This seems to be a random stricture. The alderman, indeed, has carefully registered the mayors and the sheriffs of London; and the scientific in "high and low prices" perhaps may be grateful that our pristine chronicler has also furnished the prices of wheat, oxen, sheep, and poultry--but we cannot find that he has commemorated the diversified forms these took on the solemn tables of the Guildhall, nor can we meet with the pasteboard pomps of city pageants, one only being recorded, on the return of Henry the Sixth from France. Our modern critic, composing in the spirit of our day, alludes to "the struggle for public liberty"; but "public liberty" must have been a very ambiguous point with the honest citizen who had been a sad witness to the contests of two murderous families, who had long sought their mutual destruction, and long convulsed the whole land. We may account for the tempered indifference, and "the brief recitals" for which this simple citizen is reproached, who had lived through such changeful and ensanguined scenes, which had left their bleeding memories among the families of his contemporaries. The faculties of Fabyan were more level with their objects when he had to chronicle the "tempestuous weathering of thunder and lightning," with the ominous fall of a steeple, or "the image of our Lady" dashed down from its roof; or when he describes the two castles in the air, whence issued two armies, black and white, combating in the skies till the white vanished! Such portents lasted much later than the days of Fabyan, for honest Stowe records what had once ushered in St. James's night, when the lightning and thunder coming in at the south window and bursting on the north, the bells of St. Michael were listened to with horror, ringing of themselves, while ugly shapes were dancing on the steeple. Their natural philosophy and their piety were long stationary, yet even then some were critical in their remarks; for when Fabyan recorded "flying dragons and fiery spirits in the air," this was corrected by omitting "the fiery spirits," but agreeing to "the flying dragons." Fabyan, however, has preserved more picturesque and ingenious visions in some legends of saints or apparitions--still delightsome. These legends formed their "Works of Fiction," and were more affecting than ours, for they were supernatural, and no one doubted their verity.