said to be a most flagrant system of monopoly exercised in the case of oyster meters; and what is worst of all, to have been an usurpation which operates to the injury of the public, to the amount of 10,000l. annually.

It appears that, down to the year 1680, the metage of oysters was performed by certain officers called yeomen of the water side, of whom there were formerly four, now but two, receiving, for almost nominal duties (chiefly connected with the Lord Mayor's household), in salary and fees the sum of 831. 13s. 4d. The yeomen of the water side are still called master measurers, but long ago, growing tired of measuring, they made over the duty to deputy oyster meters, who in their turn, finding that unloading, shovelling, and measuring oysters, in all weathers, was not the most agreeable occupation, appointed deputy assistants to discharge their duty, seeing them paid of course for their services, as the reader will naturally suppose, and as he will suppose correctly, but seeing them paid by the public in shape of additional charges. The deputy oyster meters' deputies or assistants are fellowship porters, called Holdsmen; and for the last half century they have been in the habit of doing the work-demanding and receiving a recompence from the purchasers of oysters over and above the charge made by the deputy oyster meters, upon the importer, of 8s. per bushel for the first one hundred bushels of every cargo, and 4s. per bushel for the remainder.

The property possessed by the companies, is reckoned to yield about a quarter of a million per annum; nor if attention be paid to some of the modes by which certain of these bodies have acquired almost unnameable wealth, need one wonder at the return. Thus

I have a field worth 107. per annum ; I bequeath 57. to school A., and 51. to school B., and after my death this field rises in value as building ground to 500l., then the Master and Wardens, the trustees of the testator, claim the right of keeping for their own uses the difference between the 10l. and the 500l. ;-the testator having neglected to provide that the whole produce of the field should be divided between the two schools; and it is understood that the greater proportion of the funds held by the Trading Companies as their private property, is the residue of charity funds thus acquired, or held under this claim.

If there be truth in the pamphlet which contains these and many other arresting charges, the Russell, the Brougham, or the Governmental purge, should be applied immediately. It is as much needed as any reform or improvement which Mr. Maslen can project; and indeed would go a great way towards the ends which the mere builders, ventilators, and drainers have so much at heart.

ART. IX.-Memoirs and Recollections of the late Abraham Raimbach, Esq., Engraver. Edited by M. T. S. RAIMBACH, M. A. ABRAHAM RAIMBACH was an eminent line engraver, and a worthy man. He was born in London in 1776, his father, a native of Switzerland, having come to this country when only twelve years old, and continuing to reside amongst us. But although arriving at that early age, and so long settled, he seems never to have become master of the English tongue; for the subject of these Memoirs thus reports:

I had, when a boy, exceeded my usual allowance of pocket-money, in the purchase of weekly periodicals, and had got into debt with my bookseller to the amount of a few shillings, but which, small as it was, I saw no immediate prospect of liquidating, unless by the discontinuing of my numbers. This, of the two, being decidedly, in my opinion, the worst alternative, the other was adopted, of disclosing the circumstance, and making an appeal to the bounty of my father. The appeal was admitted; and I was merely recommended not to run in debt, and never to defray any more expenses than were necessary. Of course incur was the word meant.

Abraham's mother was from Warwickshire, and is said to have been a descendant of Burbage—the friend of Shakspere. She was a woman of a gentle nature, but endowed with sound sense. At a very early period the subject of the volume narrowly escaped a frightful death, his nurse having let him drop from a second floor window. Providentially "I was floated in a manner by my baby's long clothes, and my fall was broken by the leads of the first story. The servant girl rushed into the room where my mother was sitting, exclaiming that she had killed the child, quitted the house, and was never seen by her afterwards." But the child was "not materially hurt."

Young Raimbach first saw the light in Cecil Court, St. Martin's Lane. His rudimental education was received at Archbishop Tennison's Library School and Highgate. At St. Martin's school he had for fellows, among others publicly known, the late Charles Matthews, and the late William Lovegrove. Liston was either a master or an assistant. The Memoir remarks that "The qualities that indicate the future actor, are not, perhaps, developed so early as may be sometimes witnessed in other pursuits connected with the imitative arts.