Colonel Newcome lived, as is well known, in Fitzroy Square, and died in the Charter House.  To these shrines the pious go in pilgrimage; the rather dingy quarters are brightened by the memory of his presence, as we think of Scott in Castle Street, Edinburgh, or of Dr. John Brown in Princes Street—­Dr. John Brown who was a Colonel Newcome that had gone into medicine instead of the army.  Smithfield is hardly more memorable for her martyrs than for the battles fought on neighbouring ground between Biggs and Berry, between Cuff and old Figs.  Kentish Town, but little sought for sentimental reasons, is glorified by the memory of Adolphus Larkins; “Islington, Pentonville, Somers Town, were the scenes of many of his exploits.”  Brompton, again, passionate Brompton, lent her shelter—­or rather, sold it, for the poetess lived in a boarding-house—­to Miss Bunnion.  Cursitor Street might be unknown as the great men before Agamemnon (many of whom, by the way, as Meleager and Pirithous, are known well enough) had not Cursitor Street contained the sponging-house where Rawdon Crawley was incarcerated.

In addition to these scholia on Thackeray so sadly needed, and so little likely to be published, we need novelists’ maps and topographies of London and Paris.  These will probably be constructed by some American of leisure; they order these things better in America.  When we go to Paris we want to know where Balzac’s men and women lived, Z. Marcas and Cesar Birotteau, and Le Cousin Pons, and Le Pere Goriot, and all the duchesses, financiers, scoundrels, journalists, and persons of both sexes and no character “Comedie Humaine.”  London also might be thus spaced out—­the London of Richardson, and Fielding, and Miss Burney, as well as the London of Thackeray or Dickens.  Already, to speak of to-day, Rupert Street is more interesting, because there, fallen in fortune, but resolute of heart and courtly as ever, Prince Florizel of Bohemia held his cigar divan.

TORRID SUMMER.

“Is it very cold?” asks the Prince of Denmark, according to a familiar reading.  No one has any occasion to consult the thermometer before answering the question, “Is it very hot?” All things combine to prove that it is very hot.  Even the man of metal who used, according to legend, to patrol the coast of Crete, the man with only one vein from head to heel, would admit (could he appear in the Machineries at present) that it is very hot indeed.  He might not feel any subjective sensation of heat (for he seems to have been a mythical anticipation of the Conquering Machine which is to dominate the world), but he would have inferred the height of the temperature from a number of phenomena.  He would have seen the ticket-clerks in the railway stations with their coats off.  He would have observed imitation Japanese parasols at a penny among the ware of enterprising capitalists in the streets.  He would have marked the very street-boys in wide, inexpensive straw hats of various and astonishing colours.  Woman he would have found in beautiful shades of blue, in such light garments “woven wind” as Theocritus speaks of when he presents the wife of his doctor with a new ivory distaff.