faith in the feminine purity of the lower orders of their countrywomen, nor the slightest value for it, allowing its possible existence.  The distinction of ranks is so marked, that the English cottage-damsel holds a position somewhat analogous to that of the negro girl in our Southern States.  Hence comes inevitable detriment to the moral condition of those men themselves, who forget that the humblest woman has a right and a duty to hold herself in the same sanctity as the highest.  The subject cannot well be discussed in these pages; but I offer it as a serious conviction, from what I have been able to observe, that the England of to-day is the unscrupulous old England of Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews, Humphrey Clinker and Roderick Random; and in our refined era, just the same as at that more free-spoken epoch, this singular people has a certain contempt for any fine-strained purity, any special squeamishness, as they consider it, on the part of an ingenuous youth.  They appear to look upon it as a suspicious phenomenon in the masculine character.

Nevertheless, I by no means take upon me to affirm that English morality, as regards the phase here alluded to, is really at a lower point than our own.  Assuredly, I hope so, because, making a higher pretension, or, at all events, more carefully hiding whatever may be amiss, we are either better than they, or necessarily a great deal worse.  It impressed me that their open avowal and recognition of immoralities served to throw the disease to the surface, where it might be more effectually dealt with, and leave a sacred interior not utterly profaned, instead of turning its poison back among the inner vitalities of the character, at the imminent risk of corrupting them all.  Be that as it may, these Englishmen are certainly a franker and simpler people than ourselves, from peer to peasant; but if we can take it as compensatory on our part, (which I leave to be considered,) that they owe those noble and manly qualities to a coarser grain in their nature, and that, with a finer one in ours, we shall ultimately acquire a marble polish of which they are unsusceptible, I believe that this may be the truth.

* * * * *

THE VAGABONDS.

  We are two travellers, Roger and I.
    Roger’s my dog.—­Come here, you scamp! 
  Jump for the gentlemen,—­mind your eye! 
    Over the table,—­look out for the lamp!—­
  The rogue is growing a little old;
    Five years we’ve tramped through wind and weather,
  And slept out-doors when nights were cold,
    And ate and drank—­and starved—­together.

  We’ve learned what comfort is, I tell you! 
    A bed on the floor, a bit of rosin,
  A fire to thaw our thumbs, (poor fellow! 
    The paw he holds up there’s been frozen,)
  Plenty of catgut for my fiddle,
    (This out-door business is bad for strings,)
  Then a few nice buckwheats hot from the griddle,
    And Roger and I set up for kings!