will find a sort of pictorial counterpart to it, and get the idea of the thing, better than you would by pages of serious description. The doings at Beulah Spa, the Tournament at Tuggeridgeville (where a hit at the famous, but rain-spoilt, jousts at Eglinton Castle is administered) carry us, with the Cox family, away from London for a time. After those feats of chivalry and the sudden disappearance of the Baron, Mrs. Cox being in low spirits, it was determined to make a sojourn at Boulogne. The travelling carriage set off from Portland Place to the Custom House, whence in those days the journey was made, followed by a hackney coach and a cab (a cab was a lighter kind of vehicle than a hackney coach, and was indeed so called from cabriole, viz., a goat's leap, whereas hackney coach is derived from coche-à-haquence, or coach drawn by a hired horse).

"The road," notes Mr. Cox, "down Cheapside and Thames Street need not be described: we saw the monument, a memento of the wicked popish massacre of St. Bartholomew; why erected here I can't think, as St. Bartholomew is in Smithfield; we had a glimpse of Billingsgate, and of the Mansion House,* where we saw the two-and-twenty shilling coal smoke coming out of the chimneys, and were landed at the Custom House in safety."

The history of the Cox family provides little more of topographical importance concerning London, for it is but the record of their downfall from the heights of prosperity in which for a time they fluttered. We take leave of them in the little shop near Oxford

*In those days the upper story-called "The Mare's Nest" still surmounted the Mansion House. It was removed in 1842,

Market in which we first made their acquaintance— far happier than they ever were in the splendid rooms of Portland Place, or amid the rustic beauties of Tuggeridgeville. Then Mrs. Cox came at last to know that her honest Crump was a far better man than her adored Baron, and that a place in the pit was more amusing than a rickety chair in a double box at the Opera.

T

X

MISCELLANIES (CONTINUED)

i

THE YELLOWPLUSH PAPERS*

THE mother of the famous Charles James Harrington Fitzroy Yellowplush, was, as Thackeray significantly tells us, Miss Montmorency, and she lived in the New Cut. This not very savoury thoroughfare must have been recently built over in the days when Thackeray wrote these papers, for we not only know that a windmill existed here in 1815, but by Luffman's plan of the following year, we see the New Cut indicated, but quite innocent of houses. The place is now much as it was when Mayhew described it in 1849, the home of innumerable hucksters, and the name of the street is as indicative of the lower state of society as was that of the Seven Dials or as is that of Whitechapel. It was to the Free School of St. Bartholomew the Less (or so Thackeray disguises it) that Yellowplush was sent for his rudimentary education. As the dress of this institution is described as consisting of " green baize coats, yellow leather whatisnames, a tin plate on the left harm, and a cap about the size of a muffing," I think we may take it that the Blue Coat School (Christ's Hospital) is indicated under a thin * Originally appeared in Fraser's Magazine for 1837-8.

disguise. That historic foundation instituted by Edward VI., in 1588, was close by, in Newgate Street. The well known dress of its scholars (blue coat and yellow stockings) is parodied; the cap, now conspicuous by its absence, used to be a flat black one made of woollen yarn, and was really about the size of a muffin; it was discontinued between fifty and sixty years ago. The "blue-coat " boys once, too, wore a yellow petticoat, but that has also long been discarded. Young Yellowplush distinguished himself, as he tells us in the "musicle way, for I bloo the bellus of the church horgin." This would have been, of course, at Christ Church, Newgate Street, built by Wren, whose galleries had sittings for 900 Blue-coat boys. The organ which Yellowplush blew was built by Renatus Harris in 1690, and is still in situ, but has been reconstructed since that day.

Our hero's first situation was with one Bago, who had a "country-house at Pentonville," and “kep a shop in Smithfield Market," where he "drov a taring good trade, in the hoil and Italian way," and whither, no doubt, he went each day, by the Goswell Road where Mr. Pickwick lodged. Pentonville, whose name is now chiefly associated with the prison which Major Jebb built there in 1840-2, was really then an outlying suburb and so called from the ground landlord, a Mr. Penton whose villa formed the nucleus of the colony which dates from the latter half of the eighteenth century. The exact situation of Mr. Bago's residence is not recorded, but we are told that his shop windows" looked right opsit Newgit," whence "many and many dozen chaps has he seen hanging there." These public executions which

continued down to 1868, became a crying scandal and Dickens and Thackeray are among the many who raised their voices against the practice.

Not long did Yellowplush remain in Mr. Bago's employ, and we next find him, as a "tiger" to a young gentleman " who kep a tilbry and a ridin' hoss at livry." "My new master," says he, "had some business in the city, for he went in every morning at ten, got out of his tilbry at the City Road, and had it waiting for him at six, when, if it was summer, he spanked round into the Park when he was at the oppera, or the play, down I went to skittles, or to White Condick Gardens." In those days the City Road was an outlying thoroughfare (it was first opened in 1761), and in 1816, much of it was still unbuilt upon. What Yellowplush calls the "White Condick Gardens," were, of course, the White Conduit Gardens, once a well known place of entertainment, and so called from a conduit which supplied water to the Charterhouse, and was demolished in 1831. The White Conduit House where small tradesmen and others once took their ease, degenerated later into a large tavern, and was finally pulled down in 1849, to make way for a new street. It stood roughly where Penton Street joins Barnsbury Road. Its "loaves" were famous, and formed one of the cries of London till about 1825. A description of the White Conduit House, as Yellowplush must have known it, is given by the late Mr. Wroth: "From 1880 till the close of the place in 1849 the entertainments, beginning about 7.30, were of a very varied character; concerts, juggling, farces, and ballets. The admission, occasionally sixpence, was usually one