AT different times several ephemeral little treatises have appeared professing to teach the inhabitants of London how to live upon 50l., 100l., and divers other sums a year, not one, however, pointing out the way by which any of these incomes were to be obtained. Mrs. Glasse went very differently to work when she attempted to throw a new light upon the economy of cooking, by advising her readers to “first catch their hare,” thereby conveying most sensible information in one brief unmistakable sentence, and leaving them to proceed with the receipt, or not, just as they were or might be provided with the animal treated of. Although this introduction is hardly to the point, it will serve to lead us to the ways and means hundreds have recourse to of obtaining a livelihood, by appealing to our eyes and ears, by the sights and sounds which they produce in our busy streets; causing those within doors to curse their deafening clamour, and those without, who are interrupted by the assembled crowd, and prevented from passing on their way, to utter any thing but blessings upon their “devoted heads,” proving the moral of the old fable, that what is fun to one is death to another, by one class being amused at the expense of another’s annoyance.

For our part we look on these street performers with a very lenient eye, knowing that they are struggling to live in the best way they can, and that their humble endeavours to please afford amusement to thousands. Look how the little urchins run at the first sound of Punch’s well-known voice; what a pattering there is of shod and unshod feet from every court and alley in the neighbourhood as soon as his “chuck, chuck, churee” is heard, startling the silence of the street! They whip up their marbles, and start off with their pegtops half wound to get a front place; for the hardened old rogue was a favourite with their forefathers, and they are never weary of seeing him bang Judy with his truncheon. They have a keen relish for his rather coarse jokes—the only objectionable point in this old exhibition. How they dance round an Italian boy with his organ, forgetting all their poverty and hunger for the moment, while some little rascal, the raggedest in the group, keeps excellent time with his castanets, which are four bare bones placed between the fingers of each hand, and rattled over his head with laughter and delight, while he thinks himself the chief contributor to the amusement.

But Punch and Judy are the chief characters in our sketch. Punch was a different performance in our youthful days: then he went out, got drunk, came home and quarrelled with his wife; from words they got to blows, and there used to be a tremendous fight between them, and sorry we are to say the drunken old rascal swore dreadfully. At last he struck Judy a tremendous blow with his truncheon, and she fell down senseless, as if dead. Then the conscience of the hump-backed villain smote him, and he wept and wailed over her, until at last the doctor came, felt her pulse, and pronounced her dead. Punch was inconsolable for her loss, pronounced the doctor a quack, and then they went at it. Oh, what a fight that was between Punch and the Doctor! but the man of physic fell beneath the truncheon of the hooked-nosed old blackguard, and appeared as if dead. Punch was next tried, and knocked the judge off the bench for finding him guilty of murder, and sentencing him to be hanged. Then the gallows was brought out, and you made sure that the old villain’s career of crime was ended; but not a bit of it; like Mat Prior’s thief, he

He seemed willing enough to be hanged, but did not know how to place his neck in the halter; sometimes he put his arms through the noose, then half his body, but never by any chance did he allow the cord to touch his neck. At length he succeeded in persuading Jack Ketch to shew him the right way: the hangman did so, placed his own neck in the noose, received a crack on the head with the staff and a kick behind, and there he hung and swung to the delight of every beholder. Then came the Devil, horned, hoofed, tailed, saucer-eyed, and black as ebony; but Punch was game to the back-bone, and fought with all his might, causing the Devil himself to retreat several times before he would give in. Nor did we ever think the Devil beat him fairly; for he came behind, like a sneaking thief as he is, pinioned both the arms of Punch, while the latter had his face turned towards us in triumph, and bore him away on his back: we could even hear the prominent-paunched old hero swearing, as his horned antagonist vanished with him below the green baize.

The dog Toby is a modern innovation. He belonged not to the Punch and Judy of our boyish days.

But our picture is not complete without the spectators. Look at that ragged woman holding up her dirty child. The little rogue claps his tiny hands, and crows again at every blow Judy receives; and that poor mother is more delighted with the pleasurable expression of her dirty darling’s countenance than she is with the exhibition, for her heart and eyes are fixed on her child. But for Punch sounding in the street, the urchin would probably have been creeping about the house, or seated upon the hearth crunching the cinders he picked up from under the grate. Even that thin pale-faced girl, who holds up a baby half as big as herself, and throws the long loose hair aside which fell over her clear blue eyes, as she came running and panting up with her heavy burden, stands looking on delighted. That respectable-looking old gentleman also halts, though half ashamed of being seen in such a motley assembly; then passes on with a smile on his face, for he remembers pausing many a time, when going or returning from school with his books swung idly over his shoulder, to look at Punch and Judy; and while he walks along his mind turns back to the days of other years. Then the drum—what a spirit-stirring sound it makes! and the shrill pandean pipes, stuck in a stock of faded crimson velvet, how clear and shrilly they sound!—the man’s head seems as if placed on a swivel, and he hammers and blows away as if for very life.

But whither is the crowd running? To see an organ-boy and his monkey. What an excellent tumbler Jocko is! his long tail seems no incumbrance to him, but head over heels he goes. What a strange language his jabbering seems, a running of one word into another! and he looks at us as if pitying our ignorance for not understanding him. There is something about his countenance conducive to merriment; something so old-manish in the expression of his face, that we cannot forbear laughing at him. See how he cracks that nut,—how nimbly he plies his fingers, and how knowingly he looks up at us all the time, as if wondering whether he shall get another or not when that is eaten. What a living caricature he is of our race; now an indignant ugly old man, jabbering and spitting out his vexation; then a mischievous boy, playing all kinds of tricks, and, though grumbled at, liked by every body. Poor fellow! we almost regret that he was ever caught and shoved into that scarlet jacket, to add to our street

amusements; and when we see him looking sorrowful, we fancy that we can read his thoughts, can imagine that his memory has wandered far away, to where he hung upon his “old ancestral trees” by his prehensile tail, before the days of his captivity, chattering to his brother monkeys, who could comprehend every word he uttered, or pelting his venerable old grandfather with nuts from the topmost bough of the highest tree that waved amid his native forest. Heigho! The longer we look the more do we feel convinced that we in a thousand ways resemble him, for we are all of us more or less monkeys. Mary Howitt says that he gambolled about and played the very devil in the ark, without bestowing a thought on the wind and rain that blew and beat on the roof; and no one living can contradict her.

But what have we here? A caravan, and a wonderful fat boy in it: charge for admission, one halfpenny. What dodging they have to elude the police—pulling up at the end of every street, if it be only for five minutes—for the fat boy must be fed: were he to get thin, the whole establishment would be ruined. All, saving himself, are thin, the horse almost a skeleton. We can picture the fat fellow crying out that he is falling off pounds if his dinner is delayed an hour behind the usual time—and what a running about there must be to supply him with food! He looks a lazy rascal—a human hog. Dwarfs also, in our eyes, always look spiteful,—little morsels of humanity that would pinch and bite us, if they dare. And well they may be: we should feel so ourselves were we caught, imprisoned, and shewn to all comers at sixpence or threepence a head.

Look at that little girl in the spangled frock; she is brought out like another Samson, to make sport for the Philistines. How prettily she dances on that board—four feet by three! Through dirt and wet she is compelled to trudge; for she and that unsailor-like fellow, who dances the sailor’s hornpipe, have to supply the whole party with bread. He who drums and pipes also contributes his share. The other two shout, and go round to the crowd, hat in hand, to obtain what they can. Sometimes a similar party is accompanied by a tumbler,—a man whose feet appear to be of no other use to him than to kick them about in the air,—who can walk best on his hands,—and who, we fancy, must be many years in wearing out a pair of shoes. Into what shapes does he twist his body! He seems lithe as a serpent—must have been born without a spine—is all skin—all angles—the spokes of a wheel—a worm rolling in salt—a monkey’s tail that has been thrust into the fire. One would hardly be surprised to see such a limber elf jump clean out of his skin, rattle his bare bones like castanets for a few seconds to amuse us, then slip into his hide again, with less trouble than we could put on our coat.

The next are the balancers,—from a feather to a fir-tree, nothing comes amiss. That fellow will balance a sword on his naked chin with the point downward; you look under his throat, and expect to see it come through every minute, and are greatly disappointed to behold it spinning round without making an incision. Now he takes a ladder, high enough to reach a second-floor window, and up it goes on his chin, as if it were no heavier than the straw he has just thrown down. Mercy on us! whatever is he going to do with that little boy in the harlequin dress? See, the daring child steps from the balancer’s shoulder to the ladder: higher the little fellow goes, slowly, cautiously—the ladder still on the man’s chin. It looks dangerous, and (self-preservation) you begin to think that if the ladder were to fall, it would be much safer to stand a few feet farther back.

The Stilt-dancers are not so common in our London streets as they were a few years ago, when they came popping up suddenly at our first-floor windows, and startled us in some occupation which we had no wish to be overlooked,—perchance trying on a peruke, so well-made, that all our friends gave us credit for wearing our own hair. Then, perhaps, they understood not a single word of English; and if you bade them go to Old Harry and shake themselves, they still kept smiling and smirking at you through the window, until their immovable goodnature overcome your slight anger, and you sent them away quite happy, and perfectly unconscious that you had given utterance to one angry word. We also miss the pipe and tabor, and those droll back-kneed fellows the dancing-dogs: these the new police act have driven away, or they are only to be met with in the far-off country.

To what different objects the telescope is now turned from what Horace Walpole describes witnessing, when the heads of unfortunate rebels were placed on Temple Bar: for a penny we may peep at the mountains in the moon, or hear a poor but intelligent man describe the wonders of the

instead of paying to peep at those mangled and goary heads—a great improvement on those old barbarous street-sights. White mice and guinea-pigs are still to be met with as “plentiful as blackberries” in the yellow month of October; and from the sound of hurdy-gurdies and the droning of bagpipes, who has not prayed to be delivered? while from our hearts we pity those poor white-haired, pink-eyed mortals, who go winking and blinking hand in hand along the crowded pavements, gazed at in wonder even by the swarthy Lascars, who are ever thrusting tracts in our faces.

Nor must we forget the “chummies,” with their Jack-in-the-green, who, instead of sooty garments, cover in May their “innocent blackness” with spangles and tinsel. How Jack reels and staggers in the midst of his green portable arbour towards the close of the day! lurching aside like the massy trunk of a tree buried in ivy, which you expect every minute to fall; reminding us of Orpheus, and the life he put into the timber toes of the hoary old oaks when the forest trees stood bough linked with bough as they danced a merry reel, making all their green array of leaves to tremble again. Merrily does the “Sweepess,” or “Jackess” of the green, jingle her bright brass ladle before the doors; and freely is the produce of that day spent in gin, until the drinking and fighting is ended, when, disrobed of their tinselled trappings, they snore happily on a couch of soft soot.

Guy Fawkes still forms one of our London street amusements, though we regret to say that Guy is now oftener personated by some great hulking gin-drinking lazy fellow, than the old, uncouth stuffed figures which were frequently carried about, with one foot hanging down before and the other behind.

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