sometimes keeps a banking account, and one man named Brown, lately apprehended, had a balance at his banker's of 800! As the members of this fraternity work wholly in the daytime, going out in the morning and returning in the evening, the landlady believes that they are engaged in mercantile pursuits, and have business in the city; and as it is part of their game to pay their way liberally, she esteems them to be model lodgers!

The domestic habits of thieves are all pretty much alike; fluctuating between the prison and the hulks, they exhibit the usual characteristics of men engaged in dangerous enterprises. They mainly pass their time when not at work' in gambling, smoking, and drinking, and in listening to the adventures of their companions. It must be remembered, however, that the professed thief, even if he drinks, is never drunk; he is employed in desperate undertakings which require him to have his wits about him quite as much, if not more, than the honest man. When a pickpocket is flush of money he spends it in the most lavish manner-takes a tour with his female companion to the Isle of Wight, or to any other place he has a wish to see, and puts up at the best hotels. In some of these trips he thinks nothing of spending 307. in a fortnight, and when the money is gone he comes back again to work.' Thieves are generally faithful to each other; indeed the community of danger in which they live developes this virtue to an unusual extent. If a 'pal' is apprehended, they cheerfully put down their guinea a-piece to provide him with counsel for his trial, and if he should be imprisoned they make a collection for him when he comes

The best class of swell mobsmen some times act upon the joint-stock principle 'with limited liabilities.' When a good thing is in prospect a gold-dust robbery or a bank robbery-it is not unusual for several of them to post as much as 501. a-piece in order to provide the sinews of war to carry on the plan in a business-like manner. If in the end the job succeeds the money advanced is carefully paid back to the persons advancing it several of whom have lived for years on plunder thus

obtained, without the police being able to detect them. Often the receivers make these adventures in crime, and plot the robbery of a jeweller's shop with as much coolness and shrewdness as though it were an ordinary mercantile speculation, and the produce is disposed of in the same businesslike manner. Watches are what is termed, re-christened,' that is, the maker's names and numbers are taken out and fresh ones put in; they are then exported in large quantities to America. All articles of plate are immediately thrown into the crucible and melted down, so as to place them beyond the hope of identification. In many cases when the receiver cannot thoroughly depend upon the thief, it is, we believe, customary to employ intermediate receivers so as to render it impossible to trace the property to its ultimate destination. It must not be supposed that the passion for gain is always the sole incentive to robbery. Oh how I do love thieving! If I had thousands I'd still be a thief;' such were the words uttered by a youth in Coldbathfields Prison, and overheard by the governor.*

If the machinery for preventing and detecting crime has so vastly improved within this present century, the same may be said for the method of dispensing justice. Up to as late as 1792, the magistrates of Bow-street-the first police office,' as it was then termed-were paid in that most obnoxious of all modes, by fees, which were often obtained in a manner so disgraceful that the magistrates got the name of 'trading justices and basket justices.' Our old friend John Townsend, whom we must summon once more to our aid, gives an insight into their proceedings, and he knew them well. He said, The plan used to be to issue warrants, and to take up all the poor devils in the streets, and then there was the bailing them, 2s. 4d., which the magistrate had. In taking up a hundred girls, that would make, at 2s. 4d., 117. 13s. 4d. They sent none to jail, for the hailing them was so much better!' The old Bowstreet worthy then draws a picture of the magistrate settling the amount of these illgotten fees with his clerk on the Monday morning. The basket justices' were so called, because they allowed themselves to be bought over by presents of baskets of game. These enormities were so glaring that, according to Townsend, they at last led to the Police Bill, and it was a great

We have extracted this anecdote from the

very interesting work just published by Captain Chesterton, entitled 'Revelations of Prison Life.”

blessing to the public to do away with these men, for they were nothing better than the encouragers of blacklegs, vice, and plunderers. There is no doubt about it. In 1792, seven other offices' were established, namely, Queen-square, Great Marlboroughstreet, Hatton Garden, Worship-street, Lambeth, Shadwell, and Union street, each office having three magistrates, who did the duties alternately. These, by the addition of the suburban courts, have since been augmented to eleven. They form the judgment-seats to which all offenders in this great capital of 2,500,000 inhabitants are brought either to be punished summarily, or to be remanded to the sessions to take their trial.

The police-courts may be likened to so many shafts sunk in the smooth surface of society, through which the seething mass of debauchery, violence, and crime, are daily bubbling up before the public eye. A spectator cannot sit beside the magistrate on the bench for a couple of hours without feeling that there are currents of wickedness flowing among the population as fixedly as the trade-winds in the tropics. A panorama of sin passes before his eye which he shudders to think is only like a single thread drawn upon the fabric of vice which underlies the whole system of elegant, punctilious, and accomplished metropolitan life. On every case that comes before him the magistrate unassisted has to decide rapidly and justly, unless he desires to call down upon his head the thunders of an ever watchful press. In addition to his judicial duties, he has to answer numberless questions, and to give advice upon law points to distressed persons: and all this amid a pestilential atmosphere which is calculated to depress both body and mind. Nevertheless, the work is done admirably, and justice, as speedy as that dispensed by cadis in Eastern tales, and much more impartial, is dealt to the throng brought before him.

From an analysis of the Criminal Returns of the Metropolitan Police, it is apparent that crimes have their peculiar seasons. Thus attempts to commit suicide generally occur in the months of June, July, and August, and rarely in November, according to the commonly-accepted notion; comfort, it is evident, is considered even in the accomplishment of this desperate act. Common assaults and drunkenness also multiply wonderfully in the dog-days. In the winter, on the contrary, burglaries increase, and, for some unknown reason, the uttering of counterfeit coin.

The character of the cases brought be

fore the police-courts varies, in some degree, according to the neighbourhood and other causes. Bow-street still maintains the pre-eminence over the other courts which it exercised in the old days, when the horse-patrol and the detective police, known as the Bow-street runners, were in existence, and this it does in consequence of its special jurisdiction over persons who are amenable to foreign law. The cases of this class-arson, murder, or bankruptcy are heard in private, generally by the chief magistrate, and the depositions are forwarded direct to the Foreign Office. Ticket-of-leave men who have committed fresh offences, are here deprived of their tickets, and apprehended by a warrant from the Home-Office. All Inland Revenue and Post-Office cases, such as stealing from letters, are adjudicated upon exclusively at Bow-Street, which is, in fact, the Government office.

The Thames Police deals with mutinies and murders committed on the high seas, and all disputes under the Mercantile Marine Act come as a matter of course to this court, together with the major portion of the criminals the scene of whose offences is in the docks and on the river. Drunkenness, the vice of the sailors, and the insubordination arising out of it, form a very large portion of the charges of the district. Worship-street is famous, or rather infamous, for wife-beaters. The reason is curious, and supplies a hint to philanthropists to reform the dwellings of the poor, rather than pass harsh acts of parliament against the husbands, which in many cases only serve to aggravate the evils arising from their brutality. The majority of the wife-beaters come from Bethnal-green, where there are a great number of large old mansions let out to the working-classes in floors or flats. Sometimes as many as twenty families live in the same house. The children play about in the passages as a neutral ground, disputes arise, and the mothers take the parts of their respective offspring with discordant fierceness. This drives the men to the public-houses, where they drink their porter iced and listen to more pleasant sounds in the shape of gra tuitous concerts. The wives in turn are driven to the tavern doors to seek their mates, with words not too conciliatory, and are brutally assaulted by the drunken husbands, who are taken up the next day and get six months' imprisonment, the family being in most instances irretrievably broken up and ruined thereby. Some of the magistrates, seeing the baleful working of the system, have attempted a solution of

the next best arranged courts, but both want space and air; Lambeth, though lately built, is a complete failure; many of the other courts are held in small private houses; and in those of Marlboroughstreet and Hammersmith, the business is transacted upstairs. In the latter court it is a common thing to hear it said of persons who have been taken before the magistrates he has been up the forty steps.' With the common people, with whom these institutions have mainly to deal, justice should be dispensed with a regard to appearances; there should be the formality of the superior courts, and somewhat of their show. A magistrate sitting in a plain black dress like an ordinary gentleman, and a lawyer dispensing justice in his wig and gown, are two very different things to the lower classes, whatever they may be to educated persons; and the want of all official costume, and the huddled style of doing business inseparable from the present confined space, is not calculated to inspire the people with much respect. The police should at least be put upon a level with the county courts. The latter have to deal with less momentous interests. Questions of paltry debt cannot be put in comparison with questions involving the liberty of the subject; the power of committing to prison for six months with hard labour is far more important than that of adjudicating in money disputes under five pounds. It is not enough that justice is administered; it is the opinion which the people have of it that produces the effect, and until the judgment seat is rendered dignified, and those who sit on it are clothed with the habiliments which distingush the magistrate from the man, the law, by losing most of its impressiveness, will lose its moral power over delinquents. The vulgar terror of punishment may remain, but the lesson which is conveyed to the feelings by the solemn stateliness of the tribunal is entirely gone..

ART. V.-1. Mémoire présenté par M. le Préfet de la Seine à la Commission Municipale. Paris, 1854.

2. Résidences des Souverains. Par C. Percier et P. Fontaine. Paris, 1833. 3. Rapport sur les Marchés Publics en Angleterre, en Belgique, &c. Paris, 1846.

No sovereign ever reigned who, in the same space of time, has rivalled Napoleon

III. in the combined magnificence, utility, and extent of his public works. Of the great undertakings in progress, the most vast is the junction of the two royal or imperial palaces, the Tuileries and the Louvre, and the consequent completion of an edifice which will surpass in size and splendour every other of its kind. The old Louvre, or Louveterie, a quadrangular building, with its conical capped towers, similar to those which still crown the opposite Conciergerie, was demolished by Francis I. in 1528. The social change in a court where for the first time dames and damsels freely mingled, created the necessity for a princely residence far different from the old cooped-up and dimly-lighted castle. A wide staircase, a vast receptionhall, and an atmosphere uncontaminated by the stagnant waters of a fosse, became the wants of the day. The architect, Pierre Lescot, Abbot of Clugny, accordingly erected on the site of the old Louvre half that portion of the new which fronts westward and joins the Musée. The king's mother, Louise of Savoy, caught up the new taste, and emigrated from the unhealthy air of the palace of the Tournelles in the midst of the city, to the site of the present Tuileries. The centre however of the existing edifice was built by Catherine of Medici, while Henry II. had previously completed the west side of the court of the Louvre. The fancy of the age was for large square masses, which resembled towers, but were called pavillons, with lines of galleries or reception-rooms connecting them. The lower part of this pavillon was devoted to the great staircase, leading to the chief apartment, such as the Hall of the Caryatides in the Louvre, which Jean Goujon ornamented for Henry II.

Henry IV. was the first to conceive the splendid project of uniting the Louvre and Tuileries by a long gallery, to be appropriated to works of art. The completion of the Louvre itself was retarded by the rivalry between the architects of the French and Italian schools. Perrault, a physician, through the patronage of Colbert, secured the adoption of his famous colonnade, which forms the east front of the Louvre, facing the church of St. Germain l'Auxerrois. The beauty of the façade scarcely sufficed to preserve it afterwards, owing to the difficulty of harmonising it with the rest of the quadrangle. Fortunately it was allowed to remain, and the contrast arising from the irregularity is now admitted to be one of the beauties of the structure. Versailles during the next century and a half was the principal

object of royal care, and the palaces of the metropolis were comparatively neglected. The dependents of the court did as they pleased with the interior and precincts of the kingly residences of Paris; and they at last built themselves, at the expense no doubt of the state, a kind of rookery of apartments, which choked up the court of the Tuileries until it was almost unapproachable. The revolutionary cannon next battered the front of the royal structure, and the Convention, having installed itself in the galleries which extended between the northern and the central pavillons, threw them into one, and increased the devastation.

The first care of Napoleon I. was to clear away the buildings which encumbered the immediate court of the Tuileries. To recover the ground that extended between them and the Louvre, was a more serious task; for the vast hotel of the Dukes of Longueville, that of the family of Elbœuf, the stables of the Duke of Orleans, together with a whole line of streets and houses, filled the space. The project of Napoleon was to connect the Louvre and Tuileries by a long gallery corresponding to that of the picture gallery or Musée. He at the same time resolved to open the garden of the Tuileries on the north side, and unite it with the city, with which it then only communicated by lanes and alleys. The site of the present Rue de Rivoli was chiefly occupied by convents and their gardens, which had been sold indeed, but were not yet disturbed; and here he constructed the noble street which has just been extended through the very heart of Paris as far as the Place de la Bastille. Even the Place Vendôme was shut in both on the side of the Boulevards and on that of the Tuileries, and the Rue de la Paix, which now runs up in either direction, was the work of the Emperor. Without this channel of communication an habitué of the present capital would scarcely recognise the gay and splendid city.

would have masked all discrepancies ex cept such as might have been visible through the central arch, where the view for this reason would have been broken by fountains. The lower portion of the transverse building was to be a covered colon nade; and as the line of the Museum Gal lery along the river was to be similarly adorned, the promenaders through a considerable portion of the city would have been protected from sun and rain.

The fifteen years which succeeded the reign of Napoleon I. were years of debt and of financial difficulty. To complete a few of the imperial designs, such as the canals and abattoirs, and the erection of some churches and colleges, absorbed all the disposable funds of the Restoration. Louis Philippe, who as Duke of Orleans had involved himself to complete and embellish the Palais Royal, arrived at the Tuileries in 1830 with vast schemes for its extension to the Louvre. His first idea, however, was of comfort; and the narrow line of almost transparent galleries, thrown up by Francis I. and Catherine de Medicis, afforded neither accommodation for a family, nor privacy for a sovereign. It was the king's intention to remedy the inconve nience by doubling the depth of the Tuileries facing the gardens. Orders were given to commence the works, and a large portion of the garden was fenced off, which nar rowed the space previously enjoyed by the public. The populace just then was peculiarly susceptible, and full of its sovereign rights. Murmurs arose which were reechoed by the press. The bitter and sarcastic criticisms of the newspapers found adherents in the Chamber of Deputies. A citizen king, it was urged, might rest contented with that palace which Louis XIV. and Napoleon had successively inhabited, and had not required to enlarge. Louis Philippe grew alarmed. The orders for sinking the foundation were revoked: but the planks, which shut out the public, remained. The enclosed ground was converted into a private garden, which still exists; the people did not attain the object of their agitation, and the monarch was baulked of his improved palace.

of joining the Tuileries and the Louvre. A decree was issued to authorise the government to take the houses of proprietors in adjoining streets, and this unlimited