vice, an aristocratic frivolity, or a Belgravian
caprice, but had (and has) a representative in
the Burlington Arcade. It was a little Vanity
Fair. I have walked it many and many a
time for years, thinking of John Bunyan, and
wondering which was Britain Row and
Portugal Row.

There was but one active handicraft exercised
in the Arcade, and that was hair-cutting.
The handicraftsmen cut your hair in sophisticated
saloons, decorated with fallacious
mural paintings of impossible Grecian
landscapes, with flaming Greeks and Turks fighting.
Below they inveigled you to buy drugs
and potions wherewith to dye the grey hairs
you should be proud of, blue black; and
stuffs to make you emulate the smell of the
civet, or the musk rat, and hog's-lard
condimented into bear's grease, and wigs;—woven
lies made from dead men's hair to thatch live
fools. Further on, there were boots to pinch
feet, corsets to tighten waists, and gloves
to cramp hands. Boys with bundles were
rigidly excluded from the precincts. Smoking
was not allowed through its length or
breadth. It was paraded by padded, tight-
booted, tight-girthed, wigged old beaus striving
to look like boys of twenty; by boys aping
the vices of old men; by carpet warriors, and
by knights fresh from Almack tournaments.

The department of Arcadia to which I
have just (and it may seem to you rather
harshly) alluded, has not been free from the
vicissitudes, humiliations, and mutabilities
common to buildings and thoroughfares, as
well as to men. Yet, on the whole, it may
be said that the Burlingtonians have been
a prosperous and well-to-do community. If
Burlington had appealed to the wisdom,
learning, good taste; or to the scientific
or philosophic tendencies of humanity, it
might have been bankrupt long ago, and its
traders gone barefoot. But Burlington has
calculated, like the quack doctor, that of
every fifty passers-by forty are fools. With
Robert Macaire it has studied the immortal
axiom delivered by that sage to Bertrand,
"The day passes, but the fools remain;" and
has occupied itself with what is co-existent
with the world and with humanity—human
folly. But for such customers, the booths in
Vanity Fair, wherever its tents be pitched,
would drive a poor trade indeed.

I will now leave the Province of Burlington,
and direct my attention to that of Exeter.
One was of comital rank; but this is the
fief of a marquisate. A word as to its
antecedents.

Where now stands the street that forms
the approach to Rennie's magnificent bridge
—the Bridge of Waterloo; the bridge of
gorgeous sunset views—the Bridge of Sighs
—the Rialto of transpontine theatricals,
industrials of the New Cut, Elephant and
Castle omnibuses, and women without names,
without hope, without lives (save a certain
dog-like existence), there stood, before I was
born, certain dingy brick houses. One of
them was the old office of the old (and now
dead) Courier newspaper; and many may be
old enough to remember the bulletin of the
great victory of Waterloo being pasted up on
the Courier windows on the 21st of June,
1815. Another was the old Lyceum Theatre;
a third was Mr. Day's trunk-shop. Close
beside these buildings, stood two mighty
elephant's tusks and a burly Beefeater,
directing the eager sight-seer, the impatient
country cousin, the enthusiastic holiday-
maker, to the Museum or Menagerie of Wild
Animals, known throughout the United Kingdom
as Crosse's Wild Beast Show. Here had
the lord of "aitches" and the Patent Theatres
—the great John Philip Kemble—borrowed
of Mr. Crosse the rhinoceros on which he
took his ever memorable ride through Covent
Garden Market—in the early morning, when
the sun was bright, and saloop stalls were
yet about—as dignified as a lord, playing the
fool as only wise men can. Here had the
howlings of unnumbered savage brutes,
the rugged Russian bear, the armed
rhinoceros, like the Hyrcanian beast, shook the
bricks of Exeter Change. Ye spotted snakes,
ye dwelt there. Hyenas, ye have laughed;
jackals, ye have wept deceivingly; blue-
faced monkies, ye have shown your cerulean
visages in those byegone Arcadian precincts.
There held out against the united forces
of Apothecaries Hall and His Majesty's foot-
guards Chunee, unconquered of refractory
elephants. There he laughed at pounds of
calomel and bales of drugs, and shook his
sides with elephantine scorn at guns and
pistols; till the great, embrowned regulation
muskets of His Majesty's foot-guards
cracked his leviathan skin and let his giant
life out. Crosse's must have been an exhibition.
Why wasn't I alive when Exeter
Change was extant, and the admission
"up-stairs" one shilling, or under?

But Arcadia was fated to come again; and
Exeter Change, though it retains its name,
has changed its locale, and is no more what
it was. It is a changed change. It had
a transition state—a sort of chrysalis-like
grubhood as a bad bazaar—a very bad
and lame imitation of those Margate and
Ramsgate, and general watering-place knick-
knack shops, where there are countless
assemblages of trifles, unconsidered, because
really useless, and where you may, perhaps,
(if you have great good luck) win, after the
investment of from seven to fifteen shillings,
such a prize as a German silver pencil-case,
or a tea-pot stand of plaited rushes. And
then Exeter Change became a wilderness of
bricks and mortar, scaffold poles, hods, ladders
and ropes, and it and its neighbourhood went
mad on the building question, after which
and (up to 1853) ultimately, the Change
changed its site, and burst on the world as an
arcade—an Arcade of desolation, silence,
despair.