hangeful canopy of "ethereal blue," or neutral tint, toned down at
whiles to hues of sombre gloom, beneath the heavy shade of passing storms
of hail and thunder, or more steady-falling rain and snow, has made the
philanthropists of these reforming times conservatives all, on this one
point, while model cottages, baths and washhouses, almshouses for
freemen, and almost every other scheme ingenuity may devise to testify
the care and thought bestowed upon the public weal, are rising up around.
Let the cry of "_Protection_" once again be raised, not for the
"distressed agriculturist" salesman, in his handsome corn exchange, but
in favour of the "unprotected females" that sit unsheltered from the sun
or storm, to vend the produce of the poultry-yards, the dairy-house, and
market-garden.

But though no Temple to Commerce of the larder has been erected--a fact
to be deplored in a utilitarian sense--it can never be denied that the
good old seat of thriving trade can boast as fine a specimen of a genuine
old market-place as may well be found in this day of competition and
rivalry. Its motley assemblage of buildings, ranged round the open
square, of all styles and all ages, jostling against one another, or here
and there huddled together into all sorts of inconceivable groups of
varied and fantastic outline; the young ones of to-day starting up with
bold and saucy front, and verily squeezing out from among them their
quaint, old-fashioned, gable-ended kinsfolk of older date, or sometimes
creeping out, as it were, from beneath them, content with shewing a
modern face in some lower window, decked with all the new-fangled
conceits of the latest fashions, and allowing their ancestors quiet
resting-place aloft, where to moulder away into decay, are a chronology
of history in themselves. Now and then, the fretted ironwork of some
miniature parade, hanging midway in the air, and clinging to the
perpendicular of masonry above some new plate-glassed and glittering
front, suggests thoughts of marine villas, moonlight and sea views, and
all those pretty poetical fancies associated with a lodging at some
fashionable watering-place, and one wonders how they ever came to be
transported thither, and for why? They that own them tell us that they
have their use, in the city, where the love of pageantry is an heir-loom
from generations long since passed away whose birthright was to minister
to the gorgeous magnificence of fraternities and guilds