Birmingham is, in fact, notable for its utility more than its beauty,—­for what is done in its workshops, rather than for what is to be seen in its streets and suburbs.  Nowhere are there to be found so numerous a body of intelligent, ingenious, well educated workmen.  The changes of fashion and the discoveries of science always find Birmingham prepared to march in the van, and skilfully execute the work needed in iron, in brass, in gold and silver, in all the mixed metals and in glass.  When guns are no longer required at the rate of a gun a minute, Birmingham steel pens become famous all over the world.  When steel buckles and gilt buttons have had their day, Britannia teapots and brass bedsteads still hold their own.  No sooner is electrotype invented, than the principal seat of the manufacture is established at Birmingham.  No sooner are the glass duties repealed than the same industrious town becomes renowned for plate glass, cut glass, and stained glass; and, when England demands a Palace to hold the united contributions of “The Industry of the World,” a Birmingham banker finds the contractor and the credit, and Birmingham manufacturers find the iron, the glass, and the skill needful for the most rapid and gigantic piece of building ever executed in one year.

In order to appreciate the independent character and quick inventive intelligence of the Birmingham mechanic, he should be visited at his own home.  A system of small independent houses, instead of lodgings, prevails in this town, to the great advantage of the workmen.

It is only within a very few years that the working classes have had, in a local School of Design, means of instruction in the principles of taste, and arts of drawing and modelling; while, until the patent laws are put upon a just foundation, their inventive faculties can never be fully developed.  When the artizans of Birmingham have legislative recognition of their rights as inventors, and free access to a first-rate school of design, their “cunning” hands will excel in beauty as well as ingenuity all previous triumphs.

The wealthier classes have, from various causes, deteriorated within the last sixty years, while the workmen have improved within that time.  Men who have realized fortunes no longer settle down in the neighbourhood of their labours.  They depart as far as possible from the smoke of manufactures and the bickerings of middle class cliques, purchase estates, send their sons to the universities, and in a few years subside into country squires.  Professional men, as soon as they have displayed eminent talent, emigrate to London; and the habit, now so prevalent in all manufacturing towns, of living in the suburbs, has sapped the prosperity of those literary and philosophical institutions and private reunions, which so much contributed to raise the tone of society during the latter half of the last century.  The meetings of an old Literary and Philosophical Society have been discontinued, and