whistles, which form an usual and most excruciating
accompaniment to a juvenile drum.
There are four sizes, which have been regularly
sold and known to the trade for half a century;
their wholesale price is five shillings
a gross. An immense trade is done in small
brass cannon, with and without limbers; but
we have not met with anything like the perfection
of Lilliputian military accoutrements
that is to be found in Paris; where we once
saw a colonel, aged eight years, march into a
ball-room with his regiment, fifty strong,
with drums beating, and colours flying, accompanied
by a perfect park of wooden artillery,
drawn by poodles. But we found very
respectable sabres of wood and brown paper
gilt scabbard, with belt, at about sixpence
each; muskets at a suitable figure, equally
serviceable. A great army of all nations and
uniforms—but especially English and French,
with faces not ill-modelled after modern
celebrities—are sent from Germany. German
toys are distinguished for taste, and
even a degree of artistic merit; English
toys for strength and usefulness. New inventions
in toys are chiefly foreign; but, as soon
as an article obtains decided favour among
the natives of Lilliput, it is made in quantity
in England.

Skipping-ropes are always in demand.
They begin at eight shillings a gross, or
three halfpence a-piece. Marbles are a
leading article for boys, as skipping-ropes
are for girls. The pattern-box displays
common English clays, coloured stones, German
porcelain, and glass—the last being an
invention since our school-days. The first
come into stock at the rate of fifty casks at a
time. Luxurious marbles seem unknown in
the Roman States; for a lady lately had a
bag of coloured taws which she was carrying
to her son at Rome, seized at Cività
Vecchia as a new kind of revolutionary
bullets. If she had not been a woman of
resources, able to knuckle down, for instruction
of the police, it is possible she might
have herself been consigned to the same safe
keeping as the marbles were.

After an hour among the standing stock
of toyshops accumulated in hundreds and
thousands of dozen dozens; after learning
where the myriads of wooden spades came
from by which the yellow sands and rolling
shingle of the British coast are dug
by infant hands every summer; the endless
wooden hoops that will bowl against
our legs on slippery days—the iron hoop,
like the iron plough, being a purely British
production; after pondering on the possible
consumers of an annual hundred thousand
gross of jews'-harps of five different patterns,
after trying some of the harmoniums at three
shillings and sixpence a dozen, and concertinas
at fourpence each, of which hundreds of dozens
go to Australia; after pondering who are the
purchasers of the brewers' drays and horses,
carriages and four; after wondering where
the children are found to build up whole
waggon-loads of bridges, houses, churches,
sheepfolds—we turned to the speciality of
the season—the Christmas-tree department.
We found a most respectable Father Christmas
who might have been copied from a fresco by
Cornelius, nicely and strongly carved in wood,
with a benevolent face, white head and beard,
a red robe, and a stout hand ready to receive
a young pine, whose brilliant green leaves
would well contrast with his ruddy cloak.
To adorn the tree, there were thousands of
tiny lamps, metal sconces, brilliant when
lighted as Golconda's caves, at a few pence
per gross, Sebastopol bombshells, mortars,
and cannon of Bohemian glass, loaded with
Scotch sweetmeats. Most striking of all are
figures of men, Turks, tumblers, enchanters,
kaisers, kings, peasants, Circassian beauties,
Indian savages, beasts of every degree of
variety, birds of large body and splendid
plumage, all manufactured with great skill
and beauty, in what is technically termed
paste, and made to contain large stores of
bonbons, to be got either by opening a bag in
Turk's robes, or unscrewing an owl's head or
an elephant's trunk. These paste toys, hollow
or solid, are so important a branch of trade,
that one celebrated German manufacturer
issues very serious pattern-books, in which
he announces, that he has not less than
ten thousand different specimens of his art.
We noted in the catalogue some oddities—
a whole column of tumblers is marked
thus in very literal English:— No. 12,
A gent tumbling on his back; No. 13, A
gent tumbling on his belly. A few pages on,
was a list of all the birds to be found in
menageries or poultry-yards—Peacocks and
turkey-cocks with glass tails and moving
wings.

Then there is a class of what may be
called intellectual toys, for playing games
with dissected maps and tee-totum travels.
We noted fifty English games, some
of them with titles of fearful dryness: as for
instance, Geographical and Historical Travels
through England and Wales; the Multiplication
Table; Weights and Measures; Historical
Dominoes and Ditto Teetotum. But
these are relieved by the Queen of Beauty;
the Magic Ring; and the Race to the
Diggings. Every year adds some new
game, which, like books, sometimes fail,
sometimes achieve a great success. Then
follow dissected games full of old familiar
faces—Robinson Crusoe, Whittington and
his Cat, Little Red Riding-hood; also,
many Scripture Stories, a Register of
Current History, the Camp at Chobham,
Emigration Life, and Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Beads form almost a part of the toy-trade,
and are a constant source of trouble at
the custom-house in disputes as whether a
solid glass or stone ball unpierced is or is not
a bead. They are collected from several
countries; Venice has had a special manufacture