"Mr J. Chapman was a Jew; but, as a resurrection-man, he stood at the head of his profession. Private students of medicine were in the habit of purchasing parcels of subjects' from him-he carrying home the entire man, (when obtained,) and dividing into portions at his own dwelling. In this way, Mr Israel, (or 'Easy,' as he was familiarly called by those who knew him,) had the reputation always of having disposed of a sailor who was murdered, about twelve years since, in Vine Street, Covent Garden. The man in question was thrown, in some affray, out of the window of a low brothel, and was seen by a watchman immediately afterwards, in a state of great bodily injury and suffering; he disappeared, however, either alive or dead, from the spot where he had been lying, in a very strange way; and Chapman, who then lived in Vine Street, was supposed always to have been concerned in his secretion. Chapman was the first man in his calling who hit upon the device of stealing

this is an analysis merely of the locus which stands completed; at the opposite corner of the Haymarket, where the works are yet in progress, translations of a still more marvellous character await us!

Here, to the abasement for ever of all "Whitcomb Street," (the ancient Hedge Lane,) St Martin's porch becomes visible almost from the gates of Carlton Palace! Yonder, the "Fives Court," and all its tumble-down dependencies, seem waiting only for the mouldering of wax and parchment to be as things that "were," and not regretted!

The star of the "Green Yard" twinkles! club-houses bestride the alleys of Suffolk Street, in which coals and candles, à l'aimable, used to be bought and sold! Panton Street, and Oxendon Court, tremble at the prospect of their own approaching respectability, and the furious march of architectural reform-(this must be the reform" from without," that the Whigs in Parliament have so often talked about!)-the furious strides of cleanliness and parochial improvement, threaten almost to open us a reputable passage into Leicester Square!

On the far side of the river, among

the warrens of mean dwellings, which have arisen between Westminster Bridge and the Borough, matter of a different character, and rather an opposite one, presents itself for consideration. We have left the chosen rallying point of wealth, for the peculiar abode of labour and of poverty. It is in these extreme districts, that we find those artists lodged, whose peculiar craft the law condemns to distance from the community. Your horse-butcher; your tallow-melter; your bone-boiler; and your fell-monger; all flourish in this region. Here, your dustman makes a fortune, by amassing, in the gross, those matters which the poorest throw away as useless in detail. Here, you may convince yourself, if you please, that it is a mistake to suppose that the "poor” are rich; for you will see probably one old woman selling gingerbread, at one corner, day after day, throughout the year, whose weekly receipt, (suppose she gained her stock-in-trade for nothing,) would not compass the half of half a dozen shillings.*

What extraordinary places are those ten or fifteen different nests of one and two-story tenements, which have arisen within the last dozen years in

bodies before they were buried; a practice which has since been followed up with great success in the poorer districts about town; and which, from its obvious tendency to spare labour and expense to all parties, may fairly rank among the happiest efforts of modern invention. Chapman was a wag, too, in his way, and had a dog who was well known at the night-houses into which choice spirits' sometimes look (in the way of a 'lark,') out of curiosity. The joke, on these occasions, was to cajole a 'raw' into paying for glasses of brandy, which Easy's 'dog, as he protested, would drink as naturally as a mid-wife drank anniseed.' When the liquor came, Easy used to swallow it himself, declaring, that he was not such a fool as to go dry while his dog drank brandy.' Mr Chapman was transported on suspicion of burglary, from the Old Bailey, in the beginning of the year 1819; and died, much lamented, on his passage to Port-Jackson."-Memoirs of Sporting Characters.

one.

6

"The poor love liberty quite as much as the rich; but I don't think they eat quite so much turtle. Your beggar dreads no calamity so much as the being taken care of;' nine in ten of them had rather take all chances than go into a workhouse; but that is not (necessarily) because the trade of asking alms is a very good Three times in four, where mendicants are found to be in possession of sums of money, I should suspect either a fortunate plunder, or some accident. Money passes from hand to hand in strange ways, and many thefts are committed which the town never hears of. I recollect an old woman, in the neighbourhood of Seven Dials, who kept a lodging-house for poor people, and used to conceal her cash under the hearth-stone of the room she herself inhabited. Going one day to this hoard alone, her whole savings, amounting to fifty guineas, had disappeared! She was stewardess to a sort of benefit club, and used, on particular days, to have the whole stock of the society in the same place; if the thief had delayed his larceny two days, he would have carried off near five hundred pounds, and beggared half the bedridden washerwomen in the parish. This robbery (recovery was so hopeless) never came before the police. Aged people in the country frequently bury their money in fields and gardens, and are very frequently watched, and their banks broken up.

the swamps of Lambeth, Walworth, and St George's Fields? What a peculiar squalor is that which attaches to the street, called " Webber Row," and to the line now known as "Charlotte Street," (where the quack-doctors live at the corner ;) in which the show caravans stand encamped for winter quarters, or repose; making up a mimic world, as it were, all of monsters and prodigies !-dwarfs giants-monkeys-conjurors, and miraculous pigs!

A still more miry, and more cutthroat character even than this, applies to a whole wilderness of crooked passages, which lead from the point called Jones's Riding-School," to the Cobourg Theatre! It is in the summer season only, or in hard frosts, that these unpaved defiles are passable. In vain you urge your hackney coachman-" Facilis descensus"-but "how am I to get back again," says the rogue," if I go down there?" the pedestrian wayfarer looks dubiously, from the gas lights at the corner of Blackfriars' Road, as far as he can see

into the fog and gloom-resolves-and then again puts his hand on his watch

and doubts whether the road "round by the Obelisk" is not the nearer. The convenience of lamps has not yet been discovered in these wild and marshy fastnesses. Watchmen, (parochial) are an invention of effeminacy, in future ages to be arrived at. You may escape (if you look very much as if you were not worth three farthings) being throttled by the bully, who waits, cudgel in hand, for you, at the first corner; but no precaution can secure you against the pig whoruns between your legs, and carries you off on his back (like a new Mazeppa) at the second. The wonder is, who can be the people-of what means, or order, that reside here? A fact, of which the dweller two miles off knows no more than the inhabitant of Kamschatka!

But if there be curiosity in the many styles of building, which you may encounter in a morning's walk through London, the varieties which present themselves, in the way of population,

An old man, who had been a small farmer some time since near me, in Devonshire, hanged himself, and (it was said) in consequence of losing all his wealth in this way. A beggar, who had kept that part of the country for several years, disappeared immediately afterwards. I knew another case, and rather a curious one, in which a common beggar must have become possessed of a considerable sum in cash. The guard of a mail-coach, which ran into the west country, was apprehended at Oxford, for being concerned in a 'parcel' robbery, and carried more than a hundred pounds (part of the product of his theft probably) to prison with him. About the same time it happened that a fellow named Marsh, a sort of half-beggar, half-poacher, was committed to the same prison for vagrancy; and, coming into gaol without three-andsixpence, he won the whole of the guard's plunder at some game of cards, or dominos! This man was actually discharged, at the expiration of his ten days' commitment, with a hundred pounds, money, in his pocket-if any part of the dress he wore afforded such a convenience. Do not judge of beggary too harshly; a penny seldom ruins the giver, even if he does bestow it in the wrong place. Mendicants may be merry, and yet have enough to complain of; law has done something, when it has made want not desperate, but humble. Few men, depend on it, would beg for a farthing, who could earn half-a-crown a-day by their labour-even although they could be certain that the farthing would not be refused to them."-Tyas on Mendicity.

• "Your citizen of Dyot Street is an eye-sore to his neighbour of Bloomsbury or Bedford Square; but this propinquity preserves the latter (eventually) from much heavier inconvenience. It is a wonderful spectacle to behold a creature, half naked, and primed with gin, for any act of outrage-to see it rise from its lair, not three steps off, and issue into a street where equipages stand at every door-and yet doing no mischief! But there is something here more than people look for, in the proverb which says Tell me your company,' &c. A mechant chien, court lien!-Dyot Street is safe while it stands in the eye of a better neighbourhood. But, put fifty such streets together, to the exclusion of richer ones, and let them form themselves into a parish; and not only that parish, but all the parishes about it, are likely soon to be unapproachable. Any attempt, however, at a system like this in London, has a tendency to correct itself; for the property of small houses, from the poverty of their tenants, is unproductive."-Cormack's Parish Surveyor.

are still more numerous and eccentric. It is not merely that you meet different people at different points, distinguished by circumstances peculiar to their rank or calling-sailors about Wapping and Limehouse-grooms about Hyde Park and Grosvenor Place -apart from these distinctions, the people have a different expression of feature-a decidedly different cast of countenance, at Aldgate and in Piccadilly. Everybody who looks at the Spitalfields weavers, men, women, and children, perceives that they resemble no other body of artizans in the metropolis. Walk, on a Sunday afternoon, in the neighbourhoods of Whitechapel or Mile-End, you will scarcely meet one handsome female, where at the West End of the town you would meet twenty. Sunken eyes, snub noses, wide mouth, and sallow complexionthe population is obviously less picturesque.

The characteristic stamp (as to feature) thrown by some crafts over those who follow them, is notorious. We know a shoemaker all over the world by his forehead, as easily as a tailor or a dancing-master by his address. The marks belonging to habit

The red night-caps of our butcher boys, and their still ruddier cheeks(if it were not for the gallows, such rogues might live for ever!)-the hair au pigeon (to a degree of inherency) observable among the haberdashers the handsome daughters that (beyond the average of any trade in London) fall to the lot of the bakers,-to notice such peculiarities in town as these, would be to count the sands of the sea, or the words of the Chinese dictionary. The crowd can neither be describedt nor analysed, but particular groups may be dwelt upon for a mo

ment.

Cross the Thames once more, and come, by the way of the Waterloo bridge, to the Surrey side of the river, where you find a sample of bolder

"Men are very little aware how much their habits, and still more their opinions, are referable to the professions which they follow. And yet the thing must be so; for, what can direct our belief, or, at least, what is so likely to do so, as the result of our (comparative) experience? Thus, no man could have a fair trial for fraud, who was tried by a jury composed of horse-dealers—because all the likelihood in the minds of his judges must be in favour of his guilt. I have heard police offi cers give evidence in courts of justice with great intelligence, and, (as regarded their statements,) with great impartiality; but always with an obvious conviction in their own minds, that the man had committed a crime, who had had it in his power to commit it. Barristers of good Nisi Prius practice, are, in common conversation, most incredulous people; and always look (though it were a matter stated upon oath) to the probability rather than to the declaration. The influence of occupation goes so far in many minor points, that peculiar feelings, (and certainly particular manners,) have seemed, time out of mind, to belong, as of nature, to particular trades. Dyers are a people, throughout all London, accounted uncivil. Linen-drapers are always polite and smirking. Fruiterers and fishmongers every one complains of as impositious. Tailors, all the world knows, give credit instinctively; geese were swans among the auctioneers so long back as the time of Noah. No man in his senses, for six centuries past, has ever believed one word spoken by a picture-dealer, or a curiosity-collector; and a friend of mine, (the most prudent man I ever was acquainted with,) refused to take a house once, because the lessor was an attorney.”—Condy-Men and Manners.

+ The most pithy description I ever heard given of a crowd, was delivered in one sentence by a Frenchman, at a late fire. As the mischief and danger increased, the mob, of course, became highly delighted, and the thieves began to hustle those persons who had staid to put their small-clothes on before they came out. A Frenchman who had stood by up to this crisis, buttoned his pockets, and prepared to depart; observing, with a shrug, as he looked back at the assemblage," Dere is mosh rascal here!"—T.

• "Introductions of a very curious character indeed have sometimes taken place in gaols-I recollect one, which occurred some years since, in Newgate, which