crusts, and cheese-parings, pitying them, wanderers far from their friends and native land; while circumhabitant infancy and childhood congregate around the smiling minstrel, melted by the pathetic cadences of "All round my hat," or stimulated to saltatory exercitations by the toe-andheel inspiriting air of "Jump Jim Crow." Their little rotund chubby faces beaming with smiles; the poor grinder, though hungry, perchance, or cold, responding to their merriment with a hop, skip, and jump, an accompanying whistle, and a good-humoured grin; the affectionate mothers in the background looking on with that look of mingled pride and tenderness, the mother's own expression-make a picture we often stop and gaze at, wishing for the pencil of a Wilkie. The Savoyards, among whom, by the way, are comprised Tyrolese, Genoese, Sardinians, and Italians proper, have their ambitions like other men; one is happy in the possession of a pair of white mice-another glorified in the tricks of a mischievous monkey; all grades of mechanical music belong to them, from the discordant hurdygurdy to the organ imitative of a full band. The ne plus ultra of their art, however, is the conduct of their "comedie," as they call it, which, being interpreted, meaneth no more or less than the puppet-show. The popularity of these exhibitions, though considerable, never rises to that height of enthusiasm where with our populace receive the immortal Punch, now naturalized in our northern clime, and, to the manner of the people, adapted, if not born.

The poor Savoyards are eminently gregarious, huddling together in narrow courts and alleys on the northern side of Holborn, whence you may see them set out in groups, on Sunday mornings, for Primrose Hill, Hampstead, and Highgate, where, in the shady woods or sunny meadows, they idle away the livelong summer's day, indulging in fond remembrances of their far distant mountain home, and laying up in their pulmonary apparatus, as much fresh air as serves them for the week ensuing. It is truly miraculous how those poor creatures make out life, paying, as they do, extortionate sums for the use of their music mills, to those who make a trade of letting them out for hire, faring hard, ill-lodged, and exposed to all weathers; yet do they struggle on in

the hope of saving a few pounds, wherewith to support their aged parents, or settle themselves for life in the pleasant valleys they have left behind.

SPANIARDS we see little of in London; they form a very minute fraction of the adventuring foreigners who swell our full tide of existence. Incapable from character and habit of exertions of trifling ingenuity, and from the long and destructive wars that have desolated their country, indifferent to trade, manufacture, or commerce, they have neither great nor petty business to attract them here. The wine, cork, fruit, and cigar trades, occupy a few merchants of no great note in the city; a few obtain a precarious subsistence by teaching their language, or the guitar; they have no peculiarities to distinguish them from other continental foreigners, except it may be the high feeling, grave deportment, and formal politesse, characteristic of their nation; whenever you meet a Spaniard in London, you may be sure, whether he be poor or rich, you come in contact with a gentleman.

GERMANS We have in abundance: musicians, teachers of languages, clockmakers, bookbinders, and artizans of various descriptions: mute, inglorious Stulzes in great numbers, attracted hither by the uncontrollable propensity of our indigenous snips to indulge in the striking absurdity of "strikes." By the way, our native-born artizans of all sorts, give every encouragement to the inundation of swarms of foreigners, by reckless indulgence in suicidal combination against their employers, not seeing that every recurring" strike" brings into the labourmarket hundreds of interlopers, who cannot so easily be got rid of, thus lowering the wages of the home artizan, and spreading distress among our humbler population. Your German in London resembles your German any where else; heavy, dunder-headed, gross, beer-and-'bacco-bemuzzed individual, but dogged and steady at his work, patient, and generally trustworthy.

AMERICANS are to be found in the commercial quarters of our world, but by no means in the numbers they contribute to Liverpool, where they may be found at every evening party. As we do not in these papers intend to inflict upon the reader descriptions of that which we have not had leisure

and opportunity to contemplate, we cannot undertake to describe the American in England. Once, and only once, had we an opportunity of contemplating the native-born Yankee, at the hospitable board of a commercial acquaintance in the city.

The biped was certainly curious, we might say unique: though, as we have said, we cannot undertake to describe the species, we make no scruple of identifying the individual, in the hope that our Zoological Society may secure the animal without loss of time. The genius in question was attired in an amorphous blue coat, with huge brass buttons, a flaming vest, profusion of projected shirt and double ruffle, boots shaped like fire-buckets, nankeen unwhisperables fluttering about his limbs, resembling a purser's couple of shirts on a couple of handspikes, a white neckcloth with loose tie, and a churn-shaped castor under his arm.

At first, we concluded he must be lunatic, but felt relieved upon hearing that he was only republican. He ate much, drank deep, talked loudly and incessantly: his topics were varied, and, as we thought, somewhat tinctured with incongruity: from one subject he rattled to another, dogmatizing and soliloquizing: "free and independent-niggers; rights of man -Lynch law: fourth of July-slave breeding: civil and religious liberty -tar and feathers: John Tyler-Jim Crow (these he called great menthe latter may be)-corn-laws-loafers shin-plasters-Van Buren: Congress-locofocos: civilization-- Kentucky: ex-President Adams, and the puddings made of Cobbett's corn and treacle, which said Adams had every day for dinner: General Jacksonclam soup canvass backs-Governor Biddle," and so on, from the beginning of the fish to the end of the Madeira. On the retirement of the ladies, this extraordinary mammal called for brandy and cigars; which, being forthwith provided, he proceeded to imbibe and exhale, talking from between his teeth in a high nasal tone, expectorating, at short intervals, betwixt the bars of the grate, with the preci. sion of a Chickasaw rifleman.

The impression produced upon the company by the conduct and conversation of this sample of transatlantic humanity, appeared to be unqualified disgust with Christopher Colombus for having discovered America, and a general inclination to take refuge with

the ladies. We should be sorry indeed to suppose that this remarkable item represented his nation ; on the contrary, we imagine him to have been a living caricature of the American citizen, who is no doubt modest, wellbred, Christian-like, and sensible, as becomes his British origin. These ridiculous stories of Lynch law, tar and feathers, John Tylers and Jim Crows, we take to be merely little imaginary extravaganzas, in which men will at times indulge, who know that the listener must travel four thou sand miles to be able to contradict them.

THE HEBREW NATION next claims a share of our attention, as representing the most numerous, important, and wealthy body of distinct people in London. It may be considered strange that we should include our notice of the Jews under the head of foreigners in London, since they are our fellow-countrymen, and fellowcitizens, as Sir Moses Montefiori and Sir David Solomons (by the way; Sir Moses has an oddity of sound about it, reminding us of the father of chemistry, and brother of the Earl of Cork) can abundantly testify.

Yet, when we reflect that this most ancient, curious, and surpassingly interesting people, not only refuse to mingle or amalgamate with us, but maintain, with inflexible perseverance, not merely their religious tenets, but their distinctive character as a nation, we may be excused from classing a people so foreign in fact, if not in law, under our present division. Whether we are right in so doing, or wrong, makes no matter; we have told the reader that we cannot be answerable for exact classification; besides, what with the cold of this attic wherein we now write, fire gone out, and nobody to fetch a bundle of wood to re-light it, nothing in the house for dinner but the heel of a twopenny loaf and half an onion, and without either money or credit, it is no wonder we should put the Jews to bed with the Christians in our hurry. In the mean time, we must just step to the public-house over the way, warm our toes and fancy, and score, if we can, a half-pint of beer till Magazine day (albo dignum saxo notandi) comes round again.

The man who can look a Jew full in the face (we do not allude to Slo.. man, or any other of the Hebrew fraternity of bums, fellows that we cannot bear to contemplate otherwise

than at the top of our speed,) without perusing in his oval pliz, high, pale forehead, dark, deep-set, flashing eye, a volume of the romance of history more eloquent than Josephus ever writ, must have no more association in his pate than a block of the New Patent Timber Paving Company.

Talk of pedigrees, forsooth!—tell us of the Talbots, Percys, Howards, and such like mushrooms of yesterday!show us a Jew, and we will show you a man whose genealogical tree springs from Abraham's bosom-whose family is older than the Decalogue, and who bears incontrovertible evidence in every line of his oriental countenance, of the authenticity of his descent through myriads of successive generations. You see in him a living argument of the truth of Divine revela

tion-in him you behold the literal fulfilment of the prophecies.

66

With him you ascend the stream of time, not voyaging by the help of the dim, uncertain, and fallacious light of tradition, but guided by an emanation of the same light, which, to his nation, was a cloud by day, and a pillar of fire by night;" in him you see the representative of the once favoured people of God, to whom, as to the chosen of all mankind, He revealed himself their legislator, protector, and king; who brought them out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. "Israelites," as Saint Paul saith, "to whom pertaineth the adoption, and the glory, and the covenants, and the giving of the law, and the service of God, and the promises: whose are the fathers, and of whom as concerning the flesh, Christ came, who is over all, God blessed for ever. Amen." You behold him established, as it were for ever, in the pleasant places allotted him you trace him by the peculiar mercy of his God in his transition states from bondage to freedom; and by the innate depravity of his human nature, from prosperity to insolence, ingratitude, and rebellion following him on, you find him the serf of Rome; you trace him from the smouldering ashes of Jerusalem, an outcast and a wanderer to all lands: the persecutor of Christ, you find him the persecuted of Christians, bearing all things, suffering all things, strong in the pride of human knowledge, stiffnecked and gainsaying, hoping all things, "For the Lord will have mercy on Jacob, and will yet choose Israel, and set them in their own land:

:

and the strangers shall be joined with them, and they shall cleave to the house of Jacob. And the people shall take them, and bring them to their place: and the house of Israel shall possess them in the land of the Lord, for servants and handmaids; and they shall take them captive whose captives they were; and they shall rule over their oppressors."

The associations connected with the history of the Jews are oppressive in interest, and would lead us far away from the humble and unpretending picture of manners we have proposed to limn in our homely Dutch-like way; he who would bring out in colours of truth and nature the romance of Jewish history, must be the Raphael, not the Teniers, of the pen.

When you are awoke early in the morning by the reiterated cry of "Old Clo"-or when the cunning little Isaac, who frequents our court, seduces all the good housewives to their doors and windows by the dulcet strains of his accordion, only to poke them into an exchange of a pair of discarded unwhisperables for a soup plate, soap dish, or some other article of his miscellaneous crockery-you have no idea of Jews or Judaism in London: you must pack up your traps, make under our experienced tutelage a voyage into the East by 'buss or cab, and when we have shown you the Hebrew quartier, and initiated you into many of the peculiarities of Hebrew life, if you do not conclude the day by treating us to a jolly "blow out" at the Albion in Bishopsgate, then art thou indeed a very Jew-a Haman, upon whom Mordecai (me ipso teste) will take unutterable revenges.

The Jewish quarter, then, is bounded to the north by High Street, Spittalfields-to the east by Middlesex Street, popularly known and called Petticoat Lane-to the south by Leadenhall Street, Aldgate, and the hither end of Whitechapel-to the west by Bishopsgate Street, where we are engaged to dine at the Albion aforesaid. This is literally the New Jerusalem: here we Christians are foreigners, strangers in a strange land: here, over the doors, are inscribed pot-hooks and vowel points, indicative, to those who understand them, that Moses Abrahams furnisheth "slops" for home consumption and exportation-this we naturally conclude to be the meaning from the

ported the phenomena of the sun's course. But we reply to that possible suggestion-that in fact it could scarcely have happened. Many other remarkable phenomena of Nigritia had not been reported; or had been dropped out of the record as idle or worthless. Secondly, as slaves they would have obtained little credit, except when falling in with a previous idea or belief. Thirdly, none of these men would be derived from any place to the south of the line, still less south of the southern tropic. Generally they would belong to the northern tropic: and (that being premised) what would have been the true form of the report? Not that they had the sun on the right hand; but that sometimes he was directly vertical, sometimes on the left hand, sometimes on the right. "What, ye black villains! The sun, that never was known to change, unless when he reeled a little at seeing the anthropophagous banquet of Thyestes, he to dance cotillions in this absurd way up and down the heavens, -why, hamstringing is too light a punishment for such insults to Apollo,"

so would a Greek have spoken. And, at least if the report had survived at all, it would have been in this shape as the report of an uncertain movement in the African sun.

But as a regular nautical report made to the Pharaoh of the day, as an extract from the log-book, for this reason, it must be received as unanswerable evidence, as an argument that never can be surmounted on behalf of the voyage, that it contradicted all theories whatsoever—Greek no less than Egyptian-and was irreconcilable with all systems that the wit of men had yet devized [viz. two centuries before Herodotus] for explaining the solar motions. Upon this logic we take our stand. Here is the stronghold, the citadel, of the truth. Many a thing has been fabled, many a thing carefully passed down by tradition as a fact of absolute experience, simply because it fell in with some previous fancy or prejudice of men. And even Baron Munchausen's amusing falsehoods, if examined by a logician, will uniformly be found squared or adjust ed-not indeed to a belief-but to a whimsical sort of plausibility, that reconciles the mind to the extravagance for the single instant that is required. If he drives up a hill of snow, and next morning finds his horse and gig

hanging from the top of a church steeple, the monstrous fiction is still countenanced by the sudden thaw that had taken place in the nighttime, and so far physically possible as to be removed beyond the limits of magic. And the very disgust, which revolts us in a supplement to the baron, that we remember to have seen, arises from the neglect of those smooth plausibilities. We are there summoned to believe blank impossibilities, without a particle of the baron's most ingenious and winning speciousness of preparation. The baron candidly admits the impossibility; faces it; regrets it for the sake of truth: but a fact is a fact: and he puts it to our equitywhether we also have not met with strange events. And never in a single instance does the baron build upwards, without a massy foundation of speci ous physical possibility. Whereas the fiction, if it had been a fiction, recorded by Herodotus, is precisely of that order which must have roused the "incredulus odi" in the fulness of perfection. Neither in the wisdom of man, nor in his follies, was there one resource for mitigating the disgust which would have pursued it. This powerful reason for believing the main fact of the circumnavigation-let the reader, courteous or not, if he is but the logical reader, condescend to balance in his judgment.

Other arguments, only less strong on behalf of the voyage, we will not here notice-except this one, most reasonably urged by Rennell, from his peculiar familiarity, even in that day, (1799,) with the currents and the prevalent winds of the Indian ocean; viz. that such a circumnavigation of Africa was almost sure to prosper, if commenced from the Red Sea, (as it was,) and even more sure to fail if taken in the inverse order; that is to say, through the straits of Gibraltar, and so down the western shore of Africa in the first place. Under that order, which was peculiarly tempting for two reasons to a Carthaginian sailor or a Phoenician, Rennell has shown how all the currents, the mon soons, &c., would baffle the navigator; whilst taken in the opposite series, they might easily co-operate with the bold enterprizer, so as to waft him, if once starting at a proper season, almost to the Cape, before (to use Sir Bingo Binks' phrase) he could say dumpling. Accordingly, a Persian

nobleman of high rank, having been allowed to commute his sentence of capital punishment for that of sailing round Africa, did actually fail from the cause developed by Rennell. Naturally he had a Phoenician crew, as the king's best nautical subjects. Naturally they preferred the false route. Naturally they failed. And the nobleman, returning from transportation before his time, as well as re infecta, was executed.

But (ah, villanous word!) some ugly objector puts in his oar, and demands to know-why, if so vast an event had actually occurred, it could ever have been forgotten, or at all have faded: to this we answer briefly, what properly ought to form a separate section in our notice of Herodotus.The event was not so vast as we, with our present knowledge of Africa, should regard it.

This is a very interesting aspect of the subject. We laugh long and loud when we hear Des Cartes (great man as he was) laying it down, amongst the golden rules for guiding his studies, that he would guard himself against all "prejudices;" because we know, that when a prejudice of any class whatever is seen as such, when it is recognised for a prejudice, from that moment it ceases to be a prejudice. Those are the true baffling prejudices for man, which he never suspects for prejudices. How widely, from the truisms of experience, could we illustrate this truth! But we abstain. We content ourselves with this case. Even Major Rennell, starting semi-consciously from his own previous knowledge (the fruit of researches a thousand years later than Herodotus,) lays down an Africa at least ten times too great for meeting the Greek idea. Unavoidably Herodotus knew the Mediterranean dimensions of Africa; else he would have figured it to himself as an island equal, perhaps, to Greece, Macedon, and Thrace. As it was, there is not a doubt to us, from many indications, that the Libya of Herodotus, after all, did not exceed the total bulk of Asia Minor carried eastwards to the Tigris. But there is not such an awful corrupter of truth in the whole world-there is not such an unconquerable enslaver of men's minds, as the blind instinct by which they yield to the ancient root-bound trebly-anchored prejudications of their childhood and original belief. Misconceive

us not, reader. We do not mean that, having learned such and such doctrines, afterwards they cling to them by affection. Not at all. We mean that, duped by a word and the associations clinging to it, they cleave to certain notions, not from any partiality to them, but because this preoccupation intercepts the very earliest dawn of a possible conception or conjecture in the opposite direction. The most tremendous error in human annals is of that order. It has existed for seventeen centuries in strength; and is not yet extinct, though public in its action, as upon another occasion we shall show. In this case of Africa, it was not that men resisted the truth according to the ordinary notion of a "prejudice;" it was, that every commentator in succession upon Herodotus, coming to the case with the fullest knowledge that Africa was a vast continent, ranging far and wide in both hemispheres, unconsciously slipped into the feeling, that this had always been the belief of men; possibly some might a little fall short of the true estimate, some a little exceed it; but that, on the whole, it was at least as truly figured to men's minds as either of the two other continents. Accordingly, one and all have presumed a bulk for the Libya of Herodotus absolutely at war with the whole indications. And, if they had once again read Herodotns under the guiding light furnished by a blank denial of this notion, they would have found a meaning in many a word of Herodotus, such as they never suspected whilst trying it only from one side. In this blind submission to a prejudice of words and clustering associations, Rennell also shares.

It will be retorted, however, that the long time allowed by Herodotus for the voyage argues a corresponding amplitude of dimensions. Doubtless a time upwards of two years, is long for a modern Periplus, even of that vast continent. But Herodotus knew nothing of monsoons, or trade-winds, or currents he allowed nothing for these accelerating forces, which were enormous, though allowing fully [could any Greek have neglected to allow ?] for all the retarding forces.Daily advances of thirty-three miles at most; nightly reposes, of necessity to men without the compass; above all, a coasting navigation, searching (if it were only for water every nook and