another's bar-parlours. So, yet wondering
and undecided, I passed through Highgate
Archway—  where no man offered to swear me
—and came to the turnpike, where I saw a
lamentable illustration of the hardness of the
times, in the turnpike-man being obliged to
take toll in kind; letting a coster-monger,
and a donkey-cart through for vegetables;
and a small boy, going Islington-wards, for an
almost bladeless knife.

Where is Cranbourn Alley?  where that
delightful maze of dirty, narrow, little
thoroughfares, leading from Leicester Square
to St. Martin's Lane? There was an alley of
bonnet shops—behind whose dusty windows
faded Tuscans and Leghorns were visible,
and at the doors of which stood women,
slatternly in appearance, but desperate and
accomplished touters. Man, woman, or child,
it was all the same to them; if they had
made up their minds that you were to
buy a bonnet, buy one you were obliged
to do, unless gifted with rare powers for
withstanding passionate persuasion and awful
menace. Piteous stories were told of feeble-
minded old gentlemen emerging from the
"courts," half-fainting, laden with bonnet-boxes,
and minus their cash, watches and
jewellery, which they had left behind them, in
part payment for merchandise which they
had bought, or had been compelled to buy.
The Lowther Arcade was not built in those
days; and, in Cranbourn Alley, there were
toy-shops, and cheap jewellery warehouses,
and magazines for gimcracks of every
description. Moreover, in Craubourn Alley was
there not Hamlet's not Hamlet the Dane,
but Hamlet, the silversmith! How many
times have I stood, wondering, by those dirty
windows, when I ought to have been wending
my way to Mr. Wackerbarth's seminary for
young gentlemen! Peering into the dim
obscurity, dimly making out stores of gigantic
silver dish-covers, hecatombs of silver spoons
and forks—Pelions upon Ossas of race-cups
and church services, — Hamlet was, to me,
a synonyme with boundless wealth,
inexhaustible credit, the payment of Consols — the
grandeur of commercial Britain, in fact.
Hamlet, Cranbourn Alley, and the Constitution!
Yet Cranbourn Alley and Hamlet are
both things departed.

In the shops in this neighbourhood they
sold things which have long since floated
down the sewer of Lethe into the river of
Limbo. What has become of the tinder-box?
—the box we never could find when we
wanted it; the tinder that wouldn't light;
the flint and steel that wouldn't agree to
strike a light till we had exhausted our
patience, and chipped numerous small pieces
of skin and flesh from our fingers?
Yet Bacon wrote his "Novum Organum," and
Blackstone his "Commentaries," by
tinder-box-lighted lamps: and Guy Faux was very
nearly blowing up the Legislature with a
tinder-box-iighted train. The tinder-box is
gone now; and, in its place, we have sinister-
looking splints, made from chopped-up coffins;
which, being rubbed on sand-paper, send forth
a diabolical glare, and a suffocating smoke.
But they do not fail, like the flint and steel,
and light with magical rapidity; so, as everybody
uses them, I am obliged to do so too.

And, while I speak of lights and smoke,
another thing departed comes before me.
There is no such a thing as a pipe of tobacco
now-a-days, sir. I see English gentlemen go
about smoking black abominations like Irish
apple-women. I hear of Milo's, Burns' cutty
pipes, Narghiles, Chiboucks, meerschaums,
hookahs, water pipes, straw pipes, and a host of
other inventions for emitting the fumes of
tobacco. But where, sir, is the old original alderman
pipe, the churchwarden's pipe, the
unadulterated " yard of clay?" A man was wont
to moisten the stem carefully with beer ere he
put it to his lips; when once it was alight, it
kept alight; a man could sit behind that pipe
but can a man sit behind the ridiculous
figments they call pipes now? The yard of
clay is departed. A dim shadow of it lingers
sometimes in the parlours of old city taverns;
I met with it once in the Bull Ring at Birmingham.
I have heard of it in Chester; but in
its entirety, as a popular, acknowledged pipe,
it must be numbered with the things that
were.

Where are the franks? I do not allude
to the warlike race of Northmen, who, under
the sway of Pharamond, first gave France its
name; neither do I mean those individuals
who, rejoicing in the appellation of Francis,
are willing to accept the diminutive of Frank.
I mean those folded sheets of letter-paper,
which, being endorsed with the signature of
a peer, or of a Member of Parliament, went
thenceforward post-free. There were regular
frank-hunters—men who could nose a Member
who had not yet given all his franks away,
with a scent as keen as ever Cuban bloodhound
had for negro flesh. He would give
chase in the lobby; run down the doomed
legislator within the very shadow of the
Sergeant-at-Arms' bag-wig; and, after a brief
contest, unfrank him on the spot. They were
something to look at, and something worth
having, those franks, when the postage to
Edinburgh was thirteen-pence. But the
franks are gone—gone with the procession of
the mail-coaches on the first of May; they
have fallen before little effigies of the
sovereign, printed in red, and gummed at the
back. English Members of Parliament have
no franks now; and the twenty-five (though
of a metallic nature) allowed, till very lately,
to the Members of the French Legislature,
have even been abolished.

I never think of franks without a regretful
remembrance of another thing departed—a
man who, in old times, stood on the steps of
the Post-office in St. Martin's le Grand, with
a sheet of cartridge-paper, and whom I knew
by the appellation of "it forms." " It forms,"