or three years since, set about making spoons
and dishes, bread-baskets and cream-jugs,
after artistic designs, and which they called
art-manufactures, thought, in their single-
heartedness, they had originated the term.
Why, bless them! Cawdor Street has had
extensive art-manufactures for scores of years.
It has been manufacturing Art, artistic
furniture, and artists to boot, almost since the
time that Art came into England.

For in Cawdor Street, be it understood,
dwell the great tribe of manufacturers
spurious antiques, of sham moyen-age furniture,
of fictitious Dresden china, of delusive
Stradivarius violins. In Cawdor Street abide
the mighty nation of picture-dealers,
picture-forgers, picture "clobberers," picture-
pawners, and other picture-traffickers, whose
name is legion. In Cawdor Street are sellers
of rare Rembrandt etchings, etched a year
ago; of autographs of Henry the Eighth,
written a week since; in Cawdor Street,
finally, are gathered together (amongst many
respectable and conscientious dealers) some
rapacious gentry, who sell, as genuine, the
things that are not, and never were; who
minister to the folly and credulity of the
ignorant rich, on whom they fatten; who
hang on the outskirts of Art, seeking whom
they may devour; who are the curse of Art,
and the bane of the artist.

I often wonder what Raphael Sanzio of
Urbino, Gerretz van Rhyn, commonly called
Rembrandt, Michael-Angelo Buonarotti, and
other professors of the art of painting would
think, if, coming with a day-rule from the
shades (Elysian, I trust), they could behold
the daubs to which their names are appended.
I often wonder how many hundred years it
would have taken them to have painted, with
their own hands, the multitudinous pictures
which bear their names. Nay, if even the
most celebrated of our living painters could
see, gathered together, the whole of their
"original" works which Cawdor Street
dealers have to sell, they would, I opine, be
sore astonished. Canvasses they never touched,
compositions they never dreamed of, effects of
colour utterly unknown to them, would start
before their astonished gaze. For every
one white horse of Wouvermans, five
hundred snowy steeds would paw the earth.
For every drunken boor of Teniers, Ostade,
or Adrien Brower, myriads of inebriated
Hollanders would cumber Cawdor Street.
Wonderful as was the facility and exuberance
of production of Turner, the dead Academician
would stare at the incalculable number of
works imputed to him. Oh, Cawdor Street,
thoroughfare of deceptions and shams! Oh,
thou that sulliest bright mirrors with ignoble
vapours! thou art not deceitful, but art
deceit itself!

Here is the collection of ancient furniture,
armour, old china, cameos, and other curiosities
and articles of vertu, forming the stock in
trade of Messrs. Melchior Saltabadil and
Co. A magnificent assemblage of rare and
curious articles they have, to be sure. Not a
dinted breastplate is there but has its
appropriate legend; not a carved ebony crucifix
but has its romance; not a broad-sword or
goblet of Bohemian glass but has its pedigree.
That china monster belonged to the
Empress Maria Louisa; that battered helmet
was picked up on the field of Naseby;
that rusted iron box was the muniment
chest of the Abbey of Glastonbury; that ivory-
hafted dagger once hung at the side of David
Rizzio; and that long broadsword was erst
clasped by one of Cromwell's Ironsides.
Come to the back of the shop, and Messrs.
Melchior Saltabadil and Co. will be happy
to show you a carved oak and velvet-covered
prie-dieu belonging to the Oratory of Ann of
Austria. That shirt of mail, yonder, hanging
between the real Damascus sabre and the
superb specimen of point lace, dates from the
Crusades, and was worn by Robin de Bobbinet
at the siege of Ascalon. Step up stairs and
Melchior Saltabadil and Co. have some
exquisite needlework for your inspection, of a
date coeval with that of the Bayeux tapestry.
An astounding collection of curiosities have
they, from worked altar-cloths, and richly-
stained glass of the fourteenth century, to
Dresden shepherds and shepherdesses, and
dazzling tea and dessert services of genuine
Sèvres china.

Chasuble Cope, dealer in Ecclesiastical
Antiquities, has his magasin just opposite to
that of the before-mentioned merchants.
Mr. Cope is great in altar candlesticks, pyxes,
rochets, faldstools, elaborately carved or
brazen lecterns, mitres of the Middle Ages,
illuminated missals, and books of "hours,"
and other specimens of the paraphernalia of
Romish ecclesiology. He has the skeleton
of a mitred abbot in the cellar, and Bishop
Blaise's crosier up stairs. Next door to him,
the Cawdor Street traveller will find, perhaps,
the copious and curious collection of Messrs.
Pagoda and Son, who more specially affect
Egyptian, Chinese, and Indian curiosities.
Curiously-painted shells and fans, ivory
concentric balls, wonderful porcelain idols, tear-
bottles, boxes of mummy wheat, carved
Hindoo sceptres, brocaded draperies of
astonishing antiquity—these form but a tithe of
the Oriental relics detailed to view. Farther
up Cawdor Street are establishments teeming
with old furniture, and cumbering the pavement
with their overplus of carved chairs, and
bulky tables with twisted legs, the boards of
which glistened, in Harry the Eighth's time,
with those sturdy flagons and long spiral-
columned glasses now resting quietly on the
dusty shelves; and there are Queen Elizabethan
cabinets, and stools on which Troubadours
and Trouvères rested their harps when they
sang the "Roman du Rou," and the legend
of King Arthur, in goodness knows how
many "fyttes." There are small curiosity
merchants in Cawdor Street, as well as