spicuous are the sooty fasces, borne by the chimney sweep and the small boy his assistant; and this picture is from a series of etchings called the "Cryes of the Citie of London, drawne after the Life," by Marcellus Lauron, a native of the Hague, where he was born in 1653. He came to England with his father, by whom he was instructed in drawing and painting; and he so surpassed his contemporaries in drapery, that Sir Godfrey Kneller employed him to "clothe" his portraits. To Lauron's etching-needle we owe, apparently, the "Nonconformist Minister," the tinker with his hammer and kettle who cries "Pots to Mend!" the man and woman who have "Many new Songs to sell," the water-carrier

"A MERRY NEW SONG."

who hawks "New River Water," and the itinerant clothesman who cries "Old Cloaks, Suits, or Coats." You will observe, also, that he carries in his right hand a couple of rapiers :-in fact, he corresponds precisely with the Parisian industrial described in 1815 in Béranger's song, "Vieux Habits, Vieux Galons! The woman who cries "Buy my Dutch Biskets," and the female vendor of London Gazettes, both point distinctly to the period of the Restoration, in the second year of which the London Gazette made its first appearance. lady newsvendor is evidently a descendant of the "Flying Stationers of Tudor 1 Published by P. Tempest, 1711.

The

"OLD CLOAKS, SUITS, OR COATS."

this country of Dutch tiles, "drops," dolls, clocks, herrings, ovens, cheeses, and very many other articles of household

use, is due, in the main, first, to the long residence of the exiled Charles II. in the United Provinces; and next, to the even more protracted sojourn at the

"BUY MY DUTCH BISKETS.

Hague of Mary, Princess of Orange, and afterwards Queen of England, in co-partnership with William III. Let it be added that this good and charitable woman introduced into England something else besides Dutch "notions" from her husband's native land. She brought home with her Dutch cleanliness and the Dutch system of charity schools.

To return to brooms, I find them figured in a great many plates coming down to 1815, in which year the indefatigable cockney antiquary, John Thomas Smith, the author of the Life of Nollekens, and the delightful Book for a Rainy Day, who died keeper of the Print Room at the British Museum, published a series of graphic etchings. illustrative of the Cries of London in his day. I shall have more to say about John Thomas Smith ere I have done; but for the present my business is brooms. The hawkers of these indispensable articles frequently included mops in their stock-in-trade, and it is not at all unlikely that the slang term for an inebriated man being "mops-andbrooms" springs from the frequency of dealers in such articles, when they had sold out their stock, indulging somewhat too copiously in alcoholic stimulants.

"Green" brooms, that is to say brooms made of rushes or of green osiers, "wellbound and cut smooth and round," have long since faded out of London streettraffic; and it is only elderly persons, I should say, who have been privileged to hear in their youth the cry of "Buy-a broom." It was a very frequent one in London town when I was young. The broom-sellers were German girls, imported generally, so it was said, from Bavaria, who plied their trade from the age of ten to fifteen, and were usually the thralls and bond-servants of German crimps at the east end of London, who stood towards their helpless little serfs in the relation in which the Italian padroni of Saffron Hill formerly stood towards the Italian organ and hurdy-gurdy grinding, and monkey and white-mouse-exhibiting children. Both the German mädchen and the Italian boys were sent out early in the morning to beg, under the pretence of giving musical entertainment or selling brooms; and if they did not bring home that which the slaveowner considered to be an adequate amount of money at night, they were mercilessly beaten. This revolting traffic has long since been stamped out, and at the present day the street trade in

"Londons Gazette HERE."

brooms seems to be to a great extent monopolized by gipsies or travelling dealers, who are of half Romany engendure, and who do not offer their wares

by solitary outcry, but heap them high on carts and caravans, which they conduct slowly through carefully selected districts of the town and suburbs. Baskets and brushes of every shape also form an important portion of the stock-in-trade of these worthies.

"Knives and Scissors to grind O!" is a cry almost as ancient as the introduction into our civilisation of scissors and knives themselves; while the useful vocation of the nomads-who are to be found busy at their wheels in the streets fashionable and unfashionable of the metropolis, excluding only those thoroughfares in which the traffic is so heavy as to make the wheelmen obstructive and consequently liable to be moved on by the police-has had literary renown conferred on it by Canning's immortal ballad of

"The

Needy Knifegrinder," in the AntiJacobin. Canning's hero appears from the text to have been an ordinary specimen of the itinerant industrial of the period. He was indigent; his hat had got a hole in it, so had his breeches; and when his labours were over he was apt to get tipsy at the Chequers, and to become disorderly as well as drunk; whereupon, the next morning, Justice Oldmixon set him in the stocks for a vagrant. I think,

66 SMALL COALE."

however, that I have heard my friend, Mr. Charles G. Leland, more than once remark, that many of the needy knifegrinders with whom he has conversed in London or in

Some of our illustrations are engraved from the well-known pictures of Francis Wheatley, R.A., who as a figure-draughtsman had much of the facile ease and simple elegance of his contemporary, George Morland. "Old Chairs to Mend," a prime favourite with the illustrators of street cries, is a subject admirably treated by Wheatley. From his pencil also come our illustrations of "Sweet China Oranges!" "Hot spiced Gingerbread," "Strawberries, scarlet Strawberries!" "The Fruit-Barrow;" "Do you want any Matches?" "A new Ballad, only a Ha'penny each ;" and of course "Knives and Scissors to grind O!" Again, this particular craft appears in almost every collection of Cries with which I am acquainted; from the penny Seven Dials' productions of the Catnach press fifty years since, to the more artistic and expensive productions of Lauron, Wheatley, and John Thomas Smith. As I have said, "Knives and Scissors to grind!" has been pictorially dwelt upon by many other artists. Hogarth, in particular, has introduced a needy knifegrinder in that astonishing demonstration of street noises, The Enraged Musician. Whether the exasperated composer-presumably of foreign extraction who is furiously gesticu

L

his

sider in considering Hogarth's engraving. Mark the female ballad singer vociferating "The Lady's Fall;" look at the little French drummer accompanying rataplan with his squeaky voice; while the buxom vendor of milk melodiously screams" Milk Belo-o-o-w!" and an itinerant performer on the hautboy -evidently an alien, and possibly a portrait from life is tootling seraphic notes on his instrument. In the background is a dustman in the noisy exercise of his calling, and the ambulatory fishmonger shouts his commodities. Just as the knifegrinder appears in Hogarth, so is he also to the fore, only in a more graceful vignette, in Wheatley who, by the way, has occasionally diverged from the portraiture of London cries to "Scenes of Clerical Life." At least we behold him, here, in the quiet little composition of "The Curate of the Parish returning from Duty."

Among those London Cries in the series etched by John Thomas Smith, and published in 1815, of which I have already spoken, the one perhaps that has the most remote genesis is the figure of the man crying, "Hot Pease!" J. T. Smith has made him quite a poetical looking street-seller, with curly locks, clean

clean

shaven cheeks, and eyes turned sweetly upwards, just as though he could appreciate such poetic efforts as "Queen Mab" or "Endymion." He has a turn-down collar, too, over his black stock; and his lower limbs are cased in a kind of Hessian boots made of strongly ribbed woollen stuff with leather soles. His tin canister of hot pease he carries under one arm, and in his disengaged hand he bears a peppercastor. Now the distributor of hot pease had been selling them in London streets since Queen Bess's time, and probably for many generations before. He was known in Chepe and Cornhill and Fleet Street long before the "Tiddy Dolls" and "Colly Molly Puffs" were heard of; but in Tudor and Stuart times, he was a street restaurateur of a somewhat more enterprising character than the sentimental youth with the upturned eyes in J. T. Smith's etching. He sold "Hot grey Pease, and a Suck o' Bacon;" that is to say, he had a piece of boiled bacon attached to a little stick, which he carried in one hand; and the purchaser of a pennyworth or a ha'penny worth of hot grey pease was entitled to introduce the piece of bacon between his lips and

In

pease customers ever bolted the bacon en bloc: perhaps the peasemonger was cautious enough to place the tempting bit of pork on a "paternoster" hook of grapnel shape; so that if the bacon were gorged by a wickedly gluttonous small boy, he would be unable to disengage himself from the hook, and might be dragged hither and thither to the serious detriment of his internal organs. another illustration will be found a reproduction of one of J. T. Smith's characters, "The Italian Image Boy." If you note the date, 1815, and the effigies of public characters in plaster of Paris which crowd the board which the boy holds on his head, you will admit that the etching possesses some curious historic interest. Never mind the Three Graces and the Farnese Hercules; but take careful note of the fact of that Chinese building to the right, being evidently a model of the pagoda erected on the bridge over the reservoir in the Green Park on the occasion of the fêtes and illuminations held in commemoration of the Peace of 1814. I cannot exactly settle in my mind whether the bust of the gentleman of somewhat florid aspect, and with a large shirt frill, is the Prince Regent; but I am

"LILY WHITE VINEGAR, THREEPENCE A QUART."

sure that I can make out a little statuette of Frederick the Great of Prussia, a bust of the Hetman Platoff, and another of Napoleon I.; and unquestionably the

London Published as the Act directs December 31 1815 G John Thomas Smith, N4 Chandos Street Covent Garden

THE ITALIAN IMAGE BOY.

Likewise among J. T. Smith's cries is that of the "Flying Pieman "-the vendor of patties being a spare, bustling little man with a protruding pig-tail. He wears a large white apron, and is in his shirt sleeves, which are tucked up to the elbow. He has just a dozen of pies displayed on a board before him. The "Flying Pieman" has all but disappeared from our social scheme; he has been, in the fugitive pastry line of business, deposed by the keeper of the permanent sedentary pieshop; and so far as kerb-stone traffic is concerned, he has been compelled to yield the pas to the proprietor of the "Hokeypokey" stall, or vendor of cheap ices. The pieman of the past was rather a fraudulent character. He used to gamble with his juvenile customers and toss them at a game game practically amounting to "heads they lost, tails he won," till he was improved off the face of the pavement by the police. So far as I can recollect, nearly the last mention of the tossing pieman in English literature is to be found in Dombey and Son, in which "Rob the Grinder" tosses away with the