The costermonger is now a travelling shopkeeper. We encounter him not in Cornhill, or Holborn, or the Strand: in the neighbourhood of the great markets and well-stored shops he travels not. But his voice is heard in some silent streets stretching into the suburbs; and there, with his donkey and hampers stands at the door, as the servant-maid cheapens a bundle of cauliflowers. He has monopolized all the trades that were anciently represented by such cries as "_Buy my artichokes, mistress_;" "_Ripe cowcumbers_;" "_White onions, white St. Thomas' onions_;" "_White radish_;" "_Ripe young beans_;" "_Any baking pears_;" "_Ripe sparrowgrass_." He would be indignant to encounter such petty chapmen interfering with his wholesale operations. He would rail against them as the city shopkeepers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries railed against itinerant traders of every denomination. In the days of Elizabeth, they declare by act of common council, that in ancient times the open streets and lanes of the city have been used, and ought to be used, as the common highway only, and not for hucksters, pedlars, and hagglers, to stand or sit to sell their wares in, and to pass from street to street hawking and offering their wares. In the seventh year of Charles I. the same authorities denounce the oyster-wives, herb-wives, tripe-wives, and the like, as "unruly people;" and they charge them somewhat unjustly, as it must appear, with "framing to themselves a way whereby to live a more easy life than by labour." "How busy is the man the world calls idle!"