Mr. Thackeray was a hearty lover of London, and has left us many evidences of his sincerity. He greatly favoured Covent Garden, of which he has painted this clever picture, sketched from "the Garden," where are annually paid for fruits and vegetables some three millions sterling:-- "The two great national theatres on one side, a churchyard full of mouldy but undying celebrities on the other; a fringe of houses studded in every part with anecdote and history; an arcade, often more gloomy and deserted than a cathedral aisle; a rich cluster of brown old taverns--one of them filled with the counterfeit presentment of many actors long since silent, who scowl or smile once more from the canvas upon the grandsons of their dead admirers; a something in the air which breathes of old books, old pictures, old painters, and old authors; a place beyond all other places one would choose in which to hear the chimes at midnight; a crystal palace--the representative of the present--which peeps in timidly from a corner upon many things of the past; a withered bank, that has been sucked dry by a felonious clerk; a squat building, with a hundred columns and chapel-looking fronts, which always stands knee-deep in baskets, flowers, and scattered vegetables; a common centre into which Nature showers her choicest gifts, and where the kindly fruits of the earth often nearly choke the narrow thoroughfares; a population that never seems to sleep, and that does all in its power to prevent others sleeping; a place where the very latest suppers and the earliest breakfasts jostle each other on the footways--such is Covent-Garden Market, with some of its surrounding features." About a century and a quarter ago, the parish of St. Paul was, according to John Thomas Smith, the only fashionable part of the town, and the residence of a great number of persons of rank and title, and artists of the first eminence; and also from the concourse of wits, literary characters, and other men of genius, who frequented the numerous coffee-houses, wine and cider cellars, jelly-shops, etc., within its boundaries, the list of whom particularly includes the eminent names of Butler, Addison, Sir Richard Steele, Otway, Dryden, Pope, Warburton, Cibber, Fielding, Churchill, Bolingbroke, and Dr. Samuel Johnson; Rich, Woodward, Booth, Wilkes, Garrick, and Macklin; Kitty Clive, Peg Woffington, Mrs. Pritchard, the Duchess of Bolton, Lady Derby, Lady Thurlow, and the Duchess of St. Alban's; Sir Peter Lely, Sir Godfrey Kneller, and Sir James Thornhill; Vandevelde, Zincke, Lambert, Hogarth, Hayman, Wilson, Dance, Meyer, etc. The name of Samuel Foote should be added.