glare of light, a babel of tongues, and a confused vision of a crammed together assemblage of working men and women—the men smoking, and the men and women drinking from every species of vessel-glass, pewter, and stoneware. The room is papered with a design imitative of carved wood-work. In the centre, on the right-hand side, is the bar from which the orders" are dispensed by active female waiters, who have much to do to squeeze themselves between the tables-which are very long and curiously narrow, each one flanked by forms for the company. At the top of the room is an absurdly small theatre, the proscenium fitted in the ordinary style, but the scale of dimensions being so insignificant, that the heads of the performers reach to what is called, in technical language, the 'flies.' The orchestra beneath consists perhaps of two or three fiddles and a piano, and the performance, it may be, going on. It consists either of a dramatic entertainment, of isolated dances, or of alternate part and comic singing-all very primitive in their style, and not a little coarse. The 'play' is not much above the calibre of a Greenwich-fair tragedy. It generally possesses a sanguinary tyrant, with an army of two retainers; a grimly ghost, who rises in the last scene amid blue-fire; two oppressed lovers, the victims of the tyrant; a rightful and a wrongful heir; and, above all, a comic peasant and his sweetheart. These last delight the audience: they dance hornpipes, sing funny duos about being married and having a family; make local allusions, which are caught at very sharply; and outrage all the laws of dramatic propriety by asking the spectators riddles. The musical part of the performance consists very often of Ethiopian serenaders, of whom the people never appear to tire; of local songs in local dialect, sung in character; with an occasional common-place sentimental ditty, while sometimes there occurs a song not of the most decorous character. This last, however, is decidedly an exception to the rule. Dancing is much relished, and all sorts of hornpipes are the staple performances. We have seen an artist' dressed in front as a sailor, and behind as a soldier, with a mask, so that he always appeared to be facing the audience, make the hit of the evening, by first going through a number of military evolutions, and singing The British Grenadiers, with a drum; and then swinging himself round, and appearing in the character of a 'true British sailor,' in which he sang The Bay of Biscay, two or three of Dibdin's songs, and ended with a most vigorous naval hornpipe.

The company who assist at these performances are almost entirely mill-hands and mechanics. On the average, two-thirds will be males, the remainder females of all ages-a good many with children, and a few with babies at the breast, these last being usually accompanied by their husbands. Young' mill-girls, however, are not wanting. You will see them in twos and threes, and you may put them down as belonging to the class of juveniles who leave home at an early age for the liberty of lodgings.

Everybody is in working-dress, and, as might be expected, a general atmosphere of decided free-and-easiness reigns over the assembly. Yet it is generally orderly, and cases of drunkenness are certainly the exception, although plenty of such are to be met with in the street outside. The buzz of loud talking, and the constant vociferations for more porter, certainly produce a continuous uproar; but generally the disposition of the people appears to be goodhumouredly conversational, and they are always inclined to be communicative to strangers. The Apollo Saloon is rivalled by another, of peculiar construction, in the vast thoroughfare of the Oldham Road. In this haunt of the Muses there are two great rooms, one above the other, with the ceiling between them partially removed, so that about half the people in each apartment can see half the people in the other, by looking up and down the yawning hatchway. This invention was the idea of an ingenious landlord, who had purchased a really very splendid self-performing organ, but who found considerable difficulty in having the instrument in both rooms at once. The organ in question plays overtures and movements of symphonies, and cost L.194. The performances take place only at certain hours and on certain nights, when they are densely attended. The lower class of singing and hornpipedancing places present no features save that of being bad imitations of bad originals. They give conjuring exhibitions occasionally, tricks with cards, and similar trivial displays; and wherever there is a pretended fortune-teller, the women are sure to muster, to hear their future fates. So much for the Manchester cheap Harmonic Rooms. Their evil social influence is indubitable, for the amusement is nearly of the lowest class, and music and dancing are made subsidiary to smoking and drinking. But a far more respectable and elevating class of entertainment has of late years been established in the Monday Popular Concerts, held in the great FreeTrade Hall. On these occasions, there are often present several thousand operatives, male and female. The price of admission is 3d., there being a small slice of the hall railed off and charged double. The programmes upon these occasions do not present any great executive display. An organ and piano for accompaniments, with a few professors-generally of merely local celebrity-now and then a London star, and a good and well-trained chorus of some thirty voices, form the executive troupe. In the pieces played, there is a preponderance of broad, massive choral music and popular ballads. Glees and madrigals also enjoy a large share of favour, and encores are curiously frequent. For all species of entertainments,' from lectures to juggling, however, Manchester is an excellent field. The itinerant entertainer,' whatever may be his luck in other quarters, is pretty sure to reap a bountiful harvest among the tall chimneys, to which, when at all within their reach, the working-classes copiously contribute.

The literature of the Lancashire operatives might be much altered for the better. A great proportion are, more or less,

readers-not readers or thinkers of the class to which we have alluded as naturalists and speculative men, but devourers of vulgar tales and monstrous legends, in the coarse manufacture of which they find matter of absorbing interest; and of cheap essayist publications, often of extreme democratic views, sometimes promulgating social and infidel opinions. With floods of cheap literature of this class, most of it of London origin, the booksellers' shops in the working portions of the town are absolutely deluged. Upon their shelves will be found masses of penny novels, and comic-song, and dream, and recitation books, jumbled with sectarian pamphlets and democratic essays. Cheap educational works, too, in great variety, are accompanied by cheap reprints of American tales, and new editions of the early Puritan divines; while the chaos is completed by Sacred Melodists, Pinnock's Catechisms, and Little Warblers, ranged side by side with double-columned translations from modern French novels by Eugène Sue, Dumas, Sand, and Paul Feval. Still, the cheap and coarse penny novel, appearing in weekly parts, seems to take the lead in popular estimation. In the winter of '49-50, Mr Abel Heywood, the greatest dealer in Manchester in working-class literature, calculated that his weekly sale of the following lot of licentious garbage amounted, for each publication, to an average of 6000 numbers: Angelina, Elmira's Curse, Claude Duval, Eardley Hall, Ella the Outcast, Gentleman Jack, Gambler's Wife, Gallant Tom, Lady Hamilton, Mazeppa, Mildred, Old Sanctuary, Royal Twins, String of Pearls, The Brigand, and The Oath. A number of these celebrate the gallant and generous qualities of highwaymen; and the general character of the whole, is that of a collection of monstrous improbabilities in narrative and character, seasoned up with a murder or a hanging every few pages, or with a scene of coarse licentiousness. There may be exceptions, but such is the rule. Of similar publications, but having a smaller circulation-say from 100 to 1500 per week-Mr Heywood furnished a list as long as the first. In the department of periodicals devoted to essays, tales, and generally to the development of democratic, and more or less socialist views, he calculated that the proportions of sale were as follow: Barker's People, 22,000 (this publication is American, and seldom seen out of the manufacturing districts); Reynolds's Miscellany, 3700; Illustrated Family Journal, 700; London Journal, 9000 (this has probably risen since the period in question); Family Herald, 8000; Home Circle, 1000; Home Journal, 1000; Penny Sunday Times, 1000; Lancashire Beacon, 3000; and Potter's Examiner, 1500. Turning to a better class of periodicals:-Mr Abel Heywood sold per week of the Domestic Journal, 600 copies; of Eliza Cook's Journal, 1250 (this was soon after the commencement of that periodical); Chambers's Journal, 900; Chambers's Information for the People, 1200; Hogg's Instructor, 60; and the People's Journal, 400. Punch sold 1200, and the Family Economist, 5000 weekly. The monthly issues of the cheap editions of

Dickens and Bulwer were 250 numbers of the former, and 200 of the latter. In answer to inquiries as to whether he could apportion particular classes of books to particular classes of readers, Mr Heywood replied, that the comic or quasi-comic tales, and humorous publications, were principally bought by shopmen and clerks; that the school of the monstrous novels, and the more rabid democratic papers, supplied the literary thirst of the mass of the operatives; and that the better weekly publications were taken by the superior classes of the work-people. The women were terribly fond of mixed love and raw-head-and-bloody-bones stories.

With all the schools-parochial and factory, public and private, Sunday and evening-now at work in Manchester, it is to be hoped that the reading tastes of the people will not always continue at their present low ebb. That there is a dire mass of stolid ignorance in the population, is a too evident fact. The reports of the Educational Commissioners supply the most startling details upon the subject, but the work of instruction is now making distinct inroads upon the waste. The present generation of adult workmen contrast the condition of their children, obliged by law to be instructed if they are to be admitted into a factory, with their own youth, when they were worked always twelve, often fourteen hours per day before they were eight years of age. Now each spinner has to pay for the education of his piecers and scavengers from 3d. to 6d. a week. A visit to any of the factoryschools will give a lively idea of the sprightly activity of body and mind of the little, dirty-faced, bright-eyed mill-children. The masters generally agree in stating, that the factory pupils are, on the average, decidedly quicker than the offspring of the small tradesmen, &c., who are not engaged in factory operations; but they complain that the juveniles from the mills are incurably dirty, and that they have continually to be sent back from the porch of Academe to wash their faces. In periods of trade depression, it is found very difficult to keep up these schools; and should a mill stop, there is an end for the time to the education of its quota of juveniles. Visiting a Manchester mill-school, we found but a scanty attendance. The master informed us, that the engine in such and such an establishment had broken down; and on our inquiring what that had to do with his pupils, he shook his head, as he rejoined: Ah, sir, in Manchester everything depends upon the engine. Stop the engine, and you stop the wages, the dinners, the fees-you stop everything.' The Lancashire Sunday-school system has already attained a European reputation. The muster of children collected in the Peel Park on the recent occasion of the royal visit to Manchester, and amounting, it is said, to more than 70,000, was a memorable proof of the perfection of the organisation which could call forth in such order and discipline so vast a juvenile army. Narrow, and often sectarian as is the education given by establishments of the kind,

it has worked an incalculable deal of good. You often hear in the north, that Lancashire would have been a hell upon earth were it not for its Sunday-schools. Long before educational committees of the privy-council, and British and Foreign School Societies were heard of-long ere the days of Institutes and Athenæumsthe Lancashire Sunday-schools were at work, impregnating the people with the rudiments of an education-rude and fanatical, perhaps, but which long kept alive the glow of moral sentiment and popular intelligence. The founders of the system still maintain a curious kind of local fame. Often will the visitor to Manchester observe, both in drawing-rooms and humble parlourkitchens, little dingy portraits of soberly-clad, grave-looking men, whose names he has never heard of, and who yet will be pointed out to him as the greatest and most glorious of Englishmen. Of these the most renowned is an indefatigable worker in the cause of the name of Stott. For half a century, this gentleman was the foremost champion of the Lancashire Sunday-schools, and worked steadily on, although now accused of training up blood-thirsty young Jacobins, and again of organising an operative Jacquerie. The school to which he principally devoted himself opened with 40 scholars. Its average number is now slightly under 3000. Sunday-schools in Manchester are not only a vast educational instrument, but a great social fact. Nearly every school has its library, and many their benefit societies. At Whitsuntide, the yearly week of rest, every school has its country trip. Many of the richest men in Manchester will tell you, that to the Sundayschools, which taught them to read and write, and inculcated habits of sobriety and honesty, they now owe their villas and their mills. Sunday-schools act also as powerful agents in binding different classes together. Men in the middle ranks of life very commonly act as teachers; and acquaintanceships formed in the school-room not unfrequently lead to life-long business connections. Families are for generations connected with the same school: a great proportion of the children, at any given time, are the offspring of old scholars; and a great proportion of the teachers were once scholars in the classes they subsequently instruct. The schools are elementary and religious. Scripture - reading and expounding, with instructions in psalmody, form the staple business of the meetings. Most schools have, however, their evening-classes, devoted to more secular instruction. For the working-day classes, small fees, varying from 2d. to 6d. per week, are paid. The Sunday education is entirely gratuitous. In general, the ages of the pupils vary from eight to twenty, and the girls commonly remain longer as scholars than the boys. The Manchester Sunday-schools hold, not only in educational but in social organisation, from 40,000 to 50,000 children and young persons, controlled by 4000 or 5000 teachers, assistants, and inspecting-visitors. Of the whole number, about 25,000 may belong to the church-schools, of which there are about 50. Of