appellation of "Plump-Muck" (pronounced
" ploomp-mook ") has touched some hidden
chord in her husband's bosom, or whether
the bent of his inebriety takes suddenly
another direction, I could not discover, but
he presently falls into a fit of grievous
weeping, and to use his own words, " whips off
t' shcarlet rag " and follows his spouse into
Whitechapel, into which we emerge likewise.

More gas, more music, and more crowds.
Wax-work shows where Monsieur Kossuth,
Queen Elizabeth, and Gleeson Wilson the
murderer, may be seen for the small charge
of one penny. Raffles for fancy articles on
the Sea-side bazaar plan, with results nearly
as profitable. Panoramas of Versailles, the
Himalaya Mountains, and the City of Canton.
Shooting Galleries (down cellar-steps),
Dissolving Views, Dancing and Singing
Saloons. These, with shops for the sale of
chandlery, slop-clothing, hosiery, grocery,
seamen's bedding, ships' stores, and cheap
literature (among which, I grieve to say it,
the blood and thunder school preponderates),
make up the rest of Whitechapel. It is the
same in the continuation thereof: Paradise
Street, which, however, boasts in addition a
gigantic building known as the Colosseum:
once used as a chapel, and with much of its
original ecclesiastical appearance remaining;
but now a Singing Saloon, or a Tavern
Concert, crowded to the ceiling.

As we wander up and down the crowded
steaming thoroughfare, we catch strange
glimpses occasionally of narrow streets. Some
occupied by lofty frowning warehouses;
others tenanted by whole colonies of Irish;
ragged, barefooted, destitute; who lurk in
garrets and swelter in back rooms, and crouch
in those hideous, crowded, filthy, underground
cellars, which are the marvel and the shame
of Liverpool—warehouses and cellars, cellars
and warehouses without end—wealth, the
result of great commercial intelligence, rising
up proudly amidst misery, hunger and
soul-killing ignorance.

If I may be allowed to make a parting
remark concerning the Lancashire Whitechapel,
it is with reference to its astonishing
elasticity. All the rags and wretchedness, all
the huckstering merchandise, seem to possess a
marvellous facility for expanding into gigantic
commerce and boundless wealth. Not a
cobbler's stall, a petty chandler's shop, but
seems ready to undertake anything in the
wholesale way at a moment's notice, and to
contract for the supply of the Militia with
boots and shoes, or the British navy with
salt beef and tobacco immediately. Hucksters
change with wonderful rapidity into provision
dealers, brokers into salesmen, small
shopkeepers into proprietors of monster
emporiums. The very destitute Irish in this
city of all cities of commerce, (the Great
Liverpool runs even London hard in matter
of fast trading!) after a preliminary
apprenticeship to the begging and hawking
business, become speculators and contractors
on a surprising scale.

So may Whitechapel flourish all the year
round, I say: may its dirt, when I next
see it, be changed to gold, and its rags to fine
linen, and its adjoining cellars to palaces.
Although, to be sure, the one disastrous
thing likely is, that, when the work of
transmutation is completed, other rags, and
cellars, and dirt, will take the place of what
has been changed to fine linen, palaces, and
gold. The ball must roll, and something must
be undermost.

LILLIPUT IN LONDON.

AT the ninety-fourth page of the third
volume of this journal, that is to say, in our
number for the nineteenth of April, eighteen
hundred and fifty-one, will be found the substance
of the tale told in connexion with the
two stunted children, entitled Aztec Lilliputians.
Their showman's career had then
already been commenced at Boston in the
United States. They appear now in this
country after two years and a half of exhibition
in America, during which no friends
of Mr. Huertis " of Baltimore," or of Mr.
Hammond " of Canada," have appeared to confirm
any portion of the story, and Velasquez
has remained a myth. We do not presume
to decide with whom lies the offence of humbugging
the public, but there is evidence
both internal and external of the gross falsehood
of the story. That we can undertake,
and it is all that we can undertake, confidently
to affirm. The English public has of late
been distinguishing itself by astonishing
excesses of credulity. If we do not soon
grow wiser we shall get a reputation on the
continent for eating camels—not beef-steaks.

We have been to see the dwarfed children
called Lilliputian Aztecs, who certainly are
as truly to be described as coming from
Lilliput as from Iximaya. We may at once
observe that as examples of arrested growth
they are extremely interesting—as a cancer
may be interesting—to the physiologist.
There is every reason why they should draw
a concourse of the medical and surgical
faculty; and, since they have been falsely
put forward as A New Race of People,
there is just reason why the ethnologists
should gather round them and examine them,
and come to the conclusion that they represent
no separate species or variety of man;
that their peculiarity, as Professor Owen puts
it; in a letter printed as a portion of the exhibition
puff, " depends on an arrested development
of the brain and brain-case." The interest
shown in these children by scientific men
is suggested by the showmen as a reason for
exhibiting them to the nobility, gentry, and
public generally. We object emphatically, and
in the strongest way to all such exhibitions.
The removal of a bony tumour from the upper
jaw, involving a most terrible dissection