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to as Mrs. Van Umbug's husband. If you ask the coachman in the adjacent mews whose horses are those the helper is harnessing to the brougham, he will probably answer, "Mrs. Van Umbug's." The servants in the house in Gladiator Street, talk continually of "Missus" , but scarcely ever mention "Master." The tradespeople usually send in their bills to Mrs. Van Umbug; and it is certain that it is that lady who issues the invitations and receives the company at her Thursday conversaziones. Mr. Van Umbug, M.P., is scarcely ever seen at those gatherings, and when he is, rarely, manifest, it is in a very meek and subdued manner. He sneaks in and out as if the house didn't belong to him , and appears desperately afraid of the portly man in black with the white Berlin gloves who hands round the tea and coffee.

This present Thursday at Mrs. Van Umbug's is a great literary one.

The lions of literature are present in the flesh. Here is the distinguished Snortup, author of "The Common Objects of the Back-yard," "Geology in Joke," "Trigonometry Judged by Taxation," "The Extinct Animals of Eel-pie Island," and other erudite and ponderous scientific works. Snortup, who is a Doctor of Philosophy of the University of Schinckelbrauen, is a heavy man, with a black wig and a huge black satin stock, in which gleams a cameo bearing a curious resemblance to an oyster. He snuffs a great deal, and when he speaks he does not belie his name, but literally snorts. Near him is young Twiddles, with his auburn hair, his turn-down collar, and Byron tie, his speckled silk stockings and low shoes, his baby face and falsetto voice. Twiddles, who writes under the pseudonym of Swedenborg Scanderberg, has just published a volume of poems of the ultra-spasmodic order. In passages replete with burning eloquence, he has spoken of the "moonbeam's frosty rime, that hoars the head of nature, and makes last summer's sapling patriarchal white." His grand passage in "Ladye Babbynetta," in which he alludes to "the hot and rabid ice, that burns and sears by force of congelation," has been enthusiastically spoken of by Sidney Muffins, editor of the "Tomfool" weekly journal. Muffins is not a poet yet, but he hopes to be one when his whiskers grow and he has read "Cassel's Popular Educator." Meanwhile, he swears by Twiddles, and fiercely abuses, in print and in person, those who can't avoid the conviction that Twiddles is a donkey.

Besides Mr. O'Roarer and his fellows already described, there is the Honourable Simperkin Blushington, that pleasing novelist and Oriental traveller. A little to the left, and scowling at the Honourable Simperkin fearfully, is Leathers, the author of "A Jaunt to Jericho" and "Seven Years in a Penal Settlement." Leathers wears a huge cut-velvet waistcoat, that looks like a fragment from some tapestried window-curtain. He is not at all clever, is Leathers--has no humour, observation, or power of description; but he has got a name among the book-selling trade, somehow, as a "good travelling hand"--a safe man for two volumes royal octavo with plates and a map--and so soon does any foreign country, from Canton to British Columbia, begin, from political or other causes, to attract public attention, so soon is Leathers commissioned to write his two bulky volumes of travels therein. Ill-natured people say that he keeps particulars relative to geography pigeon-holed in his library, and that he never went further than Boulogne, in the days of the five-shilling fares; but Leathers gets his price, and can afford to laugh at the evil-speaking. Bonassus, the publisher, of Bumpus Street, will have Leathers's portrait in the next edition of "Rambles in the Island of Perim."

I am sure it is very ungallant in me to have been so long silent regarding the ladies who grace the literary conversazione with their presence. A man must be, indeed, a brute who could pass over the charms of Miss Withers, aged forty, authoress of "Crackings of the Heartstrings," "Shudderings of the Soul," "Crinklings of the Spirit-skin," "Eyeball Darts," and other pathetic lyrics. Miss Withers once kept a boarding-school, but gradually languished into poetry. She attained considerable celebrity in the time of the Annuals, but on the downfall of those amusing ephemerides, she betook herself to history, and is the writer of "Lives of the Wet Nurses of the Princesses of England," "Memorials of celebrated Bedchamber Women," and "The Silversticks in Waiting before the Conquest"--all works replete with critical acumen, and brimful of historical lore, though following a little too closely in the footsteps of a lady who has written an admirable and genuine History concerning some Queens of England. Miss Withers, however, has done very well for her publishers and for herself. She is one of those authoresses who, dying, would never wish to blot out a line they had written, simply because Heaven has gifted them with a happy mental cecity that prevents them from discerning that nine-tenths of their works should never have been written at all. You may see Miss Withers any day in the British Museum Reading-room, vigorously compiling away at the desk marked "for ladies only." She has piles of books around her; she makes the attendants' lives a torment to them with the flying squadrons of book-tickets she deposits at the bar; she walks about the india-rubber flooring with one pen behind her ear and another in her mouth. She, being tall, bony, severe of aspect, and much given to snuff-taking, is generally feared by the Museum frequenters. She wrenches volumes of the catalogue from mild young clergymen in spectacles and M. B. waistcoats. She follows line after line of the printed page with her heavy inkstained forefinger. Once Dedman the pedigree-hunter, who was filling up his ticket opposite Miss Withers, was venturous enough to ask her the day of the month. She called him, in a hollow voice, "fellow," on the spot, snuffed indignantly, and afterwards spoke of him to the attendant with the red moustache as an "impertinent jackanapes." The only person with whom she condescends to be conversational in the reading-room, is Eglintoun Beaverup, the famous novelist, satirist, poet, traveller, Quarterly Reviewer, essayist, epigrammatist and politician, who stood for the Macbeth district of burghs last general election, and proved in an article in the "Rampant Magazine," that the present Duke of Sennacherib's grandfather was a pork butcher in Liquorpond Street, and that Sir Ranulph De Brie's papa owed his baronetcy to a loan of ten thousand pounds, advanced by him to the Prince Regent on the security of a pinchbeck watch, which that improvident scion of royalty, having no other available pawnable property, had borrowed for the nonce from one of the helpers in his stable. Beaverup is himself descended from Brian de Bois Guilbert on the father's side, and from the original Thane of Cawdor, who slew Duncan, on that of the mother. Miss Withers will sometimes exchange deadly whispers with him relative to the mushroom characteristics of our modern peerage, and the departed glories of soccage and villeinage, infang theof and outfang theof.

Of course there are some titled folks at Mrs. Van Umbug's conversazione: it would not be complete without a literary lord--a harmless nobleman, generally, who has translated Horace, invented a new metre, or discovered a new butterfly; and a literary lady--if separated from her husband all the better, who paints him in the darkest of colours, as the hero of every one of her novels. And, equally of course, Ethelred Guffoon is here. Ethelred Guffoon is everywhere. He is one of Mrs. Van Umbug's special favourites. She calls him by his Christian name. He hunts up new lions for her; occasionally he officiates as peacemaker, and prevents the lions from growling and fighting among themselves. He rushes from Mrs. Van Umbug's conversazione to the Pontoppidan Theatre, to see a new face, which he must criticise; after that he will sit up half the night to review Mr. Gladstone's Homer, for the "Daily Scratcher," and will be at Somerset House by punctual office hours the next morning. A man of the age, Ethelred Guffoon--a man of the time, a good fellow, but frivolous.

I wonder whether the celebrities one sees at this shadowy conversazione really represent the literary world--the real people who write the books and think the thoughts. I am afraid they do not. I fear that to find the princes of the pen, the giants of the land of letters, I must go further afield. Lo, here is Great Tom of Chelsea, sitting cosily, in his back parlour, smoking a pipe of bird's-eye with Eglintoun Beaverup, and telling him he is about having his ceilings whitewashed. Here is Lord Livy poring over Restoration and Revolution broadsides by his reading-lamp in his lonely chambers in the Albany;--no, not lonely, the spirits of the old historic men come from their dusty shelves and clap him on the shoulder, and cry, "Go on and prosper, Thomas Babington, Lord Livy." The great Mr. Polyphemus, the novelist, is bidden to the Duke of Sennacherib's, and as he rolls to Sennacherib House in his brougham, meditates satiric onslaughts on "Tom Garbage" and "Young Grubstreet"--those Tom Thumb foes of his--in the next number of the "Pennsylvanians." Mr. Goodman Twoshoes is reading one of his own books to the members of the Chawbacon Athenaeum, and making, I am delighted to hear, a mint of money by the simple process. Goldpen, the poet, has taken his wife and children to Miss P. Horton's entertainment; Bays, the great dramatist, is sitting in the stalls of the Pontoppidan Theatre listening with rapt ears to the jokes in his own farce; and Selwyn Cope, the essayist, is snoring snugly between the sheets, having to rise very early to-morrow morning in order to see a man hanged. And where are the working-men of literature, the conscripts of the pen, doomed to carry Brown Bess, for sixpence a day, all their lives? Where are Garbage and Grubstreet? In the worst inn's worst room, with racing prints half hung, the walls of plaster and the floors of sand, at once a deal table but stained with beer, sits Garbage playing four-handed cribbage with an impenitent hostler, a sporting man who has sold the fight, and a potboy who is a returned convict? Sits he there, I ask, or is he peacefully pursuing his vocation in country lodgings? And Grubstreet, is he in some murky den, with a vulture's quill dipped in vitriol inditing libels upon the great, good, and wise of the day? Wonder upon wonders, Grubstreet sits in a handsome study--listening to his wife laughing, over her crochet work, at Mr. Polyphemus's last attack on him, and dandling a little child upon his knee! Oh! the strange world in which we live, and the post that people will knock their heads against!

Thus circumstanced, I feel it becoming my degree to stay on the outside of great houses, and, herding among the crowd and the link-men, to witness the setting down and the taking up of the carriages coming to or going from evening parties. It has always been my lot so to stand on the kerb, to be a continual dweller on the threshold. I have stood there to see people married, to see people buried, and have murmured: "My turn must come next, surely;" but my time has not come yet. A king has patted me on the head, and I have sate, as a child, on the knee of the handsomest woman in Europe. I have been on the brink of many a precipice; I have attained the edge of many a cloud. But I have stopped there. I have always been like the recalcitrant costermonger's donkey, "going for to go," but never accomplishing the journey in its entirety.

Who is dead by this time, most probably; but I can still stand by the side of his successor, at the door of the great house, by the lamp and lantern's glare, and see the gay company pass in and out. How the horses champ! how the dresses rustle! how the jewels shine! and what fair women and brave men are here congregated! Messrs. Weippert's or Collinet's band are upstairs; Messrs. Gunter's men have brought the ices; there are flirtations in the conservatories, and squeezings of hands interchanged on the stairs. Vows of love are spoken, flowers from bouquets are given; and is it not, after all, the same old, old story, that boys and girls will love one another, and that the old people will look on with pretended severity, but with real contentment in their hearts, and that there will be present a few jealous and cankered ones, who will look on to envy the others because they are so happy? Drive envy from your hearts, ye who ride not in gilded chariots, and move not in the "fashionable circles." There is as much truth, love, and gaiety at a "sixpenny hop," between maid-servants and journeymen bakers, as at the most refined evening parties.

MIDNIGHT.--THE HAYMARKET, AND THE SUB-EDITOR'S ROOM.

But we have come to the complexion of midnight, and the hour must be described. It is fraught with meaning for London. You know that in poetical parlance midnight is the time when church-yards yawn , and graves give up their dead. And there be other grave-yards in London town--yards where no tombstones or brick vaults are--that at midnight yawn and send forth ghosts to haunt the city. A new life begins for London at midnight. Strange shapes appear of men and women who have lain a-bed all the day and evening, or have remained torpid in holes and corners. They come out arrayed in strange and fantastic garments, and in glaringly gaslit rooms screech and gabble in wild revelry. The street corners are beset by night prowlers. Phantoms arrayed in satin and lace flit upon the sight. The devil puts a diamond ring on his taloned finger, sticks a pin in his shirt, and takes his walks abroad. It is a stranger sight than even the painter Raffet imagined in his picture of Napoleon's midnight review, and it is, I think, a much better thing to be at home and in bed, than wandering about and peeping into the mysteries of this unholy London night life.

I know this book well; have conned its grim pages, and studied its unwholesome lore, attentively. But I am not about to make you a too-recondite participant in my knowledge. Were it not that the appointed hours were meted out to me, and that from one of the hours--midnight--the Haymarket is inseparable, the wicked street should find no place here; but I must be faithful to my trust, and the bad thoroughfare must be in part described.

Foreigners have frequently pointed out to me a peculiar aspect of London, and one which appeals strongly to the observant faculties, and which, nevertheless, may escape us Cockneys who are to the metropolitan manner born. It is the duality of the huge city, not so much as regards its night and day side, as in its Sunday and week-day appearance. And this is not wholly to be ascribed to the shop shutters being closed. The Strand on Ash Wednesdays and Good Fridays is still the Strand; but on the Sabbath it would seem as though every house in the West and East ends had put on its special Sunday suit, and had decorated itself with a certain smug spruceness quite marked and distinct. You have a difficulty in recognising your most familiar streets. Regent Street is quite altered. The aspect of Piccadilly is entirely changed; and Cheapside is no more like the Cheapside of yesterday than Hamlet is like Hecuba. The people, too, are not by any means the same people you meet on week-days. Not only their clothes are different, but their faces, their manners, their very gait and bearing, seem changed. You meet people out walking on Sundays, who during the week are confined to places where they are hidden from the public gaze, or are at most but half visible. You see the bar-maids' skirts and the pawnbrokers' legs on Sundays. From Monday to Saturday you can see but their busts. You may nod to a sheriff's officer on Sunday without entertaining any apprehensions as to the piece of paper he may have against you in that dismal black leather pocket-book of his. The omnibus roofs are covered, the steamboats' decks are crowded, the cabs full, the pavement thronged, the very saddle-horses bestridden by men who seem of a different race to the outside world of the previous four and twenty hours. Dirty streets look clean; disreputable streets decorous; and thoroughfares that were as still as mice during the week, become quite noisy on Sundays with carriage and cab wheels, as sinners of wealth and distinction rattle up to the doors of the fashionable chapel.

Or, "another way," as old Mrs. Glasse says in her cookery book. At the Coventry Street extremity of the Haymarket stands that celebrated and long-established institution known as the Royal Albert Potato Can. At that three-legged emporium of smoking vegetables, gleaming with block tin painted red, and brazen ornaments, the humble pilgrim of the Haymarket may halt and sup for a penny. For a penny? What say I? for a halfpenny even, may the belated and impoverished traveller obtain a refreshment at once warm, farinaceous, and nourishing. Garnish your potato, when the Khan of the Haymarket has taken him from his hot blanket-bed, and cut him in two--garnish him with salt and pepper, eschew not those condiments, they are harmless, nay, stimulating; but ho! my son, beware of the butter! it is confusion. Better a dry potato and a contented mind, than dreadful Irish salt grease--for butter I dare not call it, which may give you a bilious attack that will last for a month.

I should like to know what has been the use of my recommending these various grades of supper to you, from the lordly Caf? de l'Europe to the humble Potato Can, when I should have known all along, and as it were intuitively, that your mind was bent upon oysters, and that oysters after the play you were determined to have. Come along, then, a' goodness' name, and if oysters are to be the order of the night, e'en let us have them.

As in this real life of ours, Old Age and Infancy often meet on neutral ground, and the prattle of the child goes forth with hand out-stretched to meet the graybeard's maundering: so, oh reader, do I find the beginning and the end of these papers drawing closer and closer together. Ere many hours they will meet; and their conjunction shall be the signal for their decay. You will remember how, when the day was very young, the morning scarce swaddled, and kicking in his cradle with encrimsoned heels , we visited a great newspaper office, and saw the publication of the monster journal. Now, when midnight itself is fallen into the sere and yellow, we stand once more within the precincts of journalism. This is not, however, the monster journal that has all Printing House Square to roar and rattle in. No: our office is in the Strand. We are free of the charmed domains. We pass up a narrow court running by the side of the office, push aside a heavy door, ascend the creaking staircase, and discreetly tapping at a door, this time covered with green baize, find ourselves in the presence of Mr. Limberly, the sub-editor of the "Daily Wagon."

ONE O'CLOCK A.M.--EVANS'S SUPPER-ROOMS, AND A FIRE.

Now, whatever can this Danish old gentleman and his verdant spectacles have to do with One o'Clock in the morning, and Evans's Supper-rooms? You must have patience, and you shall hear. In subsequent chatty interviews, it came out that the old gentleman had once upon a time--a very long while ago, more than a quarter of a century--been in England. His reminiscences of our country were very dim and indistinct by this time. His knowledge of the English language, I take it, had not at any time been very extensive, and it was reduced now to a few phrases and interjections; some trifling oaths, a few facetious party-cries, current, I presume, at the time of his visit, and having, mainly, reference to Catholic Emancipation and the Reform Bill; these, with some odds and ends of tattered conversation, formed his philological stock in trade. But, even as "single-speech Hamilton" had his solitary oration, Mrs. Dubsy's hen her one chick, and Major Panton his unique run of luck at the card-table, so my old gentleman had his one story which he persisted in delivering in English. It was a mysterious and almost incomprehensible legend; and began thus: "'Ackney Rod! Aha!" Then he would snuff and suck his lump of sugar, and I would look on wonderingly. Then he would explain matters a little. "'Ackney Rod. I live there so long time ago. Aha!" This would lead to a renewed series of snuffings and suckings, and he would proceed--"Vontleroy he not 'ang. He rich man, banquier in America. He 'ang in a sospender basket. Aha!" For the life of me, I could not for a long time understand the drift about "Vontleroy" and the "sospender basket;" but at length a light broke in upon me, and I began to comprehend that this wondrous legend related to Henry Fauntleroy, the banker, who was hanged at Newgate for forgery, and concerning whose apocryphal rescue from strangulation--by the means, according to some, of a silver tube in his windpipe, and, according to others, of an apparatus of wicker-work, which, suspending him from the waist, so took the strain off his neck--rumours were current at the time of his death and for a considerable period afterwards. This cock-and-bull story was well-nigh all the poor man could recollect about England, and he decidedly made the most of it.

And, after all, I have only introduced him as a species of gentleman-usher to another foreign acquaintance--with whom my intercourse was even more transient, for I met him but once in my life, and then had only about seven minutes' conversation with him on the deck of a steamer--whose knowledge of English and recollection of England were even more limited. "Ver fine place," he remarked, referring to my native land. "Moch night plaisir, London. Sing-song ver good. Ev'ns magnifique." There, the secret of my digression is out now, and I land you--somewhat wearied with the journey, it may be--under the Piazza of Covent Garden Market.

Mr. Charles Dickens once declared in print that were he to start a horse for the Derby, he would call that horse Fortnum and Mason: the delightful hampers of edibles and drinkables vended by that eminent firm about the period of Epsom Races being connected with the most pleasurable of his impressions concerning that exciting sporting event. I have no doubt that my steamboat acquaintance was not by any means solitary in his enthusiastic estimate of the "magnifique" nature of Ev'ns, or EVANS'S, and its "sing-song;" and his opinion is, I have reason to believe, shared by many hundreds of English country gentlemen who patronise the Bedford, the Tavistock, the Hummums, and other kindred Covent Garden hotels, and who at Evans's find their heartiest welcome and their most inexhaustible fund of amusement. Nor can I see myself, exactly, how this great town of ours could manage to get on without the time-honoured Cave of Harmony; for be it known to all men--at least to so many as do not know it already--Evans's, though Captain Costigan is no longer permitted to sing his songs there, and even Colonel Newcome, were he to volunteer to oblige the company with a song, would be politely requested to desist by a waiter--is the "Cave," and the "Cave" is Evans's. It is not without a certain sly chuckle of gratulation that I record this fact. Those friends of mine who have adopted the highly honourable pursuit of hiding round corners in order to throw, with the greater security, jagged stones at me as I pass, those precious purists and immaculate precisians who cry hard upon a writer on London life in the nineteenth century, because he describes things and places which every man knows to exist, and whose existence he for one has not the hypocrisy to deny--these good gentlemen will scarcely be angry with their poor servant, Scriblerus, for giving a word-picture of a place of amusement which is immortalised in the first chapter of "The Newcomes." And please to observe, gentlemen, that I am not about to venture on the very delicate ground with respect to the quality of the songs once sung at Evans's, and so boldly trodden by Mr. Thackeray. I have the less need to do so, as that delicate or indelicate ground has long since--and to the honour of the present proprietor, Mr. Green--been ploughed up and sown with salt, and the musical programme rendered as innocuous as the bill of fare of a festival in a cathedral town.

So you understand, now, why I was compelled to dispense with the assistance of Mr. Paddy Green and Mr. Peter Cunningham, and why I am reduced to a dependence on my own personal reminiscences with respect to Evans's, without the adventitious aid of recondite anecdote and historical data. Here is the place as I remember it.

One o'clock in the morning. Of course we are supposed to be spending just a fortnight in town, and putting up at the Bedford, or it would never do to be so early-late abroad. We have been to the play, and have consumed a few oysters in the Haymarket; but the principal effect of that refreshment seems to have been to make us ten times hungrier. The delicate bivalves of Colchester have failed in appeasing our bucolic stomachs. We require meat. So, says the friend most learned in the ways of the town to his companion--"Meat at our hotel we eschew, for we shall find the entertainment of the dearest and dullest. We will go sup at Evans's, for there we can have good meat and good liquor at fair rates, and hear a good song besides." Whereupon we walk, till the piazza, about which I have kept you so long lingering, looms in sight. A low doorway, brilliantly lit with gas, greets our view. We descend a flight of some steps, pass through a vestibule, and enter the "Cave of Harmony."

But see the suppers set forth for the strong-stomached supporters of Evans's. See the pyramids of dishes arrive; the steaming succession of red-hot chops, with their brown, frizzling caudal appendages sobbing hot tears of passionate fat. See the serene kidneys unsubdued, though grilled, smiling though cooked, weltering proudly in their noble gravy, like warriors who have fallen upon the field of honour. See the hot yellow lava of the Welsh rabbit stream over and engulf the timid toast. Sniff the fragrant vapour of the corpulent sausage. Mark how the russet leathern-coated baked potato at first defies the knife, then gracefully cedes, and through a lengthened gash yields its farinaceous effervescence to the influence of butter and catsup. The only refreshments present open to even a suspicion of effeminacy are the poached eggs, glistening like suns in a firmament of willow-pattern plate; and those too, I am willing to believe, are only taken by country-gentlemen hard pressed by hunger, just to "stay their stomachs," while the more important chops and kidneys are being prepared. The clouds of pepper shaken out on these viands are enough to make Slawkenbergius sneeze for a fortnight; the catsup and strong sauces poured over them are sufficient to convince Sir Toby Belch that there are other things besides ginger, which are apt to be "hot i' the mouth," and, as humble servitors in attendance on these haughty meats, are unnumbered discs of butter, and manchets of crustiest bread galore.

Pints of stout, if you please, no puny half-measures, pints of sparkling pale ale, or creaming Scotch, or brownest Burton, moisten these sturdy rations. And when the strong men have supped, or rather before they have supped, and while they have supped, and indeed generally during the evening, there bursts out a strong smell of something good to drink; and presently you perceive that the strong men have ordered potent libations of spirituous liquors, hot whiskey-and-water being the favourite one; and are hastily brewing mighty jorums of punch and grog, which they undoubtedly quaff; puffing, meanwhile, cigars of potency and fragrance--pipes are tabooed--taken either from their own cigar-cases, or else recently laid in from the inexhaustible stores of the complaisant Herr von Joel.

"Who will always be retained on this establishment," the proprietor good-naturedly promises, and more good-naturedly performs. "Why," asks the neophyte, "is it necessary for my well-being, or the prosperity of this establishment, that the services of Herr von Joel should always be retained thereon? Why this perpetual hypothecation of Joel? Can no one else sell me cigars? What am I to Joel, or what is Joel to me? Confound Joel!" To which I answer: "Rash neophyte, forbear, and listen. In the days when thou wert very young and foolish, wore lay-down collars, and had no moustaches, save the stickiness produced by much-sucked sweetstuff on the upper lips--in the days when thou wert familiar, indeed, with Doctor Wackerbarth's seminary for young gentlemen, but not with Evans's--Herr von Joel, young and sprightly then, was a famous Mimic. In imitating the cries of birds, Herr von Joel was unrivalled, and has never been approached. In the old days, when he was famous, and did the lark and the linnet so well, he brought crowds of visitors to the old supper-rooms, who laughed and wondered at his mimicry, supped and drank, and smoked, and paid fat scores. So Joel, in his generation, was a benefactor to Evans's. And now, when the thorax is rusty, and the larynx no longer supple, the faithful servant rests upon "his well-earned laurels"--of tobacco-leaves--among the old faces of old friends. "His helmet is a hive for bees"--and Havannah cigars, and "his services will always be retained in this establishment." One would shudder to think of Wellington's old charger, Copenhagen, being sent to Cow Cross, to the knackers, instead of ending his days peacefully in a paddock at Strathfieldsaye. No one likes to hear of Sophie Arnould or Mademoiselle Camargo being brought to indigence in their declining years. Guilbert in the hospital, Cam?ens starving, blind Belisarius begging for an obolus, these are pitiable; and to this day I think the country might have done something for the widow of Ramo Samee. We give pensions to the families of those who use their swords well, but I should like to know how many can swallow them as Ramo did?

"... Most musical of Lords, A playing madrigals and glees Upon the harpsichords."

And this child's father was old Lord Mornington, whose son was Arthur, Duke of Wellington.

Tell me, you who are so quick of hearing, what is that noise above our heads--it must be in the street beyond--and which dominates the revelry as the sound of the cannon did the music of the Duchess of Richmond's ball before Quatre Bras. It grows louder and louder, it comes nearer and nearer, it swells into a hoarse continually-jarring roar, as I sit smoking at Evans's. The sham blackamoor on the stage pauses in his buffoonery, forbears to smite his woolly pate with the tambourine; his colleague's accordion is suspended in the midst of a phthisic wheeze, and the abhorred bones quiver, yet unreverberate in the nicoto-alcholoicho-charged air. The rattle of knives and forks, the buzzing conversation, cease; a hundred queries as to the cause of the noise rise on as many lips; the waiters forget to rattle the change, the toper forgets to sip his grog: there is intromission even in the inspiration of tobacco fumes: then comes the mighty answer--comes at once from all quarters--caught up, echoed and re-echoed, and fraught with dread, the momentous word--FIRE!

"Fire! fire!" It matters not how late the hour be, how important the avocations of the moment, that magic cry sets all legs, save those of the halt and the bed-ridden, in motion--strikes on every tympanum. "Fire! fire!" as the sound rolls earwards, the gambler starts up from the dicing-table, the bibber leaves the wine-pots, the lover rises from his mistress's feet, the blushing maiden forgets half of that last glowing declaration, the captive runs to his grated window, the sluggard sits up on his couch, the sick man turns his head on his pillow to whence issues the portentous cry. Hundreds of impulses are bound up in the uncontrollable desire that prompts us to run at once after the "Fire!" Fear: it may be our own premises that are blazing, our own dear ones that are in peril. Hope and cupidity: we may be rogues, and there may be rich plunder from a fire. Duty: we may be policemen, firemen, or newspaper reporters. Generous emulation, brave self-devotion: there may be lives at stake and lives to save. Curiosity: it is as good to see a house burned as a bear baited or a man hanged. All these may prompt us to follow the howl of the fire-dogs; but, chiefest of all, is the vague, indefinite, yet omnipotent desire to swell a pursuing crowd, to join in a hue and cry, to press to the van of the chasers: to hunt something, in fact.

Notwithstanding all which there is a terrific fire in the very midst of St. Giles's to-night; and that conflagration may do more in its generation towards the abolition of the district, than all the astute contractors and speculative builders. The fire is at an oilman's shop, who likewise manufactures and deals in pickles, and from the nature of the combustible commodities in which he trades, you may anticipate a rare blaze. Blaze! say an eruption of Mount Vesuvius rather; far high into the air shoot columns of flame, and hanging thickly over all are billows upon billows of crimson smoke, the whole encircled by myriads of fiery sparks that fall upon the gaping crowd and make them dance and yell with terror and excitement.

And still the fire leaps up into the cold morning air. The house will be gutted out and out, the police now say authoritatively. Happily there is no danger to be apprehended now for human life within the blazing pile. The oil and pickle chandler does not dwell in his warehouse. He has a snug villa at Highgate, and is very probably now contemplating the motley sky from his parlour-window, and wondering wherever the fire can be. The only living person who had to be rescued was an old housekeeper, who persisted in saying that she had lived in the house "seven and thirty year," and wouldn't leave it while one stone remained on another; which was not so very difficult a task, seeing that the premises were built throughout of brick. She had to be hustled at last, and after much to do, into the fire-escape; but for hours afterwards she led the firemen a terrible life respecting the fate of a certain tom-cat, of extraordinary sagacity, called Ginger, which she averred to have left sitting on the lid of the water-butt, but which very soon afterwards appeared in the flesh, so scorched that it smelt like burnt feathers, and clawing convulsively at the collar of a police-constable of the F. division. It is, perhaps, scarcely worth while to state that in the course of the fire a poor woman is carried from one of the adjoining hovels dead. She was close upon her confinement, and the child and she are gone to a more peaceable and merciful city, where lives, at least, are assured for ever.

Towards two o'clock, the columns of flame begin to grow slenderer, less continuous, more fitful. The clanking of the fire-engines does not decrease, however, in the least, though the firemen joyfully declare that the fire is "got under." The surrounding publicans--who, though they closed at midnight, have all taken down their shutters with marvellous alacrity--are doing a roaring trade in beer, which is distributed to the volunteers at the pumps in sufficiently liberal quantities, a check being kept upon the amount consumed by means of tickets. Where the tickets come from I have no means of judging, but this wonderful fire-brigade seem prepared for everything.

So, feeling very hot and dry, and dazed about the eyes with constant contemplation of the flames, I leave St. Giles's and the oil and pickle vender's warehouse, which, when daylight comes, will be but a heap of charred, steaming ruins, and wander westward, musing over the fires I have seen and the fires I have read of. I think of the great fire of London in Charles's time--the fire that began at Pudding Lane and ended at Pye Corner, and in commemoration of which they built that strange monument, with the gilt shaving-brush at the top--

"... London's column, pointing to the skies, Like a tall bully, lifts its head and lies."

TWO O'CLOCK A.M.--A LATE DEBATE IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS, AND THE TURNSTILE OF WATERLOO BRIDGE.

With this candid confession of my political shortcomings , and having thus, I hope, disarmed criticism, I shall now venture into the perilous region of politics. It is Two o'Clock in the morning; we will even be present in the spirit at a late debate in the "House."

Up in the reporters' gallery there, the gentlemen who submit to "work on an intellectual treadmill for three hundred pounds a year," are having hard times of it. The "turns" of stenography are getting shorter and shorter; but, alas! they have been terribly frequent during the debate. How unmerciful have been the maledictions bestowed on Gulliver and his indemnity since five p.m. when the Speaker was at prayers! Gulliver would be a bold man to venture into the cushion-benched chamber behind the gallery where the gentlemen of the Press retire to transcribe their notes. O'Dobbin of the "Flail" has been dying to hear Tamberlik in "Otello" these six weeks past. His chief gave him a stall this morning. Gulliver sits in it like a ghoule on a grave. Dollfus, of Garden Court, Temple, was invited to Jack Tritail, the newly-made barrister's, "call" carouse in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Gulliver is sitting at the hospitable board, gulping down the claret like Garagantua. Little Spitters, who was always a ladies' man, was to have been a "welcome guest" at a neat villa not far from Hammersmith Broadway. The fiend Gulliver is at this moment being called a "droll creature," and is flirting with the eldest Miss Cockletop.

The great chief of the Opposition has spoken. Gloomy, saturnine, isolated, yet triumphant, sits the eloquent and sarcastic Caucasian. Those once brilliant black corkscrew ringlets are growing slightly gray and wiry now, the chin tuft has disappeared, and time and thought have drawn deep lines in the sallow visage of Benjamin Disraeli, ruler of the Opposition. His attire, too, is sober compared with the myriad-hued garb, the flashing jewellery, and vests of many colours, with which Benjamin was wont to dazzle our eyes in the days before he slew Robert Peel, and hired himself to the Protectionists--all in a parliamentary sense. People say, when he wrote "Venetia" and the "Revolutionary Epic," he used to wear laced ruffles at his wrists and black velvet inexpressibles. He is wiser now. He has turned the half century, and only wears a vest of many colours when he dons his gold robe as Chancellor of the Exchequer. He has worn it once, and would very much like to wear it again. He has made a very long, telling, brilliant speech, in which he has said a multitude of damaging things against Gulliver, his indemnity, and especially against the noble Viscount at the head of the Government. He has never been abusive, insulting, coarse, virulent--oh, never! he has not once lost his temper. He has treated the noble Viscount with marked courtesy, and has called him his right honourable and noble friend scores of times; yet, hearing him, it has been impossible to avoid the impression that if any man was ever actuated by the conviction that his right honourable and noble friend was an impostor and a humbug, with a considerable dash of the traitor; and that--without hinting anything in the slightest degree libellous--his right honourable and noble friend had been once or twice convicted of larceny, and had failed in clearing himself from the suspicion of having murdered his grandmother, that man was Benjamin Disraeli, M.P. for the county of Bucks. He did not begin brilliantly. He was not in the slightest degree like Cicero or Demosthenes, Burke or Grattan, or like thee, my Eglintoun Beaverup, when thou descantest upon the "glorious old cocks," the "real tap, sir," of antiquity. He was, on the contrary, slow, laboured, downcast, and somewhat ponderous; nor even at the conclusion of his magnificent harangue, did he throw his arms about, smite his breast, stamp his foot, or cast his eyes up to heaven--and the ceiling. The days of weeping and gesticulation, of crumpling up sheets of paper, cracking slave-whips, flinging down daggers, and smashing the works of watches, seem to have departed from the House of Commons. Yet the eminent Caucasian contrived to create a very appreciable sensation, and certainly shot those barbed arrows of his--arrows tipped with judicious sarcasm and polite malevolence--with amazing dexterity and with murderous success. He has made his noble friend wince more than once, I will be bound. But you cannot see the workings of that stateman's face, for he wears his hat; and the light coming from above causes the friendly brim to cast the vice-comital countenance into shadow.

A noticeable man this Hebrew Caucasian, Benjamin Disraeli, with his byegone literary nonsenses, and black-velvet-trousered frivolities. Not at all an English Man, trustworthy, loveable, nor indeed admirable, according to our sturdy English prejudices. Such statesmen as Shaftesbury, Ximenes, De Retz, any minister with a penchant for "dark and crooked ways," would have delighted in him; but to upright, albeit bigoted, William Pitt, he would have had anything but a sweet savour. Even Tory Castlereagh and Tory Sidmouth would but ill have relished this slippery, spangled, spotted, insincere Will-o'-the-wisp patriot. I should like very much to have known what manner of opinion the late Duke of Wellington entertained of Benjamin Disraeli. It is, of course, but matter of speculation; but I can't help thinking, too, that if Arthur Wellesley had had Benjamin in the Peninsula, he would have hanged him to a certainty.

The longest lane, however, must have a turning; and this desperately long drawn-out parliamentary avenue has its turning at last. There have been frenzied shrieks of "Divide--divide!' numerous bores who have essayed to speak have been summarily shut up and coughed down; and at length strangers are ordered to withdraw, and the division bell rings.

"On our re-admission," we quote from the "Times" newspaper of 185--, the results of the division were announced as follows:--

The bill was consequently lost.

Next day the Government presided over by the noble Viscount who wears his hat, goes out of office--the "Times" giving it a graceful kick at parting, and hinting that it was never anything more than a disreputable, shameless, abandoned clique, whose nepotism had grown intolerable in the nostrils of the nation. The Right Honourable Caucasian, who doesn't wear his hat, is sent for by a certain friend of his--a noble Earl, who is generally considered a first-rate hand at making up a book for the Derby. He in his turn is sent for by his Most Gracious Sovereign; and, for the next three or four days, there is nothing but running about and getting upstairs between Buckingham Palace, St. James's Square, and Grosvenor Gate; and at the end of that time, the right honourable Caucasian finds himself snugly ensconced in Downing Street, with full liberty to wear his gold robe again.

Past, long past two in the morning. The much-suffering House of Commons at last shut up, and deserted save by the police and the night watchmen. The last cabs in Palace Yard driven away: the charioteers grumbling horribly on their boxes, for they have members of Parliament inside, who never pay more than the legal fare. Irish members walked round the corner to Manchester Buildings or Victoria Street, there dwelling. Some members do all but sleep in the House. As for the noble and defeated Viscount, he trots cheerily home--scorning either cab or carriage--shouldering his umbrella, as though nothing in the world had happened to ruffle his equanimity.

And now, for the first time since this clock was set in motion, something like a deep sleep falleth over London. Not that the city is all hushed; it never is. There are night revellers abroad, night prowlers a-foot. There is houseless wretchedness knowing not where to hide its head; there is furtive crime stalking about, and seeking whom it may devour. Yet all has a solemn, ghastly, unearthly aspect; the gas-lamps flicker like corpse candles; and the distant scream of a profligate, in conflict with the police, courses up and down the streets in weird and shuddering echoes.

The Strand is so still that you may count the footsteps as they sound; and the pale moon looks down pityingly on the vast, feverish, semi-slumbering mass. Here we stand at length by Upper Wellington Street; a minute's walk to the right will bring us to the "Bridge of Sighs."

Which never sleeps! Morning, and noon, and night, the sharp, clicking turnstile revolves; the ever-wakeful tollman is there, with his preternaturally keen apron. I call this man Charon, and the river which his standing ferry bridges over might well be the Styx. Impossible, immobile, indifferent, the gate-keeper's creed is summed up in one word--"A halfpenny!" Love, hope, happiness, misery, despair, and death--what are they to him? "A halfpenny for the bridge" is all he asks! but "a halfpenny for the bridge" he must have.

"Please, sir, will you give me a halfpenny for the bridge?" A phantom in crinoline lays her hand on my arm. I start, and she hastens through the turnstile--

"Anywhere, anywhere, Out of the world,"

perhaps. But I may not linger on the mysteries of the Bridge of Sighs. They are among the "Secrets of Gas," and the pictured semblance of the place here must content you.

HOUR THE TWENTY-FOURTH AND LAST--THREE A.M.--A BAL MASQUE, AND THE NIGHT CHARGES AT BOW STREET.

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