an old woman appeared cautiously, who, if you
did not require change, would sometimes sell
you a packet. The last I saw of the gaunt orator
was, after my school-days, at a debating club
held at the house, in Clerkenwell, of a brother
radical, who in time became a member of parliament.
He held forth with wonderful force
and volubility as a paid speaker. I am afraid
that my tall, lean, polite, much-enduring patriot
died in great indigence.

During my early school-days there was a
large influx of foreign aristocracy. Ferdinand
the Seventh of Spain, who filled up all the
leisure he could spare from embroidering
petticoats for the Virgin by hanging and torturing
his nobility, drove a host of the best families
from their homes. Many of these sought
asylums in Somer's Town, and some of the
foremost men in the Carlist-Christinos war,
which followed Ferdinand's death, were my
playfellows. Modern history was represented
by two old Scotch gentlemen dressed in green
from top to toe, silver-buckled shoes and hat
excepted. Known as the last of the Stuarts, they
were respected by the higher circles of Somer's
Town as the rightful kings of Great Britain.
They were dignified old men; never heard
to speak in the street even to one another;
never seen apart until one died. A really
historical figure was the grandfather of one of
my schoolfellows—the Ordinary of Newgate,
who spoke, on the scaffold, the last words ever
heard by Dr. Dodd. He was a white-haired
pleasant old gentleman, very fond of children,
ale, and hunting-songs; but I fear that, like
the young lady in Gay's letters, ale was his
passion. He had amassed quite a library of
hunting-songs, which were so carefully arranged
on partitioned and labelled shelves, that his
study looked like a stationer's shop. This
house in "the square" was a boy's paradise.
My friend's mother, the handsome, good-natured
widow of the original Leander in Dibdin's opera
of the Padlock, stuffed us with tea and cake, let
us play at mail-coaches with her drawing-room
chairs, and dismissed us when tired to the study,
to listen to capital stories of adventure from
the dear old doctor. Nothing delighted our
host and hostess so much as making young
people happy.

At that day the City was such an immense
way off, that it could only be reached in a
becoming manner by the aid of two stage-coaches.
These plied morning and evening; places to be
taken beforehand, for fear of disappointment:
one shilling outside, eighteenpence inside; time
of transit one hour, reduced, by means of
violent opposition, to ninepence and a shilling, and
three-quarters of an hour. Soon, however, the
death of horses and general bankruptcy of
proprietor destroyed the opposition. Why is it
that I can now think of the same distance as a
short walk, and not as about as far as to St.
Albans? Is it because I could now perform
the same trip in an omnibus in a third of the
time and for a sixth of the expense? Not to
mention the Underground Railroad?

During the heat of the contest, the rival
drivers set the town in an uproar twice daily
by galloping furiously, blowing bugles, and calling
each other, in deafening tones, anything but
gentlemen. They had their partisans, who
swelled the hubbub. I was one of them. Our
school supported Brown with loud huzzas every
time he passed. We groaned at York; telling
him, out of a play some of our boys had lately
been taken to see, that "he wasn't wanted."
But he was. It was Brown who went to the wall.
Triumphant York had the courage to appear
amongst his customers at an anniversary dinner
of the battle of Waterloo, presided over by the
Peninsular officer, at our fashionable hotel,
known specially as The Coffee House. The
far-famed actor being present (I think, though,
that he had then moved to a street off Russell-
square), The Stage was toasted. The coach
proprietor instantly got up and returned thanks.
"Very true, his was the stage; he was not
a going to crow now that Brown was run off the
road; but this he would say, &c." The proper
respondent interrupted him with such a taste
of his quality from his immortal part of Crack
in the Turnpike Gate, that the whole company
was convulsed with laughter. This story I heard
from the landlord's son, who had been admitted
into our academy because his father's signboard
displayed the words "importer and bonder;"
which meant that he was not a tradesman, as
words and meanings were taught at our school.

Seymour-street, now the main feeder of the
North Western Railway, was, with the site
of the terminus, a huge brick-field. A solitary
house, the Coronation "Wine Vaults," was stuck
up in the middle of it, close to the Fleet ditch.
St. Pancras New Church—unfinished, hoarded
in, and much abused for being of a heathenish
order of architecture—faced a number of nursery
gardens extending from the New-road to the
half of Tavistock-square then built. Beside
the church, where part of Upper Woburn-
place now stands, dazzling beds of tulips of all
colours were displayed in summer; the tulip
mania not having quite died off even then.
Long after the church was opened I saw the
King's stag-hounds stopped there, at the Duke
of Bedford's gate, and the stag taken.

The Field of Forty Steps was still a field;
but close to it, where the University College now
stands, the centre of an abandoned square had
been railed off. The unsavoury condition of this
broken ground, from puddles, festering refuse,
dead domestic animals, and other rubbish,
supplied the Tories with an elegant nickname
for the new seat of learning—Stinkomolee.

The walk to the Strand, which, after leaving
school, I had to take every day, although over
the same ground, led through neighbourhoods
now entirely extinguished. The St. Giles's of
Dusty Bob and Tom and Jerry, has since
been demolished by New Oxford-street. The
thoroughfare in that district, between east and
west London, was confined to the upper part of
High Holborn, Broad-street—belying its name,
close to Monmouth-street, where it was narrowed