extensive ones; humble dealers, whose stores
resemble more the multifarious odds-and-ends
in brokers' shops than collections of antiquity
and vertu. These bring home the savage
tomahawk, the New Zealand boomerang, the
rosary of carved beads, to the poorest door;
and render old armour, old furniture, old
lace, and tapestry, comprehensible to the
meanest understanding.

And why should not all these be genuine
—real, undoubted relics of ages gone by?
To the man of poetical imagination, what
can be more pleasant than to wander
through these dingy bazaars of the furniture,
and armour, and knick-knackery of other
days? The sack, and malvoisie, and hypocras
are gone; but, there are the flagons and
beakers that held them. The mailed knights,
and pious monks, have been dust these five
hundred years; but, there is their iron panoply,
there are their hauberks, and two-handed
swords; there are the beads they counted,
the roods before which they prayed, the holy
volumes they were wont to read. Cromwell's
name is but a noise; but those ragged buff-
boots may have enclosed his Protectorial
extremities. The mattock, and the spade, and
the earthworm have done their work with
Diana de Poitiers and Gabrielle d'Estrées;
yet in that quaint Venetian mirror they may
have dressed their shining locks, and mirrored
back their sunny glances. That should have
been the Black Prince's surcoat; that pearl
and ivory box, the jewel-casket of Ninon de
l'Enclos; that savage club, carved, beaded,
and ornamented with tufts of feathers, who
shall say it was not wielded once by
Montezuma, or was an heirloom in some far South
American forest, ere Columbus was born, or
Cortez and Pizarro heard of? Besides, are
not the dealers in these curiosities respectable
men? Are not little labels affixed to some
of the rarer articles, announcing them to have
formed part of the Stowe collection, of that
of Strawberry Hill, of Fonthill Abbey, of
Lansdowne Tower—to have been bought of
the Earl of Such-a-one's executors, or acquired
at the Duke of So-and-so's sale? My friend,
when you have travelled as long in Cawdor
Street as I have, your poetical imaginings
will have cooled down wofully; and your
faith in Oliver Cromwell's boots, Edward the
Black Prince's surcoat, and Ninon de l'Enclos's
jewel-box, will have decreased considerably.
Some of the furniture is curious, and much of
it old; but, oh! you have never heard, you
have never seen (as I have) the art-
manufactures that are carried on in Cawdor Street
garrets, in frowzy little courts, and mysterious
back slums adjoining thereon. You do not
know that wily armourers are at this moment
forging new breastplates and helmets, which,
being battered, and dinted, and rusted, shall
assume the aspect of age—and ages. You do
not know that, by cunning processes, new
needlework can be made to look like old
tapestry; that the carved leg of an old chair,
picked up in a dusty lumber-room, will suffice,
to the Cawdor Street art-manufacturer, for
the production of a whole set of carved,
weather-stained, and worm-eaten furniture—
chairs, tables, stools, sideboards, couches, and
cabinets enough to furnish half-a-dozen houses
of families of the Middle Ages, "about to
marry." You have not heard that corpulent
man in the fur cap, and with the pipe in his
mouth—and who eyed you slily just now, as
you were handling those curious silver-
mounted pistols of the Middle Ages—tell the
swart artisan by his side that there is rather a
run for inlaid Spanish crucifixes just now, and
bid him make a dozen or two by the model
he gives him. How many of those Dresden
shepherds and shepherdesses are of Saxon
origin, think you? How many of those squat,
grinning, many-coloured Pagods ever saw the
light of an Indian sun? The vertu shops of
the Quai Voltaire, in Paris, swarm with
spurious antiquities; the dealers in antiques,
in Rome, make harvests out of credulous
"milords," in the way of cameos, produced at
the rate of about two scudi, and sold at ten
guineas each; in fragments of marble urns,
statues, and rilievi, purposely mutilated,
buried in the environs of the Eternal City,
and then dug up to be sold as ancient
originals. How, then, should Cawdor Street be
exempt from deception?—Cawdor Street,
standing, as it does, in the midst of that land,
and of that city, so bursting, so running over,
with commercial competition, that, panting
to do business at any price, it cannot refrain
from vending counterfeit limbs, spurious
garments, sham victuals and drink even. The
worst of it is, that, knowing how many of the
curiosities and rarities in these seeming shops
are cunning deceits, a man is apt to get
sceptical as regards them all. For my part, I
would rather, were I a collector of curiosities,
rummage in old country public-houses (I
would I could remember the whereabouts
of that one where, as I live, I saw in the tap-
room a genuine and a beautiful Vandyck,
smoke-grimed and beer-stained!), or search in
obscure brokers' shops, where, among rusty
lanterns, beer-taps, bird-cages, flat-irons,
fishing-rods, powder-flasks, and soiled
portraits of Mrs. Billington in "Mandane," one
does occasionally stumble on an undoubted
relic of the past, and say, "here is truth."

But it is in the article of pictures that the
art-manufacturers of Cawdor Street have
astonished the world, and attained their
present proud pre-eminence. Pictures are their
delight, and form their greatest source of
profit. Take for example, the lion of Cawdor
Street, the great Mr. Turps, "Picture-dealer,
liner, and restorer. Pictures bought, sold, or
exchanged. Noblemen and gentlemen waited
upon at their own residences." To look at
Mr. Turps's shop, you would not augur much
for the magnitude or value of his stock in
trade. A small picture in panel of a Dutch
Boor, boosy, as usual, and bestriding a barrel