g these scattered rays of satire and jest in the portly person
of--Mr. Punch.

The original fair of the East and mediaeval Europe was one of the most
instructive and picturesque spectacles among the many gatherings of the
human race. The Great Fair of Novogorod assembled, and still continues
to assemble, myriads of nearly every colour and costume: and in the
market of "the Sledded Russ" the small-eyed Chinese stood side by side
with the ebony-complexioned native of Guinea. Among the many pictures
which Sir Thomas Browne desired to see painted was "a delineation of the
Great Fair of Almachara in Arabia, which, to avoid the great heat of the
sun, is kept in the night, and by the light of the moon." The worthy and
learned knight does not mention the Great Fair of the _Hurdwar_, in the
northern part of Hindostan, where a confluence of many millions of human
beings is brought together under the mixed influences of devotion and
commercial business, and, dispersing as rapidly as it has been evoked,
the crowd "dislimns and leaves not a wrack behind." But fairs and
general enterprise and opulence are not coeval: neither do they flourish
in an age of iron roads and steam-carriages. In fact, they were the
results of the inconvenience attendant upon travelling. It was once
easier for goods to come to customers than for customers to leave their
homes in search of goods. Inland trade was heavily crippled by the
badness and insecurity of the highways. The carriages in which produce
was conveyed were necessarily massive and heavy in their structure, to
enable them to resist the roughness of the ways. Sometimes they were
engulfed in bogs, sometimes upset in dykes, and generally they rolled
heavily along tracks little less uneven than the roofs of houses.

As a direct result of these obstacles to speedy locomotion, the fruits of
the earth, in the winter months, when the roads were broken up or
flooded, were consumed by damp and worms in one place, while a few miles
further on they might have been disposed of at high prices. Turf was
burned in the stoves of London, long after coals were in daily use in the
northern counties; and petitions were presented to the Houses of
Parliament in the reign of Henry VIII., deprecating the destruction of
growing timber for the supply of hearth-fuel. Nor were these miry and
uneven ways by any means exempt from toll; on the contrary, the chivalry
of the Cambrian Rebecca might have been laudably