are to be found in the toy department of the
Lowther Arcade.

These toys are sold by bright-eyed damsels,
and they are bought by plump married
couples, and pretty cousins, and prim yet
benignant old aunts, and cross yet kind
old grandmothers—yea and by cross-grained
bachelors and sulky mysogynists, and crabbed
City men. I have seen a man—one of those
men who were he but five-and-twenty you
would immediately feel inclined to call,
mentally, an old fellow—enter Lowther
Arcadia by the Strand, looking as savage, as
ill-tempered, as sulky as the defendant in a
breach of promise case, dragging rather than
leading a child; but I have seen him emerge
ten minutes afterwards with an armful of
toys looking sunny with good humour.

And they are bought, these toys, for that
marvellous little people who are the delight
and hope and joy, the sorrow, solace, chief
anxiety, and chief pleasure, of grown-up man
and womankind. For those little manuscripts
of the book of life yet unsent to press, unset up
in stern uncompromising type, as yet uncirculating
in proof-sheets for the inspection of the
judge: to be bound and published and
criticised at the last. For those innocent little
instruments of even-handed justice—the justice
that makes of our children the chief punishment
or reward to us—a heaven or a torment
about us here in life. And whether Arcadia
live or die, and whether those ruddy children
and these plump parents continue or surcease,
there will be toy-shops and toys and parents
and children to purchase them to the end, I
hope; for I believe toys to be the symbolic
insignia of the freemasonry of childhood—as
aprons and mallets, adzes and jewels are to
the older freemasons of Lincoln's-Inn-Fields—
and that they are bonds of union, pledges of
affection, from the man-child to the child-man;
and that they are substantial lectures on useful
arts and useful recreations; and although
of course I would exclude from my Tommy's
or Emily's play-box every toy that could
suggest or hint at cruelty, intolerance, injustice
or wrong, I do think that English toys
(I speak not of the Gallic and bellicose ones)
are mainly honest and well meaning, and even
moral playthings. I love toys.

The second department of Lowther Arcadia
of which I would wish, cursorily, to treat, is
that connected with the sale of jewellery. The
Lowther bijouterie is certainly unique. It
may want the intrinsic value of the productions
of Howell and James or Hunt and
Roskell. The Lowtherian brilliants may not
be of a water so fine as those of Regent
Street or Cornhill; but the jewellery of my
Arcade is as sparkling and as showy, as
gay and as variegated, as any assemblage of
gems you like to mention—the jewel-house in
the Tower of London, or the Queen of Spain's
jewels, or Mr. Hope's. The gold is as yellow;
though, perhaps, not quite so valuable as any
Brown and Wingrove have to refine. The
emeralds are green, the rubies red, the
turquoises blue: and what other colours would you
have emeralds, and rubies, and turquoises to be?
Lowther shines, too, in cameos—none of your
shrinking, shamefaced, genuine Roman ones—
but great, bold, bouncing, pictorial pancakes:
heads of Minerva as big as Bristol Channel
oysters, and trios of Graces vying in size
with bread-and-butter plates. Lowther hath,
in its huge glass-cases and beneath glass
domes, good store of necklaces (the pearl
ones like strings of varnished plover's eggs),
bracelets, agraffes, buckles, shirt-pins, hair
ornaments; but it is in the article of brooches
that she chiefly shines: brooches with a
vengeance. Geological brooches, comprising every
variety of strata, from blue clay to red
sandstone, genteelly cut, polished, and set. Pictorial
brooches, forcing on you the counterfeit
presentments of a heterogeneous assemblage of
celebrated female characters: Mary Queen
of Scots, Madame de la Vallière, Marie
Antoinette, and Jenny Lind; with a more
cautious selection from among the gentlemen,
ranging from Oliver Cromwell to Buffon the
naturalist, or from Henry the Eighth to
M. Kossuth. Brooches for hair, and simple
jet or cornelian brooches. Landscape brooches,
where the lake of Chamouni, and Mont
Blanc—the monarch of mountains, who was
crowned so long ago—are depicted in a
vivid blue and green manner—astonishing to
the eyes of Professor Forbes, or Mr. Brockedon.
Brooches for all ages, from that blushing
girl of eighteen yonder—for whom the
fond youth in the astonishing coat and the
alarming waistcoat is purchasing a gigantic
oval half-length of Charles the Second set in
elaborate filigree—down to the white-headed
old grandmamma, doubly widowed and doubly
childless, who will here provide herself with
a cheap yet handsome locket-brooch wherein
to preserve a lock of sunny brown hair, all
that is left (save a ciphering book) to remind
her of that gallant nephew Harry, who went
down in the war-steamer Phlegethon, with all
hands, far in the Southern Seas.

Nor is it the worse for being unreal—
sham is hardly the word; for Lowther says
boldly, "Here is my jewellery; I will sell it
to you at a price. If you choose to believe
my half-crown cameo-moons are made of
green cheese, my eighteenpenny bracelets
sapphires or opals, my three-and-sixpenny
necklaces barbaric pearl and gold, believe
and be blest. We do not attempt to deceive
you; if our price be too cheap, don't buy."
It may seem inconsistent in me, who have so
lately borne rather hard upon the arcade of
Burlington, that I should defend the fictitious
gems that have their abode in the arcade of
Lowther. But I consider this: that there is a
difference between a sham deliberate, a wilful
sophistry or wanton piece of casuistry, and a
lie confessant; a work of fiction for instance
—a novel, a fable, or a pleasant tale. As
such, I consider the jewels of Lowther. Is it