We pass over the sad fate of Newport for years following the Revolution—­the misery and dilapidation that succeeded its former prosperity.  We turn from the picture which a later French traveller, Brissot de Warville, draws of its poverty and desolation in 1788 to look at the renaissance, the rejuvenation that rescued this historic spot from oblivion.  To-day lines of villas and stately mansions have uplifted themselves on the avenues, and gay crowds throng the streets.  The shadowy forms of a past generation may still haunt the scenes of their former triumphs, but must rejoice over the life and light that nineteenth-century revels have dowered them with.  The world rolls on, and brings in its course new actors, new scenes, a new drop-curtain, but men and women are always men and women.  The loves, hopes, fears, disappointments or triumphs of to-day,—­these, if nothing else, link us to a past generation.  The idler on the club piazza, if not a Lauzun or Fersen, may no doubt arouse himself as nobly in a grand question of right or wrong (have we not seen it in our own generation?), unsheathe his sword and become, like Lytton’s hero, “now heard of, the first on the wall:”  the pretty belle of the afternoon fete, may she not have the same heart of steel and a spirit as true as that of some eighteenth-century ancestress?  There is room, then, even in this historic spot, for the gay modern cortege, for the life, the light, the prosperity and pleasure which embalm old memories and keep a centennial on the shrines where the youth and chivalry of a century ago lived, loved and have left the subtle odor of past adventure to add a mysterious but not unlovely fragrance to present experience.—­FRANCES PIERREPONT NORTH.

STUDIES IN THE SLUMS

V.—­DIET AND ITS DOINGS.

Later and more scientific investigations have tended to confirm the truth of the rather broad statement made by Buckle in his History of Civilization, that rice and potatoes have done more to establish pauperism than any and all causes besides.  A food easily procured, sufficiently palatable to ensure no dissatisfaction, and demanding no ingenuity of preparation, would seem the ideal diet, the promised rest for weary housekeepers and anxious political economists; but the latter class at least have found their work made double and treble by the results of such diet, while social reformers—­above all, the advocates of total abstinence—­are discovering that till varied and savory food and drink are provided the mass of the people will and must crave the stimulant given by alcoholic drinks.