on beautiful horses trapped in gold; then, great
ladies in chariots covered with cloth of gold;
more ladies on horseback; chariots in white,
containing ladies in crimson velvet; seven ladies
in crimson velvet following on horseback; a
chariot in red containing ladies, followed by
thirty ladies on horseback dressed in silk and
velvet; the cavalcade closing with a troop of
the Guards richly accoutred.

The procession was stopped at the corner of
Gracechurch-street, for the entertainment of the
queen with a pageant of Mount Parnassus, with
a fountain of Helicon in white marble, running
Rhenish wine till night, and Apollo and the
Muses there to greet the bride. In Leadenhall,
there was another stately pageant of a hill of red
and white roses, with performance by a white
falcon, and angel and St. Anne with her progeny,
then waiting to wish the queen a family as
numerous as her own. The graces were
stationed in Cornhill, by a fountain of Grace playing
wine, at which a poet sat. The great conduit
in Cheapside, opposite Mercers' Hall, was
curiously decorated, and played divers sorts of
wine for the refreshment of the populace. The
standard at the end of Wood-street was
embellished with royal portraitures, flags, trophies,
&c., and here was a fine concert of vocal and
instrumental music. At the upper end of Fleet-
street, was the recorder, who made his address
of congratulation musical, by presenting her
majesty at its close with a thousand marks in
a gold purse; after which there was at the same
place a pageant of the gods, who presented the
queen with a golden ball, trebly divided, to
signify the gifts of wisdom, wealth, and happiness.
At St. Paul's Gate, there was another
pageant. Next, her majesty was stopped to
hear the congratulatory verses of the scholars of
St. Paul's School, and so, passing on to Ludgate,
which was finely decorated, was there
entertained with songs by men and boys placed on the
leads over the gate. In Fleet-street, the
conduit opposite Shoe-lane ran wine, and there was
a handsome tower built over it, from the top of
which the cardinal virtues promised never to
desert her majesty. Inside this tower, there was
music, and at Temple-bar there was another
concert.

A part of the pageant at the coronation of
Edward the Sixth, consisted in the sliding of a
Spaniard on his breast, head first, with feet and
arms extended, down a rope stretched from the
battlements of St. Paul's steeple to the Dean's
Gate in the churchyard.

But there was nothing in all that show to be
compared for majesty with the great spectacle
in our streets on the tenth of March this year.
The spectacle was that of a populace representing
worthily a people now firmly united class
with class. The most wretched, knowing himself
to be not contemned, but to be understood and
worked for by the wealthiest and wisest of the
land, bore with his own grief that day, and
welcomed a young princess to the palace in
which many an anxious earnest thought has been
taken for the comfort of the poor man's home.

Before we speak more fully of the nature of
this change, let us compare what we have all
seen or heard of the crowd in the streets last
month with some record of a procession-seeing
crowd in the streets, as they used to be. Ned
Ward records in the London Spy his experience
in the crowd at a Lord Mayor's Show in
the days of William and Mary. No smooth
pavement then distinguished, in the narrow
filthy ill-lighted streets, the footways from the
carriage-road. The homes of the poor were
wretched unconsidered dens. Worse than all,
fashionable society had very recently been
dragged through the filth of the court of
Charles the Second. Sense of right was strong
in the people, but it had gone out of fashion.
The court had set the fashion. A young wit
and poet had accounted it a merry freak to
exhibit himself naked in a balcony in Bow-street;
many a man—Dryden for one—had been waylaid
and cudgelled, to gratify the humours of great
lords. The corruption of the court infected everywhere
the surface of society, and the forward and
weak wits of St. Giles's became as filthy as those
of St. James's in their conversation and their jests.
The better manners of the educated classes might
come to the front after the Revolution, but
the corruption was not easy of cure; and after
Defoe, and Steele, and Addison had done their
work, there were still the unwholesome courts
of the first Georges to keep open the old sore.
Ward sketches the English mob when at its
worst. If we go further back, we may,
perhaps, find it rougher and more terrible—in some
respects more stupid—but its coarseness was
rather blunt natural speech than the sign of a
diseased appetite. The love of filth for its own
sake, came in at the Restoration, and was the
mark set by that merry gentleman Charles the
Second on this country. It is a London mob
polluted by long contact with such a sovereign,
and not the natural average mob of English
history, that we here see disporting itself between
the pageants of a Lord Mayor's Show.

"When," says the Spy, "I came to the end
of Blowbladder-street, I saw such a crowd
before my eyes that I could scarce forbear thinking
the very stones of the street, by the harmony of
their drums and trumpets, were metamorphosed
into men, women, and children; the balconies
were hung with old tapestry and Turkey-work
tablecloths, for the cleanly leaning of the ladies,
with whom they were chiefly filled, which the
mob had soon pelted into so dirty a condition
with their kennel ammunition, that some of
them looked as nasty as the cover-cloth of a led
horse that had travelled from St. Margate's to
London in the midst of winter; the ladies at
every volley quitting their post and retreating
into dining-rooms, some fretting at their daub'd
scarfs. . . . Whilst my friend and I were thus
staring at the spectators much more than the
show, the pageants were advanced within our
view, upon which such a tide of mob overflowed
the place we stood in that the children cried out
for room, the women for breath, and every man,
whether citizen or foreigner, strove very hard