tramping men-at-arms, whose harness gleamed in the sunlight of the glittering lists; together with a bevy of smiling, fair haired damosels' on their ambling palfreys, rode over its unpaved area to join the tournaments there held. We pictured them coming by Gilt-spurre or Knight-rider Street, so called because of the knights, who in quality of their honour wore gilt spurs, and who, with others, rode that way to the joustings and other feats of arms used in Smithfield.' And then we thought what a fortune the events of these times would have been to the boudoir romancists of the present day, who write such pretty stories with doves' quills and otto of roses, for the annuals. Next we lost ourselves in a reverie about the sly Rahere, the founder of the monastery and fair, and minstrel to Henry the First, who was in former days employed to tell stories to royalty (an office, it would seem, not altogether obsolete), and who once began one of so great a length that he himself fell asleep in the middle, and never finished it. Rahere when he was sick was frightened into his pious act by a supposed visitation of St. Bartholomew, and became the first head of the priory, within whose walls the drapers and clothiers invited to the fair were allowed to lock up their wares every night. Anon we allowed ourselves to be carried in dreamy listlessness along the stream of time, until we were again halting, as we chuckled at the recollection of the humorous doings in the fair in the days of Rare Ben Jonson,'-the puppet motions of Hero and Leander, altered from Sestos and Abydos to Puddledock and Bankside,-the Bartholomew pig, roasted with fire o' juniper and rosemary branches,'-the court of pié-pouldre, the well-educated ape,' and the 'hare that beat the tabor,'-all hackneyed subjects to mouldy antiquaries, we allow; but, not being over-addicted to rummaging dusty records and worm-eaten volumes, still interesting to common-place every-day people like ourselves. And lastly, we pictured the fair as we had known it in our own days, of which poor Hone has left us so lively a specimen, and calling back some of the scenes we had therein witnessed, we began to think that the abolition was not altogether useless or disadvantage us.

Whether our reflections would now have taken a retrograde turn, and wandered back again to the days of the tournaments, we know not; but, having arrived close upon the present period, we were somewhat startled, upon wishing to use it, to find that our handkerchief had disappeared whilst we had been lost in our reveries; and possibly, was already fluttering before one of the neighbouring bandana-bazaars in Field Lane. Hereupon we determined to give up ruminating in Smithfield, leaving that process to those animals in the cattle-market whose peculiar nature it is to do so; and having risen from our seat, and thanked the ginger-beer-man for the accommodation his waggon afforded, we commenced making the tour of the fair, or rather the ground once allotted to it.

There were no shows-no huge yellow caravans, or canvas pavilions covered with wondrous representations of the marvels to be seen within a few small portable theatres formed the leading exhibitions. One there was, to be sure, of higher pretensions, into which, upon payment of one penny, we were permitted to enter. The proprietor of the spectacle, who had pitched his theatre in the back-parlour of one of the houses near the Hospital gate, stood at

the street-door, and informed us that the entertaiment set forth, The Bay of Naples in its native grander with the percession of the Ingian monarch and his eliphint, the sportsman and the stag as walked like life, the wild duck and the water-spanell, with the burning of Hamburg.'

Here was enough to see, so we entered forthwith, and wedged ourselves in the corner of a room, small, and unpleasantly warm, where an audience of some five-and-twenty had already assembled before a small proscenium, about twelve feet high, having a painted dropscene, which represented, as nearly as we could make out the localities, the Castle of Chillon moved to Virginia Water, with Athens and Mont Blanc in the background. After an Italian boy, who with his piano-organ formed the orchestra, had played 'The days when we went gipsying,' the drop rose, and discovered the Bay of Naples, with surrounding buildings, and something of a conical shape painted on the back scene the flat we think it is technically calledwhich we imagined to be a light-blue cotton night-cap, with a long tassel, until informed that it depicted Vesuvius-the burnin' mounting, as it appears from the sea-shore.' When the excitement caused by the rising of the curtain had somewhat subsided, a little figure, dressed like a Turk, shuffled rapidly across the front of the stage, moving his legs backwards and forwards, both at once, and evidently by means of a crank connected with the wheels he ran on, which were invisible to the audience. Next the 'percession' commenced, which was extremely imposing, and would have been much more so if the manager had been less hasty in taking the figures off, and putting them on other stands to go across again, which gave them the appearance of being most unsteadily intoxicated upon their second entrée. Then a little man came on in a boat, and shot a duck, which the spannell' swam after; and, finally, the ignition of some red fire at the foot of Vesuvius formed the burning of Hamburg, which conflagration was exceedingly advantageous in rapidly clearing the room of the audience, by reason of its sulphureous vapour.

The principal traffic of the fair, beyond the business transacted in gingerbread-husbands and wax-dolls, from four-pence to three shillings each, was monopolized by several men in tilted carts, who were haranguing little mobs of people, and apparently disposing of their wares as fast as they could put them up for sale.

There were such frequent bursts of laughter from the buyers, that we were attracted towards one of these perambulating bazaars, in the hope of participating in their merriment. The proprietor of the cart was a tall burly fellow, in a round hat and knee-breeches, something like an aristocratic railway navigator, and the cart, in front of which he stood, was covered all over with a most curious display of goods, guns, braces, gimlets, waistcoats, saws, cruets,-in fact, specimens of almost everything ever manufactured. The man was selling the goods by his own auction, and had a flow of ready or low wit,-pure, unadulterated chaff,-which was most remarkable. We recollect a few of his jokes, and these we chronicle to show the style of his address, even at the risk of being again accused of 'exhibiting the coarsest peculiarities of the coarsest classes with such ultra accuracy.' But it is in the lower orders, according to our own notion, that the natural character of a people is to be best discovered.

'Now, then, my customers,' he exclaimed, advancing to the front

of the cart, I'll tell you more lies in five minutes than you can prove true in a week. Now, missus,' he continued, addressing a female in the crowd, 'no winking at me to get things cheap. My wife's in the cart, and she's as sharp as the thick end of a pen'orth of cheese, as ugly as sin, and not half so pleasant.'

A roar of laughter followed this sally as he took up a saw.

'Now, look here!-you never saw such a saw as this here saw is to saw in all the days you ever saw. This is a saw as will cut;-all you've got to do is to keep it back. If you was to lay this saw agin the root of a tree over night, and go home to bed-’

'Well, what then?' interrupted a fellow in the crowd, who wished to throw the dealer off his guard.

'Why,' replied the man, the chances are that when you came in the morning you wouldn't find it. Sold again!'

There was another laugh, and the would-be wag slunk away very crest-fallen.

'Now, I'm not going to take you in,' he continued. 'If you don't like these things, come again to-morrow, and I shan't be here. I'll charge you a pound for the saw, and if you don't like that, I'll say fifteen shillings. Come,-you've got faint hearts. Say twelve, ten, eight, five, three, one!-going for one! I'll ask no more, and I'll take no less. Sold again, and got the money!'

He now turned and picked out a cheap accordion, upon which he played some common air, and then proceeded :

'Now, look here's a young piece of music: the appollonicon in St. Martin's Lane lays a dozen every morning, and this is one of them. It's got the advantage that, when you're tired of it, it will blow the fire or niend your shoes. May I be rammed, jammed, and slammed into the mouth of a cannon, until I come out at the touchhole as thin as a dead rushlight, if it ain't cheap at five pound! But I'll only take five shillings, and if that won't do, I'll say one! Who's got the lucky shil ing?'

Not fifteen feet from the cart of this man there was another similarly laden, and a constant fire of salutations and mock abuse passed between the two venders. The merchant, however, in this case was a mere boy he could not have been above fourteen, but carrying an expression of the most precocious meaning we ever beheld. He was no whit inferior to his adversary in ready slang, as his following oration over a two-barreled gun will testify :

There's a little flaw in the lock, to be sure; but that don't hinder its going off. I sold the fellow for two pound to a farmer in Leicestershire, and I'll tell you what it did. The first day he took it out he fired one barrel, and killed six crows as he didn't see; he fired the second, and shot nine partridges out of five, and the kick of the gun kr.ocked him back'ards into a ditch, and he fell upon a hare and killed that. These guns will shoot round a corner, and over a hay-rick; and they 're used to fatten the paupers that are turned out of the Unions for not paying the Income Tax. They load the guns with fat bacon, and shoot it down their throats.'

Of course this was a safe entamure for a laugh. When he had done talking about the gun, which, however, he did not sell, he took up a whip, and, cracking it two or three times in front of his cart, recommenced :

'Here's a whip, now, to make a lazy wife get up of a morning,

and make the kettle boil before the fire's alight. It even makes my horse go, and he's got a weak constitution and a bad resolution; he jibs going up hill, kicks going down, and travels on his knees on level ground. When he means to go, he blows hisself out with the celebrated railroad corn as sticks sideways in his insides, and tickles him into a trot. Who says a crown for this whip ?'

There did not appear much disposition to buy the article, so the seller commenced a fresh panegyric.

"You'd better buy it: you won't have another chance. There never was but two made, and the man died, and took the patent with him. He wouldn't have made them so cheap, only he lived in a garret, and never paid his landlord, but when he went home always pulled the bottom of the house upstairs after him. If any man insults you, I'll warrant this whip to flog him from Newgate into the middle of next year. Who says a crown?'

There were two or three other carts of a similar description in different parts of Smithfield, but these fellows evidently enjoyed the supremacy. How many profits had to be made upon the articles, or what was their original cost, we know not, but we bought four pocketknives, each containing three blades, with very fair springs, and horn handles, for sixpence! We had a little conversation afterwards with the first-mentioned vendor, who was, out of his rostrum, a quiet, intelligent person, and he assured us that at Wolverhampton the ordinary curry-combs of the shops were being made by families for ninepence a dozen, the rivets being clenched and the teeth cut by mere infants.

Beyond these features there was little to notice;-the vitality of the fair was evidently at its last gasp, and the civic (authorities did not appear inclined to act as a humane society for its resuscitation. A little trade was maintained by the sale of portable cholera, in the shape of green-gages; but the majority of the stalls were sadly in want of customers. Even the Waterloo-crackers, unable to go off in a commercial point of view, failed to do so in a pyrotechnical one. Had we waited until midnight, when all became still, we might pos sibly have beheld the shades of Richardson, Saunders, Polito, and Miss Biffin, with their more ancient brethren, Fawkes the conjuror, and Lee, and Harper, waiting amongst the pens, or gathering together their audiences of old in shadowy bands to people the fair once more, as Napoleon collects his phantom troops in the Champs Elysées, where, since he has been buried in the Invalides, he must find it far more convenient to attend. But there was no inducement to stay until that period, and we left the fair about twenty minutes after we entered it, having seen everything that it contained, and deemed ourselves fortunate in having been only once violently compelled to buy a pound of gingerbread-nuts, by the sheer force of a young lady who presided at the stall, and who appeared in a state of temporary insanity, caused by the lack of customers and limited incomes of the majority of the visitors.

September 11, 1842.

SUDDEN FEAR:

BY H. R. ADDISON.

Ir is curious to remark the sudden effects of fear, the manner in which men of the most acknowledged courage are sometimes paralysed when taken by surprise, when hurried unawares, and threatened by a danger before they have time to prepare for, and meet it.

Mr. C was once riding through Epping Forest; then frequently the scene of highway-robberies, caring for no one, fearing no harm, when he suddenly fell in with a couple of as pretty women as any in the county of Essex. The ladies were in the greatest distress. They had just been robbed and plundered by a couple of footpads, armed with pistols and dirks, two men of enormous strength, who had gone off across the country, carrying with them the purses, watches, and trinkets of the fair damsels, whose postillion and man-servant had not dared to interfere. Chad no weapon with him, except his riding cane; he, however, clapped spurs to his horse, and started off in the direction pointed out. His pursuit was successful. He came up with the robbers, and singlehanded seized them both, and lodged them in Chelmsford jail. They were tried, convicted, and transported.

The daring which Mr. C displayed in thus encountering and conquering two armed men became the theme of the whole county. His health was drank at all public meetings. Families who had hitherto been unknown to him, flocked round him, eager to make his acquaintance. Songs were even trolled in honour of his noble exploit. While, on the other side of the question, the poachers and freebooters vowed deep revenge if ever they caught him. His death was said to be solemnly determined on by these gentry; which threat being repeated to our friend, Mr. C, he determined for the future to follow the example of his neighbours, and never again travel unarmed. Months, however, rolled by, and no attack was made on his person or his mansion. The rogues were evidently afraid of encountering one of such determined courage.

One winter evening, about seven o'clock, Mr. C―, with five other gentlemen, well-crammed into the stage coach, came to a sudden halt. The door was thrown open, and the muzzle of an aweinspiring blunderbuss thrust through the aperture by an individual with a mask, who, after hoping that he didn't intrude,' demanded their watches and purses; when lo! the six passengers, including Mr. C, although they had pistols enough amongst them to stock a moderately extensive armoury, quietly delivered up their cash and valuables to this single footpad.

The story got abroad; the tale was told with gusto by those who had envied C's former splendid feat, and additional verses were composed to the song written on his courage. Jokes were cut at his expense. It was in vain that he raved and foamed. He took the wisest step, and left the county.

I quote this story as a sort of pendant to a very simple case of strange analogy, which came under my observation in Bengal.