What, then, are we to make of a passage which tells us that Tom Eaves belongs to Black's and to Bays's, and mentions the famous bow window (which has hitherto been a link of identity between White's and Bays's), as belonging to the former ?

IX

MISCELLANIES

i

BALLADS

ALTHOUGH there is naturally a lack of continuity in them the "Miscellanies" provide us with almost as much material for our London studies of Thackeray's writings, as do his longer works. I take, as a convenient authority, the edition published, in four volumes, in 1855. Of these the first contains, so far as concerns us here, the Ballads, The Book of Snobs, The Fatal Boots, and Cox's Diary.

From the first section-the Ballads-we cannot, of course, glean very much, so we must make the best of what there is: A May Day Ode deals with the inauguration of the Crystal Palace (it was Leigh Hunt, I think, who pointed out the fallacy of the title-the building being neither a palace nor made of crystal), and is dated May 1851. Paxton conceived the stupendous pile, which a few years since escaped threatened destruction in its Sydenham haunts, and

"As though 'twere by a wizard's rod
A blazing arch of lucid glass

Leaps like a fountain from the grass
To meet the sun!"

This was not the only occasion on which Thackeray twanged his lyre in praise of the "palace made of windows," for in his Lyra Hibernica, there is a famous and very Irish poem celebrating "this combineetion cristial."

"This Palace tall,

This Cristial Hall,

Which Imperors might covet,
Stands in High Park

Like Noah's Ark,

A Rainbow bint above it ";

we are told, and something of the nature of the cosmopolitan crowd that gathered from the ends of the earth is conveyed in the amusing verses. Jules Janin wrote a book about London in 1851, but you will hardly get in that witty account, a better idea of the world's great Fair, than you can gain from Thackeray's lines.

In "Love Songs made Easy," we find a reference to St. James's Park:

My office window has a corn

er looks into St. James's Park."

sings the writer, adding the information that

"I hear the foot-guards' bugle horn,
Their tramp upon parade I mark;

I am a gentleman forlorn,

I am a Foreign Office clerk.”

This Foreign Office, however, was not the splendid building we know, which was not erected till 1867, but the old premises, abutting on Fludyer Street and the Park, and having their entrance in Downing