had dropped behind a trifle of two hundred
years or so—swop existed, and flourished
exceedingly under the name of pledging, the
barter being mainly confined to the provisions
furnished to the pupils by the establishment.
Thus the boys pledged their dinner pudding
against potatoes—their meat against pudding.
Pledging in this form was sanctioned by the
authorities; but there was also much illegal
bartering, detection in which (there was a
legend that one boy had positively pledged
his leathern small-clothes—a relic of monastic
costume—against a pair of tumbler pigeons),
subjected the contrabandist to the punishment
of the rod.

Lest I should be betrayed into an elaborate
essay upon the different forms of barter
current among ancient and modern nations—
from Hercules swopping the deliverance of
Troy from the Sea Monster against Laomedon's
thorough-bred horses; from the mess
of pottage for which Esau pledged his birthright
to Jacob, to the swops in usage between
the burghers of the Manhattoes and the
Indians in the early days of the colony of
New York—when a Dutchman's foot was
by mutual agreement understood to weigh
ten pounds—I may as well, and at once,
explain what connection exists between
swops and Mr. Pope's friend.

Some friends of mine who live, as I do, in
a large gloomy hotel in the Quartier Latin,
and in the fair city of Lutetia; when the
weather is too wet for a walk on the
boulevards or for study at the Bibliothèque
Impériale; when the Palais Royale has no
delights, the billiard-tables no charms, and
the English newspapers (as it frequently
happens) have been stopped by the police,
and there is nothing worth reading (which
there scarcely ever is) in the French journals;
when I myself have invoked the Muses in
vain, and find that they persist in keeping
themselves coy at the very top of Mount
Parnassus—Lemprière only knows how
many thousand miles off; and when my
neighbour the doctor with the beard has
deferred till to-morrow his visit to the
dissecting-room of the clamart (which visit he
has been deferring about three hundred and
forty times a-year for the last three); are
accustomed to meet in a cheerful sederunt,
and kill the hours with swop. Few things
are too exalted or too humbie for our
commercial interchanges; and a complete
daguerreotype apparatus has been known to be
in the market at the same time with a
villanous clay-pipe never before worth more
than a sous, but now supposed to possess
some extrinsic value by having been smoked
till it is very dirty. Swops are also made of
boots, clothes, small articles of jewellery,
postage-stamps (which are always in great
demand among foreign sojourners in Paris,
and though always on sale cannot always be
bought), pomatum, surgical instruments, and
especially books. For, a studious man cannot
read, with pleasure, any but his own
books; and as his means forbid him to
accumulate a large library, swop comes to
his aid very usefully and pleasantly; and
when he has well read and meditated one
book, through, he can exchange it for another.
The prices demanded and the value placed
upon articles are frequently somewhat fanciful
and capricious. Coals are not always coals,
but occasionally run up almost as high as
diamonds; and it is now and then necessary
to threaten an appeal to the tribunal of
Cæsar, represented by the marchand d'habits
or old clothesman, who is always hovering
about the courtyard below, like a vulture,
with three hats and a moustache. I recently
became the possessor, at a perfectly exorbitant
rate of barter, of a certain cross-barred
velvet waistcoat—the transaction being
saddled with the additional disadvantage of
its being impossible to wear the garment
with propriety in any of the capitals of
Europe in which I propose to take up my
residence. The waistcoat (which would be
really a most splendid and effectively ornate
article of apparel if it had a new back and
were looked after a little about the pockets
and button-holes), is as well known in the
Rue du Palais de Laecken at Brussels, as on the
Boulevard des Italiens; in the Café Grecco
in Rome, as on the Glacis at Vienna. It has
been on the press in London—on the manly
chest of more than one sub-editor—at different
intervals during the last forty months;
and, as I am not just now prepared with the
passage-money to Constantinople (and even
there I daresay our own correspondent, come
from the Crimea to Pera to purchase a
stove, a fur tippet, and a pair of American
over-shoes, would recognise it immediately),
the only European capital where I can see a
chance of wearing it without the risk of
detection in having second-hand clothes upon
me, is Venice. I hope to go there shortly;
and should you happen to go there too, and
see an untidy man in a cross-barred velvet
waistcoat sauntering about the Place of St.
Mark, gazing at the dusky Ducal Palace,
and the muddy canal, and the black
gondolas, you may with tolerable certitude
affirm the wearer to be the writer of this
paper.

Swop and the cross-barred vest were the
means of my being introduced to Mr. Pope's
friend. For, as I grumbled a little at the
terms demanded for the transfer of the waistcoat,
its original possessor, touched, perhaps
by compunction, perhaps by generosity,
offered to throw into the bargain as a bonne-
bouche, pot-de-bin, or bonus, a copy of
Fenton. "And who the Blank," I asked,
"is Fenton?"

Whereupon, he handed me a little starved
duodecimo volume, with tarnished gilt edges,
and bound in mottled calf, the ragged state of
which suggested that several penknives of the
last century had been sharpened upon it.