Stray Studies from England and Italy

h to show me that my visitor was a man of very different stamp from his predecessors. There was something in the tall, manly figure, the bright smile, the frank winning address of Edward Denison that inspired confidence in a moment. "I come to learn, and not to teach," he laughed, as I hinted at "theories" and their danger; and our talk soon fell on a certain "John's Place," where he thought there was a great deal to be learned. In five minutes more we stood in the spot which interested him, an alley running between two mean streets, and narrowing at one end till we crept out of it as if through the neck of a bottle. It was by no means the choicest part of the parish: the drainage was imperfect, the houses miserable; but wretched as it was it was a favourite haunt of the poor, and it swarmed with inhabitants of very various degrees of respectability. Costermongers abounded, strings of barrows were drawn up on the pavement, and the refuse of their stock lay rotting in the gutter. Drunken sailors and Lascars fr