What can I compare it to? The street of
the tombs at Pompeii—the Via Sacra with all
the shops shut up and half a dozen funerals
of Sextus Quintilius Somebody winding their
way through its mournful lengths? A street
in Tripoli or Algiers at mid-day when the sun
is very hot and the plague is very bad about?
The "dark entry" in Canterbury cathedral
yard multiplied by two? Lawrence Pountney
Hill (about the dreariest of thoroughfares I
know) of a Sunday afternoon? Anything,
anywhere in any climate, country, age, or
circumstance that is gloomy, dismal, heart-depressing,
unventilated, graveyard-smelling—dull. This
gloomy avenue leads from one and into
another of the merriest London streets you would
wish to find: one the bustling Catherine
Street with its noisy News Exchange, and
Old Drury (though, to be sure, that is not
so very gay) at the top; the other the lively
Wellington Street, embellished as it is with
one of the most abusive cabstands in the
metropolis, the office of H. W., and the
sprightly Lyceum Theatre. But the Arcade
is so dull. Some ghastly artist undertook, on
its construction, to decorate it with mural
arabesques. He has succeeded in filling the
spaces between the shop windows with some
skeleton figures;—dripping, faded funerealities.
These "arabesques" ("mauresques"
would be more appropriate, for they are very
mortuary) twist themselves into horrible
skeleton presentments, all in a leaden,
deadened, dusky tone of colour; and, high over
gas-lamps, and grimly clambering about shop-
fronts, are melancholy dolphins and writhing
serpents, and attenuated birds of paradise;
all looking intensely wretched at the positions
in which they find themselves. Likewise there
are scrolls, which the Furies might twist in
their hair; and leaves which seem ready to
drop off for very deadness, and sepulchral
beadings, and egg-and-tongue fillets like rows
of coffin nails.

And are there shops in this Arcadia? There
are. And are these shops tenanted? Well.
They are tenanted; but not much. A great
many of the shops have had occupiers; but
somehow or other the occupiers are continually
vacating. They never stopped. Doubtless they
had many good and sufficient reasons for so
persistently continuing not to remain. They
went abroad, relinquished business, made their
fortunes—perhaps. I can remember in this
changing Change, house and estate agents,
servants' registry offices, coal-mine offices
(with neat little hampers of Wallsend in
the window—a novelty which would answer
well, I opine, with a horse-dealer, if he were
to put a few pasterns and fetlocks and a horse
shoe or two in his window), booksellers, news-
venders and publishers (news and publicity
here!), cigar shops, tailors and habit-makers,
milliners, dressmakers, and bonnet-builders,
architects and surveyors, and a toy-shop:
that didn't last. The drums and trumpets,
the miniature guns and swords sounded and
wielded there must have been of the same sort
as those used at Napoleon's midnight review;
the Tombolas must have had death's heads;
the Jacks must have sprung, not of boxes,
but sarcophagi; the kaleidoscopes must have
shown nothing but prismatic goblins; the
accordions played nothing but the Dead
March in Saul.

I knew a French bookseller who established
himself in Exeter Arcadia, with his wife and
olive branches round him, vainly thinking to
live by vending the lively nouvellettes and
vaudevilles of the Land of the Gaul. But his little
children pined among the brumous shades of
the 'Cade, and sighed, like Mary Queen of
Scots, for the fair land of France again—so
the Frenchman vamosed. I also knew a
confident foreigner who came here in the
Exhibition year '51, with two stools, a desk and a
Nugent's dictionary on a vague speculation of
interpreting, translating for, or verbally
assisting foreigners visiting London during the
Exhibition season. "Informations-Bureau"
he called his shop, if I am not mistaken. But,
as he spoke no English, and nobody came to
make any inquiries who spoke any foreign
language, his bureau came to nothing, and he
vamosed, too.

Desolate, dreary, weary, as any grange
with any number of moats, art thou, Arcadia
of Exeter! Yet there is hope for thee.
"Hope comes to all," says Milton, and may I
live to see the day when thy shops shall
overflow with merchandise, when thy outlets
shall be blocked up with customers, when thy
fame shall be spread among the nations, and
excursion trains start from the uttermost
ends of the earth to visit thee. Till then,
farewell, or be, as heretofore, a desert—not
howling, for there are no wild animals to
howl in thee—an empty sepulchre, a deserted
wine-cellar, an abandoned quarry, an
exhausted coal-mine, a ruined temple, or
"Ninny's Tomb," meet only for the nocturnal
rendezvous of some Pyramus of the Strand
with some Thisbe of Adam Street, Adelphi; be
anything thou listest, for, of a verity, Exeter,
I (and, doubtless, my readers,) am weary of
thee.

The Lowther Arcade—I seek not to disguise
it under any plausible incognito, for I am
proud of it—is a tube of shops running from
St. Martin's Churchyard into the Strand,
very nearly opposite Hungerford Market.
There is, frequently, very much noise in this
tube as in that far-famed one across the
Menai Straits that Mr. Stephenson built;
and there are collisions and signals—but here
my railroad similes end; for, in lieu of being
a pitch dark colour with grim iron-ribbed
sides, with a flooring of slippery rails on
which huge locomotive dragons with many
jointed tails of carriages glide, this tube
is light and airy, and roofed with glass. It
is noisy; but not with the screaming and
snorting, and panting of engines, the rattling
of wheels, and the jangling of chains: it