It was close to Sass's old school, and opposite his benign Minerva, that I once saw, myself, one bitter May-Day of nipping "north-easter," the real old "Jack-in-the-Green" described by Dickens and illustrated by Cruikshank; the "May-Day sweeps" of the _Sketches by Boz_; "my lord," "my lady," "clowns," "green," and all. Very wretched and miserable looked these belated illustrators of an ancient custom, as they danced and piped through the wind and sleet that usually, by some strange perversity, usher in the first of May. The Cockney children who storm the doorsteps, clamorously demanding May-Day tribute, and crying their shrilly monotonous song: "Fust er Ma--ay, Dawn er da--ay, It's only once a yee--ar"-- are usually suggestive of a cold, cheerless morn. At the present day, many members of the legal profession still inhabit Bloomsbury, recalling the old days when, from its residents, it was dubbed "Judge-Land." Its proximity to Fleet Street renders it equally beloved by writers; its nearness to the Strand endears it to "the profession" and the music-hall artistes, who frequent the flats near Tottenham Court Road; but the bulk of the residential population is Jewish. Bloomsbury has, however, not only been the chosen abode of judges, journalists, and Jews, but it is also the home of many sects and religious communities, some important, and some, if report be true, mustering but few adherents. There is a by-way off Lamb's Conduit Street (which is a thoroughfare at the back of Great Ormond Street, containing, like it, some quaint old houses, as well as some interesting curiosity-shops); in this by-way is a tiny building, pathetic in its minuteness, and chiefly discernible from its projecting gas-lamp, labelled "Church of Humanity." Of this church, a wit is said to have unkindly remarked, with reference to the size of its congregation, that it contained "three persons, but no God." Unitarians muster largely round the Bloomsbury squares; and the Irvingites, or, as they call themselves, members of "the Catholic and Apostolic Church," have their principal place of worship,--a fine building erected for them in 1853,--in Gordon Square. Its door is--rare indeed in London!--always open, enabling the visitor to enter and admire the long cloister that leads to the church, and the decorated interior with its triforium, wheel-window, and side-chapel. The prayer-books lying in the pews seem much the same as those used by the English Church, the chief difference being that in them the word "saint" is always rendered as "angel." This beautiful church and its strange creed result from the doctrines propounded by Edward Irving, the Annandale prophet and seer, the preacher of "the gift of tongues," who was himself ordained the first "angel" or minister of his sect. (This Edward Irving was the first lover of Jane Welsh Carlyle,--the man of whom she said, that if she had married him, "there would have been no gift of tongues!")