Tombland Fair stands not quite alone as a memorial of ancient festivals held in honour of patron saints—one other day in the year stands forth in the calendar of juvenile and mature enjoyments, unrivalled in its claim upon our notice and our love. St. Valentine, that “man of most admirable parts, so famous for his love and charity that the custom of choosing valentines upon his festival took its rise from thence,” as Wheatley tells us,—is yet, even to this hour, held in high honour, and most gloriously commemorated in this good old city, and in so unique a fashion, that a few words may not suffice to give a true delineation of it. The approach of the happy day is heralded, in these days of steam-presses and local journals, by monster-typed advertisements, gigantically headed “_Valentines_,” or huge labels, bearing the same mystic letters, carefully arranged in the midst of gorgeously-decked windows, towards which young eyes turn in glistening hope and admiration; and at sight of which little hearts beat high with eager expectation. Not of Cupids, and hearts, and darts, and such like merry conceits on fairy-mottoed note paper, doth the offerings of St. Valentine consist in this good old mart of commerce;—far more real and substantial are the samples of taste, ornament, and use, that rank themselves in the category of his gifts. The jeweller’s front, radiant with gold and precious gems, and frosted silver, and ruby-eyed oxydized owls, Russian malachite fashioned into every conceivable fantasy of invention, brooches, bracelets, crosses, studs masculine and feminine, chatelaines ditto, and not a few of _epicene_ characteristics, betokening the signs of the times,—all claim to rank under the title. The Drapers—especially the “French depots,” with their large assortments on shew, in remote _bazaars_ appropriated exclusively to the business of the festive season, where labyrinths of dressing-cases, desks, work-boxes, inkstands, and _portfeuilles_, usurp the place of lawful mercery, and haberdashery for the time being yields place to stationery, perfumery, _bijouterie_, and cutlery, proclaim the triumphs of his reign in their midst. But supreme above all, are the glories that the toy-shops display, from the gay balcony-fronted repository for all the choicest inventions science, skill, or wit can devise, at once to please the fancy, help the brain, tax the ingenuity of childhood, or dazzle the eye of babyhood, downwards through the less _recherché_, but scarcely less thronged marts, a grade below in price and quality, to the very huckster’s stall or apple booth, that shall for the time being add its quota of penny whips, tin trumpets, and long-legged, brittle-jointed, high-combed Dutch ladies, whose proportions exhibit any thing but the contour usually described as a “Dutch build.” Nor these alone—the shoemaker’s, with its newly-acquired treasures of gutta percha knick-knacks, flower-pots, card-trays,