Newhaven is most celebrated for its “fishwives,” who were declared by King George IV. to be the handsomest women he had ever seen, and were looked upon by Queen Victoria with eyes of wonder and admiration. The Newhaven fishwife must not be confounded by those who are unacquainted in the locality with the squalid fish-hawkers of Dublin; nor, although they can use strong language occasionally, are they to be taken as examples of the _genus_ peculiar to Billingsgate. The Newhaven women are more like the buxom _dames_ of the market of Paris, though their glory of late years has been somewhat dulled. There is this, however, to be said of them, that they are as much of the past as the present; in dress and manners they are the same now as they were a hundred years ago; they take a pride in conserving all their traditions and characteristics, so that their customs appear unchangeable, and are never, at any rate, influenced by the alterations which art, science, and literature produce on the country at large. Before the railway era, the Newhaven fishwife was a great fact, and could be met with in Edinburgh in her picturesque costume of short but voluminous and gaudy petticoats, shouting “Caller herrings!” or “Wha’ll buy my caller cod?” with all the energy that a strong pair of lungs could supply. Then, in the evening, there entered the city the oyster-wench, with her prolonged musical aria of “Wha’ll o’ caller ou?” But the spread of fishmongers’ shops and the increase of oyster-taverns is doing away with this picturesque branch of the business. Thirty years ago nearly the whole of the fishermen of the Firth of Forth, in view of the Edinburgh market, made for Newhaven with their cargoes of white fish; and these, at that time, were all bought up by the women, who carried them on their backs to Edinburgh in creels, and then hawked them through the city. The sight of a bevy of fishwives in the streets of the Modern Athens, although comparatively rare, may still occasionally be enjoyed; but the railways have lightened their labours, and we do not find them climbing the _Whale Brae_ with a hundredweight, or two hundredweight, perhaps, of fish, to be sold in driblets, for a few pence, all through Edinburgh.