“I shall mention _en passant_, that there are _no_ Irish coal-heavers: I may mention, too, that the statement of the author adverted to * is not to be depended on; were he living, I should show why. And now to the scene of my so-called ‘first studies,’ There was, in the neighbourhood in which I resided, a low public-house; it has since degenerated into a gin-palace. It was frequented by coal-heavers only; and it stood in Wilderness Lane (I like to be particular), between Primrose Hill and Dorset Street; Salisbury Square, Fleet Street. To this house of inelegant resort (the sign was startling, the ‘Lion in the Wood’), which I regularly passed in my way to and from the Temple, my attention was one night especially attracted by the sounds of a fiddle, together with other indications of festivity; when, glancing towards the tap-room window, I could plainly discern a small bust of Shakspeare placed over the chimney-piece, with a short pipe stuck in its mouth. This was not clothing the palpable and the familiar with golden exhalations from the dawn, but it was reducing the glorious and immortal beauty of Apollo himself to a level with the commonplace and vulgar. Yet there was something not to be quarrelled with in the association of ideas to which that object led. It struck me to be the perfection of the human picturesque. It was a palpable meeting of the Sublime and the Ridiculous; the world of Intellect and Poetry seemed thrown open to the meanest capacity; extremes had met; the highest and the lowest had united in harmonious fellowship. I thought of what the great poet had himself been, of the parts that he had played, and the wonders he had wrought within a stone’s throw of that very spot; and feeling that even he might have well wished to be there, the pleased spectator of that lower world, it was impossible not to recognise the fitness of the pipe. It was only the pipe that would have become the mouth of a poet in that extraordinary scene, and without it, he himself would have wanted majesty and the right to be present. I fancied that Sir Walter Raleigh might have filled it for him. And _what_ a scene was that to preside over and contemplate! What a picture of life was there! It was _all_ life! In simple words, I saw, on approaching the window, and peeping between the short red curtains, a swarm of jolly coal-heavers! Coal-heavers all, save a few of the fairer and softer sex--the wives of some of them--all enjoying the hour with an intensity not to be disputed, and in a manner singularly characteristic of the tastes and propensities of aristocratic and fashionable society; that is to say, they were ‘dancing and taking refreshments.’ They only did what their “betters” were doing elsewhere. The living Shakspeare, had he been, indeed, in the presence, would but have seen a common humanity working out its objects, and have felt that the _omega_, though the last in the alphabet, has an astonishing sympathy with the _alpha_ that stands first.