slight amount of relief from the annual recurrence of Holy Week. The Derby Day makes it much easier. It is only even to a very modified extent that metropolitan locomotion on Sunday can be pronounced facile. Fewer cabs ply, it is true; and there are no railway vans or lumbering market-carts to shake the window frames and make the glass drops of the lustres on the mantel twitter as the unwieldy vehicles go clattering or plunging by; but there is yet an enormous amount of Sunday traffic in the streets. The stones of the thoroughfares are ground from morning till night by heavily burdened omnibuses; there are multitudes of private carriages about; the dog-carts and mail-phaetons of "fast" young men, and the "traps" of tradespeople intent on holiday making, run riot; and in the great suburban boulevards the tramway-cars make locomotion alike swift, cheap, nasty, and dangerous. In the central quarters of London we have not yet been subjected to the infliction of these most objectionable but inevitable horse-railroads, which have already been allowed to rob Edinburgh and Dublin of half their picturesque beauty. I suppose that ere long we shall have tramways in Holborn and the Strand, in Piccadilly and Regent Street—and after that the Deluge.

To the minds of very many students of the Social Time the Deluge has, so far as the locomotion of London is affected, already arrived; yet the Flood (not to strain a metaphor) is subject to the phenomena of very strange Glacial Periods: so many times in the course of every day the swollen tide freezes hard—that is to say, there is a "block" in the traffic. Then comes a sudden thaw; and then, with renewed fury, the enfranchised torrent of vehicles rushes through the narrow gorges-steep, rugged, and perilous as a South American cañon-of the streets. We are beginning to understand and to acknowledge that the locomotive conditions of modern London life. are in a highly unsatisfactory, disagreeable, dangerous, and disgraceful condition; and I shall not, I hope, be accused of "sensationalism" if I draw attention to the past and present state of things of this nature in the British metropolis. It appears to me that to be blocked," and to miss through that "block" an appointed interview of perhaps great monetary or social importance; to be jolted in a dirty, crazy cab; to be swindled or abused by an extortionate or a ruffianly cabman, and to get often knocked down, and sometimes run over and killed by a careless or drunken Jehu-to say nothing of the perpetual jostling, hustling, and into-the-mud pushing, and againstthe-wall grinding, which fall to the lot of foot-passengers-are all "sensations" the avoidance of which is very much to be desired. I apprehend, too, that the entire street traffic of the Great City is,

from the point of view of danger to life and limb, most painfully "sensational "; and that it will be to do service to the public to inquire whether a little common sense cannot be brought to bear on the task of abrogating the very uncomfortable "sensations" in question.

The value of a picture is very often enhanced by a pendant, to serve as a contrast, being added to it; and it is with this design that ere I speak in detail of London locomotion as it is, I shall say something briefly of London locomotion as it was. I shall be enabled to go, so my younger readers may deem, somewhat far back. I can just vaguely remember the death of George IV. Why that melancholy event should be associated in my mind with a yellow chariot upon high springs I do not, and perhaps shall never, know; but, for the record of the time during which I have been suffered to live, I can recall with tolerable accuracy the events of just forty years. I can see myself, a little child, at the Bull and Mouth in the Regent Circus, being hoisted to the summit of the "Age" coach, bound for Brighton. The gala procession of mail coaches on May-Day was a sight which much younger persons than I can remember. I can see vividly the old hackney coaches-the glaring heraldic achievements with which their panels were daubed, the lamentable Rosinantes which drew them.* I can smell the wonderfully musty odour of straw which pervaded them, and hear the curses which, with amazing volubility and sounding Saxon vigour, were vented by the always dissatisfied and usually tipsy old ruffians in many-caped "benjamins" who used to drive those shameful caravans. Faintly I can discern

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Harry Baylis (Hood's "Hal Baylis)," a great (albeit to the world obscure) wit, and a friend of Douglas Jerrold, and Joe Allen, an accomplished artist and drawing-master at the Bluecoat School, were the heroes of a piece of humour which under our present superfine conditions of civilisation could scarcely be repeated, and would certainly fail to be appreciated. They used to go down on all-fours in the club-room (in days when clubs were convivial and not stuck-up), put their heads together, and simulate the conversation of a pair of hackney-coach horses-"prads," as these steeds were called in the slang of the day. Allen's remarks on the proportion of chaff to the hay in his nose-bag, and Baylis's complaints of the rib-roasting he had endured from the vicious Savage on the box, the whole mingled with sententious reflections on men and manners, were exquisitely humorous. In the delightful "Recollections" of Mr. J. R. Planché there are frequent allusions to the mad waggeries once indulged in without shame by clever men—waggeries which in this age of "sweetness and light" would be scouted as so much vulgar tom-foolery. Only fancy the beautiful Mrs. Rousby knocking run-away raps in Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, or Mr. H. Irving offering to ride a rhinoceros in a menagerie! Yet precisely such pranks were played by the beautiful Mrs. Inchbald and by the sublime John Kemble himself.

Autres temps,

autres mœurs.

the "short stages" which used to start from the White Horse Cellar, the Green Man and Still, and the old Holborn innyards, and of which you will find abundant notice in the "Sketches by Boz,” in Charles Lamb's essays, and in Theodore Hook's novels. Then my mind turns to the omnibuses imported from Paris by Mr. Shillibeer, the funeral postmaster-very narrow and comfortless vehicles, and with no seats on the roof, were they-and to the first cabriolets, likewise Parisian importations-rickety "Stanhope" bodies, with huge sheltering hoods, and a little perch for the driver by the side. They were generally painted a staring red or yellow, and they bumped fearfully. I remember the first appearance in the streets of London of the first cellular van for prisoners, which vehicle, from the royal crown and cypher emblazoned on the panels, was at once nicknamed by the quick-witted mobile "Her Majesty's carriage." Its other more dismal and more mysterious sobriquet of "the Black Maria" originated, I believe, in Liverpool. Much nearer our own time came the monstrous advertising vans-quadrilateral hoardings upon wheels, reaching to the second-floor windows of ordinary houses and placarded by the Willings of the period with proclamations of all kinds of shows, nostrums, monsters, and trade announcements. The advertising van nuisance reached its culminating point about twenty years ago, when it was put down by Act of Parliament; but meanwhile there had been growing up a locomotive scourge still more intolerable, in the shape of the railway van-a vehicle powerfully built, possessing tremendous momentum, horsed by powerful animals, and driven cleverly but recklessly. In crowded streets these "van demons," as poor Shirley Brooks used to call them, are constrained perforce to move slowly; but in the narrow avenues of the slums their pace is often furious, and fraught with peril to the poor little callow broods of brats who, for lack of Playgrounds for the Poor, are sprawling in the gutters; while in a quiet street luckless enough to lie in the line of route from a railway terminus-such a street, for example, as Gower Street or Guilford Street, Russell Square-the passage of a railway van, its edifice frequently crowned by a yelping cur, is a source of annoyance by day, and by night, of terror to the nervous, and of agony to the sick ; scarcely inferior, indeed, to the anguish caused by the clanging of church bells, the ringing of which in a crowded city has become not only a nuisance but a preposterous absurdity. The church-going bell in a rustic vale is delicious; in London it is simply disastrous.

I can perceive no appreciable difference between the brewers' and distillers' drays, the coal waggons, and the market carts of thirty or forty years since, and the cognate vehicles which traverse the thorough

fares at the present time. Their numbers have, of course, been greatly augmented; and to me it seems that red nightcaps, among the draymen, are dying out, and are being replaced by wide-awakes and billycocks; that there are more trousers and bluchers than knee-shorts and ankle-jacks among the coal-heavers and dustmen than was the case long syne; and that market gardeners more frequently appear now-a-days in moleskin jackets than in smock-frocks. As regards the costermongers, their barrows have grown much longer than of yore, and their trade impedes the traffic to a much greater extent than was formerly the case; since the shopkeepers in populous thoroughfares, jealous of the competition of the "costers," incite the police to "move" the barrow-men "on"; thus the luckless hucksters, incessantly harried by the constables, find no rest for the soles of their feet or for the wheels of their "shallows." Yet do these barrows constitute, in reality, ambulatory Markets, patronised to an amazing extent by the poor, who fancy that they can make better bargains with the street-sellers than with the shopkeepers, and who, in London at least, show a reluctance, the reasons whereof are inscrutable, to support such general markets as those with which Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, and other great provincial cities are so abundantly provided. Covent Garden, in its retail sense, is resorted to almost exclusively by the affluent classes; the new market opened a few years since at King's Cross became within a very few weeks a melancholy failure; and collapse as dolorous-from which, I fear, it will never recover-has been the fate of the magnificent emporium erected at Bethnal Green by the admirable Lady Burdett Coutts.* It takes a hundred years, they say, to make a market; but Chicago is not yet half a century old; and the City of Lake Michigan can boast half a dozen markets which can put all London's to shame.

I must not omit, while glancing at the food supply of the capital, to point out that since my experiences began London has been relieved almost entirely of one great scourge--a whip it was with a double thong-productive in the last generation of constant obstacles to locomotion, and of chronic discomfort and danger. That abominable hot-bed of foul odours, profligacy, and cruelty to animals, Smithfield, is gone. It is as dead as the vile old Bartholomew Fair-once

* Only the very faintest hopes, even, can be entertained as to Columbia Market now succeeding as a place for the sale of cheap and good fish. In the first place a fish salesmen's "ring" has a sufficiently powerful but occult influence in the councils of the Corporation to maintain the monopoly of Billingsgate virtually intact; in the next place the poor are not to be weaned from their obstinate predilection for purchasing their fish from the itinerant dealers.

the resort of all the rogues, and the ruin of half the servant girls at the East End of London, and which for many centuries used to be held in "Smiffle": the Lord Mayor and Sheriffs opening the scandalous saturnalia, in full civic state. The elder Kean, they say, once played Richard the Third, George Barnwell, and Harlequin, all in the course of a quarter of an hour, at one of the Bartlemy theatres ; and Belzoni, the famous Egyptian traveller, was fain at one period in his strange career to appear in pink tights and spangles and a Roman helmet and plumes at one of the booths in the fair, lifting prodigious weights, and bending great iron bars over his mighty fore-arm, as "the Strong Man of the Desert." But all these tales, and Charles Lamb's delightful paper on his friend Jem White's annual hot sausage feast to the youthful chimney sweeps among the "pens," are as obsolete reading now as the records of the Pie-Poudre Court, as the horrible histories of the burnings and boilings of heretics and coiners in Smithfield, and as the wonderful collection of humours brought together in Ben Jonson's "Bartholomew Fair"; the fanaticism of Zeal-o'-the-Land Bury; the idiocy of Bartholomew Cokes, the Esquire of Harrow; the conceits of Lanthorn Leatherhead, the hobby-horse seller; the knaveries and ruffianism of Knockem, the horse-courser, and Mooncalf, the tapster; and the salt drolleries of Joan Trash, the huckster of gingerbread; and Ursula, the monstrous fat woman who sold roast pig. But Smithfield, when I knew it (an end was made of the Fair about '45, I think) was not by any means a funny place. It was a gloomy, filthy, and uproarious nuisance. Every market morning ushered in a day of riot, drunkenness, and cruelty. First, the thousands of sheep and pigs and the hundreds of oxen and calves had to be driven through the crowded streets, or dragged from the miserable lairs about Cow Cross, to be huddled together in the "pens" of Smithfield. Then, when they had been sold, they were driven again their sides thwacked or prodded with sharp goads, their tails twisted, or their horns plucked out-through the most densely populated thoroughfares, not only of the City, but of the West End: for there were scores of private slaughterhouses in every neighbourhood-in Belgravia, behind Piccadilly, and close to Grosvenor Square, as well as in Bishopsgate and Whitechapel. Some scores of sheep used to get run over by carts and coaches every market morning; and very often the bullocks, overdriven, tortured, and parched with thirst, went mad, and ran amuck in the genteelest districts tossing children, goring old ladies, bursting into china shops and smashing the crockery; and affording the keenest diversion to an