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 LONDON 591 social pleasure, and where the rush from the club houses to parliament, to galleries of art, to the drives in the parks and gardens, and to the opera, balls, and receptions, is incessant. Autumn and winter find the West End com- paratively deserted, but with the pleasant walks along the new embankments and increasing improvements, and the animation of the popu- lar thoroughfares and the business regions, the metropolis is at all times attractive, and full of boundless resources and of grandeur, although the atmosphere is always lurid with the smoke of coal, and is often foggy and damp. The following are the ten parliamentary boroughs of the metropolis: City of London (pop. in 1871, 74,732), Westminster (246,413), Chel- sea (258,011), Marylebone (477,555), Hackney (362,427), Finsbury (443,316), Tower Hamlets (391,568), Lambeth (379,112), Southwark (207,- 335), and Greenwich (167,632). Their popula- tion is only about 3,000,000, the remainder be- longing to non-metropolitan electoral districts. The City, though containing a much smaller number of residents than any of the other London and its Environs. boroughs, and which further declined between 1861 and 1871 to the extent of 40,000, is on account of its commercial and financial im- portance represented by four members of par- liament, and the other nine boroughs by two each. The city of London proper, the origi- nal nucleus of the metropolis, and called dis- tinctively "the City," has for its base the N. bank of the Thames, with its W. line extend- ing to Middle Temple lane, where, crossing Fleet street at Temple Bar and Holborn at Southampton buildings, it skirts Smithfield, 505 VOL. x. 38 Barbican, and Finsbury circus, on the north ; traversing the end of Bishopsgate street With- out, and proceeding southward down Petticoat lane across the end of Aldgate street and along the Minories, it finally reaches the Thames at the tower of London. The City comprises 110 parishes, four of which are without the walls. Westminster is bounded K, from Tot- tenham Court road to its suburban limit at Kensington gardens, by Oxford street ; while on its extreme W. side, crossing the centre of the Serpentine in Hyde park, it reaches the