Evening had gathered o'er Saint Giles's, and Seven Dials. So tranquil was the season, even publishers were touched. Catnach and Pitts sat silent in their shops; placing their hands in breeches-poke, with that serenity which pockets best convey, they looked around their walls--walls more richly decked than if hung with triumphs of Sidonian looms, arrayed with Bayeux stitchings; walls, where ten thousand thousand ballads--strips harmonious, yet silent as Apollo's unbraced strings,--hung pendulous, or crisply curling, like John Braham's hair. Catnach and Pitts, the tuneful masters of the gutter-choir, serenely looked, yet with such comprehensive glance, that look did take their stock. Suddenly, more suddenly than e'er the leaves in Hornsey wood were stirred by instant blast, the thousand thousand ballads swung and rustled on the walls; yet wind there was not, not the lightest breath. Still like pendants fluttering in a northern breeze, the ballads streamed towards Catnach, and towards Pitts! Amazing truth--yet more; each ballad found a voice! 'Old Towler' faintly growled; 'Nancy Dawson' sobbed and sighed; and, 'Bright Chanticleer' crowed weakly, dolorously, as yet in chickenhood, and smitten with the pip. At the same instant, the fiddle, the antique viol of Roger Scratch, fell from its garret-peg, and lay shivered, even as glass. A cloud fell upon Seven Dials; dread and terror chilled her many minstrels: and why--and wherefore? At that dread moment, a ministrel from the sunny south, with barrel-organ, leapt on Dover beach! Seven Dials felt the shock: her troubadours, poor native birds, were to be out-carrolled and out-quavered, by Italian opera retailed by penn'orths to them, from the barrel-organs: and prompt to follow their masters, they let the English ballad singer sing unheard. The Ballad-Singer has lost his occupation; yet should he not pass away unthanked, unrecompensed. We have seen him a useful minister in rude society; we have heard him a loud-mouthed advocate of party zeal, and we have seen him almost ground into silence by the southern troubadour. Yet was he the first music-seller in the land. Ye well-stocked, flourishing vendors of fashionable scores, deign to cast a look through plate glass at your poor, yet great original, bare-footed and in rags, singing, unabashed, amidst London wagon-wheels: behold the true decendant of the primative music-seller." Charles Dickens, as Boz, long since "sketched" the Seven Dials, and at the same time and place given us his--"Meditations in Monmouth Street":--