articles exhibited in the windows; for though the sign be Hebrew to them, we need hardly say that it is Greek to us. Within the area bounded as above described, but especially about Bevis Marks, Houndsditch, St Mary Axe, and Petticoat Lane, you might readily imagine yourself transported to Frankfort, Warsaw, or any place enjoying a superabundant Jewish population; here, every face is of the shape, and somewhat of the complexion, of a turkey egg; every brow penciled in an arch of exact ellipse; every nose modeled after the proboscis of a Toucan; locks as bushy and black as those of Absalom abound, and beards of the patriarchal ages. Here, and hereabouts, Isaac kills beef and mutton according to the old dispensation Jacob receives accidental silver spoons, and consigns gold watches, now warranted never more to lose a second, to the crucible, kept always at white heat in his little dark cellar, and no questions asked. Here, at the corners, Rebecca disposes of fried liver and 'tatoes, smoking hot, on little bright burnished copper platters, to all the tribes of Israel not prohibited by law to eat-that is to say, to all who possess the solitary "browns" wherewith to purchase the appetizing dainty. Solomon negotiates in the matter of rags: Esther rejoices in a brisk little business of flat fish fried in oil-a species of dainty in which the Jews alone excel: Moses and Aaron keep separate marine stores, where every earthly thing, furtively acquired, from a chain cable to a Cardigan, finds a ready sale: Rachel, albeit a widow, dispenses from behind the bar "short "heavy" to the thirsty tribes: Ruth deals wholesale in oranges and other foreign fruits: Melchizedec dabbleth in Hebrew books and tracts: Absalom sells opium and Turkey rhubarb : Mordecai is a "crimp," the vulture of seafaring men: nothing is to be seen above, below, around, but Jewish physiognomies, Jewish houses, and Jewish occupations. The avidity with which this, in one sense, primitive people pursues gain is not wonderful, when we reflect that gain is all that the, till lately, unrelenting persecution of the Christian has left them to pursue with money, in the dark days of their history, have they purchased the poor privilege to live: with money have they secured for themselves in one country connivance,

and

in another toleration, in a third citizenship: with money have they made war, and set by the ears hostile Nazarenes with money have they negotiated peace-transferred from king to king diadems and sceptres-playing at chuck-farthing with the fates and fortunes of European and Asiatic nations. The same all-absorbing thirst of gold that formed the leading principle in the life of that pillar of the Stock Exchange, the well-remembered Rothschild, animates the merest Israelitish urchin who follows through the streets his bearded progenitor, esquire of the clothes' bag: to the pursuit of gain all their energies are directed with an intensity, unscrupulosity, and perseverance unknown to, and unattempted by, any Christian people money they must and will have, "rem, quocunque modo rem:" the lowest depths of knavery, chicanery, and extortion, are practised by this rabble to accomplish this the end of their existence: for this, the infamous "crimp" grasps the hard earnings of the unsuspecting seaman as soon as he steps upon his native shore, and then spurns him naked into the street for this, the marine storedealers and receivers open their seminaries of theft: for this, the current coin of the realm is clipped, and ingots and sovereigns perspire: for this, the pander entraps, and the bawd opens wide the gates that lead to everlasting death, trafficking in Christian flesh for purposes worse than the worst of slavery.

We are no advocates for renewing the barbarities of the Edwards and the Henries, when a Jew's tooth was rated at a thousand pounds good and lawful monies of our Sovereign Lord the King, or for making our talented friend Nasmyth extractor-general of the tusk-tax yet we must candidly confess, that when we see the daughter of a Christian man patrolling the streets, decorated in the trumpery properties of a Jewish brothel, while the devil's dam, in the shape of an hideous Hebrew hag, follows the poor unfortunate, like the shadow of death, to clutch the wages of her shame, we really think a Christian government might, without any hazard of public odium, string up at the doors of their own dens, Mother Abrahams, Mother Isaacs, and Mother Jacobs. But, after all, perhaps it is better as it is: if this abominable traffic must be connived at, it is better that those should

have the monopoly who have nothing in common with us, save that which the weasel has in common with its prey those who have made a god of mammon, worshipping the golden calf with the tenfold idolatry of their fathers.

There are various kinds of industry-the industry of enterprize, the industry of saving, the industry of toil; the industrial characteristic of the Jew, is industry of over-reaching; other men are content to do business, the Jew must do you. A curious instance of this irreclaimable propensity in the Ten Tribes to catch with instinctive claw whatever does not appear to be honestly come by, occurred no great while since in the city. A respectable man, possessed of a considerable stock of an article which hung heavy upon his hands, and which happened to be particularly suitable to the Jewish market, offered his commodity to several of the nation at a great sacrifice, but without success: a happy thought struck him, that what their hard hearts might deny, their charitable avarice might afford: accordingly, in the clouds of night, our trader repaired to the warehouse of one of the Moseses, noted for his constitutional politesse in abstaining from impertinent questions of the how came you by it" form of interrogation: acquainting the Jew with his possession of a certain quantity of a certain article which he was obliged to dispose of under peculiar circumstances. Moses jumped at the bait like a ravenous pike, and under the supposition, natural enough under the circumstances, that the goods were stolen, actually offered, and paid, more for the articles than the fair market price. When the truth came out, poor Moses, who purchased the articles bona fide stolen, as he fondly imagined, was overcome with the agonizing thought that they had been honestly bought and paid for: the speculation, so foreign to his line of business, and his ideas of mercantile honour, overcame him, and taking a sharp razor, he cut his way through the jugular, as Dr Jonathan Swift would have said, to his own place.

Many and wondrous are the shows of London; but among all the London shows, there is not to the reflecting student of human nature a more remarkable show than the Clothes' Exchange of Cutler Street, Houndsditch, or, as it is popularly called, Rag Fair.

It is a scene full of speculation-full to overflowing; a lively picture of the vicissitudes of sublunary things. Here may the philosophic historian contemplate and record the decline and fall of a Stulz-built coat, the mutations of a military uniform, the anarchy of a cotton gown, and the revolu tions of a pair of breeches; from hence, as from a great museum, could D'Orsay form a collection of fashions from the earliest ages to the present time; here the political economist could illustrate tangibly his theory of vested rights, and the moralist find ample materials for an essay on bad habits; here are turned-coats sufficient for the clothing of both Houses of Parliament; here, as to a workhouse, all that is worthless and worn-out finds its way; here are represented, in their several discarded skins or sloughs, the "out-at-elbows peer and desperate dandy;" the seedy swell is here in a greasy Newmarket cut; the literary man represented by a rusty suit of melancholy black; the subaltern officer's second-worst uniform coat; the despairing lawyer's unliquidated gown; the discarded footman's tawdry livery; in short, it is here, and here alone, you can truly and fully, without affectation or disguise, contemplate the outward and visible man-man created by tailors. You may behold the metamorphoses produced by their rising and their falling fortunes in the microcosm of Rag Fair; through this must pass, at one stage or another, half the second-hand habiliments of the empire; that chocolate silk dress, flung yesterday morning from a duchess to her favourite waiting-woman, in the evening is transferred, for a consi-de-ration, to one of the tribe of Benjamin, and loud and angry may you now hear the contention between the purchaser and seller; those crimson plush breeches we beheld a twelvemonth ago investing the limbs of a footman of the Marchioness of Cholmondeley; that venerable patriarch now holding them between him and the light is concluding the purchase from brother "Sholomonsh" for a shilling; before night they will be disposed of for half-a-crown, payable by instalments, to a dustman in Gravel Lane. That reminds us, by the way, that the natural law by which dustmen are predestinated to red plush breeches is hitherto unexplained. What are the Royal Society about?

A foolish, extravagant, and mis

chievous term has crept into our dictionaries, which is productive of much detriment to the Christian, and great wealth to the Hebrew nation, when applied, as it usually is, in derision of our faithful habiliments—the word "worn-out;" and a more dissipated word, a word more addicted to running up bills and running out money; a word more directly subversive of the liberty of the subject who is in the habit of encouraging it, does not exist under the "W's" of any known vocabulary. It is a villanous word, and has been the ruin of many a respectable family. Your child's clothes lately made are "worn out;" your wife's gowns, paid for only a month ago, are" worn out," though we know very well the gowns are good as new, the only thing worn out being the fashion: her bonnets are "worn out" in consequence of the changeableness of the weather-meaning of the fashion your servants' liveries and livery hats are always worn out, which is no way wonderful, considering that wearing out every thing belonging to their masters is the chief end of their existence: your harness is worn out, your horses are worn out, your carriage is worn out: last of all, your patience is worn out: every thing in your establishment is worn to a thread, and so are you. Go study morals in Rag Fair; any hour of the day, from nine in the morning until six at night, will you hear eloquent sermons from the lips of Rabbis upon the wickedness and folly of supposing that any habiliment in human shape divine can ever be worn out: go, dull clod, and behold the hats, coats, gowns, petticoats, bonnets, and shawls, which you and your wife, tempting the wrath of Providence, have sacrilegiously sold as good for little, or benevolently given away as good for nothing. There may you behold the third best hat you presented to ourselves the other day, in regard to what you were pleased to call our distinguished literary attainments, and which you told your lady wife you might as well give away, being half a size too little for your head, besides not being worth three-halfpence, and which we incontinently trucked for twopennorth of Betts' patent brandy; to-morrow that hat, furbished into a second birth, new lined and banded, will be found ticketed in Hollywell Street at six-and-sixpence, not merely as good, but, as Moses will tell you, clinching the asseveration

with an oath, "more betterer as new." Regard that chaos of old bootsboots, did we say ? old leathers rather; a bushel of boots for one-and-sixpence; next week, having gone through the hands of a score of renovators, you may behold these identical leathers black-balled to the nines, on a stall in Field Lane, sold for halfa-guinea a pair, and warranted to any thing-wear and tear only excepted.

ones.

Behold that venerable ruin of a coat; powers of tatters! is it possible that Mr Pobble O'Keefe, the Irish importer, (we should have observed before that three of the four provinces of Ireland are clothed out of Rag Fair,) is about to add that venerable remain to his dilapidated "properties ?" It is so. He has turned the vestment inside out over and over again, looking for the right side, but in vain; the garment having been turned so often that both sides are wrong Now he holds it expanded upon his arms between him and the light, which streams in broken rays through sundry apertures. Anon, he exhibits a "joey" between his thumb and forefinger; Moses extends three digits in reply; the Milesian shakes his head: the Hebrew plucks his beard, dances about on his axis, uttering untranslatable imprecations. Mr Pobble O'Keefe, moved by the pathos of Moses, exhibits in addition a couple of browns; the bargain is struck, the "tin" transferred, and the rag forked into the wareroom above stairs, to be packed for exportation.

Thousands and tens of thousands of transactions like these, make up the mighty business of Rag Fair. The adventuring tourist, however, who would see it in all its glory, must take care not to choose Saturday for his visit. This, the busiest, most bustling day of the week in other quarters of the town, is here, and hereabouts, the day of Hebrew rest, recreation, and devotion. On the afternoon of Friday, all business is suspended. The men perform their weekly ablutions, and the women, having set their houses in order, put on their dresses of bright scarlet or staring yellow, and having decorated themselves with ear-rings, bracelets, and necklaces of the precious metals, or, in their default, of mosaic gold, bring forth chairs and tables, seating them. selves before their several doors, in the true oriental fashion. Then issue forth the male children of Judah, dressed in all their best, to exchange

courtesies with Rachel and Rebecca. Tables covered with cloths of imposing whiteness, upon which candles burn during the evening, are placed near the windows. A Friday supper answering to our Sunday dinner is prepared, of the best each house affords, and if we may judge from the savoury steams that permeate the ambient air, provisions of the best are hereabouts in great plenty. On summer evenings, when the weather permits to its full extent the out-of-doors relaxation in which this peculiar people delights, Petticoat Lane, swarming with black flowing locks, olive complexions, scarlet, crimson, yellow, and orange dresses, mosaic gold and imitative precious stones, realizes to a vivid imagination those oriental bazars wherein Haroun al Raschid delighted to wander, unnoticed and unregarded, in search of the picturesque in human character and conduct.

Saturday, in the Hebrew quartier, is a day of devotion and of rest. The perpetual din of the Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, and the compulsory idleness of the Christian Sabbath, is exchanged for complete repose. Every shop is shut, every avocation suspended. If the traveller happen not to encounter the congregations in the way to or from the several synagogues, in the course of his perambulations, he may readily imagine the neighbourhood utterly deserted. It is truly a striking contrast between the almost conventual silence on that day of Bevis Marks, Houndsditch, and St Mary Axe, and the excessive noise and bustle of Whitechapel, Bishopsgate, and Leadenhall. How our Sabbath is observed in the Jewish neighbourhoods, may be best estimated from the following notice, which we observed, on our latest visit to the neighbourhood of Rag Fair, posted against the booth which the authorities have lately erected for the better accommodation of those engaged in "de ragsh bishness." The notice is as follows:

"Business will commence at this Exchange on SUNDAY mornings, at ten o'clock. By order of the managers, MOSES ABRAHAMS."

The toleration of Sunday trading, enjoyed by the Jewish community, is truly creditable to our city authorities. There is, it is true, the hypocrisy of half-shutters, but the real business of Rag Fair goes on as briskly, though more silently, on the Sab

bath, (our Sabbath, that is to say,) as on any other day of the week. The reason for this exemption we must leave city Solons to define; but it certainly does excite strange and repugnant sensations, when passing from the Jewish quarter, in the plenitude of its exemption from the repose of the Christian Sabbath, we come upon a little ragged urchin of our own persuasion, with his forfeited stock of oranges and nuts, dragged through the streets by a stalwart policeman, an example to Sunday traders, and consigned to durance vile for the horrible crime of sacrilegiously attempting to earn twopence wherewith to procure a morsel of bread, for a bedridden father it may be, or a widowed mother. There is surely something rotten in this. If Sunday trading is an abomination, we cannot see why we are liable to penalties in the exercise of that profanation which is connived at among the Jews, only because they choose to observe strictly their own Sabbath, while openly violating ours.

The care which the members of the Hebrew persuasion take of their own poor, is highly creditable to them as a body, and worthy all imitation. You see many poor Jews, but never a Jewish beggar. Their hospitals, asylums, and benevolent societies, embrace every variety of distress to which their unfortunate brethren may be exposed. Instead of hunting, as we do, for paupers and vagabonds over the face of the earth whereon to bestow their benevolence, their laudable selfishness takes care of its own in the first instance, and their overplus only finds its way to general purposes of charity. The sooner we begin to imitate our Hebrew fellow-citizens in this particular, the better.

Our object in these papers being, as the reader will by this time have observed, less the delineation of the physique than of the morale of London life, we abstain purposely from any description of the public buildings appropriated to Jewish worship, or of the ceremonies therein performed; this subject properly belongs to other publications, and to them we leave it.

GIPSIES We see little of in London: this nomade tribe seldom penetrate into our streets, or take up their abode permanently among us. We recollect once, and once only, seeing one of their caravans pass along Cheapside, on its way to Fairlop fair, in all probability. A tribe of wandering

most powerful nation upon earth. Can we be more than the most powerful?

While other nations have spent their energies in the continual pursuit of actual change, and find that with every change the desire of further change is all that they have attained by successive struggles, how careful should we be lest that concentration of industry, enterprize, and perseverance, now employed in accumulating, at the uttermost ends of the earth, wealth to be diffused, converted, and expended at home, should be turned against each other, which is only in another way turning each man against himself, and lowering the condition of our common country!

Arabs could not have excited more astonishment; the swarthy countenances of the men, the mascularity of the women, wrapped up in tattered blankets, with scarlet 'kerchiefs bound around their heads; the children barefooted and all but naked; their moveable house, the chimney smoking as they journeyed along, rendered the group a show of the moment, to be stared at, laughed at, and forgotten. Yet London affords to this extraordinary people a plenteous harvest; the suburban fairs, now happily limited in their noxious influences, gather together multitudes of simple holiday-tolks, of whom the gipsy tribe reap a rich contribution for services rendered in anticipating the decrees of fate, and bestowing the favours of fortune, like the sunshine, equally upon the worthy and unworthy, the just and the unjust.

In regarding the multitudes of adventurers, foreign and domestic, to which London affords an asylum and a livelihood, of one sort or other, we cannot be insensible of the small amount of individual wealth they accumulate, or of the insignificance of their services. It is to the character of the native-born citizens that this mighty world owes all its wealth, all its influence, and all its importance.

How petty, in comparison with our London merchant, our London tradesman, our London manufacturer, appear the chattering Frenchman, the fiddling Italian, the plodding German; in comparison with the magnificence of London industry and enterprize, how poor is the position occupied even by the tortuous, over-reachiug, chicaning Jew! It is to ourselves we owe all that we call our own; the supremacy of the law, based upon free institutions, gives us that tranquillity which is the parent of prosperity, and that prosperity which has enabled us to reap the rich harvest of our glory; hence the solidity of our national character; hence our aversion to rash unconsidered change, the instinctive feeling of men who are aware that change produces disturbance, and who know that disturbance is but the portal to decay. From the establishment and fixity of our institutions have we derived all that has made us avowedly, in the eyes of the most envious and hostile nations, the

With what intensity of feeling does not the humblest Englishman regard the honour of his national flag, and with what indomitable energy does he not avenge an insult offered to that flag, the representative of his might and power; how intimately is not the prosperity, glory, and honour of his country mixed up with the very constitution of every one who belongs to this country! Shall we then do that at home, in our folly, which others dare not do abroad in their hate-shall we wage a civil war, aiming suicidal blows at the venerable institutions under whose shade we have grown to greatness? Periods of distress and seasons of depression we must experience, in common with the rest of the nations of the earth; but if we preserve ourselves in peace, these distresses are casual, these depressions temporary; our resources are all but boundless ; peace, order, and repose, have developed them hitherto; peace, tranquillity, and repose, must develop them still.

The unimportance of the foreign adventurers who swarm in our streets to the great interests of this great world, suggest contrasts favourable to our national pride, in contemplating the magnitude of the interests intrusted to the keeping of our countrymen by foreign powers; Englishmen organizing navies, and commanding them, for the Sultan and the Czar; Englishmen drilling and commanding the armies of Greece, and the auxiliary legions of Portugal and Spain. This self-laudatory topic is, however, extrinsic to our subject, and we leave the vain-glorious reader to pursue it for himself.