The peculiar and somewhat old-world charm of Bloomsbury is, like that of Chelsea, only made known to her devotees. To the visitor to London, no less than to the fashionable dweller in the West-End, it is a grimy, sordid, squalid region, where slums abound, where "no nice people live," and where mere "going out to dinner" necessitates either the paying of a half-crown cab fare, or the sacrifice of an hour in the bone-shaking omnibus. Hence arises the custom of saying that "Bloomsbury is so far away." Of course, the distance or proximity of any part of London depends on what one chooses for the centre; but, taking either Oxford Circus or Charing-Cross--surely natural enough centres--as the diverging point, Bloomsbury is more central than any residential part of the metropolis. But even at the play poor Bloomsbury is maligned; and this, too, notwithstanding the fact that it is the chosen abode of so many of the theatrical profession. "They call the place where I live, Bloomsbury," says Mr. Todman, the old second-hand bookseller of _Liberty Hall_, "though why Bloomsbury, I don't know; for there ain't so much bloomin' as there is buryin'," (this, by the way, is a two-edged libel, for Bloomsbury being on high ground is notoriously healthy). And then the same gentleman goes on to remark, "they call my 'ouse a ramblin' one, though why it ain't rambled away to some nicer place, I can't think." We get, from the same play, a further impression that the Bloomsburians live mainly on a dish called "Smoked 'Addick." Perhaps the dramatist was led to this conclusion from the very pervading smell of fried fish that fills certain "unlovely streets" of cookshops or boarding-houses; where, however, in my experience the 'addick aroma has always yielded the palm to that of "sheeps'-trotters" or "stewed eels." Be this as it may, the old solidly built squares and houses of Bloomsbury have a dignity of their own. Some of the streets have, it is true, "come down in the world;" nevertheless, in their decay they retain a mournful look of having known better days,--a look that even their tenement rooms,--their broken windows, half-stuffed with paper,--their shock-headed dirty inmates,--cannot altogether abolish or destroy. Dickens, who always saw the human side of everything, has often noticed the peculiar pathos of some of these old, world-forgotten houses. In his inimitable _Sketches by Boz_ he gives a graphic account of the gradual decay of a house "over the water." Here, the process is somewhat similar. First, it changes from a private dwelling-house to a "select boarding-house"; then, it becomes a friendly, social affair, a "Home from Home"; then, its area steps become dirtier, its cook sits on them, shelling peas, and exchanging jokes with the milkman; it blossoms out in gaudy paint, like a decorator's shop; cracked flowerpots, of odd shapes and sizes, adorn its windows; and it descends, by slow degrees, yet further in the scale of "gentility,"