, a lord so quarrelsome (no: not even in the house of
peers after dinner), a pair of clowns so melancholy, a lady so muddy, or
a party so miserable.

How has May-day decayed!

CHAPTER XXI--BROKERS' AND MARINE-STORE SHOPS

When we affirm that brokers' shops are strange places, and that if an
authentic history of their contents could be procured, it would furnish
many a page of amusement, and many a melancholy tale, it is necessary to
explain the class of shops to which we allude. Perhaps when we make use
of the term 'Brokers' Shop,' the minds of our readers will at once
picture large, handsome warehouses, exhibiting a long perspective of
French-polished dining-tables, rosewood chiffoniers, and mahogany
wash-hand-stands, with an occasional vista of a four-post bedstead and
hangings, and an appropriate foreground of dining-room chairs. Perhaps
they will imagine that we mean an humble class of second-hand furniture
repositories. Their imagination will then naturally lead them to that
street at the back of Long-acre, which is composed almost entirely of
brokers' shops; where you walk through groves of deceitful, showy-looking
furniture, and where the prospect is occasionally enlivened by a bright
red, blue, and yellow hearth-rug, embellished with the pleasing device of
a mail-coach at full speed, or a strange animal, supposed to have been
originally intended for a dog, with a mass of worsted-work in his mouth,
which conjecture has likened to a basket of flowers.

This, by-the-bye, is a tempting article to young wives in the humbler
ranks of life, who have a first-floor front to furnish--they are lost in
admiration, and hardly know which to admire most. The dog is very
beautiful, but they have a dog already on the best tea-tray, and two more
on the mantel-piece. Then, there is something so genteel about that
mail-coach; and the passengers outside (who are all hat) give it such an
air of reality!

The goods here are adapted to the taste, or rather to the means, of cheap
purchasers. There are some of the most beautiful _looking_ Pembroke
tables that were ever beheld: the wood as green as the trees in the Park,
and the leaves almost as certain to fall off in the course of a year.
There is also a most extensive assortment of tent and turn-up bedsteads,
made of stained wood, and innumerable specimens of that base imposition
on society--a sofa bedstead.

A turn-up bedstead is a blunt, honest piece of furniture; it