dish on his head: a fork being stuck in one of the cucumbers. He has long dark hair and an aquiline nose and a full underlip; and altogether I should say that he was a child of Israel. I am confirmed in my belief by the circumstance that the last time I explored a Sunday morning market in Petticoat Lane, now Middlesex Street, E.C., I heard frequent cries of "Pickled Cucumbers!" the dealers in which were exclusively Jews. Yet another J. T. Smith etching is one of the men who used to cry "Door Mats!" and who carried those domestic appliances in several superposed layers back and front, like so many herald's tabards. The advantage of such a mode of exhibiting door-mats may be considered as analogous to the benefit which ladies in a dressmaker's showroom obtain from beholding the dress which they wish to criticise being donned by one of the young lady-assistants, who gracefully marches up and down the room, turns round, bends, and submits the costume to examination from every point of view; only the young lady-assistant can only exhibit one costume at a time.

1 This and the following seven illustrations are copied from a series of engravings of the Itinerant Trades of London, designed by F. Wheatley, R. A., and published 1794-96.

J. T. Smith's street-seller could place simultaneously at least a dozen samples of his commodity in evidence; and intending purchasers would lift up his frontal mats, one after the other; then turn him round and examine his dorsal rugs; and ultimately select the article that pleased them best.

There are a great many more London cries, ancient and modern, that I could descant upon; but the brief remaining space at my command bids me to be as concise as I can in enumerating the many cries which have passed away, and the few which are still audible in the streets of London. The most implacable foe to our cries has been the statute known as the New Police Act. Almost all the popular announcements that were once so pleasantly frequent have been silenced by the stern ordinances of municipal authority. The tinkling bell of the muffin man is still, I believe, occasionally heard in the outlying suburbs; but not long ago a hawker of muffins and crumpets was summoned to a metropolitan police court, for employing the traditional tintinnabulum in proclaiming the beginning of his afternoon rounds. I don't think the poor man was prosecuted to conviction; still, I am afraid that he was

ticket inscribed with the letter "D" in the corner of the window-pane as a hint to the contractor's men that they would like their dust removed, the dustmen are slow in coming, and even when they do come decline to remove the rubbish unless they are regaled with "backshish" or with beer. But their official voice is hushed. No more do they cry " Dust ho!" no more do they lustily peal the clanging bell. "Bellows to Mend!" is another street-cry which at present is seldom if ever heard. People who like æsthetic surroundings in their houses sometimes indulge in the luxury of a pair of fine art bellows; elaborately carved or painted; but the kitchen bellows has become more or less a negligible quantity. The chimney sweep has become quite as mute as the

"SWEET CHINA ORANGES."

dustman. The New Police Act gagged him more than half a century ago; and I was reading only the other day in a volume of the Examiner for 1835, of a chimney sweep who was summoned before the Lord Mayor for the offence of crying "Soot!" in a public thoroughfare. The incriminated sweep was a very cunning fellow. His defence was that he never pronounced the word "soot" at all, and that he only cried Boots!" a pronouncement which he contended was not prohibited by the statute. Moreover, he produced two witnesses-a periwinkle merchant and a watercress-girl-who were willing to swear their heads off that he cried Boots!" and not "Soot!" The Lord Mayor, laughing, sent the sable casuist about his busi

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clothesman, I am scarcely qualified to say whether the once common morning jödel, "Clo! Clo!" is quite so audible as was formerly the case; because for many years past I have not lived in a London street which was habitually in the beat of a second-hand clothes dealer. I should say, however, that the indefatigable pickers-up of cast-off garments casionally make themselves heard to the dwellers of the suburbs. Their business, in any case, must have been seriously interfered with by the wholesale dealers in second-hand wearing apparel, who systematically advertise their business in the daily papers, and to whom you send by parcel-post the wearing-apparel which you are anxious to get rid of; receiving by return of post a remittance which the buyer probably thinks to be quite ample, but which, in the majority of cases, the seller thinks to be shamefully inadequate. "All Hot!" again is a cry which no longer issues from the lips of the bakedpotato man, who has now become, I am told, a merchant of "Irish fruit," and has a baking-machine on wheels before him of a far more elaborate construction than the old potato-can, one of which, some five and forty years ago, was installed in permanence in the middle of the northern extremity of the Haymarket. "Pickled Oysters! once a familiar cry, has become

as hushed in West-end London as the cry of "Fresh Oysters!" in "Namby Pamby" Philipps's poem of "The Splendid Shilling;" still I am not prepared to assert, positively, that pickled oysters have altogether vanished from the Eastend of London. I fancy that those bivalves pickled are still to be heard of in Petticoat Lane, to which I intend to pay a flying visit some Sunday morning during the autumn. "Boot-laces and Stay-laces, a Penny a Pair!" are very seldom cried at present. They are as defunct in a street-selling sense as the "Last Dying Speeches" which used to be hawked about the streets by fellows with harsh voices every execution morning,ordinarily Monday morning; and these public hangings, it is a national shame to remember, occurred on a great many Mondays during the year. A very long. time also has elapsed since I have met the man with a wooden pole over his shoulder, supporting at either end a mountain of bonnet-boxes and cap-boxes. He, too, may still haunt to a limited extent the environs of the great city; but in the main thoroughfares the law and the police, and indeed the exigencies of public convenience, are all dead against him. There are still, it is scarcely necessary to say, vast numbers of street-vendors of fruit,

prove inconveniently obstructive to the traffic. Among the really pretty cries which still obtain, but which you must go to the uttermost ends of London to hear, are "Sweet Lavender, Sweet Lavender, Sixteen Branches a Penny!" nor has there yet been any solution in the continuity of the industrial who has the pretty little woolly trifles, which he calls Young Lambs to sell; his grandfather and his greatgrandfather, commercially speaking, dealt in these commodities; and his portrait duly figures in J. T. Smith's etchings. I have been told, too, that the man who cries hearthstones may yet be occasionally met with; but I am afraid you would have to travel far and wide before you came across the reduced gentlewoman who was compelled to sell Bath brick for a livelihood, but who, when, in faint accents, she proclaimed her wares, added the murmured expression of a hope that nobody heard her. "One a

Penny, Two a Penny, Hot Cross Buns!' is essentially a Good-Friday cry, and would not, probably, be resented by the police; but in genteel neighbourhoods householders order their hot-cross-buns on Thursday evening, and have no need for the services of the wandering bunpurveyor. "Hot and Strong, Peppermint and Ginger Drops!" is a cry that is heard no longer; nor are your ears often assailed

A NEW LOVE SONG, ONLY A HALFPENNY EACH.

by the strident bawl of the man who sells dog-collars, and who, as I knew him fifty years ago, used from neck to heel to be hung round with straps, collars, and

ments for our fourfooted friends no longer proclaim their goods from the housetops, or, rather, from the kennel. The plain truth is, that the New Police Act and the costermongers' barrows have between them all but completely stifled the Cries of London. You do hear, it is true, "Yah! ah! Sparragrass!" and "Mackerel!" and "Strawberries! fourpence a pottle!" but not many more yells of peripatetic retailers. I myself am partially deaf; but the result. of my inquiries among my friends who have two ars a-piece, and can make sharp use of them, is that although they often hear "Lavender ! " "Primroses!" "Cresses!" and "Shrimps!" cried, they very seldom listen to the prolonged "yaup of the man who used to go about with a basketful of live eels, or the woman who shouted "Sprats! Alive O!" in a voice that was almost pathetic. Nearly all the articles which street-buyers want can be had now off the costermongers' barrows; and the keepers thereof are content to exhibit them without uttering any more definite announcement than "Will you Buy-Will you Buy, Buy, Buy?" which may be considered a mere invitation to purchase, but cannot be accepted as a genuine Cry.

OSTON was long the undisputed magnet of American literature, but in the end of this century it would seem that the loadstone had been transported to New York. At one time there lived in or round Boston such a brotherhood of giants Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier, Holmes, Garrison, and Wendell Phillipps. The body of Whittier a great poet, who wrote few great poems, the psalmist of a nation's throes-was but yesterday, amidst universal grief, laid in the New English earth which has received his forefathers for two hundred and fifty years. day Boston is lit by the lingering sunsets of Oliver Wendell Holmes and Julia Ward Howe, and mourns the prematurely closing day of Francis Parkman, but the rays of what there is meridional in American literature of to-day play round New York.

To

New York is the literary centre of America mainly because it is the literary market. Against the Century, Harper's, Scribner's, and the Cosmopolitan, Boston has only the Atlantic Monthly. On a more popular plane Boston has two capital literary journals, most liberal and enterprising, the Arena and the Youth's Companion, which have no exact rivals in New York; but on the other hand the Boston Herald and Globe do not attempt to rival the Independent, Harper's Weekly, Sun,

Herald, Tribune, Times, or World of New York. The great Boston firm of Houghton, Mifflin & Co., which occupies in the history of American literature a position like our three classic firms of Macmillan, Murray, and Longman, have now a New York house; and since they have for the second time absorbed the Ticknors, there is no house of great literary note confined to Boston except that of Roberts Brothers, whose operations are eclectic rather than extensive. The author living in New York can carry his wares from Houghton, Mifflin & Co., to the Scribners, the Harpers, the Appletons, the Putnams, Dodd, Mead & Co., the Lovell Publishing Co., and Henry Holt & Co., not to mention the Century Company, and the firms which, having no connection before the jealous eyes of United States law, nevertheless bear the historic names and fatten on the business of great English houses such as Macmillans, Longmans, and Cassells. There is a host too of less noted firms, some of which have colossal transactions, such as the Bonnors, Street and Smith, and P. F. Collier. "popular" character of Once a and the Frank Leslie publications with their enormous circulations shows what mental pabulum the many-headed demands.

The Week

The lesson to be learnt by looking over the publishing houses, magazines, and newspapers is borne out by a glance at the literary clubs.

Boston has nothing to match the Century Club, the Athenæum of New York,