grieved still over the desecration of the
once fashionable Piazza—"a magnificent
square," says Maitland, a hundred years ago,
"wherein (to its great disgrace) is kept a herb
and fruit market, two charity schools, one
meeting-house, a parish workhouse, a cold
bath, and a playhouse." Very offensive,
indeed, to a poetical eye! Nevertheless, the
artists were content to dwell here. Under
the colonnade, Sir James Thornhill kept his
school for artists, and in his house immortal
Hogarth (that terrible moralist) painted and
exhibited gratis his Marriage à la Mode.
Somewhere in the square lived bearish
Wilson, and money-getting Sir Peter Lely,
and Sir Godfrey Kueller, great in the portraiture
of bâtons and flowing periwigs;
besides Zoffany, the actors' portrait-painter,
and Lankrink, and Closterman, and a host of
others less known to fame. The charity
schools are gone. So are the meeting-house,
and the workhouse. The playhouse has
turned its back upon the place. The cold
bath is not what it was; but the market,
after being winked at in all its encroachments
for a couple of centuries, has been finally
recognised.

Daylight has come on since I have been
musing here. The dissipated coffee-house
down the street, whose painted blind is drawn
up all awry, has just turned out its last
customer, and shut the door. Objects at a
distance are growing more and more distinct,
and now a man with a ladder hurries on from
lamp to lamp and puts the lights out. The
illuminated clock of St. Paul's, Covent Garden
waxes pale, and strikes three. Proprietors of
waggons, who have been sleeping in public-houses
and coffee-houses, in order to be in
time for business, are out: the crowd, the
bustle, the hum of Saturday morning have
begun. "Business never stops here," says an
old man at my elbow. "'T aint only the three
regular market days, but every day, from
morning till night—come when you will,
something's adoing." From all the five inlets
to the great square—choked to the throats
with every description of thing that goes on
wheels—costermongers with baskets, porters
in knee-breeches, "hagglers," fruiterers,
greengrocers, eating-house keepers, salesmen,
and carters swell the restless multitude.
They invest the building on all sides; they
duck and bob under upturned shafts; they
pour in, denser still, through narrow passages,
and circulate in the maze of stalls within.
Fruit-sellers, perched upon boxes, empty out
their cornucopias on the crowd below. Sacks
of peas and potatoes glide down from waggon
tails upon the backs of porters, who grapple
their burdens with hooks of steel, and plunge
with them into the crowd. I see crews of
boarders who dash into waggons and cast
their cargoes overboard; men who clamber
to the summits of towers of cabbages and
begin to level them to the shafts; gangs—
whom the crazy Spanish knight would at
once have taken for robbers plundering a
caravan—sacking spring-carts; wholesale
buyers who commit tremendous ravages in
the ranks of flower-pots; amazons in drab
great-coats with metal buttons, and flattened
bonnets, who lay violent hands upon hampers;
brawny giants straining and bending under
deal cases. How they swarm and jostle each
other! How they dive into and cleave a way
through the multitude, regardless of every
man's business but their own! "Now then!
travel on" is the cry. What is this tall
wicker column, like that terrible Saxon idol
which the priests were wont to cram with
living people and set fire to? This way it
comes: four feet ten of human thew and
muscle and fifteen feet perpendicular of circular
baskets fitted one upon the other. Gone!
and the furrow in its wake closed up in an
instant. Hold, my friend Hindbad, with the
one eye! Not Argus himself might hope to
carry those fuchsias through this mob, without
loss or damage to their delicate, pendent bells
of crimson and purple: and wilt thou think
to guide them scatheless, and to run too, O
less happy than the Cyclops whose solitary
organ of vision is conveniently placed in the
precise middle of his forehead? Yes, he does
hope to do it, and will do it; more dexterous
than that waiter from the coffee-house near
by, whose spoons rattle in his cups as the
crowd buffet him here and there; whose
saucers are flooded with coffee; whose white
bread and butter has become a brown sop.
He rears his tray aloft, and tries to balance it
on the tips of the fingers of one hand, and
vents angry words upon the crowd that heeds
him not. Look at this grizzly black man
with the strawberry-pottles under his arm.
Easily he gets along, grinning with his rows
of ivory teeth, because the sellers from their
little fortified citadels call him Uncle Tom.
Not a single one will he lose of those large
" toppers," blushing under the dark-green
leaves. Also at this cheerful old man, who
has walked all the way from Croydon this
morning, with a sweet-smelling basket of
white flowers which he calls " double rocket,"
and all (as he tells me afterwards) for the
sake of earning half-a-crown, less tenpence
market fees for his stand under the church.
Also at the thin young widow woman in a
short gown, and with a baby under her
shawl, who has come to lay out her miserable
capital in some sort of vegetable stock to sell
again—nearly all coppers—which she holds
screwed up in paper in her hand. She wins
her way along by meekly begging them "to
mind her little 'un" —strong in her weakness.
Not like that Irish giant, whom I saw just
now pitch down and damage a load of cauliflowers,
because the owner haggled about the
porterage, and who now essays to force a
passage through the crowd, by turning his
sacks of peas crosswise, and knocking people
down with them. A watchful officer of the
market stops him, and warns him to carry