This carel is, we believe, the market-place.
But the straw in the shoe, in past years, had
a much more crafty signification than the
straw in the mouth. Fielding, in his Life of
Jonathan Wild, relates that Jonathan's aunt
Charity "took to husband an eminent
gentleman, whose name I cannot learn, but who
was famous for so friendly a disposition, that
he was bail for about a hundred gentlemen in
one year. He had likewise the remarkable
honour of walking in Westminster Hall
with a straw in his shoe." Our age has
almost forgotten the nature of this strawbail
to which Fielding so sarcastically alludes;
but the subject has lately been gossipped
into notoriety in Notes and Queries. Straw
bail means, simply, insufficient or fraudulent
bail;but Westminster Hall has long ceased
to witness the straw which was its symbol.
In an article in the Quarterly Review it is
said, " We have all heard of a race of men
who used, in former days, to ply about our
own courts of law, and who, from their manner
of making known their occupation, were
recognised by the name of straw-shoes. An
advocate or lawyer, who wanted a 'convenient'
witness, knew by these signs where to
find one;and the colloquy between the
parties was brief. 'Don't you remember?'
said the advocate, (the party looked at the fee
and gave no sign; but the fee increased, and
the power of memory increased with it);
'To be sure I do.' ' Then come into Court
and swear it;' and straw-shoes went into
the Court and swore it." There is an old
picture of Westminster Hall still extant, in
which, among the figures crowding the Hall,
is a man with a straw in his shoe.

There are other men of straw besides these.
In the docks, a "straw-yarder" is a name
contemptuously given to a would-be sailor who
has never been out to sea. But there are
real men of straw carried about at some of
the Italian carnivals;and we have men of
straw enough on Guy Fawkes day and other
popular festivals. Certainly the smartest
men of straw which have ever come under
our own personal observation, were a regiment
of fellows employed by a London straw-
bonnet maker;they perambulated the
streets dressed in straw plait garments from
top to toe—hats, coats, trousers, boots, and all.
The agricultural, stable and decorative uses
of straw are so apparent and so simple, as to
speak for themselves; but there is just now a
project on which we may gossip a little, viz.
the manufacture of writing and printing
paper from straw. The trials in this respect
have been made in a brave spirit; if the
straw paper be not a first-rate favourite, it is
not from any deficiency in the attempts to
make it so. It has been long known that
a good packing and wrapping paper can be
made from straw; but something finer than
this has occasionally been produced. Very
good tracing and copying paper has been
made from it. In eighteen hundred and
fourteen, an Austrian paper maker produced
paper from straw, useful for many purposes.
At a somewhat earlier date, the Marquis of
Salisbury, at one of George the Third's
levées, presented to the King a small book
printed on straw-paper, as a specimen of
the art. Seguin produced at Paris, in
eighteen hundred and one, some specimens of
straw-paper, which were not only suitable
for writing and printing, but even for copperplate
engravings. Estler, of Vienna, who
had a secret mode of making straw-paper, is
said to have sold his secret to the King of
Denmark in eighteen hundred and fifteen:
but whether his Scandinavian Majesty
made anything out of his bargain, we do
not know.

In the last century, a curious work was
produced at Ratisbon. It was an account,
by Jacob Christian Schäffer, of certain experiments
which had been made to produce
paper from various vegetable substances;
and with it were interleaved several specimens
of the paper so made; together with lace and
woven cloth made from such of them as are
fibrous. The whole collection is not a little
remarkable. Greyish, brownish, greenish,
blueish;dull, shining, granular, fibrous—
they present extraordinary diversities. The
straw specimens are among those which
present a certain glossiness of surface, due
probably to the large amount of silex which
straw contains. Schäffer's first volume contains
fifteen of these specimens, with notices of the
substances whence they were made, and a
brief account of the mode of manufacture; the
second volume contains fourteen specimens;
the third, seventeen; the fourth, ten; the
fifth nine; and the sixth, nine; making the
whole number upwards of seventy. Some
are made of inner bark, some of leaves, some
of rind, some of moss, some of stalky fibres,
some of reeds, and some of straw. Another
of these desperate attempts after novelties
in paper-making is a small edition of a part
of the works of the Marquis de Villette,
published in London in seventeen hundred
and eighty-six. A copy of this work is in
the British Museum;and the paper, made
from the inner bark of the linden or limetree,
is certainly among the oddest productions
which we have met with. The book is
a duodecimo, of about one hundred and fifty
pages;and we suspect it was rather intended
to show off the paper than the Marquis.
The paper is coarser than the coarsest ever
now used for printing English books;and
its colour more nearly resembles that of a
London November fog than anything else.
It is, in fact, a paper maker's edition;for the
paper maker, in his dedication of the volume
to the Marquis Ducrest, speaks of the experiments
which he (Delille) has made in the
manufacture of paper, from various kinds of
bark, leaves, and other vegetable productions,
and seems to imply that he had had the
volume printed as an exemplar of one variety