Under this head it is our intention, from time to time, to revert to
numberless free exhibitions, which, in this advancement-of-education age,
have been magnanimously founded with a desire to inculcate a knowledge of,
and disseminate, by these liberal means, an increased taste for the arts in
this vast metropolis. We commence not with any feelings of favouritism, nor
in any order of ability, our pleasures being too numerously divided to be
able to settle as to which ought to be No. 1, but because it is necessary
to commence--consequently we would wish to settle down in company with the
amiable reader in front of a tobacconist's shop in the Regent Circus,
Piccadilly; and as the principal attractions glare upon the astonishment of
the spectators from the south window, it is there in imagination that we
are irresistibly fixed. Before we dilate upon the delicious peculiarities
of the exhibition, we deem it absolutely a matter of justice to the
noble-hearted patriot who, imitative of the Greeks and Athenians of old,
who gave the porticoes of their public buildings, and other convenient
spots, for the display of their artists' productions, has most generously
appropriated the chief space of his shop front to the use and advantage of
the painter, and has thus set a bright example to the high-minded havannah
merchants and contractors for cubas and c'naster, which we trust will not
be suffered to pass unobserved by them.

The principal feature, or, rather mass of features, which enchain the
beholder, is a whole-length portrait of a gentleman (_par excellence_)
seated in a luxuriating, Whitechapel style of ease, the envy, we venture to
affirm, of every omnibus cad and coachman, whose loiterings near this spot
afford them occasional peeps at him. He is most decidedly the greatest
cigar in the shop--not only the mildest, if his countenance deceive us not,
but evidently the most full-flavoured. The artist has, moreover, by some
extraordinary adaptation or strange coincidence, made him typical of the
locality--we allude to the Bull-and-Mouth--seated at a table evidently made