October is to London what April is to the Country; it is the Spring of the London Summer, when the hopes of the shopkeeper begin to bud forth, and he lays aside the insupportable labour of having nothing to do, for the delightful leisure of preparing to be in a perpetual bustle. During the last month or two he has been strenuously endeavouring to persuade himself that the Steyne at Brighton is as healthy as Bond-street; the _pavé_ of Pall Mall no more picturesque than the Pantiles of Tunbridge Wells; and winning a prize at one-card-loo at Margate as piquant a process as serving a customer to the same amount of profit. But now that the time is returned when "business" must again be attended to, he discards with contempt all such mischievous heresies, and re-embraces the only orthodox faith of a London shopkeeper--that London and his shop are the true "beauteous and sublime" of human life. In fact, "now is the winter of his discontent" (that is to say, what other people call Summer) "made glorious Summer" by the near approach of Winter; and all the wit he is master of is put in requisition, to devise the means of proving that every thing he has offered to "his friends the public," up to this particular period, has become worse than obsolete. Accordingly, now are those poets of the shopkeepers, the investors of patterns, "perplexed in the extreme;" since, unless they can produce a something which shall necessarily supersede all their previous productions, their occupation's gone.
It is the same with all other caterers for the public taste; even the literary ones. Mr. Elliston, "ever anxious to contribute to the amusement of his liberal patrons, the public," is already busied in sowing the seeds of a New Tragedy, two Operatic Romances, three Grand Romantic Melodrames, and half a dozen Farces, in the fertile soil of those _poets_ whom he employs in each of these departments respectively; while each of the London publishers is projecting a new "periodical," to appear on the first of January next; that which he started on the first of _last_ January having, of course, died of old age ere this!
As to the external appearance of London this month, the East End of it shows symptoms of reviving animation, after the two months' trance which the absence of its citizens had cast over it; and Cheapside, though it cannot boast of being absolutely impassable, is sufficiently crowded to create hopes in its inhabitants that it soon will be.