of the middle class in our age is a true one; but it is the fact, that it should be accepted as true, and laughed at as such, that shows the deplorable vitiation of the popular taste of London.

Anyone who enjoys such literary offal may find it at the Music Halls, where one performer is said to earn his thousand or fifteen hundred pounds a year, and rides in his brougham from one place to another, singing the same song eight or ten times in the evening, to new and delighted audiences. Or if any investigator recoil from such haunts, he may read comic song-books, closely protected by a copyright that will not permit the infringement or piracy of anything so valuable—and so ignoble.

The all but worn-out saying of the nameless friend of Fletcher of Saltoun, who, in the days before newspapers, declared that he would rather be the songwriter than the law-giver of the people, has a side to it that its first utterer never imagined; for if the song-writers of the people are of the class that provide the Music Halls with their mirth and their morality, the administrators of the law, if not the law-makers, are likely to have extra work. When the song-writer teaches virtue, celebrates true love, exalts patriotism, and has no ridicule to throw except at the harmless follies and small vices of the people, he is a power in the state. When he reverses the process, sneers at virtue, ridicules the

great and the heroic in character, and borrows, as his choicest vehicles of expression, the language of burglars and beggars, he also becomes a power in the state, but a power for evil. The greater the popularity which he achieves, the more serious the mischief he causes. The English were said, by the old French chronicler, to amuse themselves sadly; and anything sadder, in every sense of the word, than the comic songs that are popular in London is difficult to imagine.

FLIES AND MOSQUITOES.

ONSENSE!" said my tenderest friend and life-companion, when I told her, as I always do, what I was going to write about. "You cannot possibly find anyThis was my wife's first "I should think," I re

thing to say about flies." impression of the matter.

plied, "that a good deal might be said about flies, and their uses in the economy of creation." "No doubt," said she; "but flies are a nuisance, especially those horrible mosquitoes, from which we suffered so much in America. Indeed, now I come to consider it, I think you might write something readable about those dreadful pests. I think the plague of flies, that afflicted Egypt when Pharaoh would not let the Israelites go free, must have been a plague of mosquitoes." "Very likely," said I; " and then you know that one of the names given

to the devil is Beelzebub, or the Lord of the Flies." "I wish he had them all in his own dominions, then," rejoined my wife. "What, all the flies ?" I inquired. "Would you banish the bees and the butterflies in all their innumerable varieties of beauty, and the flying beetles, and the fire-flies that make night brilliant in warm latitudes ?" "No," she replied. "I was wrong. I would only banish the common flies and the mosquitoes." "Then I will write about common flies and mosquitoes, and leave the bees and the butterflies alone."

The busy, impertinent, buzzing little creature, known in most parts of the world as The Fly, is chiefly remarkable for its incessant cheerful activity, and for its constant thirstiness. It seems to have a love for everything that is succulent and sweet. In this respect it is honourably distinguished from the culex, or gnat family, of which there are no less than thirty varieties in the British Isles, none of which have any taste for sweets, nor any relish for anything except the blood which they suck from pores of animals. The house-fly is a veritable dipsomaniac:

the

Busy, thirsty, curious fly,

Thou shalt drink as well as I,

says the old convivial chant; and, in this predilection for drink, the fly very much resembles the toper who apostrophises him. Nothing potable

comes amiss to him-from wine to brandy, from milk to water. Like man in search of his gratification, little musca continually comes to grief. At the breakfast-table he dips into the tea or coffee cup, if he have a chance, and is often scalded to death for his temerity. He darts from the sugarbasin to the cream-jug, and not unfrequently falls into the clammy liquor and is drowned for his greediness. Sitting alone at breakfast one morning, at a country inn, with nothing particular to do, and with no newspaper or book to read, I amused myself by extricating an unfortunate fly from the cream into which it had fallen, and placed it upon the table-cloth to live or die, as fate, not I, might determine. It was not in my power to do anything more for my small fellow-creature. Its wings were clogged, for the cream was not London cream. had not lain in this unhappy condition above a minute, when another fly was tempted to take a look. Whether the new comer understood the real state of the case, or whether it was too fond of cream to refuse to taste it, even when clotted over the body of a moribund brother, is not easy to decide; but putting out its little proboscis, it began to suck vigorously at the cream. Nor was it left alone to its enjoyment, or to its work of mercy, whichever it may have been, for it was speedily joined by five or six other flies, who all sucked

It