INTRODUCTION.

Its

THERE must be many persons in London, particularly in the busy neighbourhood extending from St Paul's Churchyard to Charing Cross, perfectly familiar with Mr RICHARD TAYLOR. His burrow, or central point, was in some lane, small street, or alley, between Arundel Street and Surrey Stairs, whence he daily revolved in an orbit of which no man could trace the eccentricity. extremities seemed to be Gray's Inn on the north, the Obelisk on the south, the London Docks on the vulgar side, and Hyde Park Corner on the point of gentility. It was next to impossible, any day from eleven till two o'clock, between the years 1815 and 1832, to walk from Pall Mall to St Paul's, without once, if not oftener, encountering "The Gentleman with the Umbrella." There he emerged from Chancery Lane, and here he popped upon you from Temple Lane; you saw him glide down Norfolk Street, or lost sight of him all at once about Drury Lane ; or beheld him holding on briskly, but without effort, along the Strand, till, about Charing Cross, he suddenly disappeared to start upon you, like a Will o' the Wisp, in some unexpected corner. Now was he seen in the Chancery Court-now sauntering towards Billingsgate Market-now at the Stock Exchange, and again at the Bow Street Office. He might, in the same hour, be seen at the hustings in Palace Yard, and hovering on the outskirts of one of Orator Hunt's meetings, as far off as Spa-fields; at a reasonable hour, in the gallery of the House of Commons, and next in Mr Edward Irving's Chapel. The VOL. I.

British Museum divided his favour with the great butcher markets, and with the picture and book auctions, which he regularly frequented. The best idea may be formed of the movements of Mr Richard Taylor, from the different notions formed of his character and calling. For the first five years of his sojourning in London, many conjectures were formed concerning this "Gentleman about town," or "The Gentleman with the Umbrella;" by which descriptive appellation he came to be pretty generally known among the shopmen and clerks along his line of quick-march. His costume and appearance, strange as the association seems, was halfmilitary, half-Moravian. By many he was set down as a reporter for the daily prints— vulgarly a penny-a-liner; a calling universally sneered at by those whose figments and marvels are paid from twopence a line upwards. His frequent attendance at the Police Offices, and in the Courts of Law, favoured this conjecture, as well as his occasional appearance at places of public amusement. A sagacious tradesman in Cockspur Street, a reformer, who had been involved in "the troubles" of the times of Hardy and Horne Tooke, set him down as a half-pay officer, now a spy of the Home Office. A tavernkeeper in Fleet Street, who had seen him at the Bow Street Office voluntarily step forward to interpret for a poor Polish Jew, against whom law was going hard from ignorance of the Cockney dialect of the English language, affirmed that he was a Polish refugee. But he had also been heard to interpret for an itinerant weather-glass seller from the Lake of Como, in a similar scrape;

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