The original fair of the East and mediæval Europe was one of the most instructive and picturesque spectacles among the many gatherings of the human race. The Great Fair of Novogorod assembled, and still continues to assemble, myriads of nearly every colour and costume: and in the market of “the Sledded Russ” the small-eyed Chinese stood side by side with the ebony-complexioned native of Guinea. Among the many pictures which Sir Thomas Browne desired to see painted was “a delineation of the Great Fair of Almachara in Arabia, which, to avoid the great heat of the sun, is kept in the night, and by the light of the moon.” The worthy and learned knight does not mention the Great Fair of the _Hurdwar_, in the northern part of Hindostan, where a confluence of many millions of human beings is brought together under the mixed influences of devotion and commercial business, and, dispersing as rapidly as it has been evoked, the crowd “dislimns and leaves not a wrack behind.” But fairs and general enterprise and opulence are not coeval: neither do they flourish in an age of iron roads and steam-carriages. In fact, they were the results of the inconvenience attendant upon travelling. It was once easier for goods to come to customers than for customers to leave their homes in search of goods. Inland trade was heavily crippled by the badness and insecurity of the highways. The carriages in which produce was conveyed were necessarily massive and heavy in their structure, to enable them to resist the roughness of the ways. Sometimes they were engulfed in bogs, sometimes upset in dykes, and generally they rolled heavily along tracks little less uneven than the roofs of houses.