looked upon in the light of a frivolous innovation,
and clean shirts are regarded as new-
fangled inventions. Thus it is in more places
than Seven Dials. Tradition, ridiculous, obsolete,
barbarous, hurtful as it may be, is ever
looked upon with some sort of reverence and
affection ; and the good old joke, the good old
cesspool, the good old tax, the good old job,
the good old gallows, and the good old times,
abandoned, and are called good because they are
pertinaciously retained or reluctantly are old.

Thus, though a printed broadsheet with a
full and particular account of the capture of
Sebastopol, the assassination of the Emperor
of Russia by the King of Prussia (while
excited by champagne); or the blowing up
of the New Houses of Parliament, by some
modern Guy Fawkes, might cause a transitory
excitement in the Dials; while a few new
steps might be hewn out of Parnassus by a
doggrel ballad upon some passing subject—
Bloomerism, Popery, Potichomania, or Cochin
China fowls — the Diallian interest will
always be found to revert to the old murders
and ballads. The day passes, these chanticleers
pass not away. Fresh assassins are hanged
month after month; but the last dying
speech and confession of John Thurtell or
William Corder, still continue to serve for the
valediction ot every murderer executed. Seven
Dials are eminently conservative. Sam Hall
only found favour in their eyes because he
was hanged as far back as the reign of Queen
Anne (and it is possible that even then the
ruffianly sweep was only a hash up of some
footpad of the reign of James the First).
Willikins and his Dinah are tolerated in the
Dials as a popular melody; but the veterans
of the neighbourhood know the song to be as
old as the hills. Lord Bateman and the Fair
Sophia flourished in front of those houses of
seven times seven gables, long before Mr.
George Cruikshank undertook to illustrate
the life of that roving nobleman who employed
the proud young porter; and the germ of
Lord Lovell and his milk-white steed was
sprouting in the poetic garden of the Dials,
years before the present favourite singers of
that legend were born.

The water-colour placards are all manufactured,
the half-penny broadsides all printed, in
the immediate vicinity of Seven Dials; and
from the mysterious recesses of the courts
and alleys round about sally forth the men
with the red noses, the hoarse voices, and the
shabby clothes, who address the mixed
audiences of the Dials. But it will sometimes
happen that business (a robbery, a fire,
or a razzia on an overturned fruit barrow)
or pleasure, such as a mad-dog to hunt, an
idiot to hoot and pelt, an accident to follow,
a newly-opened public-house to visit, or a
favourite fried-fish shop to fight outside of;
or temporary satiety — leading the Dialists to
lean moodily against posts, or gamble secretly
at knuckle-down or poker behind hoardings
and piles of bricks, or gaze misanthropically
into yawning sewers — will bring chanticleers
into considerable depreciation and discount
for a time, and cause an almost total dearth of
the harvest of halfpence which the patterers
strive so hard to reap. Then do these industrious
men fly the regions of the Dials, and
betake themselves to work the districts
inhabited by those favoured ones of humanity
—the nobs at the Westend. The stories,
however, which would attract admiration and
coppers in the Dials would not be quite
suitable for Eaton Place or Lower Grosvenor-
street. It would scarcely be consonant with
delicacy to trumpet forth the misfortunes of
the Earl of C —- opposite to the mansion
possibly inhabited by his Lordship; and
however merited may have been the revenge
taken by the young lady of quality upon the
person of the dastardly lieutenant who had
destroyed her illusions and blighted her
existence, it would scarcely be prudent to
allude to the circumstances in the vicinity of
the residence of the parents of (perhaps) the
young lady of quality herself. So the bill of fare
is altered. About nine or ten o'clock in the
evening have you never heard, in the silent
aristocratic streets, the voices of the patterers
calling forth in sonorous, almost sepulchral
accents, accounts of pestilence, battle, murder,
and sudden death: the assassination of this
emperor, the storming of a certain fortress,
accompanied, of course, by a dreadful massacre ?
For, observe, though personal reflections upon
the aristocracy do not go down among the
nobs at the Westend, horrors are always sure
of a sale. The inhuman mother with the
black beetles is a great favourite in the areas—
that sober insect, the beetle, coming familiarly
home to the serving man and woman's mind
in connection with the kitchen dresser and the
coal-cellar — and ofttimes, as a patterer dwells,
with grim minuteness, upon the horrible perticklers
of the murder; or the agonies of the
small children under the walnut shells; or, as
with grisly unction he describes Vyenna in
flames; the red flag of the Marsellays histed
over Paris; the Kezar's hanser to the
Hemperer; war to the last rubble and the last
knife; the Preston strike hended in blood,
the hartillery called out; or (a very favourite
device), feariocious hattempt upon her
Majesty by a maniac baker; you will see
John the footman, or Mary the housemaid,
steal up the area steps and into the street,
purchase a halfpennyworth of dire intelligence,
which, shallow cock as it is, is read with
trembling eagerness and enthralled interest,
in kitchen or servants' hall, till the cat puts
her back up by the fire, and the hair of the
little footpage stands on end. The shabby
men with the solemn voices who perambulate
the Westend streets at nightfall are own
brothers to, if not the very same eloquent
individuals who carry the banners in Seven
Dials; and they again are descendants of the
old flying stationers, the pleasant lying
vagabonds who were wont to waken the stillness