startled by the sight of five couple of boys
chained together, going under care of tipstaves
to Bridewell—an exhibition, we grieve to say,
which remained common and familiar in the
same quarter for more than half a century
afterwards. On another occasion, in that
same neighbourhood, he was led by an awful
curiosity, having heard that it was
"notorious for its constant supply of Tyburn,"
into a court called Blueberry Alley, which
he found to be, precisely what to our disgrace
such courts remain at the present hour, "filled
with small huttish kind of houses, the habitations
of filth and vice." Having occasion to
cross Hounslow Heath, his attention is arrested
by "three monuments of human folly and divine
justice"—as many gibbets with the remains
of so many wretches, hanging in chains. At
Tyburn itself, he sees thirteen executed in one
day; in connection with which he has to note
the melancholy consideration that robberies
are nevertheless greatly increasing, as indeed
is thieving of all kinds in the metropolis. Not
long after, he beheld a similar exhibition of
ten suffering in one day on the same scaffold.
Quietly walking up Holborn on another day,
shortly after having seen two pickpockets
publicly whipped at the Old Bailey (when
the assembled mob expressed much dissatisfaction
with the very moderate lashing
inflicted on the oldest offender, and loudly
swore "he had bought off Jack Ketch"), he
found a throng of ordinary people crowding
round a chaise filled with young children of
about seven years of age, and, inquiring what
it meant, learnt to his horror that so many
infants, "capable of being trained to useful
employments, and becoming blessings to
society," were already known for hardened
young sinners, and at that instant were on
their way to Newgate. "What was his amazement,
too, to find a clergyman of the Church
of England suddenly carried off to Poultry
Compter on a charge of forgery,—his real
name Dodd, but better known by the
name of the Maccaroni Doctor; and to
remember that this was the same reverend
divine whom, not many months before, he
had heard at the Magdalen preaching from
the text These things I command you, that ye
love one another "a most elegant, sensible,
serious, and pathetic discourse, enough to
have warmed a heart not callous to the
impressions of pity,"and which did indeed warm
his, until his eyes "flowed with tears of
compassion."

The tears of compassion due to Doctor
Dodd in the pulpit, however, were certainly
not due to him in his more proper place, the
prison; and Mr. Curwen's feeling, when he
heard what his previous career had been, took
the very different and more natural direction
of surprise that such a man should have been
permitted to mount the pulpit at all. But
without dwelling upon this, or seeking to
account for the indifferentism which at
that time had crept into the Church, and
which the vigorous preachings of Wesley
and Whitfield were rapidly driving out ot
it, let us accompany our New England
visitor to one of those fashionable Sunday
promenades at which it was then no unusual
or indecorous thing to find yourself, in the
evening, crowding and pushing past the
parson under whose pulpit, in the morning,
you had been sitting with reverent attention,
—and of which the Doctor of Divinity so
unexpectedly committed to the Poultry was
a noted and constant visitor.

The Sunday evening promenade, says Mr.
Curwen (and the remark may be not unworthy
of attention with such a question as the Sunday
admission to the Sydenham Palace still
undetermined), had been invented because less
objectionable places of amusement were closed
by enactment. In lieu of such, the promenade
had been instituted "to compensate for twelve
tedious hours' interval laid under an interdict
by the laws of the country, as yet unrepealed
formally by the legislature, though effectually
so in the houses of the great and wealthy,
from whence religion and charity are but
too generally banished." It was held at the
house (now D'Almaine's) in Soho Square,
which the Lords Carlisle occupied to within
twenty years of this date, which Mrs. Cornelys
had afterwards hired for her celebrated balls
and masquerades, and which—on that
ingenious but unsuccessful lady's retreat from it,
to vend asses' milk at Knightsbridge—was
fitted up with rooms à la Chinois, with variegated
lamp-lit galleries, with grottoes of
natural evergreens, with wildernesses of
flowering moss and grass, with dimly-lighted
caves of spar and stalactite, with Egyptian
recesses mysterious in hieroglyphic panellings,
and with tea-rooms and tea-tables for
accommodation of a thousand promenaders. The
employment of the company was simply
walking through the rooms, and drinking
(when they could get it) tea, or coffee, or chocolate,
or negus, or lemonade; for which privilege
tickets were purchased at the doors costing
three shillings each. What such a place would
degenerate into, the reader can easily imagine.
"Though it is also resorted to by persons of
irreproachable character," says our grave and
elderly friend, "among the wheat will be
tares; the ladies were rigged out in gaudy
attire, and attended by bucks, bloods, and
macaronies." Full dress he found not requisite;
but respectable habiliments absolutely
so; and on the night he attended, the spurs of
one promenader caught carelessly in a lady's
flounce, whereupon the booted individual was
obliged to apologise, and take them off. Yet
very difficult it must have been for anybody,
spurred or not, to keep clear of the flounces,
seeing that the ladies appear to have come
uniformly in two divisions, of which the first
swept their track by long trails, and the other
by enormous hoops and petticoats. A good
thousand thronged the rooms on the night
when Mr. Curwen was there; and such was