I maid mi borde a leetle whyder,
To let you nowe I sels good Syder :'

the lines, like the liquors, being composed by the said John Stubbs! A giant,* well padded out, was adding some inches to his stature by a pair of German hogloshes, with extra high heels; a fresh-water sailor, with one eye, and one leg, had a seal that exhaled an odour most ancient and fish-like;' a ballad-singer was whitening his head with chalk,† and several poor Italian boys, with tortoises, squir rels, monkeys, and white mice, were jabbering away their patois in a corner with great animation. One lively little fellow, the lion of the party, with brilliant black eyes, ivory teeth, and a dark brown complexion, tinged with the bright warmth of an Italian sun, who bore on his shoulder a frolicksome marmoset‡ that he had been teaching to leap through a hoop, amused his companions with a ditty that he had picked up on his journey hither from the pleasant valleys of his father-land.

The person of Uncle Timothy was naturally imposing; but the superfine broad cloth and brass buttons of Mr. Rumfit had invested it with a magisterial character that caused a sudden movement among the exhibitors when he entered their sanctorum. But the middle-aged gentleman soon convinced them that he was a man of humanity, and no magistrate; which quieted the alarms of both men and monkeys; and so gracious were his looks and demeanour, that the shaved bear, which had viewed him with scowling distrust, no longer kept aloof, but proffered his shaggy paw for a shake. At this moment the lecturing musician entered the room, and Master Jackimo, recognizing his benefactor, jumped from the organ, ran up to him, doffed his cap, and made his best bow! Uncle Timothy and

Giants have been At Home' not at fairs only. Og, King of Bashan, was more than twelve English feet in height. Goliah was about nine feet nine inches high-or eleven feet, according to some commentators. The Emperor Maximinus is said to have been nine feet. Turner, the naturalist, mentions having seen on the Brazil coast a race of gigantic savages, one of whom measured twelve feet! And Monsieur Thevet, in his description of America, published at Paris in 1575, declares that he saw and measured the skeleton of a South American, which was eleven feet five inches in length. Diemerbroeck saw at Utrecht a well-proportioned living man, measuring eight feet six inches; and Dr. Becamus was introduced to a youth who was nearly nine feet high; a man almost ten feet, and a woman quite ten feet. The Patagonians have been represented as a nation of giants. The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society contain accounts of skeletons dog up in England, measuring eight and nine feet in length, which probably were Roman. In the forty-first and forty-second volumes of the same work are two en. gravings taken from an os frontis and an os bregmatis, the former of which is reckoned to have belonged to a person between eleven and twelve feet high; the latter to a giant of thirteen feet four inches. Walter Parsons, porter to King James the First, was seven feet seven inches in stature. The Chinese would have us believe that they possess giants fifteen feet high. More of these prodigies hereafter.

+ Powdering the hair is supposed to have taken its rise in modern Europe from some ballad singers at the fair of St. Germain's in 1614, whitening their heads to make themselves ludicrous!

The custom of bearing an ape on the shoulder at country fairs, &c., is very an. cient. Ben Jonson makes the following allusion to it in his Masque of Gypsies : A gypsy in his shape,

More calls the beholder,
Than the fellow with the ape,
Or the ape on his shoulder.

his company being now upon terms, he ordered in biscuits for the monkeys, and buns for the bears; not forgetting some nuts for his friend, Jackimo, who waited for the musician's nod before he ventured to crack one of them. He then inquired of the bear-ward what his four-footed companion would like to drink? Upon which the keeper consulted his oracle, and received a reply which set the room in a roar that a jug of home-brewed, with a toast and sugar, would be supremely acceptable! Uncle Timothy started, conceiving Bruin to have suddenly become possessed of Balaam's miraculous quality but the mystery was soon explained; the keeper being a ventriloquist, and this one of his Bartlemy fair tricks.

'Pray, gentlemen,' said Uncle Timothy, 'by what means do you make these animals so apprehensive and docile? I fear there is some cruelty in the case.'

'No cruelty at all, good sir,' replied the lecturing musician, who was the organ of the company. It is your Smithfield drovers and butchers as is cruel! We prac-tise the soothing system. We don't larn our hanimals to dance on red-hot iron plates, as our aunt's sisters (ancestors?) did. Now that 'ere monkey o' mine; I soon found out which way the cat jumped with him. Never was sich a wain little cove! It costs me a fortin in starch to stiffen his shirt collars; and if any on 'em is in the least limp, my wig! he chatters, grins, and gies himself all the airs and graces of a fine lady. Sometimes I larn him his dooty by long lessons and short commons; sometimes I threatens- only threatens ! - (but that in your honour's ear, for he 's a-listening all the while!) to tip him monkey's allowance (shaking ferociously a very thin cane); but when I want to touch his feelings, I says, "Jackimo, you 're a good-for-nuffin little monster, and I'll walk off your red waistcoat!"

This explanation was satisfactory to Uncle Timothy. 'But the monkey and the bear, how relish they the razor?' 'Kindly, sir, kindly!' replied the bruin shaver. At first the old feller was summut rough and ugly; his beard turned the hedges of three oyster-knives afore I could trim him into a gentleman. But now he sees the advantage on it. Don't you my daisy?'

The bear, after the fashion of the Irish echo, was made to ventrilo quise in a growl, gruffly, 'I does, my tulip!'

The several rehearsals being over, and all things put in order for their approaching campaign, the exhibitors were about to depart, when it occurred to Uncle Timothy that he had not paid his footing for being admitted behind the scenes. He addressed the real wild Indian, and begged her to call for what best pleased her palate; which call resolved itself into a rasher on the coals, a Welsh rabbit, a ruimer of nutbrown, and a thimblefull of brandy to keep off the spasms. She was then escorted to her tea-kettle, and put under cover for the night. The bear and the monkey having been similarly disposed of, their respective shavers made merry with the rest of the show-folk. Uncle Timothy took the poor little Italian boys under his own care, and feasted them plenteously. At this moment a rival tea-kettle drew up, with a caravan in the rear.

'Pray, madam,' said a tragedy queen, peeping through a bit of ragged green curtain that depended before the entrance of the teakettle, to a dwarf in the caravan, 'do you put up at Mother RedCap's?'

'Not I, madam,' responded the Lilliputian lady, 'I stops at the Robin Hood at merry Hoxton ;† none but the lower orders stops at Mother Red-Cap's!' And the caravan moved on as fast as the wall-eyed, half-starved anatomy of a Rosinante could drag it.

The rival tea-kettle poured out a part of its contents in the person of a long, lean man, with all his limbs rumbling; no way reducible to compass, unless you doubled him up like a pocket-rule. His wardrobe was in a fluttering condition, and illustrative of Jewfrippery and Rag-Fair tawdry. His coat was a patchwork quilt, his waistcoat and pantaloons, the sign of the chequers, an escutcheon quartering all the colours of the rainbow.

'In his hand

A box he bore, wherein the pungent dust
Of Dutch rapee, in gaudy state reclin'd.
Oft would he ope the lid, and oft immerge
His fingers,'

for the purpose of exciting an agreeable titillation in a very sharp nose, that blushed like a corn-poppy.

'A glass of cold water, warm without sugar, Lady Teazle? or a strip of white satin and bitters, my Belvidera? A pint of half-andhalf in the pewter, my Calista? or a tumbler of cold without, Mrs Longbow?"

'D'ye think, Mr. Bigstick, I'm a rhinoscheros, a river-oss, or a crocodile? Order me a pot of hot coffee and buttered toast; and mind, Mr. Bigstick, let it be buttered on both sides.'

This dialogue was carried on between the long lean man and an invisible sharp-voiced personage in the tea-kettle.

'Coffee and toast for the tea-kettle,' shouted the waiter.

* This old house, fronting the fields at Hoxton, was formerly a noted place of resort for the Finsbury archers. Sir William D'Avenant, in his Long Vacation in London,' says of the proctors and attorneys,

A stray Toxopholite may now and then be seen at the Robin Hood, stringing his bow, and dreaning of the merry days that are past. Underneath the ancient sign is the following inscription,

Ye archers bold, and yeomen good,
Stop, and drink with Robin Hood;
If Robin Hood is not at home,
Stop, and drink with Little John.'

+ Thomas Dale, Drawer at the Crown Tavern at Aldgate, kept the Turk's Head Music-Booth in Smithfield-Rounds, over-against the Greyhound Inn, during the time of Bartholomew Fair (Temp. W. 3d.) where he exhibited, with other ludi. crous antics, Scaramouch dances and drolls, the Merry Cuckolds of Hogsden! It is stated in the Henslowe papers, deposited in the archives of Dulwich College, that Ben Jonson killed Gabriel Spencer, a fellow actor, in a duel fought in Hoxton Fields.

'How many?' demanded mine host.

Four. Lady Teaser, Belvideary, Miss Cannister, and Mrs. Longbow.'

'Mort de ma vie!' ejaculated the long lean man. 'For one!In the incomparable Tumbletuzzy all these characters are combined. And, garçon, bring me a basin of tea and a-biscuit.'

The frugal refection was laid before the lean man. 'Cat-lap base!' he muttered, swallowing the scalding hot bohea, that was strongly impregnated with Sir Hugh Middleton, and champing the dry hard biscuit.

'Another round of toast for Lady Teaser!'

Buttered on both sides,' growled the lean man, sarcastically; and he began to number with his long skinny fingers, as if counting the cost.

Uncle Timothy was the last person in the world to flout a threadbare coat, because it is threadbare, or take a man for a sharper because he happens to be sharp-witted or sharp-set. Your full-fed fool, he thought, was quite as likely to have nefarious designs on his purse, as the hungry humorist who at once lets you into the secret of his starvation. If he be deserving as well as poor, it was gratifying to Uncle Tim that he had made honest poverty forget its privations for a season; and should he prove a shirking idler on the pavé, still he had not been taken in at any vast expense. Reflections like these had been some time passing in his mind—and he left the room.

On his return, he found the lean man still counting with his fingers. Presently the waiter spread the table with a snow-white cloth; the clattering of knives and forks, plates and spoons, roused the lean man from his reverie; he gazed wistfully at the preparations, and looked thrice famished.

There is a story of a tyrant, who, to add to the natural torments of starvation, caused a roast chicken to be suspended every day before the prison bars of his victim, until he expired. Just such a tormentor, unwittingly, was Uncle Timothy. For the garçon again. appeared, bearing a fragrant dish of broiled ham and poached eggs, the sight and aroma of which seared the eye-balls and tantalised the pinched nostrils of the lean man. At the same moment, 'Another round for Lady Teaser! tolled a twopenny knell in his ears.

My friend not arrived yet?' said Uncle Timothy.

'No, sir,' replied the garçon slyly, but respectfully.

'Let him pay, then, for his want of punctuality. I wait for nobody. My motto is, First come, first served. Will you, sir,' politely addressing the lean man, 'do me the favour to become my guest? Though I have ordered supper for two, I really cannot command appetite for two.'

The lean man stared irresolutely at Uncle Timothy. Hunger and Pride were at fisticuffs; but Hunger hit Pride such a blow in the stomach, that Pride gave up the contest.

And how gracefully did the middle-aged gentleman play the host! inviting his guest (though little invitation was needed) with the kindest words, and helping him to the daintiest morsels. The office proved no sinecure; and it was not until this supper-out of the first lustre had fully indulged his eating propensities, and cleared the board, that he found leisure to look up from his plate, and contemplate the execution he had done. But when a cauliflower-wigged

tankard of brown stout crowned the repast, his rapture knew no bounds. He pressed it with ecstasy to his lips, and sang joyously

Porter! drink for noble souls!

Raise the foaming tankard high!
Water drink, you water think-
So said Johnson—so say I!

Let me take a Dutchman's draught-
Ha!-I breathe!—a glorious pull !
Malt and hops are British drops-

Froth for Frenchmen! Stout for Bull!

If you ask why Britons fight

Till they conquer or they die?—

Their stout is strong, their draughts are long-
Now you know the reason why.

'Lady Teaser is quite ready, sir,' said the garçon, hurriedly. 'Give my respectful compliments to Lady Teazle, and tell her ladyship that I'll kiss her superlative "pickers and stealers” in “the twinkling of a bed-post.":

The garçon made another precipitate entry, with 'The tea-kettle can't wait, sir!'

'A fico for the tea-kettle! It must!-it shall! With three rounds of toast buttered on both sides, and coffee à discrétion, hath the immortal Tumbletuzzy been magnificently regaled-(“ Marriage is chargeable!")—and shall I not take mine ease in mine inn? Your banquet, sir, hath warmed the cockles of my heart, and made my hair curl!" Beggar that I am, but I thank you

When a lean man's stomach lacks dainty fare,

AndCupboard!' and 'Cupboard!' it croaks in his ear,

It rejoices, i'feggs! when bacon and eggs

Smoke on the board, with a tankard of beer.
Without much ado, he soon falls to,

The delicate viands vanish from view;

O'er a glass of good liquor

His heart beats the quicker,

And he drinks to his kind host, as I drink to you.

(Singing)

There's my card-Bonassus Bigstick, Esq., Bartholomew Fair' (presenting a bill of the performances). 'I'll put you on our free list, which to all the world, but yourself and the public press, shall be unavoidably suspended! Ha!'-(scenting a rummer of hot punch that the garçon placed before him)-brandy for heroes!' Welcome, old friend! for a' langsyne. Yet what is punch without a song? A clerk without a Cocker; a door without a knocker; a ship without a sailor; a goose without a tailor; a priest without a pulpit; a stage without a full pit!-As you, sir, have been instrumental to my entertainment, let me be vocal for yours! Egad, I'll turn the affair to business account-omnibus tulip punctum, as we say in the classics!-by giving you an undress rehearsal of one of my crack songs for to-morrow at Saint Bartlemy.

All the world's a stage, the men and women actor folks,

Very, very tragical, or very full of fun.

Nature, in a merry mood, on some has, quizzing, crack'd her jokes;
And Mr. Dicky Dunderhead of Dunstable is one.