more thousands of the names, addresses, and
avocations of persons in every rank and
condition of life, are not a bad substitute for the
foolscap counterfeit presentments in the fate-
pregnant letter-bags. So let the Post-office
London Directory be my Royal Mail, and let
me start with it on its journey from the
printing-offices of its proprietors, in that
sombre and mysterious locality, Old Boswell
Court, near Temple Bar, London.

I don't think I am called upon to relate
how many reams of paper were used for
this great work; how much the paper
weighed or cost per ream. I am afraid
that were I to launch into such abstruse
statistics I could not pull up without
enumerating the tons of rags employed in
making the paper itself; their size, their
colour, the far-off climes from whence they
came; the princesses, chambermaids,
milkmaids, and beggars that had worn them in
the process of their decadence from fine linen
to mere rags. This again would lead me to
the number and classification of the paper
makers, their names, ages, statures, and
complexions; and I should end by a statement
of how many of the sewers had had the
measles, and how many of the folders
belonged to the Free Church of Scotland, which
might render me amenable to a suspicion of
becoming a bore—a suspicion I wish to avoid
at all risks.

The Great Red Book contains eleven
separate directories: the Official, the Street,
the Commercial, the Trades, the Law, the
Court, the Parliamentary, the Postal, the
City, the Conveyance, and the Banking
Directories. The price is a long one—thirty-six
shillings; but then, every private person is
not expected to have a directory to himseif.
One might as well be the sole proprietor of a
white elephant, the skeleton of a mastodon, of
a brass band, a club-house, a fire insurance
company, or a Museum of Economic Zoology.
The Great Red Book is a museum in itself
—an encyclopedia, a corpus literarum to
be subscribed to, to be divided into shares,
to have trustees for, to fall to the oldest
survivor in the long run on the tontine
principle. It is not light reading by any
means. It could not form part of a Railway
Library, a Fireside Library, or a Laughing
Library. It is a huge, frowning rubicund
tome; a monument of nomenclature
and topography; the Domesday Book of
London—to be approached with reverence,
consulted with anxious eye and inquiring
finger. If such a work could have been
printed two hundred years ago (which it
couldn't), it would have been attached to the
lectern in the parish church by a chain and
padlock, like the Vulgate or Fox's Martyrs.
I would be as chary of admitting the veracity
of a man who told me that he had read all
Great Scarlet Letters through, as I am of
believing Buffy, who because he has heard of
Gargautua and Pantagruel, swears that he
has read Rabelais; or Cuffy, who on the
strength of being able to repeat a stray
couplet or two, declares that he knows Hudibras
by heart.

There is a large and elaborate map of the
Great Middlesex Wen and its environs
attached to the Directory; and affixed to the
map is a very simple yet ingenious apparatus
for finding any street and ascertaining any
division of mileage within the four miles
circle. This is effected by a piece of tape
revolving on a pivot, and containing a series
of numbers corresponding to other numbers
on the margin of the map: the street looked
for being found in certain columns beneath.

The first publication of the Great Red
Book took place in the year eighteen hundred.
It was then but a feeble little bantling in
pamphlet form, containing but two hundred
and ninety-two pages altogether. The
directory portion consisted of a list
containing only eleven thousand names. The
corresponding portion for eighteen fifty-five
contains one hundred and seven thousand
names. The Banking Directory was
established by the Inspector of Letter-carriers
of the General Post Office; and down to
the year forty-six, the Directory had been
corrected each year by the General Post
Office letter-carriers: when uprose the
present editor, and arrangements were made
for procuring a selected staff of well educated
men for the purposes of revision; and that
selected staff did I see, in a large inky room
somewhere in a court near the printing-
offices—in a court where odours of law,
pounce, and blue bags were wafted on the
breeze; where the sun had attempted to issue
a fieri facias on the pavement, but finding
itself blocked out by the tall houses (like
dingy law books reared on end), had made a
return of nulla bona to the Sheriff of Nature;
and where the little children had hung a parchment
doll to a rusty nail by a halter of red tape.

Even as, almost immediately after Monday's
Times is printed off, the editor rises
from his late breakfast with the notion—
soon aggravated into an imperative necessity
—of seeing after Tuesday;—even as no
sooner than one number of Household
Words is gone to press, and long before it is
in the hands of the public, the labour of
arranging another number commences: even
so, directly the Great Red Book for eighteen
fifty-five is published, the merry or studious
men thereunto attached commence the
compilation of the scarlet calendar for eighteen
fifty-six. For though court is always court, and
commerce commerce, and law law—though
streets are streets, and trades trades to the
end of the chapter, men change. The prime
minister falls into the plain right honourable;
the briefless barrister becomes a county
court judge; the medical student passes Hall
and College, and sets up for himself in a neat
little druggist's shop in Camden New Town;
the patientless physician starts into renown