"pocket-book has slipped off with two hundred pounds in it." Williams was a satirist of the old school, and the allusions made by some of the vendors render this otherwise interesting satire wantonly coarse and indelicate. Attached to this rare and curious production is the following doggerel:-- "'Tis the favourite plaything of school-boy and sage, Of the baby in arms and the baby of age; Of the grandam whose sight is at best problematical, And of the soph who explains it by rule mathematical. Such indeed is the rage for them, chapel or church in, You see them about you, and each little urchin Finding a sixpence, with transport beside his hope, Runs to the tin-man and makes a caleidoscope!" 1819. THE HOBBY. Another invention made its appearance in 1819: this was the _velocipede_, or as it was then called "the hobby," the grandfather of the bicycle and tricycle of our day. A tall gawky perched on the summit of a lofty bicycle, with an enormous wheel gyrating between a couple of spindle shanks capped with enormous crab-shells, is a sufficiently familiar and ridiculous object in our times; but the appearance presented by the people of 1819, who adopted the spider looking thing called a "hobby," was so intensely comical that it gave rise to a perfect flood of caricatures. The best of these we have personally met with is one entitled, _The Spirit Moving the Quakers upon Worldly Vanities_, a skit upon the Society of Friends (published by J. T. Sidebotham). The scene is laid in front of a "Society of Friends Meeting House," and numerous "Friends" of both sexes are busily engaged in exercising their hobbies. In the foreground, a broad-brimmed young "Friend" gives ardent and amorous chase to a lovely Quakeress, who, apparently disinclined to encourage his advances, urges her steed to its utmost speed, and makes frantic endeavours to get out of his way. DEPRESSION IN TRADE.