and has the prophecies of Robert Nixon and Mother Shipton 2 by heart. No man can make so much out of an eclipse, or even an unusually dark day; and he shook the tail of the last comet over the heads of his customers and disciples until they were nearly frightened out of their wits. He has lately got hold of a popular legend or prophecy, on which he has been unusually eloquent. There has been a saying current among the ancient sibyls, who treasure up these things, that when the grasshopper on the top of the Exchange shook hands with the dragon on the top of Bow Church steeple, fearful events would take place. This strange conjunction, it seems, has as strangely come to pass. The same architect has been engaged lately on the repairs of the cupola of the Exchange, and the steeple of Bow Church; and, fearful to relate, the dragon and the grasshopper actually lie, cheek by jole, in the yard of his workshop.

"Others," as Mr. Skryme is accustomed to say, "may go star-gazing, and look for conjunctions in the heavens, but here is a conjunction on the earth, near at home, and under our own eyes, which sur passes all the signs and calculations of astrologers." Since these portentous weathercocks have thus laid

1 Known as the Cheshire Idiot, a contemporary of Mother Shipton, and reckoned a poet. See Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions, by Charles Mackay, vol. i. pp. 196–201.

2 A woman said to have been living in Yorkshire in the tim of Henry VII., and to have had prophetic power. Many of her prophecies, in rhyme, are in the mouths of half-educated people in England to-day, and their fulfilment looked for.

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their heads together, wonderful events had already occurred. The good old king, notwithstanding that he had lived eighty-two years, had all at once given up the ghost; another king had mounted the throne; a royal duke had died suddenly 2 other, in France, had been murdered; there had been radical meetings in all parts of the kingdom; the bloody scenes at Manchester; the great plot in Cato Street; 5 — and, above all, the queen had returned to England! 6 All these sinister events

1 George III., who died January 29, 1820, and was succeeded by George IV.

2 The Duke of Kent, who died in 1820.

8 The Duke of Berri, second in succession to the crown, who was assassinated in 1820.

4 There had been a period of great suffering in England and a chronic discontent at the existing order of things, when in August, 1819, an immense meeting, in opposition to the government, was held at Manchester. Troops were on the ground, and in a sudden panic the magistrates ordered a charge which had a frightful result.

5 The Cato Street Conspiracy was a plot to murder all the ministers of the crown at a cabinet dinner to be held February 23, 1820, to fire the barracks, and make an assault upon the Bank of England and the Tower. It was the scheme of a few desperate men in the time of great popular discontent with the govern

ment.

6 Caroline, queen of King George IV. She had gone to the Continent in 1814, driven there by the persecution of her husband then Prince Regent. She returned in 1820 to vindicate her rights, and all England was divided into two parties upon he question of her innocency. A bill was introduced into Parliainent for her deposition as queen and her divorce from the king, ut finally failed. Her acquittal was followed by immense popalar rejoicings, but her own imprudence partly cooled the public sympathy, and her death, in August, 1820, shortly after the king's coronation, came in season to save her from further dis

aster.

are recounted by Mr. Skryme, with a mysterious look, and a dismal shake of the head; and being taken with his drugs, and associated in the minds of his auditors with stuffed sea-monsters, bottled serpents, and his own visage, which is a title-page of tribulation, they have spread great gloom through the minds of the people of Little Britain. They shake their heads whenever they go by Bow Church, and observe, that they never expected any good to come of taking down that steeple, which in old times told nothing but glad tidings, as the history of Whittington and his Cat bears witness.

The rival oracle of Little Britain is a substantial cheesemonger, who lives in a fragment of one of the old family mansions, and is as magnificently lodged as a round-bellied mite in the midst of one of his own Cheshires. Indeed, he is a man of no little standing and importance; and his renown extends through Huggin Lane, and Lad Lane, and even unto Aldermanbury. His opinion is very much taken in affairs of state, having read the Sunday papers for the last half century, together with the "Gentleman's Magazine," Rapin's "History of England," and the "Naval Chronicle." His head is stored with invaluable maxims which have borne the test of time and use for centuries. It is his firm opinion that "it is a moral impossible," so long as England is true to herself, that anything can shake her: and he has much to say on the subject of the national debt; which, somehow or other, he proves to be a great national bulwark and blessing

He passed the greater part of his life in the purlieus of Little Britain, until of late years, when, having become rich, and grown into the dignity of a Sunday cane, he begins to take his pleasure and see the world. He has therefore made several excursions to Hampstead, Highgate, and other neigh boring towns, where he has passed whole afternoons in looking back upon the metropolis through a telescope, and endeavoring to descry the steeple of St. Bartholomew's. Not a stage-coachman of Bulland-Mouth Street but touches his hat as he passes; and he is considered quite a patron at the coachoffice of the Goose and Gridiron, St. Paul's Churchyard. His family have been very urgent for him to make an expedition to Margate, but he has great doubts of those new gimcracks, the steamboats, and Indeed thinks himself too advanced in life to underake sea-voyages.

Little Britain has occasionally its factions and divisions, and party spirit ran very high at one time in consequence of two rival "Burial Societies " being set up in the place. One held its meeting at the Swan and Horse Shoe,' and was patronized

1 It is just possible that this may have been The Swan and Harp. "The Mitre was a celebrated music-house in London House Yard at the northwest end of St. Paul's. When it ceased to be a music-house the succeeding landlord, to ridicule its former destiny, chose for his sign a goose stroking the bars of a gridiron with his foot The Goose and Gridiron) in ridicule of the Swan and Harp, a common sign for the early music-houses. Such an origin does the Tatler give; but it may also be a ver. acular reading of the coat of arms of the Company of Musi ians, suspended probably at the door of the Mitre when it was a

by the cheesemonger; the other at the Cock and Crown, under the auspices of the apothecary; it is needless to say that the latter was the most flourishing. I have passed an evening or two at each, and have acquired much valuable information, as to the best mode of being buried, the comparative merits of churchyards, together with divers hints on the subject of patent-iron coffins. I have heard the question discussed in all its bearings as to the legality of prohibiting the latter on account of their durability. The feuds occasioned by these societies have happily died of late; but they were for a long time prevailing themes of controversy, the people of Little Britain being extremely solicitous of funereal honors and of lying comfortably in their

graves.

Besides these two funeral societies there is a third of quite a different cast, which tends to throw the sunshine of good-humor over the whole neighborhood. It meets once a week at a little old-fashioned house, kept by a jolly publican of the name of Wagstaff, and bearing for insignia a resplendent half-moon, with a most seductive bunch of grapes. The old edifice is covered with inscriptions to catch the eye of the thirsty wayfarer, such as "Truman, Hanbury, and Co.'s Entire," "Wine, Rum, and

music-house. These arms are, a swan with his wings expanded, within a double tressure, counter, flory, argent. This double tressure might have suggested a gridiron to unsophisticated pass8-by.” — The History of Signboards, by Jacob Larwood and John Camden Hotten, pp. 445, 446.