before theatres and great houses, card-leavers
at Park Lane mansions, book-signers at
Buckingham Palace; O! carriage people,
titled and untitled; do you know what sort of
men and women have seen your carriages in
Long Acre before they were brought to the
mews near Belgrave Square? Do you know
anything of the feeding, tending, lodgement,
raiment, of the miserable beings who, crossing
the Acre to buy a red herring or a bundle of
firewood at the chandler's shop, have stopped
to stare at the coachmakers' men dusting the
grand carriages? Do you know anything of
the ragged Gwillims and d'Hoziers who have
commented upon the harlequinaded heraldry
on your coach panels, who have glozed over
the griffins and winged birds, the bends and
lozenges, the crests and mottoes, which they
could not have read had they been even
in English instead of dog-latin—all with the
same dull, stony, helplessly envious glare as
that which they bestow upon the penn'orths
of pudding they have no pence to buy, in the
shop opposite? Do you know what sort of
humanity it is that paces the Acre after
nightfall, up and down in the rain, up and
down in bedraggled shawls, long after the
great iron shutters of the repositories have
been put up? Take physic, Pomp, in Long
Acre. Look at the fever palanquin turning
round the corner; consider the children coming
out of the pawnbrokers', and the women going
into the gin-shops; glance up the infamous
courts; lean against the posts, make one of the
hungry band before the pudding shop; ponder
well upon your carriage-wheels, and re-
member when they roll swiftly, almost
noiselessly, down the Acre towards Belgravia,
how much of the mud beneath them is human.

Let me glance at a few more of the living
curiosities of London. There is the bare-
footed man with the enormous red beard,
ragged in his person, spasmodic in his
demeanour, who is supposed to have a mission,
who is reported to be one hundred and ten;
years of age, and who, I was once told, on very
excellent authority, was a bill-discounter of
the sharpest order. There is the gentleman
in seedy, but continually changing costumes,
who seems to me to be Proteus and Briareus
combined; for he is always appearing in
different shapes and different phases of
manipulative labour in different parts of the
metropolis—now selling sealing-wax, now pens,
now vermin-annihilators, now removing the
grease stains from the cuffs and collars of
little boys' jackets, but always haranguing
his audiences in a loud, confident, alcoholically-
sonorous voice; from time to time propounding
riddles and conundrums, such as, If the
devil were to lose his tail, where would he
go to get a new one? Answer: To the gin-
shop, because there they re-tail the worst
of spirits. Or (this was during the corn-law
unpopularity of Sir Robert Peel), Why is
Sir Robert Peel like a counterfeit shilling?
Answer: Because he's a bad Bob! These
riddles are poor and bald, but the inflections
and deflections of the Protean man's voice
during their delivery are humorous. He has a
ready wit, too, has my Protean friend; he is as
ready at repartee as at legerdemain, and has as
many quick rejoinders and retorts, more or less
courteous, as he has avocations. He is a
difficult man to tackle. I once heard him shut-up
(to continue the indulgence of another curiosity
of London, slang) a friend of mine who had
trod the Thespian waggon, shod now with the
cothurnus, now with the sock, now with the
buskin; who, in other words, had once been
a country actor. My friend, witnessing his
performance, essayed to "chaff" him.

"You needn't laugh," said Proteus, "I was
one of you once."

My friend blushed deeper than red-ochre;.
he remembered what he had himself done in
the low-comedy and general-utility lines; and
sneaked down Carlisle Street, Soho (at the
corner of which the performance was taking
place), in a humiliated manner.

There are many men about London—
natives of a metropolitan province I mean to
describe some day, Lower Bohemia—whom I
will not recognise as curiosities because they
are either quacks or mendicants. Such are
the fellows who sell herbs and nostrums and
medicated ginger cakes about the streets;
such are the knavish vendors of sealed packets
and straws, of brass medals of the devil flying
away with the King of Hanover, as sovereigns
for a wager; such even the professors of
outdoor chromo-lithography,—the artists who
draw tinted portraits, and mackerel, and
broken plates, and flourishing specimens of
caligraphy on the pavement. I used formerly
to entertain some respect and sympathy for
these latter industrials; but I found out
early one morning, while watching a
professor commencing art for the day, just
outside the Surrey toll-gate, of Waterloo Bridge,
that he made use of a series of stencilled
patterns for his outlines; knew nothing
whatsoever of design; and only possessed, in
tinting and finishing, a paltry degree of
mechanical ingenuity, which might have been
far better employed in some honest trade.
Avaunt ye quacks! in whatsoever guise ye
may be found.

Eccentricity, however, though combined
with a slight dash of Lower Bohemianism,
may charitably be ranked among things
curious. The gentleman known to the
initiated as Porky Clark, was a curiosity. The
man in rags and a cocked hat, who to this
day is to be found on Epsom Downs at race
meetings, who tells you that he is a Master
of Arts, quotes scraps of Homer and Virgil,
and prefaces and terminates every quotation
by this talismanic exclamation:—"Another
bottle of sherry—plop!"—is a curiosity.
Curiosities, too, are most of the professors of
hard-lines: the man who, with marvellous
quickness and accuracy, cuts out the black
profiles; the man who, with a piece of chalk