those of twenty or thirty years back. Is this the case with regard to the rapid development of inhabitants for Baldwin’s Gardens, Leather Lane, Saffron Hill, and neighbouring purlieus? There may be increased leisure there, but if the wages are higher now than they were, in proportion to the higher price of provisions, they must have suffered worse than starvation in years gone by. So unhealthily crowded—in fact, pestilent—is the neighbourhood we have mentioned, that no number of quacks could have done more to shorten life than the inhabitants now do for themselves. But even these poor wretches are made the groundwork for a new system of quackery—the quackery of the mock philanthropist, who builds model lodging-houses, ostensibly and with much flourishing of trumpets, for the very poor, and then lets them to people who never did dwell in rookeries; to those people who can afford to pay good rents, and so keep up the dividends which are the modern reward of so-called charity.
Notwithstanding the many stirring events of the early part of the last century, there is little or nothing to read in any of the papers. This may be accounted for by the difficulty of obtaining news from distant or even from any parts a hundred and thirty years or so back; but whatever the reason, this is certain, the advertisements are by far the best reading in the journals, daily or weekly. Though the newspapers were to our notions wonderfully small, their editors seem to have had the greatest difficulty in filling the little space they had at command with news, and provincial journals were sometimes put to strange shifts, even the now common work of the liner, that of inventing facts, being then unknown. It is by no means unusual to find a chapter of the Bible put in to fill up the columns; and even as late as 1740 the London and County Journal gratified its readers with the History of the Old and New Testaments, while other papers filled up their front pages with occasional extracts from the histories of England and other countries, or selections from books of travel. Singular as this may seem, it is true. Its truth is perhaps the most singular thing about it.