London has always been celebrated for the excellence of its meat, and her sons do justice to it; at least it has become the universal impression that they consume more, man for man, than any other town population in the world. It was a sirloin, fresh and ruddy, hanging at the door of some Giblett or Slater in a former century, that inspired, we suspect, the song which ever since has stirred Englishmen in a foreign land, "The Roast Beef of Old England." The visitor accustomed to the markets of our large provincial towns would doubtless expect to find the emporium of the live-stock trade for so vast a population of an imposing size. The foreigner, after seeing the magnificence of our docks--the solidity and span of our bridges--might naturally look for a national exposition of our greatness in the chief market dedicated to that British beef which is the boast of John Bull. What they do see in reality, if they have courage to wend their way along any of the narrow tumble-down streets approaching to Smithfield, which the great fire unfortunately spared, is an irregular space bounded by dirty houses and the ragged party-walls of demolished habitations, which give it the appearance of the site of a recent conflagration--the whole space comprising just six acres, fifteen perches, roads and public thoroughfares included. Into this narrow area, surrounded with slaughter-houses, triperies, bone-boiling houses, gut-scraperies, &c., the mutton-chops, scrags, saddles, legs, sirloins, and rounds, which grace the smiling boards of our noble imperial capital throughout the year, have, for the major part, been goaded and contused for the benefit of the civic corporation installed at Guildhall.[22] The best time is early in the morning--say one or two o'clock of the "great day," as the last market before Christmas-day is called. On this occasion, not only the space--calculated to hold 4,100 oxen and 30,000 sheep, besides calves and pigs--is crammed, but the approaches around it overflow with live stock for many hundred feet, and sometimes the cattle are seen blocking up the passage as far as St. Sepulchre's church. If the stranger can make his way through the crowd, and by means of some vantage-ground or door-step can manage to raise himself a few feet above the general level, he sees before him in one direction, by the dim red light of hundreds of torches, a writhing party-coloured mass, surmounted by twisting horns, some in rows, tied to rails which run along the whole length of the open space, some gathered together in one struggling knot. In another quarter, the moving torches reveal to him now and then, through the misty light, a couple of acres of living wool, or roods of pigs' skins. If he ventures into this closely wedged and labouring mass, he is enabled to watch more narrowly the reason of the universal ferment among the beasts.