are few persons who have not been amused
by those small and admirably modelled figures
which have of late appeared in our toy-shop
windows, and in which, as they are principally
used in caricaturing English tourists abroad, the
"cordial understanding" (of each other's worst
qualities) which exists between the two nations
comes out in such tremendous force.

There are few persons, we have said, who are
not familiar with those little figures which first
dawned upon the London horizon through the
window-panes of Mr. Cremer's toy-shop in
Bond-street; but have they been fully understood
and appreciated? Has the full humour
of the caricature and the terrific venom of the
satire contained in it been altogether entered
into? The tourist with the eye-glass in his eye,
with the little cane, with the inquisitive nose; the
Oxford clergyman in compromised clerical
undress, and with a lady on each arm doing
continental sights, with a determination that is
almost venomous—these little studies are all as
true and humorous as the figure of the fat man
with bags of money under each arm which are
running over with fulness, as he stares at the
particular lion whose roar he is listening to.

But it is not with these little figures, good as
they are, that we are at present to occupy
ourselves: they have had their day—"a day" does
not last long in this age—and are forgotten.
They are merely mentioned here because they
seem in some measure to belong to a certain
school of humour, some more exalted and
polished developments of which we are about,
with the reader's permission, to glance at.

The range of vision which such a glance
requires, it should be mentioned to start with, is
rather a powerful one, and no near-sighted
person must hope to follow us. It is necessary for
the reader—whom we will suppose to be living
at the west-end of London—to glance first of
all through all the masses of brick and mortar
that intervene between him and the great
railway station at London-bridge. This done, he
must put his glance into a train starting for
Dover, and when it has reached that town in
safety, must transfer it to the steamer starting
for Calais. His glance having got so far as
this, and being invigorated by the sea air, will
find little difficulty in getting over the flat bit of
country between the last-named town and the
French metropolis, and will make comparatively
light of such a trifling achievement as piercing
its way through the streets which lie between
the northern suburb of Paris and the great
Boulevard, and there concentrating all its force
on the shop-front of Monsieur Verreaux, No. 6,
Boulevard Montmartre.

The glance which has travelled thus far will
be well repaid for so noble an exertion, the
objects contained in the window of the shop just
indicated being of so humorous a character as
to expand the features of even those grave
Frenchmen who constantly surround the spot,
with something dimly approaching the confines
of a smile.

The window of M. Verreaux's shop is
completely filled with a series of—what shall I
call them?—tableaux, the performers in which
seem to have been arrested when the scene in
which they were engaged was at its very acme
and crisis, and struck motionless, as by an
enchanter's hand, when the humour of the farce
was at its height.

The comedians thus suddenly arrested in the
middle of their performance are of a peculiar
build and stature, and their proprietor may be
congratulated at once on the extraordinary
native comicality of their persons, which is so
complete that anything in the shape of a "get
up" is altogether superfluous. These
performers are all—both ladies and gentlemen
—singularly alike. They have all got very huge
and bloated bodies, excessively thin arms and
legs, and are in every instance altogether destitute
of the slightest pretensions to a throat.
The fact is—for why should the reader be kept
any longer in suspense?—that M. Verreaux's
company of comedians consists of nothing more
nor less than half a hundred or so of frogs!

These frogs, stuffed and preserved with the
most exquisite care, are arranged into groups,
sometimes of two or three together, sometimes
of eighteen or twenty, and are engaged in all
sorts of human occupations, chiefly, however,
but not entirely, in those through which
mankind lays itself the most open to ridicule or
censure. The grouping and placing of these
small animals is beyond all praise, and is so
marvellously free and natural, that it never
suggests that the frogs have been stuffed first and
arranged afterwards, but always that the frogs
have been really engaged in the scenes in which
they are here performing, and have been arrested
in these different positions at M. Verreaux's
word of command.

The principal of the compositions is a scene
from the old fable of the Frogs and the Stork.
A stuffed stork, of a singularly hunchy and
conceited appearance, is standing in the middle of
the swamp in which a host of frogs habitually
reside. The frogs are paying their court to
their newly-elected king, and are vying with
each other in rapturous feats of fawning
sycophancy. If these frogs were toads they could
not toady better than they do. There is not
one among them who stands upright in the
presence of their potentate, with the exception of
a wretch who has flung his head back in order the
better to bellow forth the fatuous praises which
he is lavishing on his royal master. The rest of
the toadies are all stooping, and that with a
peculiar high-shouldered bend, which the artist
who placed the figures must surely have studied
in the very best society. That artist, whoever
he is, is a satirist of no mean ability, or he
would never have caught this peculiar reverent
stoop, which always weighs down the neck of
the genuine parasite when in the presence of
the rich and powerful, and in which the
sycophant proclaims himself quite as much as in a
certain rubbing and rinsing in and out of the
hands, as in the act of washing, which is also
much in vogue among such personages. But