d the parliamentary borough includes part
of the rough population just described. It is very clean, without
antiquities or picturesque beauties, and contains nothing to attract visitors
except its manufactures, of which the best known is cheap saddlery for the
American, West Indian, and Australian markets. They make the leather and
wooden parts, as well as stirrups and bridles; also gunlocks, bits, spurs,
spades, hinges, screws, files, edge tools, and there is one steel-pen
manufactory, besides many articles connected with the Birmingham trade,
either finished or unfinished, the number of which is constantly increasing.
Walsall is celebrated for its pig-market, a celebrity which railroads have
not destroyed, as was expected, but rather increased. Special arrangements
for comfortably disembarking these, the most interesting strangers who visit
Walsall, have been made at the railway station.

The principal church, with a handsome spire, stands upon a hill, and forms a
landmark to the surrounding country. The ascent to it, by a number of steps,
has, according to popular prejudice, produced an effect upon the legs of the
inhabitants more strengthening than elegant, which has originated the
provincial phrase of "Walsall-legged." But this is, no doubt, a libel on the
understandings of the independent borough.

The houses are chiefly built of brick, but it seems as if some years ago the
inhabitants had been seized with an architectural disease, which has left its
marks in the shape of an eruption of stucco porticoes, and one or two
pretensious mansions, externally resembling jails or infirmaries, internally
boasting halls which bear the same proportion to the living rooms as
Falstaff's gallon of sack to his halfpennyworth of bread. No doubt there are
persons whom this style of house exactly suits, the portico represents their
pride, the parlour their economy. What was intended for the Walsall public
library consists of a thin closet behind a gigantic Ionic portico, now
tottering to its fall; and in like manner a perfectly dungeon-like effect has
been given to the principal hotel by another portico, which affords a much
better idea of the charges than of the accommodation to be found within.

As a general rule in travelling, we pass by all hotels with porticoes to take
refuge in more modest Green Dragons or Blue Boars.

Walsall has a municipal corporation of six aldermen and eighteen councillors.
The Reform Bill, to inc