number of these candidates for cast clothing is
not so wonderful when we remember that the
poor could get, at that time, nothing else to
wear. Amongst the great benefits conferred by
machinery and free trade on the present generation,
is cheap new clothing, and the extinction
of a race of disreputable hawkers.

We start for the City. What a glory of shops,
on both sides of the way! A street full of
scaffolding—half-built Regent-street; Charing-
cross; the statue of a man on horseback close
to the gates of the King's stables; Temple Bar;
St. Paul's. At length St. Martin's-le-Grand—
"a cheat," I thought; for, being then a squalid-
looking lane, it was the reverse of grand, no
removal of the Post-office from the ample
premises in Lombard-street being then dreamt of.
Finally, the yard of the Bull and Mouth Inn,
up a narrow turning. Here my father had lived
for three days, expecting us every minute,
and was in the coffee-room with groups of other
persons waiting for friends from all parts of the
country, discussing chances and probabilities of
their having perished in the snow, like the mail
guard. No post letters could precede us, and
the joy of that meeting, now nearly half a century
old, swells my heart, even as I write these words.

The quadrangular and galleried inn-yard
I believe to have been nearly in the same
state as the inn-yards of Chaucer were, and
exactly like the inn-yard painted by Hogarth.
Now, it would be difficult to find such a
place in all England. The second-hand family
carriage, driven by a coarse, dogged
metropolitan savage staggering under the weight
of a towering flight of capes rising from knee
to shoulder, is also extinct; so is Fleet Market,
straggling in the middle of what is now
Farringdon-street, the end of which we passed on
our way to our suburban new home; so is
Holborn Bridge; so is St. Chad's Well, in Gray's
Inn-road, even then resorted to medicinally; so
is the mountain of cinders which rose higher
than Primrose Hill, at Battle Bridge (where
Queen Boadicea was so unhandsomely beaten
by Seutonius), and which schoolboy tradition
sold to the Emperor of Russia for a prodigious
sum of money, when the neighbourhood was
condemned to be covered with houses, and
christened King's Cross. The Small-Pox and
Fever Hospitals, with the expanse of park-like
lawn, screened in by rows of noble elms, are now
extinguished by the Great Northern Railway
terminus. "Rhodes's Fields," affording a clear
view from Old St. Pancras Church straight
across the site of Sir Edmonbury Godfrey's
murder to Mornington Crescent, nearly half a
mile off, are no longer grass, but groan under
billions of bricks dug out of their own bowels.
These fields then were speckled from foreground
to distance by Mr. Rhodes's nine hundred and
ninety-nine cows; which number, according to
milk-walk gossip, Rhodes had passed a long and
anxious life of cow-keeping in endeavouring to
increase to one thousand. But if he bought a
thousandth cow, one of the old stock died; if
two new cows, two old ones died; and so on in
regular numerical order. On a pond, long since
filled up by the Metropolitan Model Lodging-
Houses in Old St. Pancras-road, I, a South
Devon boy, first saw skating, at the close of the
memorable journey with my parents to our
destination. Here we were deposited in a frozen
state. I well remember enjoying a hot dispute
that ensued with the caped savage respecting the
amount of hackney-coach fare; during which he
imprecated shockingly about our having brought
him "off the stones."

When Somer's Town had an aristocracy, its
court centre was "The Polygon," in the middle
of Clarendon-square. There I was put to school.
This Alma Mater of mine was a genteel old lady,
professing in her prospectuses the strictest
exclusion of the sons of tradesmen. I do not
defend her; but I am bound to remark that
the present generation can have no idea of the
claims of that now degraded quarter to
insist upon having its high tone kept up. In
and around it, Art and Literature nestled in
cozy coteries, with half-pay officers (including
one Peninsular colonel), City merchants, and
stockbrokers. Let me tell you, haughty
Belgravia, that when you were a swamp under the
name of Chelsea Five Fields, and your highest
boast was your Bun-House, the most eminent
historical engravers of that day dated their
works, "as the act directs," from Somer's
Town. I think a royal academician, I know
an A.R.A., and a world-famed actor, lived in
the Polygon. I was once asked in "to play
with" a little cadet of the house of a popular
novelist, who flourished also in Kingsgate-
street, Holborn, as the deputy county court
judge. Our games were interrupted in the
hall—which was also the play-room—by the
entrance of Theodore Hook (a former inhabitant
of Clarendon-square), Mr. Tommy Hill,
and Haydon the painter, who had all dropped
in to dinner. And did not Peter Pindar's
funeral start, a little before that time, from the
cottage of a nursery-garden close by, whither he
had moved from Tavistock-row, Covent Garden,
and whence his latest party squib was dated?
But politics found the loudest exponent in an
ally of Sir Francis Burdett, whose blackest
treasons, whether uttered at local meetings, or
at the Crown and Anchor in the Strand, are
now the guiding principles of our present rulers.
He lived in a side-street; for he never would
have been allowed to exhibit his professional
brass-plate nearer to our centre of exclusiveness;
where politics of the politer sort—Toryism
—most prevailed. Public services, especially
when volunteered, are never well requited.
This gentleman's practice was eventually reduced
to the sale of ginger-beer powders (then a
genteel sort of novelty), in the parlour of a
semi-detached cottage, fitted up as like to an
apothecary's shop as two coloured bottles and a
few papers of powders in the window, could
make it. The door being always barred
(perhaps against emissaries from the Sheriff of
Middlesex, or red-vested myrmidons from the Home
Office), customers had to ring a bell; whereupon