himself, and dangerous to his neighbours;
and has now an opportunity of showing how
well he can govern the two millions and a
half of people, whose sovereign he has become
by a strange piece of Oriental good fortune.

ARCADIA.

ARCADIA!—what a nice place it must have
been to be sure! A perpetual pic-nic,
without wasps or thunder-storms, and with
nothing to pay. A smiling landscape, all
gently undulating—no fierce rocks or yawning
chasms. Banks on which wild thyme and
violets continually grow. Eternal summer.
Fruits, flowers, and odoriferous herbs.
Innocent flocks of more innocent sheeplings;
soft, mild, benignant, undesigning bleaters
with dainty coats of whitest wool, hanging
in worsted ringlets, unsmirched by the red
ochre or cinnabar of mercenary grazier; yet
when the sun rises or sets, gleaming with iris-
tints from Nature's prism, making of each a
mutton-rainbow—like Mr. Hunt's sheep in his
picture of Our English Coasts. And then the
shepherds with their long hair confined by an
azure ribbon; their abundance of clean linen,
and guilelessness of braces; their silken hose,
and shoon with purple heels; their harmless
sports consisting in shooting at a stuffed bird
on a highly decorated Maypole with a crossbow
bedecked with ribbons. And the
shepherdesses, with auburn tresses and wide
spreading straw hats, with golden crooks, and
wreaths of flowers, and petticoats of gold and
silk and satin brocade. And the old women
—the Dorcases and Cicelys—dear old dames
with silvery hair, scarlet cloaks, and ebony
crutch-sticks; but who never scolded, O no,
nor had the rheumatism, nor groaned about
their precious bones and the badness of the
times. There were no Game Laws in Arcadia,
no union workhouses, no beer-shops, no
tallymen, no police. There were balls every and
all day long in Arcadia; endless country
dances. No shepherd beat another shepherd
or shepherdess with his crook, or a poker, or
pewter pot; for there was no quarrelling—
save here or there a trifle of bickering, a
transient fugacious jealousy when Celia
detected Corydon kissing of Phyllis, or if
Sacharissa in a pet broke Damon's pipe. But
these fleeting differences would soon be
reconciled: all would kiss and be friends:
and banquets to re-united friendship would
take place in cool grottoes on carpets of
fairest flowers; the viands (fruits, syllabubs,
and cakes of finest flour), cooled by
murmuring, rippling, pebbly, sparkling streamlets,
and by fragrant boughs outside the cave,
drooping with foliage and luscious fruit, and
waved by the pitying summer breeze; sheltering
the grotto's inmates from the burly Sun's
too bold salute. And the sky was very blue,
and the birds sang carols continually.

Yet, though the golden age be gone, and
there are no more picturesque shepherds
or shepherdesses, save in the canvasses of
Watteau and Lancret, Arcadia still exists.
It lives in the very heart of London.

The prototype of the London arcade was,
undoubtedly, the Oriental Bazaar. There is
not a town in Turkey or Hindostan, without
some dirty, stifling, covered passage, both
sides of which overflow with amphitheatres
of knicknackery for sale. The Bezesteen of
Stamboul is a genuine arcade, with all the
crowding and confusion, the kaleidoscopic
arrangement and gossip-bargaining of the
Arcadia of England.

The French, who manage so many things
better than ourselves, and not a few so much
worse, have long had an Arcadia of their
own. As a special measure of relief for their
legionary flâneurs or street-pacers—driven,
in wet weather, from the much sauntered
over Boulevards—there were devised the
unrivalled galleries and passages which are
the delight of Paris, the admiration of
strangers, and the bread-winners of unnumbered
artificers, factors, and retailers of those
heterogeneous odds and ends known as articles
de Paris. To the Passage de l'Opéra, des
Panoramas, du Saumon Gouffroy; from the
Galeries Vivienne, Colbert, and Vero-Dodat;
the caricatures of Gavarni and Grandville, the
classic lithographies of Jullien, the novels of
Paul de Kock, the statuettes of Dantan, and
the ballads of Mademoiselle Eloïsa Puget owe
their chief celebrity. Beneath those glass
roofs literary and artistic reputations have
been won and lost.

Milan followed in the wake of Paris, and the
city of the Duomo boasts many plate-glass-
adorned and nick-nack-crowded covered
thoroughfares. Vienna and Berlin followed;
but England knew not arcades before the
present century. Some inventive genius
accomplished a great feat in conjunction
with certain shopkeepers and the Cork and
Burlington estates. He brought Arcadia into
Piccadilly, and built the Burlington Arcade.

At first the shops of this Arcade were small
and dark. They sold no articles of positive
necessity: the useful arts were repellent to
Burlingtonian notions of industry: and luxury
was almost exclusively purveyed for.
Burlington (as became a comital godfather) was
intensely aristocratic. Boots and shoes and
gloves were certainly sold; but they fitted
only the most Byronically small and
symmetrical hands and feet; none but the finest
and most odoriferous leathers were employed
in their confection, and none but the highest
prices charged for them. The staple
manufactures of this Arcade have been in turns
jewellery, fans, feathers, French novels, pictorial
albums, annuals, scrap-books, caricatures,
harps, accordions, quadrille music,
illuminated polkas, toys, scents, hair-brushes,
odoriferous vinegar, Rowlands' Macassar
Oil, zephyr paletôts, snuff-boxes, jewelled
whips, clouded canes, lemon-coloured gloves,
and false whiskers. Scarcely a fashionable