Literary ladies, and blue-stockings too, have thronged Richmond, and to this day there stands on the Green a row of charming old houses, fronted with gardens and decaying wrought-iron gates, called Maid of Honour Row, where were lodged such maids of rank whom interest or favour could admit to that honoured, though hard-worked and thankless guild. Madame D’Arblay, who, as Fanny Burney, was a domestic martyr to the royal household, has shown us how empty was the title and painful the place of “Maid of Honour.” But despite royal associations, perhaps, indeed, on account of them, the Richmond of to-day is Radical: it has been distinguished, or notorious, for its Radical tradesmen any time these last hundred and forty years, from the time when the institution of “Tea and shrimps, 9d.” may be said to date. Tea, by itself, is not distinctly Radical, but I confess I see the germs of Republicanism in shrimps, and I should not be surprised at hearing of red-capped revolts originating at any of those places--Herne Bay, Margate, Ramsgate, Greenwich, Gravesend, Kew, and Richmond, where the shrimp is (so to speak) rampant. Time was, indeed, when a “dish of tea” was distinctly exclusive and aristocratic: it has been, with the constant reductions of duty, rendered less and less respectable. The first step in its downward career was taken when the “dish” was substituted for the “cup,” and its final degradation is reached in the company of the unholy shrimp. The “cup of coffee and two slices” of the early morning coffee-stall is vulgar, but seems not to sound the depths of the other institution. Let Chancellors of the Exchequer be warned ere it is yet too late; with the disappearance of the last halfpenny of the duty upon tea will come the final crash. Tea and shrimps will be obtainable for sixpence, and monarchy will no longer rule the land; perchance Chancellors of the Exchequer themselves will be obsolete and dishonoured officers of State. Perhaps, too, in some far distant period, Richmond will succeed in obtaining a water supply. Now she stands on one of the charmingest reaches of Thames, and yet, within constant sight of his silver flood, drinkable water is hardly come by in Richmond households. This is the penalty (or one of them) of popularity; the wells that were all-sufficient for Richmond of the past do not suffice for the population of to-day, which has gained her a charter of incorporation, and lost her an aristocratic prestige. The rateable value of Richmond must be very large indeed, but what does it avail when hundreds of thousands of pounds are continually being spent in fruitless borings for water? Richmond folk, nowadays, have all of them a species of hydrophobia, induced by a tax of too many pence in the pound for the water rate. Uneasy sits the Mayor, and the way of the Council is hard.