Walk into Debenham and Storr’s long room, and with the exercise of a little judgment and keenness of observation, you will be enabled to recognise these amateurs of auctions in a very short space of time, and to preserve them in your memory. They very rarely bid, they yet more rarely have anything knocked down to them; indeed, to all appearances, the world does not seem to have used them well enough to allow them to buy many superfluities, yet there they stand patiently, hour after hour, catalogue in hand—they are always possessed of catalogues—ticking off the amount of the bids, against the numbers of the articles which they never buy; you should remark, too, and admire, the shrewd, knowing, anxious scrutiny which they extend to the articles which are hung up round the room, or which are held up for inspection by the porter, as the sale proceeds. They seem actually interested in the cut of a Macintosh, in the slides of a telescope, in the triggers of a double-barrelled gun; they are the first to arrive at, the last to leave the Sale; and then, in the close of the afternoon, they retire, with long-lingering footsteps, as though—like the gentleman for whom a judge of the land and twelve honest men had settled that a little hanging was about the best thing that could be done, and who so often fitted the halter, took leave, and traversed the cart—they were “loath to depart,” which I am willing to believe they are. I imagine to myself, sometimes, that these men are cynical philosophers, who delight in the contemplation of the mutabilities of property; who smile grimly—within their own cynical selves—and hug themselves at the thought, not only that flesh is grass, that sceptre and crown must tumble down, and kings eat humble pie, but that the richest and the rarest gems and gew-gaws, the costliest garments, the bravest panoplies, must come at last to the auctioneer’s hammer. Perhaps you would like to know what they are selling by auction at Debenham and Storr’s this sultry July afternoon. I should very much like to know what they are not selling. Stay, to be just, I do not hear any landed estates or advowsons disposed of: you must go to the Auction Mart in Bartholomew Lane if you wish to be present at such Simoniacal ceremonies; and, furthermore, horses, as you know, are in general sold at Tattersall’s, and carriages at Aldridge’s repository in St. Martin’s Lane. There are even auctioneers, I am told, in the neighbourhood of Wapping and Ratcliffe Highway, who bring lions and tigers, elephants and ourangoutangs, to the hammer; and, finally, I must acquit the respectable firm, whose thronged sale-room I have edged myself into, of selling by auction such trifling matters as human flesh and blood.