most towns. The workmen do not congregate six or eight families in a house: it is more common for one or two families to have a small house to themselves; and as, luckily for Birmingham, most of the streets incline from one end to the other, on account of the irregular level of the town, the streets undergo a natural drainage, which is of immense importance to the health of the inhabitants. The consequence is, that Birming ham is, for a smoky centre of manufactures, a tolerably healthy town. A little progress is being made by some of the larger firms, in the adoption of smoke-consuming apparatus for the furnaces; and if Birmingham would go as far as Leeds has gone in this matter, it would be all the better for the inhabitants. : In Birmingham, as elsewhere, a Mechanics' Institution was founded,-flourished for a time,—and decayed. On its ashes arose a Polytechnic Institution, having a somewhat similar object in view this still exists. Whether by such or by any other means, the raising of the position of the working-classes by education is of immense importance in a town like Birmingham, where such classes form so large a proportion of the whole population. That they become both better workmen and better men by such agency, is now pretty well a settled point. Valuable testimony on this matter was given by Mr. Turner, the eminent button-manufacturer, in 1841, to one of the Commissioners sent down by the Government. His evidence was summed up as follows: "Knows all his work-people personally; has had constant opportunities of contrasting the conduct of the educated and well-informed with that of the ignorant and ill-informed; finds that the educated workman is unquestionably of much greater value to his employer than the uneducated; would not, knowingly, employ even one of the lowest mechanics, who could not read; finds that exactly in proportion to the extent of a mechanic's information, is he respectful in his behaviour, and generally well-conducted; and, on the other hand, the ignorant are less respectful, and not so well-disposed towards their employers. In the event of any disagreement between the workmen and their employer, the most ignorant are always the first to complain, and are invariably the most suspicious and untractable." This distinct avowal, by an employer of several hundred persons, is very important. A remarkable and laudable attempt is being made by Mr. J. G. Brooks, to establish a 'Ministry to the A Society has been formed, in co-operation with certain Sunday-schools; the purpose of which is, to diffuse among the poorest inhabitants a knowledge of and taste for those purifying influences to which they are too often strangers. A humble house in a poor neighbourhood has been rented at a low rate: it has been cleansed and whitewashed and rendered | decent it has been furnished with a few forms and desks, and a few books. Here, at stated times, the broad principles of Christian truth are set forth to whoever will come and listen to them, in a series of simple discourses. At other times the poor and ragged are invited in to learn something of the decencies and use fulness of society: boys and girls are taught to read and write, and girls are taught to hem and sew. Those who, at their own wretched homes (for there are some wretched homes at Birmingham, notwitstanding the circumstances recently touched upon) witness nothing but ignorance, dirt, and profligacy, do here catch a glimpse of something better, a something which may raise them above the level of brutes. At other times the sick and poverty-stricken are visited at their own homes; and a little pecuniary aid, and that sort of kindness which is often of more value even than money itself, are bestowed. Something of a literary cast, too, is attempted; for a news-room, library, and lecture-room -forming indeed a sort of humble Mechanics' Institution-are maintained. It is termed the People's Instruction Society, and is, in fact, a distinct and selfsupporting institution. Though the payment is so marvellously small as one penny per week from each member, yet by frugality and good management, the Society is enabled to have a news-room, with newspapers and magazines, a circulating library, classes for instruction, and occasional lectures.-Let those who would wish to do much with little means, see what earnestness of purpose can accomplish. This 'Ministry to the Poor' seems to have but small funds at its command; yet it has set on foot a People's Instruction Society, Sunday-schools, a Provident Institution, Dayschools for children, Evening-schools for adults, and District-visitings to those whom small contributions in money, food, or raiment might benefit. In short, it is an attempt to penetrate down to those classes which Mechanics' Institutions and Benefit Societies have never yet reached.-All honour to such an attempt! A few words more about the men of Birmingham before we leave them. Institutions have been established, mainly through the instrumentality of Mr. Sanders and Mr. Francis Clark, designed to embrace all the advantages of Benefit Societies, without the pernicious obligation of holding the meetings at public houses, and with sounder financial principles in regard to the apportionment of benefits. One of these, the Birmingham Provident and Benevolent Institution,' has been established about fifteen years, and is in connection with Church Sunday-schools. It numbers between two and three thousand members. It embraces a Medical Attendance Club; an Annuity, Sick Pay, and Funeral Society; a Saving Club; an Endowment Society; a Benevolent Fund; and a Library. Whatever may be the station in life of a member, of either sex or of any age, some one or other of these benefits may be made available. By paying one penny a week, medicines and medical attendance are ensured during sickness. By making a small weekly payment, a funeral-fund, a sick-fund, a superannuation-fund, or an endowment-fund, may be secured. The other Society, the New Meeting Provident Institution,' is very like the former in character and object, and is, like it, primarily connected with certain Sunday-schools. Both proceed on the principle, that the system of co-operation and mutual assistance may be judiciously carried much further than it usually is; that the every-day red brick houses. It is scarcely an exaggeration to troubles of life are susceptible of much amelioration, if say that the eight miles from Birmingham to Dudley we would only make to-day think for to-morrow. If present one continued string of houses. You hardly sickness be the evil, one penny per week will do what know what to call it; you meet with but few of the man can do to ward it off. If prudent saving be the adjuncts of a complete and regular town. It seems as object, sums so small as one penny are received as if houses had been jotted down here and there-anydeposits. If endowment or superannuation allowance where-and had shuffled themselves into the order of be desired, every imaginable facility is offered, to meet a street. There is one large parish, West Bromwich, the means and wants of all. Two admirable features which was a few years ago mostly agricultural ground, accompany these institutions-they are self-support- belonging in great part to the Earl of Dartmouth. ing, deriving no portion of their funds from charity; Shafts have since then been opened, galleries wrought, and they are conducive to length of life; for an extra- and mines established; and as the crude coal and iron ordinary difference is observable, between the rate of was brought up to the surface, so were smelting and mortality in those who belong to these institutions, and colliery works formed on the surface; and as the works in that of the other inhabitants of Birmingham who spread around, so were houses rapidly built for the move in a similar sphere of life. accommodation of the workmen. The consequence is that West Bromwich has become not merely a parish, but a town; and a most extraordinary town it is. You cannot tell where it begins or where it ends. You may walk through two or three miles of houses along the high road, and be all the while in West Bromwich; you may see a clustering village afar off across some fields-still West Bromwich; you may leave the high road altogether, and strike across to the north-eastagain and again West Bromwich. Several local names are however, gradually being given to different portions of the group; and we shall probably find the name of West Bromwich by-and-bye applied to a more limited area of ground. Most of the houses inhabited by the workmen are two stories in height, and as all of them are made with red bricks, (red through the impregnation of the clay with iron,) the several groups are very conspicuous when contrasted with the green fields seen from a distance. THE NEIGHBOURING IRON AND COAL TOWNS. We must now ask the reader to turn his back upon Birmingham, and take a hasty glance at the district by which it is surrounded, North-westward lies the busy home of iron and coal. Nothing gives a better notion of the region than a ride outside a 'bus' or coach to Wolverhampton or Dudley: especially if we return in the evening, after dusk; we see the daylight scene in one direction, and the extraordinary glare of flames in the other. We can see that the grass of the fields is willing to be green, if the miner will let it alone. We see how towns and villages have grown up where farms and fields were a few years ago. We see that churches, and chapels, and humanizing institutions have settled down in these spots, but generally long after a thick population had been brought together. We see a district in which every town and village, every house, every man and woman and child, every occupation and station, are more or less dependent on, and at the mercy of lumps of coal and lumps of iron.-Very unpoetical, perhaps; but yet there is a good deal of rough stern poetry in these said lumps. The principal manufacturing towns, however, are of older date, and have the usual concomitants of established towns. The whole of them-Wolverhampton, Walsall, Wednesbury, Bilston, Dudley, &c.,-derive their commercial position almost wholly from manufactures in iron and it is curious to see how particular branches of manufacture have settled in particular spots. Bloxwich supports itself almost wholly on awlblades and bridle-bits; small matters perhaps, but grea by the power of numbers. Wednesfield has its locks keys, and traps-most of the unlucky rats, mice, foxes. badgers, and weazels, have to thank Wednesfield for the means by which they have been or are to be captured; Darlaston, its gun-locks, hinges, and stirrups; Walsall, its buckles, spurs, bits, and saddlers' ironmongery generally; Wednesbury, its gas-pipes, coach-springs, axles, screws, hinges, and bolts; Bilston, its japanwork and tin-plating, but principally the actual smelting and making of iron; Sedgeley and the whole of its neighbourhood, nails, nails, nothing but nails; Dudley, its vices, fire-irons, nails, and chains; Willenhall, its locks, keys, latches, curry-combs, bolts and gridirons; Tipton, its heavy iron-work; and lastly Wolverhampton, the giant of the whole, with its more If the district underground is a labyrinth of dark varied products of locks, keys, nails, tips, screws, passages, so is the district above-ground a labyrinth of | hinges, vices, bolts, tin toys, steel toys, tin plate-work, The southern corner of Staffordshire is one huge honey-comb. The ground is perforated and tunnelled and galleried in every direction, insomuch that the surface is continually sinking. Many and many a house requires to be chained round its middle, or propped up by timbers or stones, to prevent it from falling. Many a turnpike-road or path changes its level by sinking. When a new church or other large structure is to be built, great difficulty is sometimes experienced in finding a spot firm enough to bear it. Near Sedgeley there are (or were, a few years ago) a church and parsonage-house made of frame-work, capable of being screwed-up when they wander from the perpendicular! Much of the Staffordshire coal lies very near the surface; so that when the coal is extracted by mining, the superficial crust is scarcely strong enough to bear itself up. and japan-work. A few towns, farther south, such as Oldbury, Smethwick, Rowley-Regis, Halesowen, and Stourbridge, are also connected with the iron manufacture, but not so exclusively as those named above. The state of society has assumed many remarkable features in this district. Workers in iron give the tone to everything; and many of the elements of a wellbalanced society are in some places almost wholly wanting. In the parish of Darlaston, containing about ten thousand inhabitants, it was said, two or three years ago, that there were no resident gentry whatever; all were engaged either in mining or manufacturing. Walsall is a good town: it is situated on a declivity, which greatly aids in the maintenance of drainage. The Walsall folks keep up an odd old custom on St. Clement's Day, of scrambling for apples and nuts thrown among them from the Town Hall. Bilston is perhaps the blackest of the black: it makes more iron, as is said, than the whole of Sweden, and it must needs be a smoky place. There are many streets of this town where gas-lights are almost useless-so bright is the glare at night from fifty furnace-mouths being within a short distance of it. In Wolverhampton, Willenhall, and others of these towns, the work is nearly all executed by small masters, who have a few apprentices each, and work hard themselves. They work for factors, or dealers, who procure their supplies from these men and sell to merchants and shop-keepers. There are whole districts of streets and courts almost without names or numbers, in which neither name nor occupation of the inhabitants is written up. A stranger could neither see nor guess what is going on, nor who are the residents; and if he wished to find a particular person, he might have some difficulty so to do-unless he were well-learned in nick-names, in which these Staffordshire folks love to revel. The nameless streets and the non-numbered houses are occupied by the small masters who work in small shops in the rear of their dwellings; and as they know nothing of any employers except the factors whom they supply, they care nothing about the means of publicity which a London tradesman courts. Willenhall is really an extraordinary place. There are scarcely a dozen professional men in it-all the rest being working manufacturers; and two-thirds of all these workmen are employed in making locks. The men are mostly small masters, employing two or three apprentices each; and masters and boys together work on almost incessantly from morning to night. Mr. Horne, one of the Commissioners sent down a few years ago to examine the state of the manufacturing districts, gave the following picture :-"Sometimes men and boys eat their meals at leisure: the former at intervals, between drinking and smoking, the latter while playing at marbles or going on errands. This is on Monday and Tuesday. In the middle and latter end of the week, men and boys eat their victuals while they work, or bolt their victuals standing. You see a locksmith and his two apprentices with a plate before each of them, heaped up (at the best of times when they can get such things) with potatoes and lumps of something or other, but seldom meat, and a large slice of bread in one hand. Your attention is called off for two minutes, and, on turning round again, you see the man and boys filing away at the vice." This filing is the most endless part of the Willenhall work; for the file is the tool that principally gives form and surface to the parts of a lock. Some men file away all their lives, and, in such cases, they acquire what the workmen call a K knee, from the position into which they throw themselves while at the bench. The apprentices, who are sent with a small premium by the guardians of agricultural parishes, have but a hard life of it. Yet do these Willenhall folks manage to pick up some crumbs of comfort out of their rough and toil-worn life. They have quite an esprit de corps among them: a Willenhall girl will, for the most part, only marry one of her townsmen, and a strangerhusband would be looked upon with something like doubt and suspicion. The love of home shows itself in a remarkable way; for, a few years ago, a factor sent over twenty-five Willenhall men to Brussels, to establish a lock-manufacture there their earnings, which at home had not reached 15s. per week, were £3 a week at Brussels: yet they did not like it; they were out of place and out of sorts, and they came back one by one to Willenhall, there to resume their old habits. Intermediate between the towns of this remarkable district are the hovels and forges of the nailors—a class quite as curious as any we have named. For a century and a half-probably much more-have these nailors speckled the district. William Hutton, who contrives to give an odd quaintness to everything he says, tells us, that when he first approached Birmingham, about a century ago, he was surprised to observe the prodigious number of blacksmiths' shops upon the road. "In some of these shops," he remarks, "I observed one or more females, stripped of their upper garments, and not overcharged with their lower, wielding the hammer with all the grace of the sex. The beauties of their face were rather eclipsed by the smut of the anvil, or, in poetical phrase, the tincture of the forge had taken possession of those lips which might have been taken by a kiss. Struck with the novelty, I enquired Whether the ladies in this country shod horses?' but was answered, with a smile, 'They are nailors.'” It is as true in 1848 as it was in 1748, that these sooty beauties make nails. Their cottages are the same, their forges are the same, the anvils and hammers are the same, their fathers, brothers, husbands are the same scarcely anything in their condition is altered, except that they have to contend against nails made by steam-power. The machine-made nails are mostly what are termed cut nails, while those made with the hammer on an anvil are wrought; and the wroughtnailors are still able to bear up against the competition. They go to a neighbouring town and buy a bundle of iron rods, or wire, of the requisite thickness, and then they work the iron up into nails in the little, dark, dirty forges attached to their dwellings: father. mother, sons, daughters, all frequently working together. The rapidity of their rate of working is quite surprising. Some years ago a man undertook, for a wager, to make thirty-four thousand large nails in a fortnight he completed his task, and a newspaperwriter took the trouble of making a few statistical calculations on the matter. He estimated that, on an average, twenty-five strokes with a hammer were required for each nail-making nearly a million in all; and that, in addition to this, the man had to give from one to three blasts with his bellows for every nail he made, had to supply the fire with fuel, and had to move from the fire-place to where the nails were made, and vice versa, upwards of 42,830 times!-Curious statistics these! The nailors are a rough set; but we are not obliged to suppose them always amenable to the picture drawn by Hutton. THE NEIGHBOURING PLEASURE-SPOTS. When the Birmingham inhabitants wish for a holiday, whither can they go? We have before said that they have no river, no steam-boats, no regattas, no rowing matches, no parks; and the iron and coal towns of the north-west are not exactly the places for a ramble or a pic-nic. Yet is there a goodly sprinkling of pleasant green fields near and around Birmingham, when once we get quit of the streets and factories. A year or two ago, there was an advertisement which looked like a gentle satire on the Birmingham folks, for their donothing course in respect to public parks. At the eastern margin of the town is a place of public amusement called Vauxhall Gardens, concerning which an advertisement ran thus :-" Eligible public walks having long been desired and highly recommended, ་་ feels convinced that those who wish for such a desideratum, will find the above rustic retreat a place where they can promenade for hours, among stately trees, flowers, and shrubs, with beautifully designed fountains of crystal water, playing continuously; the whole presenting a rich display of nature and of art, refreshing and invigorating, &c., &c., &c." till the death of the latter in 1809, the residence of Watt near the spot till his own death in 1819, and the continuance of the establishment by the sons of these two great men-all tended to fix public attention on the Soho Works as the centre of a mighty social power. It was more than ninety years ago that a rolling mill was built on this spot-previously a barren heath; in 1762, the mill was bought by Boulton; in 1764, he built the large structure which still exists; and for eighty-two years the operations of the establishment have continued uninterruptedly. It is not merely the making of steamengines and other large pieces of machinery that has made these works famous; other manufacturing processes have been introduced; or, more properly speaking, other manufactures preceded that of steam-engines by ten years. Buttons, buckles, watch-chains, and trinkets, were the first objects of manufacture; then plated ware; then or molu vases, candelabra, clockcases and watch-stands; then pure silver plate, of the highest order of excellence. All this occurred before the introduction of Watt to the firm. The establishment was then divided into two parts; one for continuing the former manufactures, and the other for making steam-engines and other machines. Their separation has continued down to the present day: but the importance of the place is gone-it has outlived itself. The relations and successors of the two great founders have become wealthy men; and, like the Etruria Works of Wedgwood, and the Cromford Works of Arkwright, the Soho Works no longer possess the rank which pertained to them in the days of the Watt and the Boulton. There is even, we believe, mention made of breaking up part of the establishment, and letting the ground on building leases. We must never, however, forget what the Soho has been its memory must be preserved in pictures as well as in words. The representative of the Boultons resides in a mansion near the works; while the representative of the Watts lives at Aston Hall, (Cut, No. 10,) a fine old mansion, of which we obtain a peep through an avenue of trees, from the Lichfield Road. This manor-house was erected by Sir Thomas Holt, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and is a good example of those comely comfortable hospitable old Elizabethan structures. Charles the First was sheltered there for two nights, previous to the battle of Edge Hill; for which act of loyalty, the Parliamentarians soon afterwards levied contributions on the then Sir Thomas Holt, and cannonaded his mansion: the impress of some of these republican bullets is still visible on the staircase. Not far from Aston Hall is the church, a picturesque old building, which looks well from all sides. Indeed, the neighbourhood around Aston is sprinkled with many pretty spots. There are two villages or hamlets almost absorbed within the vortex of Birmingham, but yet still maintaining the character of country spots, Aston and Handsworth, which are worth a visit for more reasons than one. They are agreeable places in themselves, and they are associated with the names of the departed great. The spirit of James Watt hovers about this neighbourhood. In the immediate vicinity of Handsworth, at the northern margin of Birmingham, stand the celebrated Soho Works (Cuts, Nos. 7 and 8), which will be associated with the great engineer long after every brick has been razed to the ground. From the year 1774, when It is well worth a walk, too, to the nice old country Watt entered into partnership with Matthew Boulton, church at Handsworth. The church and the village till 1800, when the partnership ended, the works at seem to have run away from each other; for while the Soho were the great scene of operation, whence all one is out in the open fields, thoroughly countryfied in Europe was supplied with those steam-engines which so all its associations, the other is half a mile off, on the excited the wonder of all; and even after Watt's seces- busy Wolverhampton Road! The church is many sion from the firm, his enduring friendship with Boulton | centuries old, and contains several curious monuments |