as we can see it was neither religious nor irreligious. Cicero was no scoffer. The official religion of the State he passed over in decorous silence. It had ceased even then to be taken seriously by any educated man. But Cicero, though he sometimes used the language of what is now called Agnosticism, was a sincere believer in immortality and in God. As Bayle truly and nobly says, his religion was in his heart, and not in his mind. He could not prove it. He He felt it, and if it did not always sustain him under the stress of calamity, it prevented him from sinking into the abysses of materialism. He had the natural faith which

did not want to prove it.

springs from a sense of human dignity and moral grandeur.

A letter from Cicero to Atticus of the 7th of March, B.C. 45, 'essentially private,' is the pathetic record of a manly struggle against the burden of almost intolerable suffering. He never quite recovered his daughter's death. But public duty did at last restore him to active interest in political affairs, and his sanguine temperament prevented him from despairing of the Republic until Octavius joined Antony. Then he submitted to the inevitable, but he did not live to see the final overthrow of Roman freedom. He parted, at the turning of the tide, the most illustrious victim of the second Triumvirate. It illustrates the continuity of history and the nothingness of time, that some of Cicero's latest epistles might well have come from a contemporary Frenchman who had heard rumours of a junction between the Duc d'Orléans and General Zurlinden. Editors have taken strange liberties with the text of Cicero's correspondence. In one letter they deliberately inserted the word non, and made Cicero say that he did not struggle with his grief; instead of that he did. By an equally simple and audacious process they caused him, in the most interesting of his literary criticisms, to deny Lucretius either art or genius, instead of crediting him with both. Mr. Tyrrell and Mr. Purser have had the sense and courage to restore the manuscript readings wherever that was possible. Their services as commentators are beyond all praise. Few scholars have set themselves a more difficult task, and still fewer have more successfully performed it. The treasures which these volumes contain have stood the supreme test. They have defied the centuries. They are proof against all changes of language and religion, because they possess the elements of permanent interest over which all change passes harmlessly as storms pass over the depths of the sea. When Sir Robert Peel was summoned from Rome in 1834 to form a Government, he calculated that he performed the journey in the same time as the Emperor Hadrian. In ten years travelling had been more completely transformed than it was between 1834 and the days of Abraham. But what are mechanical improvements of that sort to the principles of human nature, and the motives of human action?

There is not an interest or an incident of Cicero's life which does not appeal in some manner to ourselves. He was right to count upon the heritage of immortality for his life and writings. We have it under John Henry Newman's own hand that in style he had but one master, and that the last great Republican of Rome.

HERBERT PAUL.

ROWTON HOUSES-FROM A RESIDENT

WHEN you have been accustomed to go every year to one of the most beautiful salmon rivers in Scotland, that passes from under the shadow of Ben Klibrech through Strathnaver to the sea, it is curious to find yourself living in London in one of Lord Rowton's houses, on an expenditure that seldom exceeds ten shillings a week—and to have done this for a considerable period of time.

There is no silence like the silence of a Highland strath. I have passed many days by the river, when salmon fishing in Strathnaver, when we would see no one, and then one day there would come down the road which follows the course of the river a cart with a man and a dog, and we would cease fishing for a few minutes to watch them; and as we walked home in the evening my friend would break the silence by saying, 'I think it must have been the shepherd from old Syre.'

This is very different from the noise that never ceases in the King's Cross Road, where you have the head office of the Parcel Post on your right, and the termini of the three great northern railways on your left.

Rowton House, King's Cross, gives accommodation to six hundred and seventy-one people. They may be described in the words of a Highlander who, upon being asked as to the people in the glen among whom he lived, said they consisted of good folk, bad folk, and the Patersons.' With the Patersons you are familiar. In this house we are never without them. They are perfectly dressed in frockcoat and silk hat. If you could remove the stains, and take away the faded and worn appearance of their dress, they might walk in the Park' on Sunday without fear of observation. You see them haunting Fleet Street and Piccadilly, listening to the bands. Whence they come or whither they go, no one seems to know; they toil not, neither do they spin. If you sent one of them into the City to change a ten-pound note, you might have to wait a long time before he returned with your change.

The sleeping accommodation at Rowton House consists of

cubicles. Each cubicle contains a bed and a chair, and above each bed there is a window, which the occupant may keep open or shut, as he please. There is a small shelf, and three iron pegs upon which he may hang his clothes. The sheets and blankets of the bed are ample, and the bed as comfortable as you get in a first-class hotel. To the door in the cubicle there is no lock, but only an iron bolt. To these six hundred and seventy-one sleeping-rooms there are only two locks and keys-the locks and keys of two great iron gates on the landing of the first floor.

These gates are closed at nine-thirty in the morning, and kept locked all day until seven-fifteen, when one of them is opened to admit the first batch of sleepers, mostly men who have to rise at three, four, or five in the morning-workers in the Smithfield Meat Market, sellers of newspapers, and workers among the vegetables in Covent Garden.

This gate is opened again every quarter of an hour, when a fresh batch of sleepers will have gathered at the gateway, where they have to show their cubicle ticket, which is marked by the attendant, or stamped 'cancelled' if their time has expired.

There are no appliances for washing on the cubicle floors. Washing is done on the ground floor. There are eighty wash-hand basins, with hot and cold water, towels hung upon rollers, and you supply your own soap.

There is a long, narrow room containing twelve large foot-baths in which the men may wash their feet.

And last if it ever should be that the people for whom Lord Rowton has built these homes should wish to raise a tribute to his memory, let them carve at the base of its granite column that he gave them a bath, a clean towel, and soap for a penny.

And now we will pass to the breakfast and dining rooms.

There are two rooms. The larger room contains thirty-eight tables made of oak, the smaller room nine tables-forty-seven tables in all. Four people can dine with comfort at each table, giving accommodation for one hundred and eighty-eight people at a time.

In the larger room there is a bar for the sale of provisions. At this bar there are three things they sell for a farthing-milk, matches, and vinegar. I bought a farthing's-worth of milk to use at breakfast this morning. For a halfpenny you can get a cup of tea, coffee, or cocoa, bread, watercress, onions in spring, marmalade, pickles, and butter. The articles to be purchased for a penny are too numerous to mention, but to-day you may get a small plate of cold meat, potatoes, and a salad of either cucumber or lettuce with tomatoes, the cost of which will be threepence. The working man dearly loves a salad. The walls of this room are hung with familiar engravings-Landseer's Horse-Shoeing,' 'Elaine' ('the lily maid of

Astolat').

In the smaller room the walls are brightened with chromolithographs-prominent among them Millais' Bubbles.'

There are two sitting-rooms, and in one of them a library, to which have recently been added two hundred and sixty new books, well printed and excellently selected. So far as my observation goes, Dumas seems to be most popular. I asked a workman the reason of this, and he answered: 'Because there's plenty of "go" about him.' Captain Marryat comes next-Midshipman Easy and delightful Peter Simple. Who would not be a boy again to read Peter Simple?

Among these six

But in this library there is one omission. hundred fellow-lodgers of mine, there are at times sorrowful people for whom there should have been provided a copy of Robinson Crusoe.

You may play at draughts or chess, but cards are not permitted. Here, again, you have many pictures-Rosa Bonheur's 'Horses coming from the Fair;' 'Prince Rupert: His Last Charge at Edge Hill: '

Ere this hath Lucas marched, with his gallant cavaliers,

And the bray of Rupert's trumpets grows fainter in our ears.

In the course of a few months there will be opened at Hammersmith a new house built by the company which owes its origin to Lord Rowton, and containing eight hundred beds. When this house is completed, there will be four houses in London, affording accommodation for more than two thousand five hundred people.

It may be interesting for a moment to compare the cost of living in one of these houses with the cost of living in one of the hotels with which you are familiar.

If you have been away for a holiday you will not have far to seek to find a paper upon which is written: 'Bedroom and attendance, six shillings; bath, one shilling; breakfast, three shillings and sixpence; dinner, five shillings.' Fifteen shillings and sixpence in all. What a prescription it is! How soon it reduces the hard-workedfor five-pound note into a heap of insignificant shillings!

But we must live in hope. Some day there may be opened for you an hotel with charges somewhat similar to Lord Rowton's: 'Bedroom, sixpence; bath, one penny; breakfast, fourpencebread, butter, bacon, and tea; dinner, eightpence '-amounting to one shilling and sevenpence per day. At these prices Lord Rowton's houses pay a dividend of 5 per cent.

sure.

Let us compare the table d'hôte at six shillings with the humbler meal at eightpence. You will say the comparison is absurd. I am not Carving at a table d'hôte has been reduced to a science and a fine science, too. Is there not an art in serving you a slice of saddle of mutton not much thicker than an envelope? And it may be that on your first visit to Switzerland the carver at the 'Schweitzerhof'