he fewest words by which it is capable
of being confined, I would remark that,

"Here We Are!

"And to that momentous observation, allow me to add the profound
inquiry,

"How Are You?"

So saying, the Clown flings a summerset, and proceeds to pick pockets,
swallow sausages, and burn himself with the hot poker, varying these
practical pleasantries with dissertations on morals and metaphysics.

* * * * *

THE POST OFFICE LONDON DIRECTORY FOR 1854.

We have perused this volume with considerable pleasure. We observe that
it contains two thousand four hundred and ten pages, most of them
comprising three columns of closely printed matter, and but that we
found it impossible to take the book up, we have no doubt we should have
found it equally impossible to lay it down. As a literary composition it
is really remarkable, for the tone which the author takes up at the
beginning is preserved to the very end, and the same unflaggingness, if
we may be permitted the word, which on page 1 introduces us, with a
PALMERSTONIAN jauntiness, to MR. ABBOTT'S coffee-house in the
Whitechapel Road, conducts us, with a GLADSTONIAN tenacity of purpose,
to MR. WILLIAM YOUNG, the accidental secretary of deaths, on page 2288.
But do not let us be misunderstood. There is no monotony of treatment.
We are successively presented with a series of _tableaux_, or rather
tables, of life, of a perpetually varying character. We first find "our
warmest welcome at an inn," and Green Dragons, Blue Lions, Essex
Serpents, and White Horses, spit, roar, hiss, and neigh before us in all
the frightful friendliness of provincial hospitality. Then we are shown
official circles, and there is no mistaking the individual who is
delineated, whether he lounges and reads the _Morning Post_ in the
Treasury, sternly overhauls the national ledger in the Audit Office, or
waits upon the tides, or overhauls the travelling baskets of returning
young ladies, near the Custom House Stairs. Anon, the mysteries of the
streets of London are laid open to us with a minuteness which neither
ASMODEUS nor MR. PETER CUNNINGHAM has ever attempted. But our author is
not confined to the _trottoir_; trades--whose followers look jealously
on the census-paper, and by no means affectionately on the income-tax
return--are thrown open, and to him everybody reveals his business
instead of telling the prying writer to go about his own. He equally