coaches to drown any particular sound, we may readily imagine the din of the great London thoroughfares of four centuries ago, produced by all this vociferous demand for custom. The chief body of London retailers were then itinerant,literally pedlers; and those who had attained some higher station were simply stall-keepers. The streets of trade must have borne a wonderful resemblance to a modern fair. Competition was then a very rude thing, and the loudest voice did something perhaps to carry the customer.

If the age of the Stuarts was not the greatest period of London cries (and it is probable that the progress of refinement had abolished many of them), that period has preserved to us the fullest records of their wonderful variety. Artists of all countries and times have delighted to represent those peculiarities of costume and character which belong to the history of cries. Annibal Carracci has immortalized the cries of Bologna; and from the time of James I. to that of George IV., we have woodcuts and etchings almost numberless of the cries and Itinerant Trades of London. There is a very rare sheet of woodcuts in the British Museum, containing twelve cries; and these may be taken, on the authority of Mr. Smith, the late keeper of the prints, as of the same date as Ben Jonson's "fish wives and costard-mongers." We have here the reverend watchman, with his "Hang out your light," and the noisy "bellman," described and engraved in a recent paper. The "orange-women" of Ben Jonson are here figured to the life. The familiar mention of the orange-sellers in the Silent Woman,' and this very early representation of one of them, show how general the use of this fruit had become in England at the beginning of the seventeenth century. It is stated, though the story is somewhat apocryphal, that the first oranges were imported by Sir Walter Raleigh. It is probable that about his time they first became an article of general commerce. We now consume about two hundred and fifty millions of oranges every year. The orange-women who carried the golden fruit upon their heads through every street and alley, with the musical cry of

lasted for a century or two. beginning of the eighteenth

"Fair lemons and oranges,

Oranges and citrons,"

Mauron (sometimes spelt Lauron), belong unquestionably to an earlier period. The orange-woman became, as everything else became, a more prosaic person as she approached our own times. She was a barrow-woman at the end of the last century; and Porson has thus described her :

"As I walked through the Strand so cheerful and gay,

I met a young girl a-wheeling a barrow;

Fine fruit, sir, says she, and a bill of the play."

The transformation was the same with the cherry-women. The "Strawberries ripe, and cherries in the rise,"

of the days of Henry V., was a poetical cry. It must have come over the ear, telling of sunny gardens not a sparrow's flight from the city, such as that of the Bishop of Ely in Holborn,* and of plenteous orchards which could spare their boughs as well as their fruit. "Cherry ripe" was the cry in the seventeenth century; and we all know how Herrick has married the words to poetry which is not the worse for having been as popular in our own day as "Jump Jim Crow:" "Cherry ripe-ripe-ripe-I cry,

Full and fair ones; come, and buy:

If so be you ask me where

They do grow? I answer, there,
Where my Julia's lips do smile,
There's the land, or cherry-isle;
Whose plantations fully show

All the year where cherries grow."

What a tribute to the fine old poet, who says,

"I sing of brooks, of blossoms, birds, and bowers,"

to have had the dirty lanes of London, two hundred years after his death, made vocal with words that seemed to gush from his heart like the nightingale's song!

But the cries of "Cherry ripe" and of "Fair oranges" are no longer heard. The barrow laden with its golden or ruby treasures no longer is wheeled securely through the Strand. Driven off the pavement by the throng of population, the orange-woman stands upon the edge of the kerb, poising her laden basket so as to present the least impediment to the passengers, and thus satisfy

the inexorable policeman. She is now silent. Even Morose, with his “turban of nightcaps," would shun her not.

We shall not readily associate any very agreeable sounds with the voices of the "fish-wives." The one who cried "Mackerel" in Lydgate's day had probably no such explanatory cry as the " Mackerel alive, alive ho!" of modern times. In the seventeenth century the cry was "New mackerel ;" and in the same way we

have "New Wall-fleet oysters," and "New flounders." The freshness of fish must have been a considerable recommendation in those days of tardy intercourse. But quantity was also to be taken into the account, and so we find the cries of " Buy my dish of great smelts," "great plaice;" "great mussels." Such are the fish-cries in Overton's various collections. The respectable one-eyed lady whom we here present is in Tempest's set; and her cry is "Four for sixpence, mackerel." She is to be contrasted with the damsel gaily tripping with a basket on her head, to the cry of "Buy my dish of great eels," and with another sprightly maiden, who vociferates "Crab, crab, any crabs?" The fish-wives are no longer seen in our great thoroughfares. In Tottenham Court Road, indeed, which still retains the character of a market, they stand in long rows as the evening draws in, with paper-lanthorns stuck in their baskets on dark nights; and there they vociferate as loudly as in the old time.

The "costard-monger" that Morose dreaded, still lives amongst us, and is still noisy. He bawls so loud even to this day, that he puts his hand behind his ear to mitigate the sensation which he inflicts upon his own tympanum. He was originally an apple-seller, whence his name; and, from the mention of him in the old dramatists, he appears to have been frequently an Irishman. In Jonson's 'Bartholomew Fair,' he cries "pears." Ford makes him cry "pippins." He is a quarrelsome fellow, according to Beaumont and Fletcher :

"And then he 'll rail like a rude costermonger,

That schoolboys had cozened of his apple,

As loud and senseless."

The costermonger is now a travelling shopkeeper. We encounter him not in Cornhill, or Holborn, or the Strand: in the neighbourhood of the great markets and well-stored shops he travels not. But his voice is heard in some silent streets stretching into the suburbs; and there his donkey-cart stands at the door, as the

dingy servant-maid cheapens a bundle of cauliflowers. He has monopolized all the trades that were anciently represented by such cries as " Buy my artichokes, mistress," "Ripe cowcumbers," "White onions, white St. Thomas' onions;" "White radish;" "Ripe young beans ;""Any baking pears," "Ripe speragas." He would be indignant to encounter such petty chapmen interfering with his wholesale operaHe would rail against them as the city shopkeepers of the sixteenth and

tions.

seventeenth centuries railed against itinerant traders of every denomination. In the days of Elizabeth, they declare by act of common council, that in ancient times the open streets and lanes of the city have been used, and ought to be used, as the common highway only, and not for hucksters, pedlers, and hagglers, to stand and sit to sell their wares in, and to pass from street to street hawking and offering their wares. In the seventh year of Charles I. the same authorities denounce the oyster-wives, herb-wives, tripe-wives, and the like, as "unruly people;" and they charge them somewhat unjustly, as it must appear, with "framing to themselves a way whereby to live a more easy life than by labour."

"How busy is the man the world calls idle!"

The evil, as the citizens term it, seems to have increased; for in 1694 the common council threatened the pedlers and petty chapmen with the terrors of the laws against rogues and sturdy beggars, the least penalty being whipping, whether for male or female. The reason for this terrible denunciation is very candidly put the citizens and shopkeepers are greatly hindered and prejudiced in their trades by the hawkers and pedlers. Such denunciations as these had little share in putting down the itinerant traders. They continued to flourish, because society required them; and they vanished from our view when society required them no longer. In the middle of the last century they were fairly established as rivals to the shopkeepers. Dr. Johnson, than whom no man knew London better, thus writes in the Adventurer:' "The attention of a new-comer is generally first struck by the multiplicity of cries that stun him in the streets, and the variety of merchandise and manufactures which the shopkeepers expose on every hand." The shopkeepers have now ruined the itinerants-not by putting them down by fiery penalties, but by the competition amongst themselves to have every article at hand for every man's use, which shall be better and cheaper than the wares of the itinerant. Whose car is now ever deafened by the cries of

the broom-men? The Bavarian broom-women, with their "buy a broom" and their hideous songs, belong to the class of street exhibitions. They go with the Savoyard and his monkey and white mice. But the man who bears about real brooms for use has vanished. He was a sturdy fellow in the days of old Morose, carrying on a barter which in itself speaks of the infancy of civilization. His cry was "old shoes for some brooms." These proclamations for barter no doubt furnished a pecu

liar characteristic of the old London cries. The itinerant buyers were as loud, though not so numerous, as the sellers. The familiar voice of "old clouze" has lasted through some generations; but the glories of Monmouth Street were unknown when a lady in a peaked bonnet and a laced stomacher went about proclaiming "old satin, old taffety, or velvet;" and a puritanical-looking gentleman, with three hats on his head, and a bundle of rapiers in his hand, bawled "old cloaks, suits, cr coats." There was trading then going forward from house to house, which careful housewifery and a more vigilant police have banished from the daylight, if they have not extirpated it altogether. Before the shops are open and the chimneys send forth their smoke, there may be now sometimes seen creeping up an area a sly-looking beldam, who treads as stealthily as a cat. Under her cloak has she a pan, whose unctuous contents will some day assist in the enlightenment or purification of the world, in the form of candles or soap. But the good lady of the house, who is a late riser, knows not of the transformation that is going forward. In the old days she would have heard the cry of a maiden, with tub on head and pence in hand, of " any kitchen-stuff have you, maids?" and she probably would have dealt with her herself, or have forbidden her maids to deal. So is it with the old cry of "any old iron take money for?" The fellow who then went openly about with sack on back was a thief, and an encourager of thieves; he now keeps a marine-store.

A curious parallel might be carried out between the itinerant occupations which the progress of society has entirely superseded, and those which even the most advanced civilization is compelled to retain. We can here only hastily glance at a few of these differences. The water-carrier is gone. It is impossible that London can ever again see a man bent beneath the weight of a yoke and two enormous pails, vociferating "New River water." In the days of James I. the water-carrier bore a large can upon his shoulders, with a towel over his back and another over his breast, and he was called a tankard-bearer; and he tra