The old city, so rich in antiquarian remains, can boast but slow progress in modern architectural developments; nor may it vie with many a younger town in its contrivances for the comfort and conveniences of those most useful members of society—the market-folks. No Grainger has arisen, to rear a monument to his own fame, and of his city’s prosperity, in the form of a shelter for this important class of the town and country populace. May be, the picturesque beauty of the Flemish scene, with its changeful canopy of “ethereal blue,” or neutral tint, toned down at whiles to hues of sombre gloom, beneath the heavy shade of passing storms of hail and thunder, or more steady-falling rain and snow, has made the philanthropists of these reforming times conservatives all, on this one point, while model cottages, baths and washhouses, almshouses for freemen, and almost every other scheme ingenuity may devise to testify the care and thought bestowed upon the public weal, are rising up around. Let the cry of “_Protection_” once again be raised, not for the “distressed agriculturist” salesman, in his handsome corn exchange, but in favour of the “unprotected females” that sit unsheltered from the sun or storm, to vend the produce of the poultry-yards, the dairy-house, and market-garden. But though no Temple to Commerce of the larder has been erected—a fact to be deplored in a utilitarian sense—it can never be denied that the good old seat of thriving trade can boast as fine a specimen of a genuine old market-place as may well be found in this day of competition and rivalry. Its motley assemblage of buildings, ranged round the open square, of all styles and all ages, jostling against one another, or here and there huddled together into all sorts of inconceivable groups of varied and fantastic outline; the young ones of to-day starting up with bold and saucy front, and verily squeezing out from among them their quaint, old-fashioned, gable-ended kinsfolk of older date, or sometimes creeping out, as it were, from beneath them, content with shewing a modern face in some lower window, decked with all the new-fangled conceits of the latest fashions, and allowing their ancestors quiet resting-place aloft, where to moulder away into decay, are a chronology of history in themselves. Now and then, the fretted ironwork of some miniature parade, hanging midway in the air, and clinging to the perpendicular of masonry above some new plate-glassed and glittering front, suggests thoughts of marine villas, moonlight and sea views, and all those pretty poetical fancies associated with a lodging at some fashionable watering-place, and one wonders how they ever came to be transported thither, and for why? They that own them tell us that they have their use, in the city, where the love of pageantry is an heir-loom from generations long since passed away whose birthright was to minister to the gorgeous magnificence of