508 My First Lord Mayors Show. [Nov. 



trumpeters tore the air to tatters about him, and he passed away, like 

 the shadow of the strength and the youth of chivalry. 



Eureka ! eureka ! The crushing car of the Juggernaut of the show 

 now rolled along, kneading the mud under its golden wheels. The 

 mobility darted inquiring looks in at the open windows, which the mace- 

 bearer and sword-bearer completely filled, and saw they could not see 

 the Mayor for the mist, which enveloped him as with an extra civic 

 garment. Up went a shout, however, that seemed to stagger the state- 

 coach ; for it swaggered from the left to the right of Bridge-street, as if 

 undecided on which side to spill its right-honourable contents : but the 

 mace-bearer shifting his seat a little, she righted with a heavy lurch, 

 as a broad-bottomed Dutch brig adjusts herself in a gale. Next came 

 the retiring Mayor, some distance in the rear, and in much seeming 

 hurry to overtake his successor, as if he felt he was too late even for the 

 late Lord Mayor. 



It was now no very easy task to tell an alderman's coach from his coal- 

 waggon, save by the polite difference between the oaths of the driver of 

 one and the other. The elder aldermen were, however, distinguishable 

 by their asthmas, the younger by their sneezing. After these came the 

 ominous-browed Recorder ; then the Sheriffs, brilliant and benighted ; 

 then that love and loathing of good and bad apprentices the kindly, 

 veteran Chamberlain ; then the Remembrancer ; and the Foreign Am- 

 bassadors, wondering every one, save him of Holland, at the climate. 

 Then the Judges, enveloped in wig and darkness ; and, after them, 

 several understood persons of distinction, who could by no means be 

 distinguished. By the time that the head and tail of the procession had 

 wound round St. Paul's, like the serpent round the Laocoon, and had 

 reached Cheapside, the last link was burnt out ; and the finery of the 

 first footmen was as dingy and undiscernible as the fluttering rags of the 

 merry bootless and shoeless boys who shouted before them, as if they 

 would have drowned the clamour of Bow-bells with their " most sweet 

 voices." 



Such was " my first Lord Mayor's Show/' and " let it be the last :" the 

 undeceiving of all my imaginations of it I have not yet forgiven in the 

 Lord Mayors' Shows of other years. The general impression that it 

 was a melancholy sight, has ever since affected me ; and I am not sin- 

 gular in this feeling ; for an ingenious friend of mine, who has illus- 

 trated Burton's " Anatomy of Melancholy," among the other heads into 

 which he divides that hydra-like volume, has one which he calls " the 

 Lord Mayor's Show Melancholy," a mental phantasma, which visits 

 his imagination yearly on the ninth of November, at which time he is 

 impressed with the constant passing and repassing of a dim and half- 

 perceivable show of much-supposed splendour, which gropes its way 

 through the Bosotian fog and Stygian darkness ; and then turning about, 

 hey presto ! there repasses a long-continued line of mourning-coaches, as 

 if to shew the serious vanity and ultimate end of all human splendour. 



C. W. 



