undergone no change whatever since that epoch,
and indeed has undergone but little since it was
built, nearly two hundred years ago. It was
the dingy district called Soho that took my
memory back Thirty Years, and made me think
how much has passed away, how much sprung
up, during that lapse of time. As long as
memory lasts, that desert of brick and mortar
will be suggestive to my mind of the days when
Grey and Russell were fighting the battle of the
Reform Bill; and I shall never thread its mazes
without seeing a little wraith of myself, as I
then was, going on before me, knowing nothing
of Reform Bills or Administrations, but
passively receiving the mental photographs of
surrounding things which I am now endeavouring
to reproduce in pen and ink.

For me, life dawns over Soho-square and its
adjacent territory. Certain grey, glimmering,
and almost spectral prefigurements of that dawn
there may, perhaps, be, hinting at a western
suburb, leafy with trees that are now usurped
by houses; but I suspect all such glimpses, as
being probably nothing but reflections of what
I have heard related. The authentic dawn, as
far as my own recollection is concerned, breaks
over that Square and its tributary streets, whereunto
I was conveyed, one black March evening
in the year 1830, in a hackney-coach. How
well I remember being carried out of the
firelight, and lifted into the great, dusky, yawning,
mouldy cavern on wheels which was to rumble
me off to the unknown region of Soho! How
well, too, do I remember the house to which I
was taken, and the effect it had on me! Soho
was originally an aristocratic neighbourhood,
though the fashion has now swept far away
westward. The Square was built about the year
1681, and has had, among its eminent
inhabitants, the unfortunate Duke of Monmouth
(one of Charles the Second's natural sons—the
Absalom of Dryden's poem); Gilbert Burnet,
Bishop of Salisbury; Sir Cloudesley Shovel,
who perished with his fleet on the Scilly Isles;
Horace Walpole's friend, General Conway;
George Colman the Elder; Sir Joseph Banks,
etc. In Gerrard Street, not far off, lived Dryden,
and, many years afterwards, Edmund Burke;
in Greek Street, as late as 1804, dwelt Sir
Thomas Lawrence; in Carlisle-street, the Earls
of Carlisle had their town mansion up to 1756;
in Dean Street, Hayman and Harlowe, the
painters, had houses; in Frith Street died
Hazlitt. The district is still respectable, though
no longer splendid; but it has acquired an
aspect inconceivably dolorous and depressing,
and is flanked by the disreputable purlieus of
St. Giles's and Seven Dials. However, the
houses in Soho-square and in the best streets
adjoining are large, stately, and austere, with
something of a gloomy magnificence about them,
as if they lived in the mournful memory of
better days, and drew a certain consolation from
grizzling over their faded grandeur. The house
of which I speak was really spacious, and to my
childish eyes seemed vast. On first entering it,
I was dimly and vaguely impressed by a long
suite of rooms opening out of one another, along
which I glanced as down an arcade, and felt
awestruck, until, recognising in a little chaos of
newly-unpacked goods a vessel in which I had
been accustomed to see my infantine food cooked,
I took heart, and was content. Other memories
of that house remain to me. I have to this day
an intense perception of its cupboards, which
were as rooms, and which appear to me, at this
distance of time, to have been perpetually
haunted by ghosts of orange marmalade
other conserves;—I say "ghosts," because I
recollect no bodily presence of those delicacies,
but only an abiding odour. The broad, high,
wainscoted staircase also dwells in my mind;
but most of oil the old-fashioned window-seats.
I had a prodigious idea of the capacity of those
window-seats; and once, coveting, for some
strange whim, a ladder as high as the house
which I had seen some workmen use, I made a
request for its purchase, stating that, when done
with for the day, I would dispose of it on a
particular window-seat where I was accustomed to
lay out my toys. I likewise offered to stable a
Shetland pony in the same retreat, and had the
most entire faith in my ability to groom and
tether him there if I could only possess him;
but Fate denied me the opportunity.

From the altitude of that window-seat I
contemplated Life, as Life developed itself Thirty
Years Ago. Upon looking back, I find that to
my infant senses it chiefly took the shape of
street hawkers and street exhibitions. The
hawkers were much the same then as they are
now, excepting that they generally wore knee
breeches and velveteen, in the manner of Bill
Sikes, and had (I think) a more lofty and
independent disregard of the claims of grammar and
pronunciation than their successors have—which
I note as showing the demoralising effects of
education. The street exhibitions differed in
many respects, and were distinguished by an
amazing dreariness and gloom. I remember no
acrobats, and believe them to be a comparatively
modern importation, as far as the streets are
concerned: but there were men and girls on
stilts, stalking along like shadows in the evening.
The conjurors, I suspect, excelled chiefly
in what may be called fraudulent frauds, such as
promising, for threepence more, to send a pack
of cards round the ring "so fast you can't see
'em;" which was a feat easy of accomplishment
in its negative feature, but in no respect satisfactory.
Punch-and-Judy undoubtedly flourished;
but I confess with shame and grief that I never
could see much fun in that ancient drama.
Puppet-shows abounded at that time, and were very
lamentable. The hospitals and the lunatic asylums
seemed to turn out their lame and blind and
deaf and witless, to make London hideous by
their demented antics. There was one poor
fellow who blew a pipe and drummed upon a
tabor, to a set of forlorn dolls suspended to a
string attached to a spring-board which he
worked with his foot, causing the figures to
revolve, heels overhead, in a monotonous and
ghastly fashion. Child as I was, I used to be