he was continually saying, "now it forms a
jockey-cap, now a church-door, a fan, a mat,
the paddle-boxes of a steamer, a cocked hat;"
and, as he spoke, he twisted the paper into
something bearing a resemblance to the articles
he named. He is gone; so is the sheet of foolscap
we used to twist into the semblance of
cocked hats, silkworm-boxes, and boats, when
boys at school. The very secret of the art is
lost in these degenerate days, I verily believe,
like that of making Venetian bezoar, or
staining glass for windows.

Whole hosts of street arts and street artists
are among the things departed.   Where is the
dancing bear, with his piteous brown muzzle
and uncouth gyrations? Where is the camel?
Where the tight-rope dancers?  the performers
on stilts?  Where are these gone?  Say not
that the New Police Act has abolished them;
for though that sweeping piece of legislation
has silenced the dustman's bell, and bade the
muffin boy cry muffins no more, we have still
the organ-grinders with, or without, monkeys,
the Highland bag-pipes, and the acrobats.
The fantoccinis are almost extinct; and I
suppose Punch will go next. It is all very
well, and right, and proper, of course. Dancing
bears, and camels, monkeys, and fantoccinis,
are all highly immoral, no doubt; but I should
just like to see what the British Constitution
would be without Punch and Judy.

The small-coal man is gone; the saloop
stall; the blind man and his dog are
becoming rarœ aves; the grizzled Turk with a
dirty turban, and a box of rhubarb before
him, is scarcely ever to be met with. In his
stead we have a liver-coloured Lascar, shivering
in white cotton robes, selling tracts of the
Inflammatory order of Piety, and occasionally
offering them in exchange for gin.  Age,
caprice, the encouragement of new favourites,
are driving these old-established ornaments
of the streets away.

I do not quarrel so much with the
ever-changing fashions in dress. I can give up
without a sigh the leg-of-mutton sleeves, those
dreadful pear-shaped monsters of silk and
muslin, they wore about the year '30. I will
not clamour for the rviival of the bishop's
sleeves—unwieldly articles that were always
either getting squashed flat as a pancake in a
crowd, or dipping into the gravy at dinner.
I will resign the monstrous Leghorn hats—
the short-waisted pelisses, the Cossack trousers,
and flaming stocks in which we arrayed
ourselves, when George the Fourth was king;
but let me drop one tear, heave one sigh, to
the memories of pig-tails and Hessian boots.

Both are things departed. One solitary
pig-tail, I believe, yet feebly flourishes in some
remote corner of the agricultural districts of
England. t comes up to town during the
season; and I have seen it in New Burlington
Street.  The Hessians, though gone from the
lower extremities of a nation, yet find abiding
place on the calves of the Stranger in Mr.
Kotzebue's play of that name, and over the
portals of some bootmakers of the old school.
The Hessians of our youth are gone. The
mirror-polished, gracefully outlined, silken
tasselled Hessians exist no more — those famous
boots, the soles of which Mr. Brummell caused
to be blacked, and in the refulgent lustre
of which the gentleman of fashion
immortalised by Mr. Warren was wont to shave
himself.

Of the buildings, the monuments, the streets,
which are gone, I will not complain. I can
spare that howling desert in the area of
Leicester Fields, with its battered railings, its
cat-haunted parterres, its gravel walks, usurped
by snails, and overgrown with weeds. I like
Mr. Wild's Great Globe better. I can dispense
with the old Mews of Charing Cross, and the
bill-covered hoarding surrounding them,
though I loved the latter, for the first announcement
of the first play I ever saw, was pasted
there. I like Trafalgar Square (barring the
fountains) better. I can surrender the horrible
collection of mangy sheds, decomposed vegetables,
and decaying baskets, which used to block
up Farringdon Street, and which they called
Fleet Market. I can renounce, though with
a sigh, the Fleet Prison, acquiesce in the
superiority of New Oxford Street over St.
Giles's and the Holy Land, and of Victoria
Street, as compared with the dirt and squalor
and crime of Westminster. Yet, let me heave
one sigh for King's Cross, that anomalous
little area where many roads converge, and
many monuments have stood. There was a
stone monster, an adamantine Guy Fawkes,
which was traditionally supposed to represent
George the good, the magnificent, the great;
his curly wig, his portly mien, his affable
countenance.  Little boys used to chalk their
political opinion freely on the pedestal,
accompanied by rough cartoons of their parents,
and guardians, their pastors and masters;
omnibus drivers and conductors pointed the
finger of hilarity at it , as they passed by; it
was a great statue.  They have taken it away,
with the Small-pox Hospital into the bargain,
and though they have set up another George,
stirrupless, hatless and shoeless, in Trafalgar
Square, and the Hospital is removed
elsewhere, the terminus of the Great Northern
Railway, and the pedestal with three big lamps
now standing in their stead, are a dis-sight
to mine eyes, and make me long for the
old glories of King's Cross and Battle
Bridge

Smithfield is going. Tyburn is gone (I am
not such an old fogy, Mr. Squrrel, as to be
able to remember that; nor so stanch a
Conservative as to regret it, now that it is gone).
Bartholomew Fair is gone. Greenwich Fair
going. Chalk Farm Fair a melancholy mockery
of merriment. Let me ask a few more
interrogations, and let me go too.

Where are the fogs? Light brumous
vapours I see hanging over London, in
December; but not the fogs of my youth.
They were orange-coloured, substantial,