by Middle-row, a second-hand shoe-mart, reeking
with the stench of stale leather and bad blacking
—St. Giles's Church and High-street, now left
high and dry by the traffic diverted into the new
street. Southward, Endell-street has been driven
between a maze of filth, misery, and vice,
through which it was difficult to pick one's way,
to Long Acre. No continuation of Bow-street,
Covent Garden, led to the Strand; for one face
of the corner house in which these lines are
written formed part of an unbroken row of
houses joined to Tavistock-street. The burning
down of the old Lyceum Theatre, in 1830,
altered all that. Some houses immediately
opposite to its stage door in Exeter-street, at the
back of Tavistock-street, having previously
tumbled down of their own decay, the much-
needed opening was made by the two catastrophes
ready to hand, and a clear passage secured
between the end of Bow-street and Waterloo
Bridge. The front entrance of the theatre faced
the Strand a little east of the present pit door,
D'Oyley's warehouse, the Courier newspaper
office, and one or two shops, had stopped that way
northward for a century.

You, modern playgoers, who cannot remember
Wilkinson, or his Geoffrey Muffincap; or T. P.
Cooke as the Monster in Frankenstein; or the
first night of Der Freyschutz; or Peake's farce of
Before Breakfast; or Wrench and Miss Kelly in
Gretna Green; or the Serjeant's Wife, performed
by that lady, with Keeley, Miss Goward (now,
and let us not hint for how many years past, Mrs.
Keeley), the terrible Chapman, and the awful
0. Smith; or Mr. Perkins, who played romantic
melodrama ill spectacles; or Braham in the splendid
opera of Tarrare, with "The Bay of Biscay
0," or "Let us haste to Kelvin Grove," in pantaloons
and kid gloves between the acts; or Mr.
Wood and Miss Paton in the Bottle Imp; or
Miss Cubitt, the stock page or boy-part lady,
and her duet double Miss Povey—to you, these
most delightful of all theatrical reminiscences—
of the Lyceum in its best time—are denied. You
never sat a whole evening roaring till your sides
ached and your eyes brimmed over at the Mail
Coach Adventures, or the Memorandum Book,
or the Trip to America of Charles Mathews
the Elder. You were never taken there by a
serious relative in Lent, to behold Mr. Bartley,
the stock Falstaff of another theatre, dressed all
in black like a clergyman, and to hear him
preach a solemn sermon about the stars, pointing
them out on his grim orrery with a white
wand. These many joys, this one depressing
souvenir, can only belong to you as history.

Neither can you remember the Courier, that
High Tory, then Low Radical, then Moderate
Conservative, then quite extinct, evening
newspaper, published, while it lived, a door or two east
of the fondly-remembered entrance (boarded like
its own stage) of the Lyceum Theatre. It was
the Courier that commenced the plan of keeping
up public curiosity by successive editions, and
exciting it to frenzy, by the aid of loud-voiced
news-runners with deafening post-horns. The
sounds of Sec'nd Edishon! Couriar! Couriar!
mixed with splitting blasts of horn, scarcely left
one end of a quiet street, before, enter at the
other end, more fanfare announcing Third
Edishon! Couriar! Couriar! Death of an
Illustrious Personage! Couriar! Couriar! That dying
out to a short lull, another voice, with a louder
horn, shouts all along the pavement, Fourth
Edishon! Couriar! Couriar! Frightful Butchery
in Piccadilly! Couriar! Couriar! Couriar! and
so on for hours, night after night. Our
neighbourhood was favoured, at, and long after, the
Queen Caroline excitement, with the evening
visits of a famous Courier emissary known as
Copper-throat. We heard him a mile off: first
down the chimney like ventriloquism; then
gradually nearer and nearer, till, in a quarter of
an hour or so, the air outside was ablaze—our
street door nearly split open—with Couriar!
Couriar! Fifth Edishon! Shocking Murder in
Harfordshire! Couriar! Couriar! Couriar!

Any scrap of news served to .make an edition.
A friend of my father recollected that when
Bellingham shot Mr. Perceval, the Courier
published edition after edition from the moment of
the murderer's arrest to that of his execution.
The prisoner's demeanour in Newgate was
editioned from hour to hour, the last piece of
important news one evening standing thus:

FOURTH EDITION.
Courier Office, 10 min. past 6.

The villain refuses to be shaved!

These late editions were put into type in an
upper story by a glare of gas that served as a
Pharos for benighted travellers crossing Waterloo
Bridge. The toll being heavy, that edifice
was so select a thoroughfare, that a humorist of
the day defined it as a "great granite accommodation
to the Coburg Theatre" (now loyally
named after the Queen), the only transpontine
public building to which it led, except Bedlam.
It was a cheap solitude let out at a penny per
passenger. People really having business on
the other side of the water, were intercepted by
firemen-watermen in flaring red coats and
badges as big as dinner-plates, and were rowed
across the river at half price.

An optical delusion to which I was subject for
years, after the whole scene at the end of Wellington-
street was changed, whenever I was facing
homeward over Waterloo Bridge on a winter
evening, reconstructed it completely. The upper
parish lamps of the new and steep street across the
Strand, gleaming in the same point of space as the
compositors' lights used to occupy in the top
floor of the Courier Office, realised the latter to
my mind's eye. The side of the new portico of the
Lyceum Theatre faced about through the murky
air and posed itself in the Strand in its habit as
it was, next to the still-existing trunk-shop.
This delusion was seldom dispelled till I had
actually reached the Strand, where Exeter
Change no longer stood, and where my ears
were disappointed of the old roaring from Mr.
Crosse's Menagerie. The top of the trunk-
shop, now makes night pleasant by the aid of an
illuminated clock. The twelve letters arranged
round its face form a memento of E·X·E·T·E·R
C·H·A·N·G·E, and tell passers-by from the