36 KEVIEWS THE CANADA DIRECTORY. 



For a' his china pigs are toom ; 



Nor do we see 

 In wine the soukar biskets soom 



As light's a flee. 



Old Directories are, in truth, a favorite and much valued resort for 

 the topographer, the local antiquary, and the curious biographer. 

 Professor Masson, for example, — sifting out the scattered fragments 

 of incidents and surmises relative to the brief career of " the mar- 

 vellous boy," — remarks : " In what precise part of Shoreditch that 

 house of Mr. Walmsley was where Chatterton lodged 'when he first 

 came to London, and to which, on that memorable day, he returned 

 through many dark and strange streets, we do not know. London 

 Directories of the year 1770 are not things easy to be found." And 

 Peter Cunningham — more successful in his search after, and into the 

 old Directories of the " Fog Babel," — fishes up many a hint from thence 

 to give graphic individuality to the Sketches in his " Handbook of 

 London." And Canada too has her men already, we trust, about whom 

 future topographers and biographers may have something to inquire ; 

 and has her elements of wider, and ever widening interest, about which 

 the future historian will have many anxious questions to ask. The 

 immediate use, and aparently all the value of Mr. Lovell's labours 

 past, on the superseding of this Directory by its successor of '59-60 j 

 the obsolete columns of names and addresses, with business and bank- 

 ing records, local officialities, advertisements, and so forth, will seem 

 stale and worthless, and, "dry, as the remainder biscuit after a voyage." 

 Nevertheless, stored away on the shelves of public and private libraries, 

 the time will come when — in the few antiquated survivors of the pre- 

 sent large and plentiful edition, — all this classified miscellaneous 

 matter about Clergy and religious denominations ; Universities, 

 Colleges, and Schools ; Periodicals, and the Canadian press ; Banks, 

 Customs, Crown Lands, and Hallways ; Trade, Emigration, Population, 

 and general statistics ; shall prove to be possessed of the very highest 

 value. Some, indeed, of what seems most local and ephemeral in its 

 character will, by and by, grow to be the most curious and widely in- 

 teresting of its contents, and gather cobwebs of as eloquent antiquity 

 as ever draperied ancient wine bin, or world-famous Heidelberg tun. 

 The quaint gossip of Old Sam. Pepysis not quainter than much of this 

 will yet be. We have only to fancy the possibility of getting hold oi 

 such a volume compiled by some enterprising Juan Lovell, Spanish 

 hidalgo of the sixteenth century ; or by one of Raleigh's colonists of 

 the Virgin Queen Bess's era; or a prim and dumpy New England 



