ity should deem it fruitless toil to wend
their way through the old market-place on Christmas Eve, and take a
poet's lesson from the scene!

But there are other pictures still to be seen within the quaint old
Elizabethan frame-work of the city's market-place than scenes of
merchandise, in these days of monster meetings. Who can forget the human
gatherings that have many a time and oft, within the limits of even
childhood's memory, been witnessed here, when gable roofs, and parapets,
windows, and balconies, church towers, and Guildhall leads, have swarmed
with living thousands; gay dressed "totties" and dames, aye, and
sober-minded lords of the creation too! all eager and intent to watch
from safe quarters some common object of attraction that has drawn
together a mighty multitude of the people, with their proverbial love of
sight-seeing, an inheritance bequeathed to them by their ancestral
pageantries. Slight stimulus is needed to send the heart's blood of the
city through every vein and artery to this centre, where it pulsates in
deep and heavy throbs of joy, or hope, or anger, as the case may be;
true, in these modern days the common wants and common blessings that
have bound the sympathies of the million into one, cause the spectacle of
tumultuous hate and bitterness, knocking together of heads, &c, to be a
rare manifestation of popular enthusiasm; more frequently one desire, one
feeling animates the body aggregate, be it to see the mammoth train of a
Hughes or Van Amburgh, the _entree_ of a royal duke, the failure of a
promised fountain bid to play by a new water company, the more successful
display of fireworks at the same behest, the popping of some threescore
pensioners in honour of some royal birthday, or the advent of some
political election. On each and all of such occasions, and many more,
the filling up of the frame-work is a picture of life, of concentrated
human power, will, and passion, full of effect; may be, it needs an
adequate cause to give it full strength, but everywhere it is full of
interest, and the good old city's market-place would not be fairly
chronicled were its monster meetings of sight-seers deemed unworthy a
passing comment. Pageantry has been numbered among the chartered rights
of the citizens, from the days of "mysteries," when the itinerant stage,
with its sacred drama provided by the church, was the only theatre known,
through the age of tournaments, the season of royal visits, Eli