[Illustration: GEORGE AUGUSTUS SALA, THE AUTHOR OF “TWICE ROUND THE
CLOCK.”]




                          TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK;
                                  OR THE
                        HOURS OF THE DAY AND NIGHT
                                IN LONDON.

                                    BY
                          GEORGE AUGUSTUS SALA,
    AUTHOR OF “A JOURNEY DUE NORTH,” “GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT,” ETC. ETC.

                             ILLUSTRATED WITH
        A PORTRAIT OF THE AUTHOR, AND NUMEROUS ENGRAVINGS ON WOOD,
                    FROM DRAWINGS BY WILLIAM M’CONNEL.

                                 LONDON:
                    RICHARD MARSH, 122, FLEET STREET.
                                  1862.




PREFACE.

TO AUGUSTUS MAYHEW.


Had I not fifty other valid reasons—did I not feel myself impelled to
such a course by the long years of affectionate intercourse which have
cast sunshine on that highway of life, of which the shadier side of
the road has been apportioned to me, I should still, my dear Augustus,
dedicate this book to you. I could show, I hope, my affection and esteem
in other ways; but to address to you the Epistle Dedicatory of “Twice
Round the Clock” is only your due, in justice and in courtesy. Civility
is not so common a quality among the Eminent British Authors of the day,
and mutual admiration is not so plentifully displayed by our Fieldings
and Smolletts of 1859, that we middling and middle-class ink-spillers
can afford to throw away a chance of saying a kind or civil thing to one
another in the right way and in the right place. Do you, therefore, say
something neat and complimentary about me in the preface to your next
book; and I only trust that the task will confer as sincere a pleasure on
you as it confers on me at this moment.

But I might still, I must admit, admire you very much, without that
admiration giving you a Right to the Dedication of a Book relating
exclusively to London Life and London Manners in the nineteenth century.
Herein, however, rests, I think, your claim: That you are the author
of a capital book called “Paved with Gold,” replete with the finest
and shrewdest observation drawn from the scenes we have both delighted
to survey, to study, and to describe, and of which book, although the
basis was romantic fiction, the numerous episodes were picturesque but
eminently faithful photographs of fact. I should have liked, myself, to
tell the story of a prize fight, of a ratting match, or of a boy’s low
lodging-house, in my own way, and in these pages; but I shrank from the
attempt after your graphic narratives in “Paved with Gold.” And, again,
have you not been for years the fellow-labourer of your brother Henry,
in those deeply-tinted but unalterably-veracious studies of London Life,
of which we have the results in “Labour and the Poor” and in the “Great
World of London?” Of how many prisons, workhouses, factories, work-rooms,
have you not told the tale? of how many dramas of misery and poverty have
you not been the chronicler? Let us bow to the great ones of letters,
and, reading their books with a hearty, honest admiration, confess that
the capacity to produce such master-pieces is not given to us; but let
us, on our own parts, put in a modest claim to the recognition and
approval of the public. Please remember the reporters. Please not to
forget the bone-grubbers. Fling a pennyworth of praise to the excavators
and night-watchmen who have at least industriously laboured to collect
materials wherefrom better painters may execute glowing tableaux of
London Life. At least, we have toiled to bring together our tale of
bricks, that by the hand of genius they may be erected some day into a
Pyramid. At least, we have endeavoured to our utmost to describe the
London of our day as we have seen it, and as we know it; and, in the
words of the judicious Master Hooker—of whose works, my Augustus, I am
afraid you are not a very sedulous student—we have worked early and
late on London, and have done our best to paint the infinitely-varied
characteristics of its streets and its population, “Tho’ for no other
cause, yet for this, that Posteritie may know we have not looselie, thro’
silence, permitted thinges to pass away as in a dreame; there shall be
for men’s information extant thus much concerning the present state
of”—London.

So you see, my dear friend, that I have dedicated my work to you; and
that, _bon grè, mal grè_, you have been saddled with the dignity of its
Patron. I might have addressed you in heroic verse, and with your name
in capitals; and, in the manner of Mr. Alexander Pope, bidden you:—

    “Awake, my MAYHEW: leave all meaner things
    To low ambition and the pride of kings.”

I believe your present ambition extends only to few-acre farming and
the rearing of poultry, and I might well exhort you to return to your
literary pursuits, and to leave the Dorkings and Cochin Chinas alone.
But I refrain. Am I to insult my Patron with advice? Do I expect any
reward for my dedication? Will your Lordship send me a handful of
broad-pieces for my flattery’s sake by the hands of your gentleman’s
gentleman? Will you put me down for the next vacancy as a Commissioner
of Hackney Coaches, or the next reversion for a snug sinecure connected
with the Virginia Plantations or the Leeward Islands? Will your Lordship
invite me to dinner at your country-seat, and place me between Lady
Betty and the domestic chaplain? May I write rhyming epitaphs for her
ladyship’s pug-dog, untimely deceased from excess of cream and chicken?
Or will you speak to Mr. Secretary in my behalf, lest that last paper
of mine against Ministers in “Mist’s Weekly Journal” should draw down
on me the _ex-officio_ wrath of Mr. Attorney-General, and cause my ears
to be nailed to the pillory? Can I ever hope to crack a bottle in your
Lordship’s society at Button’s, or to see your Lordship’s coach-and-six
before my lodgings in Little Britain? Let us be thankful, rather, that
the species of literary patronage at which I have hinted exists no
longer, and that an Author has no need to toady his Patron in order to
make him his friend. For what more in cordiality and kind-fellowship
I could say, you will, I am sure, give me credit. When friendship is
paraded too much in public, its entire sincerity may be open to doubt. I
am afraid that Orestes, so affectionate on the stage, has often declined
in the green-room to lend Pylades sixpence; and I am given to understand,
that Damon has often come down from the platform, where he has been
saying such flourishing fine things about Pythias, and in private life
has spoken somewhat harshly of that worthy.

You will observe that, with the economy which we should all strive to
inculcate in an age of Financial Reform, I have made these remarks to
serve two ends. You are to take them, if you please, as a Dedication.
The public will be good enough to accept them as a Preface. But as the
dedicatory has hitherto disproportionately exceeded the prefatory matter,
a few words on my part are due to that great body-corporate of Patrons
whom some delight to call the “many-headed monster;” some the “million;”
some the fickle, ungrateful, and exigent—and some the generous,
forbearing, and discerning British Public.

The papers I have now collected into a volume under the title of “Twice
Round the Clock, or the Hours of the Day and Night in London,” were
originally published in the pages of the “Welcome Guest,” a weekly
periodical whose first and surprising success must be mainly ascribed to
the taste and spirit of its original proprietor, Mr. Henry Vizetelly.
I confess that I thought as little of “Twice Round the Clock” in the
earlier hours of its publication as the critics of the _Saturday
Review_—who, because I contributed for six years to another periodical
whose conductor they hold in hatred, have been pleased to pursue me with
an _acharnement_ quite exciting to experience—may think of it, now. I
looked upon the articles as mere ephemeral essays, of a description of
which I had thrown off hundreds during a desultory, albeit industrious,
literary career. But I found ere long that I had committed myself to
a task whose items were to form an Entirety in the end; that I had
begun the first act of a Drama which imperatively demanded working out
to its catastrophe. I grew more interested in the thing; I took more
pains; I felt myself spurred to accuracy by the conscientious zeal of
the admirable artist, Mr. William M’Connell, whose graphic and truthful
designs embellished my often halting text. I found, to my great surprise,
that the scenes and characters I had endeavoured to embody were awakening
feelings of curiosity and interest among the many thousand readers of
the journal to which I contributed. The work, such as it is, was in the
outset not very deliberately planned. I can only regret now, when it is
terminated, that the details I have sometimes only glanced at were not
more elaborately and completely carried out.

It would be a sorry piece of vanity on my part to imagine that the
conception of the History of a Day and Night in London is original.
I will tell you how I came to think of the scheme of “Twice Round the
Clock.” Four years ago, in Paris, my then Master in literature, Mr.
Charles Dickens, lent me a little thin octavo volume, which, I believe,
had been presented to him by another Master of the craft, Mr. Thackeray,
entitled—but I will transcribe the title-page in full.

                                LOW LIFE;
        OR, ONE HALF THE WORLD KNOWS NOT HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVE.

       Being a Critical Account of what is Transacted by People of
       almost all Religions, Nations, Circumstances, and Sizes of
                          Understanding, in the

                            TWENTY-FOUR HOURS,
                                 BETWEEN
                    SATURDAY NIGHT AND MONDAY MORNING.
                        In a true Description of a
                                 SUNDAY,
          As it is usually spent within the Bills of Mortality,
                calculated for the twenty-first of June.

       WITH AN ADDRESS TO THE INGENIOUS AND INGENUOUS MR. HOGARTH.

                 Let Fancy guess the rest.—_Buckingham._

The date of publication is not given; but internal evidence proves the
Opuscule to have been written during the latter part of the reign of
George the Second; and in the copy I now possess, and which I bought at
a “rarity” price, at a sale where it was ignorantly labelled among the
“_facetiæ_”—it is the saddest book, perhaps, that ever was written—in
my copy, which is bound up among some rascally pamphlets, there is
written on the fly-leaf the date 1759. Just one hundred years ago, you
see. The work is anonymous; but in a manuscript table of contents to
the collection of miscellanies of which it forms part, I find written
“By Tom Legge.” The epigraph says that it “is printed for the author,
and is to be sold by T. Legg, at the Parrot, Green Arbour Court, in
the Little Old Bailey.” Was the authorship mere guess-work on the part
of the owner of the book, or was “Tom Legge” really the writer of “Low
Life,” and, if so, who was “Tom Legge?” Mr. Peter Cunningham, or a
contributor to “Notes and Queries,” may be able to inform us. I have
been thus particular, for a reason: that this thin octavo is one of the
minutest, the most graphic—and while in parts coarse as a scene from the
“Rake’s Progress,”—the most pathetic, picture of London life a century
since that has ever been written. There are passages in it irresistibly
reminding one of Goldsmith; but the offensive and gratuitous coarseness
in the next page destroys _that_ theory. Our Oliver was pure. But for the
dedicatory epistle to the great painter prefixed, and which is merely a
screed of fulsome flattery, I could take an affidavit that “Low Life”
was written by William Hogarth. And why not, granting even the fulsome
dedication? Hogarth could have more easily written this calendar of
Town Life than the “Analysis of Beauty;” and the sturdy grandiloquent
little painter was vain enough to have employed some hack to write the
prefatory epistle, if, in a work of satire, he had chosen to assume the
anonymous. Perhaps, after all, the book was written by some clever,
observant, deboshed man out of Grub Street, who had been wallowing in the
weary London trough for years, and had eliminated at last some pearls
which the other swine were too piggish to discern. There, however, is
“Low Life.” If you want to know what London was really like in 1759, you
should study it by night and study it by day; and then you may go with
redoubled zest to your Fielding, Smollett, and Richardson, as one, after
a vigorous grind at his Greek verbs, may go to his Euripides, refreshed.
From this thin little octavo I need not say I borrowed the notion of
“Twice Round the Clock.” I chose a week-day instead of a Sunday, partly
for the sake of variety, partly because Sunday in London has become so
decorous as to be simply dull, and many of the hours would have been
utterly devoid of interest. I brooded fitfully over the scheme for many
months. At first I proposed to take my stand (in imagination) at King
Charles’s Statue, Charing Cross, and describe the Life revolving round me
during the twenty-four hours; but I should have trenched upon sameness by
confinement to singularity; and I chose at last all London as the theme
of description—

    “A mighty maze, but not without a plan.”

As a literary performance, this book must take its chance; and I fear
that the chance will not be a very favourable one. Flippant, pretentious,
superficial and yet arrogant of knowledge; verbose without being
eloquent; crabbed without being quaint; redundant without being copious
in illustration; full of paradoxes not extenuated by originality; and of
jocular expressions not relieved by humour—the style in which these pages
are written, combines the worst characteristics of the comic writers who
have been the “guides, philosophers and friends” of a whole school of
_quasi_ youthful authors in this era. I have reviewed too many would-be
comic books in my time, not to be able to pounce on the unsuccessful
attempts at humour in “Twice Round the Clock;” I have sufficient
admiration and respect for the genuine models of literary vigour and
elegance extant, not to feel occasionally disgusted with myself when I
have found the most serious topics discussed with a grotesque grimace
the while. It is a bad sign of the age—this turning of “cart-wheels” by
the side of a hearse, this throwing of somersaults over grave-stones.
The style we write in is popular now; but a few years, I hope, will see
a re-action, when a literary man must be either clown or undertaker, and
grinning through a horse-collar will not be tolerated in the case of a
mountebank otherwise attired in a shroud. Meanwhile, I cannot accuse
myself of pandering to a depraved taste. I neither follow nor lead it.
I cannot write otherwise than I do write. The leopard cannot change
his spots. Born in England, I am neither by parentage nor education
an Englishman; and in my childhood I browsed on a salad of languages,
which I would willingly exchange now for a plain English lettuce or
potato. Better to feed on hips and haws than on gangrened green-gages
and mouldy pine-apples. I read Sterne and Charles Lamb, Burton and Tom
Brown, Scarron and Brantôme, Boccaccio and Pigault-le-Brun, instead of
Mrs. Barbauld, and the Stories from the Spelling-book. I was pitchforked
into a French college before I had been through Pinnock in English; and
I declare that to this day I do not know one rule out of five in Lindley
Murray’s grammar. I can spell decently, because I can draw; and the
power (not the knowledge) in spelling correctly is concurrent with the
capacity for expressing the images before us more or less graphically
and symmetrically. It isn’t how a word _ought_ to be spelt: it is how
it _looks_ on paper, that decides the speller. I began to look upon the
quaint side of things almost as soon as I could see things at all; for
I was alone and Blind for a long time in childhood. I had so much to
whimper about, poor miserable object, that I began to grin and chuckle at
the things I saw, so soon as good Doctor Curée, the homœopathist, gave
me back my eyes. It is too late to mend now. While I am yet babbling, I
feel that I have nearly said my say. This book, as a Book, will go, and
be forgotten; but it will, years hence, acquire comparative value when
disinterred, from the “two-penny-box” at a bookstall. Old Directories,
Road Books, Court-Guides, Gazetteers, of half a century since, are worth
something now. They are as the straw that enters into the composition
of new bricks or books. Let us bide our time, then, my Augustus, humbly
but cheerfully. _You_ may have better fortune. You write novels and
tales: and the chronicles of Love never die. But if in the year 1959,
some historian of the state of manners in England during the reign of
Queen Victoria, points an allusion in a foot note by a reference to an
old book called “Twice Round the Clock,” and which professes to be a
series of essays on the manners and customs of the Londoners in 1859,
that reference will be quite enough of reward for your friend. Macaulay
quotes broadsides and Grub Street ballads. Carlyle does not disdain to
put the obscurest of North German pamphleteers into the witness-box;
albeit he often dismisses him with a cuff and a kick. At all events, we
may be quoted some of these days, dear Gus, even if we are kicked into
the bargain.

                                                     GEORGE AUGUSTUS SALA.




CONTENTS.


                                                                      PAGE

    FOUR A.M.—BILLINGSGATE MARKET                                        9

    FIVE A.M.—THE PUBLICATION OF THE “TIMES” NEWSPAPER                  25

    SIX A.M.—COVENT GARDEN MARKET                                       37

    SEVEN A.M.—A PARLIAMENTARY TRAIN                                    49

    EIGHT A.M.—ST. JAMES’S PARK—THE MALL                                65

    NINE A.M.—THE CLERKS AT THE BANK, AND THE BOATS ON THE RIVER        78

    TEN A.M.—THE COURT OF QUEEN’S BENCH, AND THE “BENCH” ITSELF         88

    ELEVEN A.M.—TROOPING THE GUARD, AND A MARRIAGE IN HIGH LIFE        104

    NOON—THE JUSTICE-ROOM AT THE MANSION-HOUSE, AND THE “BAY TREE”     116

    ONE P.M.—DOCK LONDON AND DINING LONDON                             128

    TWO P.M.—FROM REGENT STREET TO HIGH CHANGE                         142

    THREE P.M.—DEBENHAM AND STORE’S AUCTION-ROOMS, AND THE PANTHEON
      BAZAAR                                                           158

    FOUR P.M.—TATTERSALL’S, AND THE PARK                               186

    FIVE P.M.—THE FASHIONABLE CLUB, AND THE PRISONERS’ VAN             200

    SIX P.M.—A CHARITY DINNER, AND THE NEWSPAPER WINDOW AT THE
      GENERAL POST-OFFICE                                              218

    SEVEN P.M.—A THEATRICAL GREEN-ROOM, AND “BEHIND THE SCENES”        235

    EIGHT P.M.—HER MAJESTY’S THEATRE, AND A PAWNBROKER’S SHOP          251

    NINE P.M.—HALF-PRICE IN THE NEW CUT, AND A DANCING ACADEMY         268

    TEN P.M.—A DISCUSSION AT THE “BELVIDERE,” AND AN ORATORIO AT
      EXETER HALL                                                      284

    ELEVEN P.M.—A SCIENTIFIC CONVERSAZIONE, AND AN EVENING PARTY       297

    MIDNIGHT—THE HAYMARKET, AND THE SUB-EDITOR’S ROOM                  317

    ONE A.M.—EVANS’S SUPPER-ROOMS, AND A FIRE                          330

    TWO A.M.—A LATE DEBATE IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS, AND THE
      TURNSTILE OF WATERLOO BRIDGE                                     357

    HOUR THE TWENTY-FOURTH AND LAST—THREE A.M.—A BAL MASQUE, AND
      THE NIGHT CHARGES AT BOW STREET                                  375




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.


    PORTRAIT OF THE AUTHOR                                  _Frontispiece._

    FOUR A.M.—BILLINGSGATE MARKET: CARRYING FISH ASHORE            PAGE 17

    FOUR A.M.—BILLINGSGATE MARKET: THE FISH SOLD BY AUCTION             20

    FIVE A.M.—PUBLICATION OF THE “TIMES:” INSIDE THE OFFICE             32

    FIVE A.M.—PUBLICATION OF THE “TIMES:” OUTSIDE THE OFFICE            33

    SIX A.M.—COVENT GARDEN MARKET: THE WEST END                         41

    SIX A.M.—COVENT GARDEN MARKET: EARLY BREAKFAST STALL                44

    SEVEN A.M.—PARLIAMENTARY TRAIN: PLATFORM OF THE LONDON AND
      NORTH-WESTERN RAILWAY                                             60

    SEVEN A.M.—PARLIAMENTARY TRAIN: INTERIOR OF A THIRD-CLASS CARRIAGE  64

    EIGHT A.M.—ST. JAMES’S PARK                                         68

    EIGHT A.M.—OPENING SHOP                                             76

    NINE A.M.—OMNIBUSES AT THE BANK                                     84

    NINE A.M.—PENNY STEAMBOATS ALONGSIDE THE PIER AT LONDON BRIDGE      85

    TEN A.M.—INTERIOR OF THE COURT OF QUEEN’S BENCH                     96

    TEN A.M.—INTERIOR OF THE QUEEN’S BENCH PRISON                       97

    ELEVEN A.M.—TROOPING THE GUARD AT ST. JAMES’S PALACE               109

    ELEVEN A.M.—A WEDDING AT ST. JAMES’S CHURCH, PICCADILLY            113

    NOON—THE JUSTICE-ROOM AT THE MANSION HOUSE                         121

    ONE P.M.—DOCK-LABOURERS RETURNING TO WORK                          137

    ONE P.M.—DINING-ROOMS IN BUCKLERSBURY                              141

    TWO P.M.—REGENT STREET                                             148

    TWO P.M.—HIGH CHANGE                                               156

    THREE P.M.—DEBENHAM AND STORR’S AUCTION-ROOMS                      168

    THREE P.M.—THE PANTHEON BAZAAR                                     177

    FOUR P.M.—TATTERSALL’S                                             193

    FOUR P.M.—THE PARK                                                 197

    FIVE P.M.—THE FASHIONABLE CLUB                                     212

    FIVE P.M.—THE PRISONERS’ VAN                                       216

    SIX P.M.—A CHARITY DINNER                                          229

    SIX P.M.—THE NEWSPAPER WINDOW AT THE GENERAL POST-OFFICE           233

    SEVEN P.M.—A THEATRICAL GREEN-ROOM                                 244

    SEVEN P.M.—BEHIND THE SCENES                                       249

    EIGHT P.M.—THE OPERA                                               257

    EIGHT P.M.—INTERIOR OF A PAWNBROKER’S SHOP                         265

    NINE P.M.—HOUSE OF CALL FOR THE VICTORIA AUDIENCE                  276

    NINE P.M.—A DANCING ACADEMY                                        281

    TEN P.M.—A DISCUSSION AT THE “BELVIDERE”                           288

    TEN P.M.—AN ORATORIO AT EXETER HALL                                296

    ELEVEN P.M.—A SCIENTIFIC CONVERSAZIONE                             312

    ELEVEN P.M.—AN EVENING PARTY                                       316

    MIDNIGHT—SUPPER-ROOMS IN THE HAYMARKET                             325

    MIDNIGHT—THE SUB-EDITOR’S ROOM                                     329

    ONE A.M.—EVANS’S SUPPER-ROOMS                                      341

    ONE A.M.—A FIRE                                                    349

    TWO A.M.—A LATE DEBATE IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS                     368

    TWO A.M.—THE TURNSTILE OF WATERLOO BRIDGE                          372

    THREE A.M.—A BAL MASQUE                                            381

    THREE A.M.—THE NIGHT CHARGES AT BOW STREET                         392




TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK; OR, THE HOURS OF THE DAY AND NIGHT IN LONDON.




FOUR O’CLOCK A.M.—BILLINGSGATE MARKET.


Reader, were you ever up all night? You may answer that you are neither
a newspaper editor, a market gardener, a journeyman baker, the driver
of the Liverpool night mail, Mrs. Gamp the sicknurse, the commander of
the Calais packet, Professor Airey, Sir James South, nor a member of the
House of Commons. It may be that you live at Clapham, that one of the
golden rules of your domestic economy is “gruel at ten, bed at eleven,”
and that you consider keeping late hours to be an essentially immoral and
wicked habit,—the immediate prelude to the career and the forerunner of
the fate of the late George Barnwell. I am very sorry for your prejudices
and your susceptibilities. I respect them, but I must do them violence. I
intend that—_bon gré, mal gré_—in spirit, if not in actual corporeality,
you should stop out not only all night but all day with me; in fact, for
the space of twenty-four hours, it is my resolve to prohibit your going
to bed at all. I wish you to see the monster LONDON in the varied phases
of its outer and inner life, at every hour of the day-season and the
night-season; I wish you to consider with me the giant sleeping and the
giant waking; to watch him in his mad noonday rages, and in his sparse
moments of unquiet repose. You must travel TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK with
me; and together we will explore this London mystery to its remotest
recesses—its innermost arcana. To others the downy couch, the tasselled
nightcap, the cushioned sofa, the luxurious ease of night-and-day rest.
Ours be the staff and the sandalled shoon, the cord to gird up the lions,
the palmer’s wallet and cockle-shells. For, believe me, the pilgrimage
will repay fatigue, and the shrine is rich in relics.

Four o’clock in the morning. The deep bass voice of Paul’s, the Staudigl
of bells, has growlingly proclaimed the fact. Bow church confirms the
information in a respectable baritone. St. Clement’s Danes has sung forth
acquiescence with the well-known chest-note of his tenor voice, sonorous
and mellifluous as Tamberlik’s. St. Margaret’s, Westminster, murmurs
a confession of the soft impeachment in a contralto rich as Alboni’s
in “Stridi la vampa;” and all around and about the pert bells of the
new churches, from evangelical Hackney to Puseyite Pimlico, echo the
announcement in their shrill treble and soprani.

Four o’clock in the morning. Greenwich awards it,—the Horse Guards allow
it—Bennett, arbiter of chronometers and clocks that, with much striking,
have grown blue in the face, has nothing to say against it. And that
self-same hour shall never strike again this side the trumpet’s sound.
The hour itself being consigned to the innermost pigeon-hole of the Dead
Hour office—(a melancholy charnel-house of misspent time is that, my
friend)—you and I have close upon sixty minutes before us ere the grim
old scythe-bearer, the saturnine child-eater, who marks the seconds and
the minutes of which the infinite subdivision is a pulsation of eternity,
will tell us that the term of another hour has come. That hour will be
five a.m., and at five it is high market at Billingsgate. To that great
piscatorial Bourse we, an’t please you, are bound.

It is useless to disguise the fact that you, my shadowy, but not the less
beloved companion, are about to keep very bad hours. Good to hear the
chimes at midnight, as Justice Shallow and Falstaff oft did when they
were students in Gray’s Inn; but four and five in the morning! these be
small hours indeed: this is beating the town with a vengeance. Were it
winter, our bedlessness would be indefensible; but this is still sweet
summer time.

But why, the inquisitive may ask—the child-man who is for ever cutting up
the bellows to discover the reservoir of the wind—why four o’clock a.m.?
Why not begin our pilgrimage at one a.m., and finish the first half at
midnight, in the orthodox get-up-and-go-to-bed manner? Simply because
four a.m. is in reality the first hour of the working London day. The
giant is wide awake at midnight; he sinks into a fitful slumber about
two in the morning: short is his rest, for at four he is up again and at
work, the busiest bee in the world’s hive.

The child of the Sun, the gorgeous golden peacock, strutting in a
farmyard full of the Hours, his hens, now triumphs. It is summer; and
more than that, a lovely summer morning. The brown night has retired,
and the meek-eyed moon, mother of dews, has disappeared: the young day
pours in apace; the mountains’ misty tops are swelling on the sight, and
brightening in the sun. It is the cool, the fragrant, and the silent
hour, to meditation due and sacred song; the air is coloured, the efflux
divine turns hovels into palaces, and shoots with gold the rags of
beggars.

    “The city now doth like a garment wear
      The beauty of the morning....
      Never did Sun more beautifully steep
    In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill.
      Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep.
    The River glideth at its own sweet will;
      Dear God! the very houses seem asleep,
    And all that mighty Heart is lying still.”

I know that the acknowledgment of one’s quotations or authorities is
going out of fashion. Still, as I murmur the foregoing lines as I wander
round about the Monument and in and out of Thames Street, waiting for
Billingsgate-market time to begin, a conviction grows upon me that the
poetry is not my own; and in justice to the dead, as well as with a view
of sparing the printer a flood of inverted commas, I may as well confess
that I have been reading Mr. James Thomson and Mr. William Wordsworth on
the subject of summer lately, and that very many of the flowery allusions
to be found above, have been culled from the works of those pleasing
writers.

_Non omnis moriar._ Though the so oft-mentioned hours be asleep, and the
river glideth in peace, undisturbed by penny steamboats, the mighty heart
of Thames Street is anything but still. The great warehouses are closed,
’tis true; the long wall of the Custom House is a huge dead wall, full of
blind windows. The Coal Exchange (which edifice, with its gate down among
the dead men in Thames Street, and its cupola, like a middle-sized bully,
lifting its head to about the level of the base of that taller bully the
Monument, is the neatest example of an architectural “getting up stairs”
that I know)—the Coal Exchange troubles not its head as yet about
Stewarts or Lambtons, Sutherlands or Wallsend. The moist wharfs, teeming
with tubs and crates of potter’s ware packed with fruity store, and
often deliciously perfumed with the smell of oranges, bulging and almost
bursting through their thin prison bars of wooden laths, are yet securely
grated and barred up. The wharfingers are sleeping cosily far away. But
there are shops and shops wide open, staringly open, defiantly open, with
never a pane of glass in their fronts, but yawning with a jolly ha! ha!
of open-windowedness on the bye-strollers. These are the shops to make
you thirsty; these are the shops to make your incandescent coppers hiss;
these are the shops devoted to the apotheosis and apodeiknensis (I quote
Wordsworth again, but Christopher, not William) of Salt Fish—

    “Spend Herring first, save Salt Fish last,
    For Salt Fish is good when Lent is past.”

So old Tusser. What piles of salted fish salute the eye, and make
the mouth water, in these open-breasted shops! Dried herrings,
real Yarmouth bloaters, kippered herrings, not forgetting the old
original, unpretending red herring, the modest but savoury “soldier”
of the chandler’s-shop! What flaps of salt cod and cured fishes to me
unknown, but which may be, for aught I know, the poll of ling which
King James the First wished to give the enemy of mankind when he dined
with him, together with the pig and the pipe of tobacco; or it may be
Coob or Haberdine! What are Coob and Haberdine? Tell me, Groves, tell
me, Polonius, erst chamberlain and first fishmonger to the court of
Denmark. Great creels and hampers are there too, full of mussels and
periwinkles, and myriads of dried sprats and cured pilchards—shrunken,
piscatorial anatomies, their once burnished green and yellow panoplies
now blurred and tarnished. On the whole, each dried-fish shop is a most
thirst-provoking emporium, and I cannot wonder much if the blue-aproned
fishmongers occasionally sally forth from the midst of their fishy
mummy pits and make short darts “round the corner” to certain houses of
entertainment, kept open, it would seem, chiefly for their accommodation,
and where the favourite morning beverage is, I am given to understand,
gin mingled with milk. It is refreshing, however, to find that the
fragrant berry of Mocha (more or less adequately represented by chicory,
burnt horse-beans, and roasted corn)—that coffee, the nurse of Voltaire’s
wit, the inspirer of Balzac’s brain; coffee, which Madame de Sevigné
pertly predicted would “go out” with Racine, but which nevertheless has,
with astonishing tenacity of vitality, “kept in” while the pert Sevigné
and the meek Racine have quite gone out into the darkness of literary
limbo—is in great request among the fishy men of Billingsgate. Huge,
massive, blue and white earthenware mugs full of some brown decoction,
which to these not too exigent critics need but to steam, and to be
sweet, to be the “coffee as in France,” whose odoriferous “percolations”
the advertising tradesmen tell us of, are lifted in quick succession
to the thirsty lips of the fishmen. Observe, too, that all market men
drink and order their coffee by the “pint,” even as the scandal-loving
old ladies of the last century (ladies don’t love scandal now-a-days)
drank their tea by the “dish.” I can realise the contempt of a genuine
Billingsgate marketeer for the little thimble-sized filagree cups with
the bitter Mocha grouts at the bottom, which, with a suffocating Turkish
chibouque, Turkish pachas and attar-of-roses dealers in the Bezesteen,
offer as a mark of courtesy to a Frank traveller when they want to cheat
him.

Close adjacent is a narrow passage called Darkhouse Lane, and here
properly should be a traditional Billingsgate tavern called the
“Darkhouse.” There is one, open all night, under the same designation, in
Newgate Market. Hither came another chronicler of “twice round the clock”
with another neophyte, to show him the wonders of the town, one hundred
and fifty years ago. Hither, when pursy, fubsy, good-natured Queen Anne
reigned in England, and followed the hounds in Windsor’s Park, driving
two piebald ponies in a chaise, and touched children for the “evil,”
awing childish Sam Johnson with her black velvet and her diamonds, came
jovial, brutal, vulgar, graphic Ned Ward, the “London Spy.” Here, in the
“Darkhouse,” he saw a waterman knock down his wife with a stretcher, and
subsequently witnessed the edifying spectacle of the recreant husband
being tried for his offence by a jury of fishwomen. Scant mercy, but
signal justice, got he from those fresh-water Minoses and Rhadamanthuses.
Forthwith was he “cobbed”—a punishment invented by sleeveboard-wielding
tailors, and which subsequently became very popular in her Majesty’s
navy. Here he saw “fat, motherly flatcaps, with fish-baskets hanging over
their heads instead of riding-hoods,” with silver rings on their thumbs,
and pipes charged with “mundungus” in their mouths, sitting on inverted
eel-baskets, and strewing the flowers of their exuberant eloquence over
dashing young town rakes who had stumbled into Billingsgate to finish
the night—disorderly blades in laced velvet coats, with, torn ruffles,
and silver-hilted swords, and plumed hats battered in scuffles with the
watch. But the town-rakes kept comparatively civil tongues in their
heads when they entered the precincts of the Darkhouse. An amazon of the
market, otherwise known as a Billingsgate fish-fag, was more than a match
for a Mohock. And here Ned Ward saw young city couples waiting for the
tide to carry them in a tilt-boat to Gravesend; and here he saw bargemen
eating broiled red-herrings, and Welshmen “louscobby” (whatever that
doubtless savoury dish may have been, but there _must_ have been cheese
in it); and here he heard the frightful roaring of the waters among the
mechanism of the piers of old London Bridge. There are no waterworks
there now; the old bridge itself is gone; the Mohocks are extinct; and we
go to Gravesend by the steamer, instead of the tilt-boat; yet still, as
I enter the market, a pleasant cataract of “chaff” between a fishwoman
and a costermonger comes plashing down—even as Mr. Southey tells us that
the waters come down at Lodore—upon my amused ears; and the conviction
grows on me that the flowers of Billingsgate eloquence are evergreens.
Mem.: To write a philosophical dissertation on the connection between
markets and voluble vituperation which has existed in all countries and
in all ages. ’Twas only from his immense mastery of Campanian slang that
Menenius Agrippa obtained such influence over the Roman commons; and one
of the gaudiest feathers in Daniel O’Connell’s cap of eloquence was his
having “slanged” an Irish market-woman down by calling her a crabbed old
hypothenuse!

Billingsgate has been one of the watergates or ports of the city from
time immemorial. Geoffrey of Monmouth’s fabulous history of the spot
acquaints us that “Belin, a king of the Britons, about four hundred years
before Christ’s nativity, built this gate and called it ‘Belinsgate,’
after his own calling;” and that when he was dead, his body being burnt,
the ashes in a vessel of brass were set on a high pinnacle of stone
over the said gate. Stowe very sensibly observes, that the name was
most probably derived from some previous owner, “happily named Beling
or Biling, as Somars’ Key, Smart’s Wharf, and others, thereby took the
names of their owners.” When he was engaged in collecting materials for
his “Survey,” Billingsgate was a “large Watergate port, or harborough for
ships and boats commonly arriving there with fish, both fresh and salt,
shellfish, salt, oranges, onions, and other fruits and roots, wheat,
rye, and grain of divers sorts, for the service of the city, and the
parts of this realm adjoining.” Queenhithe, anciently the more important
watering-place, had yielded its pretensions to its rival. Each gives its
name to one of the city wards.

Some of the regulations concerning the “mystery” of the fishmongers in
old times are sufficiently interesting for a brief notice. In the reign
of Edward I. the prices of fish were fixed—for the best soles, 3_d._
per dozen; the best turbot, 6_d._ each; the best pickled herrings,
1_d._ a score; fresh oysters, 2_d._ a gallon; the best eels, 2_d._ per
quarter of a hundred. In a statute of Edward I. it was forbidden to
offer for sale any fish except salt fish after the second day. In the
city assize of fish the profits of the London fishmongers were fixed at
one penny in twelve. They were not to sell their fish secretly, within
doors, but in plain market-place. In 1320 a combination was formed
against the fishmongers of Fish-wharf, to prevent them from selling by
retail; but Edward II. ordered the mayor and sheriffs to interfere,
and the opposition was unsuccessful. The mayor issued his orders to
these fishmongers of Bridge Street and Old Fish Street, to permit their
brethren in the trade to “stand at stall;” to merchandise with them, and
freely obtain their share of merchandise, as was fit and just, and as the
freedom of the city required. A few years later some of the fishmongers
again attempted to establish a monopoly; but it was ordered that the
“billestres,” or poor persons who cried or sold fish in the streets,
“provided they buy of free fishmongers, and do not keep a stall, or make
a stay in the streets, shall not be hindered;” and also that persons and
women coming from the uplands with fish caught by them or their servants
in the waters of the Thames or other neighbouring streams, were to be
allowed to frequent the market. With these exceptions, none but members
of the Fishmongers’ Company were to be allowed to sell fish in the city,
lest the commodity should be made dear by persons dealing in it who were
unskilful in the mystery.

The old churches of London in the immediate vicinity of the fish-markets
contained numerous monuments to fishmongers. That the stock-fishmongers,
or dealers in dried or salted fish, should have formed so important
a portion of the trade is deserving of notice, as a peculiarity of
the times. Lovekin and Walworth, who both acquired wealth, were
stock-fishmongers. The nature of the commodity was such as to render the
dealers in it a superior class to the other fishmongers. A great store
might be accumulated, and more capital was required than by the other
fishmongers, who only purchased from hand to mouth.

In 1699, an act was passed for making it a free market for the sale of
fish—though the very commencement of the preamble alludes to Billingsgate
having been time out of mind a free market for all kinds of floating
and salt fish, as also for all manner of floating and shellfish. The
necessity of a new act had arisen, as the preamble recites, from various
abuses, one of which was that the fishmongers would not permit the street
hawkers of fish to buy of the fishermen, by which means the fishmongers
bought at their own prices. The extraordinary dream of making the country
wealthy, and draining the ocean of its riches by means of fisheries, had
for above a century been one of the fondest illusions of the English
people; and about the time that the act was passed, “ways to consume more
fish” were once more attracting the popular attention. The price of fish
at the time was said to be beyond the reach of the poor and even of the
middling classes; and for many days together the quantity received at
Billingsgate was very inconsiderable. To remedy these evils, carriages
were to be constructed, to be drawn by two post-horses, which were to
convey the fish to market at a rate of speed which was then thought to
be lightning rapidity. But though the project was much talked about,
it never came to a head, and ultimately fell through, the projectors
consoling themselves with the axiomatic reflection—that there are more
fish in the sea than ever came out of it.

But while I am rummaging among the dusty corners of my memory, and
dragging forth worm-eaten old books to the light; while I have suffered
the hare of the minute-hand, and the tortoise of the hour-hand (the
tortoise wins the race), to crawl or scamper at least half round the
clock, Billingsgate Market itself—the modern—the renovated—a far
different place to that uncleanly old batch of sheds and hovels, reeking
with fishy smells, and more or less beset by ruffianly company, which
was our only fish market twenty years ago—New Billingsgate, with a real
fountain in the centre, which during the day plays real water, is now
in full life and bustle and activity. Not so much in the market area
itself, where porters are silently busied in clearing piles of baskets
away, setting forms and stools in order, and otherwise preparing for
the coming business of the fish auction, as on the wharf, in front of
the tavern known to fame as Simpson’s, and where the eighteenpenny fish
ordinary is held twice every day, except Sunday, in each year of grace.
This wharf is covered with fish, and the scaly things themselves are
being landed, with prodigious celerity, and in quantities almost as
prodigious, from vessels moored in triple tier before the market. Here
are Dutch boats that bring eels, and boats from the north sea that bring
lobsters, and boats from Hartlepool, Whitstable, Harwich, Great Grimsby,
and other English seaports and fishing stations. They are all called
“boats,” though many are of a size that would render the term ship, or
at least vessel, far more applicable. They are mostly square and squat
in rigging, and somewhat tubby in build, and have an unmistakeably fishy
appearance. Communications are opened between the vessels, each other,
and the shore, by means of planks placed from bulwark to bulwark; and
these bulwarks are now trodden by legions of porters carrying the fish
ashore. Nautical terms are mingled with London street vernacular; fresh
mackerel competes in odour with pitch and tar; the tight strained rigging
cuts in dark indigo-relief against the pale-blue sky; the whole is a
confusion, slightly dirty but eminently picturesque, of ropes, spars,
baskets, oakum, tarpaulin, fish, canvas trousers, osier baskets, loud
voices, tramping feet, and “perfumed gales,” not exactly from “Araby the
blest,” but from the holds of the fishing-craft.

[Illustration: BILLINGSGATE MARKET: CARRYING FISH ASHORE.]

Upon my word, the clock has struck five, and the great gong of
Billingsgate booms forth market-time. Uprouse ye, then, my merry, merry
fishmongers, for this is your opening day! And the merry fishmongers
uprouse themselves with a vengeance. The only comparison I can find
for the aspect, the sights, and sounds of the place, is—a Rush. A
rush hither and thither at helter-skelter speed, apparently blindly,
apparently without motive, but really with a business-like and engrossing
pre-occupation, for fish and all things fishy. Baskets full of turbot,
borne on the shoulders of the _facchini_ of the place, skim through the
air with such rapidity that you might take them to be flying fish. Out of
the way! here is an animated salmon leap. Stand on one side! a shoal of
fresh herrings will swallow you up else. There is a rush to the tribunes
of the auctioneers; forums surrounded by wooden forms—I mean no pun—laden
with fish, and dominated by the rostra of the salesmen, who, with long
account-books in their hands, which they use instead of hammers, knock
down the lots with marvellous rapidity. An eager crowd of purchasers
hedge in the scaly merchandise. They are substantial-looking, hearty,
rosy-gilled men—for the sale of fish appears to make these merchants
thrive in person as well as in purse. Why, though, should fishmongers
have, as a body, small eyes? Can there be any mysterious sympathy between
them and the finny things they sell?—and do they, like the husband and
wife who loved each other so much, and lived together so long, that,
although at first totally dissimilar in appearance, they grew at last to
resemble one another feature for feature—become smaller and smaller-eyed
as their acquaintance with the small-eyed fishes lengthens? I throw this
supposition out as a subject for speculation for some future Lavater.
Among the buyers I notice one remarkable individual, unpretending as to
facial development, but whose costume presents a singular mixture of the
equine and the piscine. Lo! his hat is tall and shiny, even as the hat of
a frequenter of Newmarket and an _habitué_ of Aldridge’s Repository, and
his eminently sporting-looking neckcloth is fastened with a horse-shoe
pin; but then his sleeves are as the sleeves of a fishmonger, and his
loins are girt with the orthodox blue apron appertaining, by a sort of
masonic prescription, to his craft and mystery! His nether man, as far
as the spring of the calf, is clad in the galligaskins of an ordinary
citizen; but below the knee commence a pair of straight tight boots of
undeniably sporting cut. Who is this marvellous compound of the fishy
and “horsey” idiosyncrasies? Is he John Scott disguised as Izaak Walton?
is he Flatman or Chifney? Tell me, Mr. Chubb, proprietor of the “Golden
Perch;” tell me, “Ruff,” mythical author of the “Guide to the Turf”—for
knowing not to which authority especially to appeal, I appeal to both,
even as did the Roman maid-servant, who burnt one end of the candle to
St. Catherine and the other to St. Nicholas (old St. Nicholas I mean,
sometimes familiarised into “Nick”), in order to be on the safe side.

There are eight auctioneers or fish salesmen attached to the market,
and they meet every morning between four and five o’clock at one of the
principal public-houses, to discuss the quantity and quality of fish
about to be offered for sale. The three taverns are known as Bowler’s,
Bacon’s, and Simpson’s. The second of these is situated in the centre
of the market, and is habitually used by the auctioneers, probably on
account of the son of the proprietor being the largest consignee at
Billingsgate.

[Illustration: BILLINGSGATE: THE FISH SOLD BY AUCTION.]

As the clock strikes five, the auctioneers disperse to their various
boxes. Below each box are piled on “forms” or bulks the “doubles” of
plaice, soles, haddock, whiting, and “offal.” A “double” is an oblong
basket tapering to the bottom, and containing from three to four dozen
of fish; “offal” means odd lots of different kinds of fish, mostly small
and broken, but always fresh and wholesome. When the auctioneer is
ready, a porter catches up a couple of “doubles,” and swings one on to
each shoulder, and then the bids begin. Soles have been sold as low as
four shillings the “double,” and have fetched as high as three pounds.
There is one traditional bid on record, which took place in the early
part of the present century, of forty guineas per hundred for mackerel.
Plaice ranges from one-and-sixpence to four shillings the double. The
sale is conducted on the principle of what is termed a “Dutch auction,”
purchasers not being allowed to inspect the fish in the doubles before
they bid. Offal is bought only by the “fryers.” You may see, almost every
market morning, a long, gaunt, greasy man, of that dubious age that you
hesitate whether to call him youngish or oldish, with a signet ring on
one little finger, and a staring crimson and yellow handkerchief round
the collar of his not very clean checked shirt, buy from fifteen to
twenty doubles of one kind or another; and in the season the _habitués_
of the market say that he will purchase from twenty-five to thirty
bushels of periwinkles and whelks. This monumental “doubler,” this
Rothschild of the offal tribe, resides in Somers Town. To him resort to
purchase stock those innumerable purveyors of fried fish who make our
courts and bye-streets redolent with the oleaginous perfumes of their
hissing cauldrons. For the convenience of small dealers, who cannot
afford to buy an entire double, stands are erected at different parts of
the market for “bumbarees.” We may ask in vain, _undè derivatur_, for the
meaning of the term, though it is probably of Dutch origin. Any one can
be a bumbaree: it requires neither apprenticeship, diploma, nor license,
and it is the _pons asinorum_ of the “mystery of fishmongers.” The career
is open to all; which, considering the difficulty of settling one’s
children in life, must be rather a gratifying reflection for parents.
The process of bumbareeing is very simple. It consists in buying as
largely as your means will afford of an auctioneer, hiring a stall for
sixpence, and retailing the fish at a swingeing profit. I think that if
I were not a landed gentleman, a Middlesex magistrate, and a member of
the Court of Lieutenancy—vainly endeavouring, meanwhile, to ascertain my
parochial settlement, in order to obtain admission to a workhouse as an
unable-bodied pauper—that I should like to be a bumbaree.

Plaice, soles, haddocks (fresh), skate, maids, cod, and ling (the two
last-mentioned fish in batches of threes and fours, with a string passed
through the gills), are the only fish sold by auction. Fresh herrings are
sold from the vessel by the long hundred (130). They are counted from
the hold to the buyers in “warp” fives. Twopence per hundred is charged
to bring them on shore. Eels are sold by the “draft” of twenty pounds
weight—the price of the draft varying from three shillings to fifteen.
Twopence per draft is paid for “shoreing” or landing the fish from the
vessels. Sprats are sold on board the ships by the bushel. A “tindal” is
a thousand bushels of sprats. When we come to consider the vast number of
these oily, savoury little fishes that a bushel will contain, the idea
of a “tindal” of them seems perfectly Garagantuan; yet many “tindals” of
them are sold every week during the winter season—for the consumption of
sprats among the poorer classes is enormous. What says the Muse of the
Bull at Somers Town—what sweet stanzas issue from the anthology of Seven
Dials?—

    “O! ’tis my delight on a Friday night,
      When sprats they isn’t dear,
    To fry a couple of score or so
      Upon a fire clear.

    “They eats so well, they bears the bell
      From all the fish I knows:
    Then let us eat them while we can,
      Before the price is rose.”
        (Chorus—ad libitum) “O! ’tis my delight,” &c.

The last two lines are replete with the poetry and philosophy of the
poorer classes: “Let us eat them while we can, before the price is rose;”
for even sprats are sometimes luxuries unattainable by the humble.
Exceedingly succulent sprats labour under the disadvantage of being
slightly unwholesome. To quote Mr. Samuel Weller’s anecdote of the remark
made by the young lady when remonstrating with the pastrycook who had
sold her a pork pie which was all fat, sprats are “rayther too rich.”
And yet how delicious they are! I have had some passably good dinners
in my time; I have partaken of _turbôt à la crême_ at the Trois Frères
Provençaux; I have eaten a _filet à la Chateaubriand_ at Bignon’s: yet
I don’t think there is a banquet in the whole repertory of Lucullus and
Apicius—a more charming red-letter night in the calendar of gastronomy,
than a sprat supper. You must have three pennyworth of sprats, a large
tablecloth is indispensable for finger-wiping purposes—for he who would
eat sprats with a knife and fork is unworthy the name of an epicure—and
after the banquet I should recommend, for purely hygienic and antibilious
reasons, the absorption of a _petit verre_ of the best Hollands.

To return. As regards salmon, nine-tenths of the aristocratic fish are
brought up by rail in barrels, and in summer packed in ice. Salmon and
salmon-trout are not subjected to the humiliation of being “knocked
down” by an auctioneer. They are disposed of “by private contract” at so
much per pound.

Of dried and smoked fish of all kinds the best come from Yarmouth; but
as regards the costermonger and street-vender—the modern “billestres,”
of dried haddocks, smoked sprats and herrings, entire or kippered—they
are little affected by the state of the cured fish market so long as they
can buy plenty of the fresh kind. The costermonger cures his fish himself
in the following manner:—He builds a little shed like a watch-box, with
wires across the upper part; and on this grating he threads his fish.
Then he makes a fire on the floor of his impromptu curing-house with coal
or mahogany dust, and smokes the fish “till done,” as the old cookery
books say. There is a dealer in the market to whom all fish-sellers
bring the skins of departed soles. He gives fourpence-halfpenny a pound
for them. They are used for refining purposes. And now for a word
concerning the crustacea and the molluscs. Of oysters there are several
kinds: Native Pearls, Jerseys, Old Barleys, and Commons. On board every
oyster-boat a business-like gentleman is present, who takes care that
every buyer of a bushel of oysters pays him fourpence. No buyer may carry
his oysters ashore himself, be he ever so able and willing. There are
regular “shoremen,” who charge fourpence a bushel for their services; so
that whatever may be the market-price of oysters, the purchaser must pay,
_nolens volens_, eightpence a bushel over and above the quoted rate.

Of mussels there are three kinds: Dutch, Exeters, and Shorehams. They are
brought to market in bags, of the average weight of three hundredweight;
each bag containing about one hundred and sixty quarts, inclusive of dirt
and stones. They are sold at from five shillings to seven shillings a
bag. Of periwinkles—or, as they are more popularly and familiarly termed,
“winkles”—there are four sorts: Scotch, Clays, Isle of Wights, and
Maidens. They are sold by the bushel, or by the “level” or gallon. Crabs
are sold by the “kit” (a long shallow basket) and by the score. Lobsters
by the score and the double.

At the “Cock,” in Love Lane, and at the “White Hart,” in Botolph Lane,
there is a boiling-house in the rear of the premises. Each boiling-house
consists of a spacious kitchen filled with immense cauldrons. Here winkle
and whelk buyers, who have neither utensils nor convenient premises
sufficient to boil at home, can have it done for them for fourpence
a bushel. Each boiling is performed separately in a wicker-basket;
crabs and lobsters may likewise be boiled at these houses. Half-a-dozen
scores of the fish are packed in a large basket, shaped like a
strawberry-pottle, a lid is put between each lot, and the hot-water
torture is inflicted at the rate of sixpence a score.

If your servant, the writer, were not precluded by the terms of his
contract from taking any natural rest, he might, pleading fatigue, retire
to bed; and, tossing on an unquiet couch, as men must do who slip between
the sheets when the blessed sun is shining, have fantastic dreams of Ned
Ward and Sir William Walworth: dream of the market-scene in “Masaniello,”
and hum a dream-reminiscence of “Behold, how brightly beams the morning!”
which, of course, like all things appertaining to dreams, has no more
resemblance to the original air than the tune the cow died of. Then
fancy that he is a supernumerary in a pantomime, and that Mr. Flexmore,
the clown, has jumped upon his shoulders, and is beating him about the
ears with a “property” codfish. Then he might be Jonah, swallowed by the
whale; and then Tobit’s fish. Then he would find himself half awake, and
repeating some lines he remembered reading years ago, scrawled in ink on
a huge placard outside the shop of Mr. Taylor, the famous fishmonger, in
Lombard Street. Yes: they ran thus—

    “So the ‘Times’ takes an interest in the case of Geils;
    I wish it would take some in my eels!”

What a queer fish Mr. Taylor must have been! Where is he now? Why,
he (your servant) is Taylor—Jeremy Taylor—Tom Taylor—Taylor the
water-poet—Billy Taylor—the Three Tailors of Tooley Street—Mr. Toole, the
toast-master of arts and buttered toast; and—he is asleep!




FIVE O’CLOCK A.M.—THE PUBLICATION OF THE “TIMES” NEWSPAPER.


    “There she is—the great engine—she never sleeps. She has her
    ambassadors in every quarter of the world—her couriers upon
    every road. Her officers march along with armies, and her
    envoys walk into statesmen’s cabinets. They are ubiquitous.
    Yonder Journal has an agent at this minute giving bribes at
    Madrid; and another inspecting the price of potatoes at Covent
    Garden.”

                                                        “PENDENNIS.”

If you have no objection to the statement of the fact, I would beg to
observe that our present station on the clock face, twice round which
we have to go, is now five in the morning; and that at five a.m. the
publication of the “Times” newspaper is, to use a north-country mining
expression, in “full blast.” You abhor the politics of the journal
in question, you say: you consider the “Times” and “Evening Mail” to
be the organ of a company, with limited liability, composed of the
Emperor Alexander, Cardinal Wiseman, Baron Rothschild, Prince Aali
Pacha, Metternich, Doctor Cumming, Baring Brothers, Lord Palmerston,
Mr. Disraeli, Mr. W. J. Fox, and Miss Martineau. You are offended with
the “Times” because the editor declined to insert that last six-paged
letter from you against organ grinding. Never mind, you must come all
the same to see the paper published. For the publication of the “Times”
is a great, an enormous, a marvellous fact: none the less wonderful for
being repeated three hundred and thirteen times a-year. It is a pulsation
of London’s mighty heart, that should not be neglected. It is the daily
booming of a tocsin, which, year after year, proclaims progress, and
still progress to the nations; which is the joy bell to the good, the
passing bell to the bad, the world is blessed or cursed with; which rings
out ignorance and prejudice and superstition, and rings in knowledge
and enlightenment and truth. The “Times” is not alone in the possession
of a peal of bells of this kind; and many daily, more weekly, papers
ring out, loud and clear, to eager listeners; were your vassal not one
of the modestest of men, he would hint that for the last dozen years he
has been agitating daily and weekly a little tintinnabulum with what
lustiness his nerveless arm will let him. But hard by St. Paul’s, the
cathedral of Anglicanism, is Printing House Square, the cathedral of
Journalism, and in it hangs a bell to which Great Tom of Lincoln, Peter
of York, the Kolokol of Moscow, and our own defunct “Big Ben,” are but
as tinkling muffineers. For though the sides of the bell are only paper,
the clapper is the great public tongue; the booming sound that fills the
city every morning, and, to use the words of Mr. Walter Whitman, “utters
its barbaric youp over the house-tops of creation,” is the great Public
Voice. Bottle up your animosities, then, stifle your prejudices, and come
and hear the voice’s first faint murmur at five o’clock in the morning.

The office of the “Times” and “Evening Mail” is, as all civilised men
should know, situated in Printing House Square and Playhouse Yard, in the
parish of St. Ann’s, Blackfriars, in the city of London. Now this is very
pleasant and comfortable information, and is fit matter for a studious
man to lay to heart; and there exists but one little drawback to mar the
felicity which one must naturally feel at having the style and title of
the press’s great champions’ _habitat_ so patly at one’s fingers’ ends.
The drawback—the kink in the cable, the hyssop in the wine-cup, the thorn
to the rose—is that, with the exception of Honey Lane market and Little
Chester Street, Pimlico, Printing House Square is the most difficult
locality to find in all London. It is not much use asking your way to
it; a map of London, however elaborate, would not be of the slightest
assistance to you in discovering it: it will avail you little even to be
told that it is close to Apothecaries’ Hall, for where, I should like
to know, is that huge musty caravanserai of drugs, and who is to find
it at a short notice? And the intimation that Printing House Square is
not far from Puddle Dock, would not, I opine, render you great service,
intimate as might be your acquaintance with the shores of the river, both
above and below bridge, and would be scarcely more lucid a direction
than the intimation that the London terminus of the South-Western
Railway was close to Pedlars’ Acre. The “Times” newspaper is somewhere
near all these places; and it is likewise within a stone’s throw from
Ludgate Hill, and not far from St. Paul’s, and within a minute’s walk of
Fleet Street, and contiguous to Blackfriars Bridge, close handy to Earl
Street, and no great distance from Chatham Place. Yet, for all this,
the “Times” office might be, to the uninitiated, just as well placed in
the centre of the Cretan labyrinth, or the maze at Hampton Court, or
the budget of a Chancellor of the Exchequer. The best way to reach the
office is to take any turning to the south side of London Bridge, or
the east of Bridge Street, Blackfriars, and then trust to chance. The
probabilities are varied. Very likely you will find yourself entangled
in a seemingly hopeless net-work of narrow streets; you will be jostled
into chandlers’ shops, vilified by boys unctuous, black, and reeking
from the printing-machine; pursued by costermongers importuning you to
purchase small parcels of vegetables; and, particularly after sundown,
your life will be placed in jeopardy by a Hansom cab bouncing up or down
the narrow thoroughfare, of course on its way to the “Times” office,
and on an errand of life and death; the excited politician inside,
frantically offering the cabman (he, even, doesn’t know the way to the
“Times,” and has just asked it of a grimy cynic, smoking a pipe in front
of a coal and potato shed) extra shillings for speed. The grimy cynic,
perhaps from sheer malevolence of disposition, perhaps from the ruffling
of his temper naturally incidental to his being asked the same question
about five hundred times every day, answers morosely that he believes
the Hoffice is in Bummondsey, but he’s blest if he knows hanything more
about it. He will have bad times of it, that grimy cynic, I perpend,
for telling such fibs. Still struggle on manfully, always like the
nautical gentleman in the blue pilot jacket who had had so many domestic
afflictions, and exhorted the passenger to “go down, go down.” Never mind
the regiments of gallinacea that board in the gutter and lodge in the
adjacent coal-cellars, and peck at your feet as though they could relish
your corns. Never mind the infants of tender years who come tumbling
between your legs, sprawl, howling, at your feet, and cast around
appealing glances, which draw cries of “shame!” from vengeful family-men
who have never set eyes on you before, but who evidently regard you as a
peripatetic ogre, going about, of malice prepense, to trip up children.
Never mind the suffocating odour of second-hand fish, vegetables, fruit,
coal-dust, potato sacks, the adjacent gasworks, gum-benzoin, hartshorn,
opium, and other medicaments from Apothecaries’ Hall. Never mind the
noises of dogs barking, of children that are smacked by their parents
or guardians for crying, and then, of course, roar louder; of boys
yelling the insufferable “Old Dog Tray,” the abominable “Keemo Kimo,” the
hideous “Hoomtoomdoodendoo,” and rattling those abhorrent instruments
of discord, the “bones;” of women scolding, quarrelling, or shrieking
domestic calumnies of Mrs. Armstrong in connection with Bill Boosker,
nicknamed the “Lively Flea,” from garret-windows across the street; of
men growling, and wagon-wheels rumbling, and from distant forges the
yell of the indignant anvil as the ruthless hammer smites it, and the
great bar of iron is beaten flat, the sparks flying up, rejoicing in a
red “ha-ha!” at the ferruginous defeat. Never mind the dangers of hoop,
“hopscotch,” “fly-the-garter,” “thread-the-needle,” “trip-the-baker,”
“tipcat,” and “shove-halfpenny,” for the carrying out of which exciting
and amusing games the juvenile population entirely monopolise what spare
strips of pavement there are. Trust on, be not afraid, keep struggling;
and it is five hundred to one that you will eventually turn up Printing
House Square, over against the “Times” office. How ever the leviathan of
the press manages to breathe in this close, stifling, elbow-hampering
neighbourhood, has always puzzled me, and has puzzled, I daresay, a great
many wiser than I. How do the archbishops in their coaches and six (it
is well known that those gorgeous prelates write the leading articles,
carrying the necessary stationery in their mitres, and wiping their pens
on their black silk aprons—the B—p of O—x—d, however, always writes with
a pastoral crozier, dipped in milk and honey, or a lamb’s fleece—and
come down to the office at a quarter past nine every evening to correct
their proofs) contrive to squeeze their broad-shouldered equipages
through these bye-lanes? How can the sub-editor’s four-in-hand pass, the
city correspondent’s comfortable yellow chariot, nay, even the modest
broughams of the compositors? Why does not the “Times” burst forth from
the shell it has grown too large for, and plant its standard on the hill
of Ludgate, or by the side of Cheap,—if it must needs be in the city? The
area of Lincoln’s Inn Fields would be perhaps the most suitable locality
for a new office; but it is indubitable that unless the “leading journal”
retrogress and contract its operation, they will have, some day, to pull
down the choking little nests of back-streets which surround and hem it
in, even as they had to pull down the wall of the dock, bodily, in order
to let the _Great Britain_ steam-ship out.

What a contrast sequestered Printing House Square, with its old-fashioned
aspect, its quiet, dingy-looking houses, its clump of green trees within
a railing to the left, presents to the gurgling, gasping neighbourhood
which stands in such close propinquity to it! Here is the great brainpan
of journalism; the centre of newspaper activity, the prefecture of
police of the public press. Absolutely necessary is it that it should
be entirely a secret police, the “awful, shadowy, irresponsible, and
yet _puissant_ we” should dominate over the columns of the daily
journal. Will a time ever come, I wonder, when a man will sign his own
articles in a newspaper; receive his reward for honesty, his censure
for tergiversation, from the public? Will a strange day of revolution
ever arrive, when the mystic “we” shall be merged into the responsible,
tax-paying, tangible, palpable, shootable, suicidable, and kickable “I?”
Perhaps never; perhaps such a consummation would be disastrous. Old
Cobbett, in one of his screeds of passionate contempt in his “gridiron”
paper the “Register,” once said that he should like to have all the
newspaper editors and correspondents in London assembled in Hyde Park,
in order that from their personal appearance the public might judge
by what a disreputable-looking set of fellows they were hoodwinked
and nose-led. There would be no need to hold such a gathering in this
scene-painting age. Walk but into any fashionable photographic studio,
and you shall find all the “sommités” of the press neatly collectionised,
and stuck on pasteboard in the show-room portfolio; and if you entreat
the photographer’s pretty wife civilly, she will point out to you
Doctor Copperbolt of the “Thunderer,” and Bill Hornblower of the “Penny
Trumpet,” in their habit as they live.

Printing House Square is to me interesting at all times of the day and
night. In the afternoon, the dullest period of its existence, when the
compositors are gone away, the editors not come, the last number of the
last edition of the day’s sheet printed, and the mighty steam-engine
for a time hushed, I wander into its precincts often; make some small
pretexts of taking out a slip of paper, and wending my way towards the
advertising department; but soon retrace my steps, and, to tell the
truth, moon about the square in such a suspicious and prowling manner,
that if they kept any spoons on the premises, I should most probably be
ordered off by the compositor on duty. This was Playhouse Yard too, once,
was it—nay, is still; but where is the old playhouse—the Globe Theatre,
Blackfriars, if I mistake not? Not a vestige, not a particle remains.
The fourth estate has swallowed it all up. The Press Dragon of Wantley
has devoured everything; and the “Times” seems omnipotent in its home by
Puddle Dock. Look over the door of the advertisement office. Above that
portal is a handsome marble slab, a votive tablet, in commemoration of a
great victory the “Times” once gained, not a legal victory, but one of
power and influence with the people, and especially with the commercial
community, by its exposure, anent the trial of Bogle _v._ Lawson, of the
most extensive and remarkable fraudulent conspiracy ever brought to light
in the mercantile world. The “Times” refused to be reimbursed for the
heavy costs with which its proprietors had been saddled in defending the
action brought by Mr. Bogle, a banker at Florence, against the publisher
of the “Times,” Mr. Lawson. But a subscription, amounting to £2,700, had
been raised, and this handsome sum, which the “Times” proprietors refused
to accept, was at last laid out in the foundation of two scholarships
at Christ’s Hospital and the City of London School, for the benefit of
pupils of those institutions proceeding to the universities of Oxford
and Cambridge. Do you remember—are you old enough to remember—the famous
case of Bogle _versus_ Lawson, reader? It would take me five times the
space I can spare for this paper to give you even the outline of the
history of the monstrous fraud from which that action grew. Suffice
it now to say, that Mr. Bogle had been mixed up—it has been since
established innocently—in the great continental letter of credit forging
system, invented, carried out, and pursued with consummate success by an
accomplished scoundrel, the Marquis de Bourbel, who, when the felonious
bubble at length burst, and the fraud was detected, was in nowise cast
down or abashed by that discovery that had come, and the punishment that
seemed imminent, but with admirable strategy called in his outlying
pickets of countesses, actresses—_demi-monde_ adventuresses—couriers,
and sham English milords, who had been scouring the Continent changing
his forged letters of credit, and, after the unutterable impudence of
an appearance in court during the “Times” trial, gracefully retired
into private life. I, the scribe, _moi qui vous parle_, have lived in
the same house with this great man. It was at a hairdresser’s shop in
the Regent’s Quadrant, and in an upper chamber of the house in question
did the gallant marquis, assisted by a distinguished countess, who had
formerly danced on stilts, and an English copper-plate engraver, work
off the proofs of his wicked paper money from the counterfeited plates.
I should like to know what became eventually of the Marquis de Bourbel:
whether his lordship was, in the ripeness of his time, guillotined,
garotted, hanged, or knouted. I go for Siberia and the knout, for, from
the peculiar conformation of his lordship’s character, I don’t think it
possible that he could have refrained for long from forgery. We should
have heard of him, I think, had he come to grief in Western Europe;
but Russian bank-notes are very easy to forge, and Russian prisons and
prisoners are seldom brought before the public eye. They manage those
little things better, and keep them nice and cozy and quiet; and so I go
for Siberia and the knout.

It is, however, as the shades of evening gather round the _Cour des
Miracles_ which encompasses the “Times” office, that the scene which
it and the Square present becomes more interesting. For early in the
evening that giant steam-engine begins to throb, and, as the hour
advances, the monster is fed with reams on reams of stout white paper,
which he devours as though they were so many wafers.[1] It gets late at
Printing House Square; the sub-editors have been for some time in their
rooms; the ineffable mysteries of the “Times”—editors, proprietors,
cabinet ministers, lord chancellors, generals of the Jesuits, for aught I
know, have arrived from their clubs in broughams and in cabs. Who shall
tell? That stout good-humoured looking gentleman with the umbrella and
the ecclesiastical neckcloth, may be the writer of the comic leading
articles, just arrived with his copy. No; he has vainly tried the door
of the advertisement office, which is closed. Perhaps he is only X.
Y. Z., who, in the second column, entreats P. Q. R. to return to his
disconsolate parents; or the inventor of some new tooth-powder with a
Greek name, or the discoverer of the “fourteen shilling trousers.” It is
getting later, and the windows of the great office are all blazing with
gas. The steam-engine not only throbs; it pants, it groans, it puffs, it
snorts, it bursts into a wild, clanging pæan of printing. Sub-editors
are now hard at work cutting down “flimsy,” ramming sheets of “copy” on
files, endlessly conferring with perspiring foremen. Ineffable mysteries
(I presume) are writing terribly slaughtering articles in carpeted rooms,
by the light of Argand lamps. Do they have cake and wine, I wonder,
in those rooms? Sherry and sandwiches, perhaps, and on field-nights
lobsters. It is getting later, but there is no sign of diminution yet in
the stream of cabs that drive into the Square. Every one who is in debt,
and every one who is in difficulties, and everybody who fancies that he,
or any friend, relation, or connection of his, has a grievance, and can
put pen to paper, four letters together in orthography and four words in
syntax, must needs write a letter to the “Times;” and of the metropolitan
correspondents of that journal, the immense majority themselves bring
their letters down to the office, thinking, haply, that they might
meet the editor standing “promiscuous” on the door-step, and after
some five minutes’ button-holding, secure, irrevocably, the insertion
of their communications. I don’t at all envy the gentleman whose duty
it is to open and read (do they read them all?) the letters addressed
to the editor of the “Times”. What quires of insane complaints, on
matters running from the misdelivery of a letter to the misgovernment
of India, from the iniquities of the income-tax to an overcharge for a
sandwich in a country inn, that editor must have to wade through; what
reams of silly compliments about “your influential journal,” and “your
world-known paper,” he must have to read, and grin in his sleeve at! What
a multitudinous army, what a Persian host, these correspondents must be!
Who are they?—the anonymous ones—what are they like? Who is “Verax?” who
“Paterfamilias?” who “Indophilus?” who “The London Scoundrel?” who “A
Thirsty Soul?” When will Mr. Herbert Watkins photograph me a collection
of portraits of “Constant Readers,” “Englishmen,” and “Hertfordshire
Incumbents?” Where is the incumbency of that brilliant writer? Who is
“_Habitans in Sicco_,” and how came he first to date from the “Broad
Phylactery?” and where does “Jacob Omnium” live when he is at home? I
should like to study the physiognomy of these inveterate letter writers;
to be acquainted with the circumstances which first led them to put pen
to paper in correspondence with the “Times;” to know how they like to
see themselves in print, and also how they feel, when, as happens with
lamentable frequency, their lucubrations don’t get printed at all.

[Illustration: PUBLICATION OF THE “TIMES” NEWSPAPER: INSIDE THE OFFICE.]

[Illustration: PUBLICATION OF THE “TIMES” NEWSPAPER: OUTSIDE THE OFFICE.]

It is getting later and later, oh! anxious waiters for to-morrow’s
news. The “Times” has its secrets by this time. State secrets, literary
secrets, secrets artistic and dramatic; secrets of robbery, and fire,
and murder—it holds them all fast now, admitting none to its confidence
but the Ineffables, the printers, and the ever-throbbing steam-engine;
but it will divulge its secrets to millions at five o’clock to-morrow
morning. Later and later still. The last report from the late debate
in the Commons has come in; the last paragraph of interesting news,
dropped into the box by a stealthy penny-a-liner, has been eliminated
from a mass of flimsy on its probation, and for the most part rejected;
the foreign telegrams are in type; the slaughtering leaders glare in
their “chases,” presaging woe and disaster to ministers to-morrow; the
last critic, in a white neckcloth, has hurried down with his column
and a-half on the last new spectacle at the Princess’s; or has, which
very frequently happens, despatched that manuscript from the box at the
“Albion,” where he has been snugly supping, bidding the messenger hasten,
and giving him to procure a cab the sum of one extra shilling, which that
messenger never by any chance expends in vehicular conveyance, but runs
instead with the art-criticism, swift as the timid roe, so swift indeed,
that policemen are only deterred through chronic laziness from pursuing
and asking whether he hasn’t been stealing anything. By this time the
“Times” has become tight and replete with matter, as one who has dined
well and copiously. Nothing is wanting: city correspondence, sporting
intelligence, markets, state of the weather, prices of stocks and railway
shares, parliamentary summary, law and police reports, mysterious
advertisements, and births, deaths, and marriages. Now let the nations
wonder, and the conductors of the mangy little continental fly-sheets
of newspapers hide their heads in shame, for the “Times”—the mighty
“Times”—has “gone to bed.” The “forms,” or iron-framed and wedged-up
masses of type, are, in other words, on the machine; and, at the rate of
twelve thousand an hour, the damp broad sheets roll from the grim iron
instrument of the dissemination of light throughout the world.

At five o’clock a.m., the first phase of the publication of the “Times”
newspaper commences. In a large bare room—something like the receiving
ward of an hospital—with a pay counter at one end, and lined throughout
with parallel rows of bare deal tables, the “leading journal” first
sees the light of publicity. The tables are covered with huge piles
of newspapers spread out the full size of the sheet. These are, with
dazzling celerity, folded by legions of stout porters, and straightway
carried to the door, where cabs, and carts, and light express phæton-like
vehicles, are in readiness to convey them to the railway stations.
The quantity of papers borne to the carriages outside by the stout
porters seems, and truly is, prodigious; but your astonishment will
be increased when I tell you that this only forms the stock purchased
every morning by those gigantic newsagents, Messrs. Smith and Son, of
the Strand. As the largest consumers, the “Times” naturally allows them
a priority of supply, and it is not for a considerable period after
they have received their orders that the great body of newsagents and
newsvenders—the “trade,” as they are generically termed—are admitted,
grumbling intensely, to buy the number of quires or copies which they
expect to sell or lend that day. The scene outside then becomes one of
baffling noise and confusion. There is a cobweb of wheeled vehicles
of all sorts, from a cab to a hybrid construction something between a
wheelbarrow and a costermonger’s shallow. There is much bawling and
flinging, shoving, hoisting, pulling and dragging of parcels; all the
horses’ heads seem to be turned the wrong way; everybody’s off-wheel
seems locked in somebody else’s; but the proceedings on the whole are
characterised by much good-humour and some fun. The mob of boys—all
engaged in the news-trade—is something wonderful: fat boys, lean boys,
sandy-haired and red-haired boys, tall boys and short boys, boys with red
comforters (though it is summer), and boys with sacks on their backs and
money-bags in their hands; boys with turn-down collars; and boys whose
extreme buttonedupness renders the fact of their having any shirts to put
collars to, turn-down or stuck-up, grievously problematical. Hard-working
boys are these juvenile Bashi-Bazouks of the newspaper trade. And I am
glad to observe, for the edification of social economists, with scarcely
an exception, very honest boys. I don’t exactly say that they are trusted
with untold gold, but of the gold that is told, to say nothing of the
silver and copper, they give a generally entirely satisfactory account.
At about half-past seven the cohorts of newsvenders, infantry and
cavalry, gradually disperse, and the “Times” is left to the agonies of
its second edition.

As you walk away from Printing House Square in the cool of the morning,
and reflect, I hope with salutary results, upon the busy scene you
have witnessed, just bestow one thought, and mingle with it a large
meed of admiration, for the man who, in his generation, truly made the
“Times” what it is now—John Walter, of Bearwood, Member of Parliament.
Foul-mouthed old Cobbett called him “Jack Walters,” and him and his
newspaper many ungenteel names, predicting that he should live to
see him “earthed,” and to “spit upon his grave;” but he survived the
vituperative old man’s coarse epithets. He put flesh on the dry bones of
an almost moribund newspaper. He, by untiring and indomitable energy and
perseverance, raised the circulation of the “Times” twenty-fold, and put
it in the way of attaining the gigantic publicity and popularity which it
has now achieved. It is true that Mr. Walter realised a princely fortune
by his connection with the “Times,” and left to his son, the present Mr.
John Walter, M.P., a lion’s share in the magnificent inheritance he had
created. But he did much solid good to others besides himself. This brave
old pressman, who, when an express came in from Paris—the French king’s
speech to the Chambers in 1835—and when there were neither contributors
nor compositors to be found at hand, bravely took off his coat, and in
his shirt-sleeves first translated, and then, taking “a turn at case,”
proceeded to set up in type his own manuscript. Mr. Walter was one of
the pioneers of liberal knowledge; and men like him do more to clear
the atmosphere of ignorance and prejudice, than whole colleges full of
scholiasts and dialecticians.




SIX O’CLOCK A.M.—COVENT GARDEN MARKET.


An Emperor will always be called Cæsar, and a dog “poor old fellow,”
in whatever country they may reign or bark, I suppose; and I should
be very much surprised if any men of Anglo-Saxon lineage, from this
time forward to the millennium, could build a new city in any part
of either hemisphere without a street or streets named after certain
London localities, dear and familiar to us all. There is a Pall Mall in
Liverpool, though but an unsavoury little thoroughfare, and a Piccadilly
in Manchester—a very murky, bricky street indeed, compared with that
unequalled hill of London, skirted on one side by the mansions of the
nobles, and on the other by the great green parks. Brighton has its
Bond Street—_mutatus ab ille_, certainly, being a fourth-rate skimping
little place, smelling of oyster-shells, sand, recently-washed linen, and
babies. I question not but in far-off Melbourne and Sydney, and scarcely
yet planned cities of the Bush, the dear old names are springing up,
like shoots from famous trees. Antipodean legislators have a refreshment
room they call “Bellamy’s;” merchants in far-off lands have their
“Lloyd’s;” there are coffee-houses and taverns, thousands of miles away,
christened “Joe’s,” and “Tom’s,” and “Sam’s,” though the original “Joe,”
the primeval “Tom,” the first “Sam,” most bald-headed and courteous of
old port-wine-wise waiters, have long since slept the sleep of the just
in quiet mouldy London graveyards, closed years ago by the Board of
Health. On very many names, and names alone, we stamp _esto perpetua_;
and English hearts would ill brook the alteration of their favourite
designations. Long, long may it be, I hope, before the great Lord Mayor
of London shall be called the Prefect of the Thames, or the Secretary of
State for the Home Department be known as the Minister of the Interior!

Foremost among names familiar to British mouths is Covent Garden. The
provincial knows it; the American knows it; Lord Macaulay’s New Zealander
will come to meditate among the moss-grown arcades, when he makes that
celebrated sketching excursion we have so long been promised. To the
play-goer Covent Garden is suggestive of the glories of Kemble and
Siddons; old book-a-bosom studious men, who live among musty volumes,
remember that Harry Fielding wrote the “Covent Garden Journal;” that
Mr. Wycherley lived in Bow Street; and that Mr. Dryden was cudgelled in
Rose Street hard by. Politicians remember the _fasti_ of the Westminster
election, and how Mr. Sheridan, beset by bailiffs on the hustings,
escaped through the churchyard. Artists know that Inigo Jones built that
same church of St. Paul, in compliance with the mandate of his patron,
the Earl of Bedford. “Build me a barn,” said the Earl. Quoth Inigo, “My
lord, I will build you the handsomest barn in England;” and the church is
in the market to this day, with its barn-like roof, to see. Old stagers
who have led jovial London lives, have yet chuckling memories of how in
Covent Garden they were wont to hear the chimes at midnight in the days
when they were eating their terms, and lay over against the “Windmill”
in Moorfields, and consorted with the Bona Robas. Those days, Sir John
Falstaff—those days, Justice Shallow, shall return no more to you. There
was the “Finish,”—a vulgar, noisy place enough; but stamped with undying
gentility by the patronage of his late Royal Highness the Prince of
Wales. Great George “finished” in Covent Garden purlieus; Major Hanger
told his stories, Captain Morris sang his songs, there. In a peaceable
gutter in front of the “Finish,” Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Esq., M.P.,
lay down overtaken in foreign wines, and told the guardian of the night
that his name was Wilberforce. A wild place, that “Finish;” yet a better
one than Great George’s other “Finish” at Windsor, with the actress to
read plays to him, the servants anxious for him to quit the stage, that
they might sell his frogged, furred coats, and white kid pantaloons:
the sorry end in a mean chair—unfriended, unloved, save by hirelings
deserted. When the Hope of England is old enough to wear on his fair
head the coronal and the three ostrich feathers, will _he_ patronise a
“Finish?” shall we have another wild young Prince and Poins, I wonder.
To be sure, Mr. Thackeray tells us that the young nobles of the present
age have “Spratts” and the “back kitchen” to finish up a night in; but,
pshaw! the Hope of England takes the chair at the Royal Institution to
hear Mr. Faraday lecture, and sits on the bench beside John Lord Campbell
to see rogues tried.

Covent Garden is a very chain, and its links are pleasant reminiscences.
They are somewhat dangerous to me, for my business is not antiquarian,
nor even topographical, just now; and I have but to do with the sixth
hour of the morning, and the vegetable market that is held in the monks’
old garden. I will dismiss the noble house of Bedford, though Covent
Garden, &c., are the richest appanage of that ducal entity—simply
recording a wish that you or I, my friend, had one tithe of the fat
revenues that ooze from between the bricks of the Bedford estate. You
should not dig, nor I delve, then. We would drink brown ale, and pay the
reckoning on the nail, and no man for debt should go to jail, that we
could help, from Garryowen to glory. I will say nothing to you of the
old theatre: how it was burnt again and again, and always re-appeared,
with great success on the part of Phœnix. Of Bow Street, even, will
I be silent, and proffer nought of Sir Richard Birnie, or that famed
runner, Townsend. Nor of the Garrick Club, in King Street, will I
discourse; indeed, I don’t know that I am qualified to say anything
pertinent respecting that establishment. I am not a member of the club;
and I am afraid of the men in plush, who, albeit aristocratic, have
yet a certain “Garrick” look about them, and must be, I surmise, the
prosperous brothers of the “green-coats” who sweep and water the stage,
and pick up Sir Anthony Absolute’s hat and crutch in the play. And
scant dissertations shall you have from me on those dim days of old,
when Covent Garden was in verity the garden of a convent; when matins
and vespers, complins and benedictions, were tinkled out in mellow
tintinnabulations through the leafy aisles of fruit trees; when my Lord
Abbot trod the green sward, stately, his signet-ring flashing in the
evening sun; and Brother Austin hated Friar Lawrence, and cursed him
softly as he paced the gravel walks demurely, his hands in his brown
sleeves, his eyes ever and anon cast up to count the peaches on the
wall. Solemn old conventual days, with shrill-voiced choir-boys singing
from breves and minims as big as latch-keys, scored in black and red on
brave parchment music-tomes. Lazy old conventual days, when the cellarer
brewed October that would give Messrs. Bass and Allsopp vertigo; when the
poor were fed with a manchet and stoup at the gate, without seeking the
relieving officer, or an order for the stoneyard. Comfortable old days,
when the Abbot’s _venator_ brought in a fat buck from Sheen or Chertsey,
the _piscator_ fresh salmon (the water-drops looked like pearls on their
silvery backs). Comfortable old days of softly-saddled palfreys, venison
pasties, and Malvoisie, sandalled feet, and shaven crowns, bead-telling,
and censor-swinging. These were the days of the lazy monks in their
Covent Garden. Lazy! They were lazy enough to illuminate the exquisitely
beautiful missals and books of hours you may see in the British Museum;
to feed, and tend, and comfort the poor, and heal them when they were
sick; to keep art and learning from decay and death in a dark age; to
build cathedrals, whose smallest buttress shall make your children’s
children, Sir Charles Barry, blush; but they were the lazy monks—so
let us cry havoc upon them. They were shavelings. They didn’t wash
their feet, they aided and abetted Guy Fawkes, Ignatius Loyola, and the
Cardinal Archbishop of ——.

It is six o’clock on a glorious summer’s morning; the lazy monks fade
away like the shadows of the night, and leave me in Covent Garden, and
in high market. Every morning during the summer may be called market
morning; but in the winter the special mornings are Tuesday, Thursday,
and Saturday. It is a strange sight then in the winter blackness to see
the gas glimmering among huge piles of vegetables hoisted high on carts,
and slowly moving like Birnam Woods coming to a Dunsinane of marketdom.
When the snow is on the ground, or when the rain it raineth, the glare of
lights and black shadows; the rushing figures of men with burdens; the
great heaving masses of baskets that are tumbled from steep heights; the
brilliantly-lighted shops in the grand arcade, where, winter or summer,
glow the oranges and the hot-house fruits and flowers; all these make up
a series of pictures, strange and sometimes almost terrible. There are
yawning cellars, that vomit green stuff; there are tall potato-sacks,
propped up in dark corners, that might contain corpses of murdered men;
there are wondrous masses of light and shade, and dazzling effects of
candlelight, enough to make old Schkalken’s ghost rise, crayon and
sketch-book in hand, and the _eidolon_ of Paul Rembrandt to take lodgings
in the Piazza, over against the market.

[Illustration: COVENT GARDEN MARKET: THE WEST END.]

But six o’clock in the glorious summer time! The London smoke is not out
of bed yet, and indeed Covent Garden market would at all times seem to
possess an exemption from over fumigation. If you consider the fronts
of the houses, and the arches of the Piazza, you will see that though
tinted by age, they have not that sooty grimness that degrades St. Paul’s
cathedral into the similitude of a temple dedicated to the worship of
the goddess of chimney-sweepers, and makes the East India House (what
will they do with the India House when the directors are demolished?)
look like the outside of the black-hole at Calcutta. Smoke has been
merciful to Covent Garden market, and its cornucopia is not as dingy as
a ramoneur’s sack. All night long the heavily-laden wagons—mountains
of cabbages, cauliflowers, brocoli, asparagus, carrots, turnips, and
seakale; Egyptian pyramids of red-huddled baskets full of apples and
pears, hecatombs of cherries, holocausts of strawberry pottles, chair
wicker bosoms crimsoned by sanguinolent spots; and above all, piles,
heaps—Pelions on Ossas, Atlases on Olympuses, Chimborazos on Himalayas,
Mount Aboras on Mont Blancs—of PEAS, have been creaking and rumbling and
heavily wheezing along suburban roads, and through the main streets of
the never-sleeping city. You heard those broad groaning wheels, perturbed
man, as your head tossed uneasily on the pillow, and you thought of the
bill that was to come due on the morrow. You too heard them, pretty
maiden, in the laced night cap, as you bedewed that delicate border
of dentelle with tears, coursing from the eyes which should have been
closed in sleep two hours since, tears evoked by the atrocious behaviour
of Edward (a monster and member of the Stock Exchange) towards Clara (a
designing, wicked, artful thing, whose papa lives in Torrington Square)
during the last _deux temps_. That dull heavy sound was distinct above
the sharp rattle of the night cabmen’s wheels; the steady revolving
clatter of the home-returning brougham: for the sound of wheels in
London are as the waves of a sea that is never still. The policemen met
the market wagons as they trudged along, and eyed them critically, as
though a neat case of lurking about with intent to commit a felony might
be concealed in a strawberry-pottle, or a drunk and incapable lying
perdu in a pea-basket. Roaring blades, addicted to asserting in chorus
that they would not go home till morning—a needless vaunt, for it was
morning already—hailed the bluff-visaged market carters, interchanged
lively jocularities with them bearing on the syrup giving rhubarb and
the succulent carrot, and lighted their pipes at the blackened calumets
of the vegetarians. Young Tom Buffalo, who had been out at a christening
party at Hammersmith, and had made the welkin ring (whatever and wherever
the welkin may be, and howsoever the process of making it ring be
effected) met a gigantic cabbage-chariot, as home returning, precisely
at that part of Knightsbridge where Old Padlock House used to stand,
and struck a bargain with the charioteer for conveyance to Charing
Cross, for fourpence, a libation of milk, qualified by some spirituous
admixture, and a pipeful of the best Bristol bird’s-eye. And so from all
outlying nursery-grounds and market-gardens about London: from Brompton,
Fulham, Brentford, Chiswick, Turnham Green, and Kew; from sober Hackney,
and Dalston, and Kingsland, bank-clerk beloved; from Tottenham, and
Edmonton, sacred to John Gilpin, his hat and wig; from saintly Clapham
and Brixton, equally interested in piety, sugar-baking, and the funds,
come, too heavy to gallop, too proud to trot, but sternly stalking in
elephantine dignity of progression, the great carts bound to Covent
Garden. One would think that all the vegetable-dishes in the world would
not be able to hold the cabbage, to say nothing of the other verdant
esculents.

Delude not yourself with the notion that the market-carts alone can
bring, or the suburban market-gardens furnish, a sufficient quantity of
green meat for the great, insatiable, hungry, ravenous monster that men
call (and none know why) London. Stand here with me in Covent Garden
market-place, and let your eyes follow whither my finger points. Do you
see those great vans, long, heavily-built, hoisted on high springs, and
with immense wheels—vans drawn by horses of tremendous size and strength,
but which, for all their bulk and weight, seem to move at a lightning
pace compared with the snail crawl of the ancient market-carts? Their
drivers are robust men, fresh-coloured, full-whiskered, strong-limbed,
clad in corduroy shining at the seams, with bulging pockets, from
which peep blotting-paper, interleaved books of invoices, and parcels
receipts. They are always wiping their hot foreheads with red cotton
pocket-handkerchiefs. They are always in such a hurry. They never
can wait. Alert in movement, strong in action, hardy in speech, curt
and quick in reply, setting not much store by policemen, and bidding
the wealthiest potatoe salesman “look sharp;” these vigorous mortals
discharge from their vans such a shower of vegetable missiles that you
might almost fancy the bombardment of a new Sebastopol. “Troy,” the old
ballad tells us, “had a breed of stout bold men;” but these seem stouter
and bolder. And they drive away, these stalwart, bold-spoken varlets,
standing erect in their huge vans, and adjuring, by the name of “slow
coach,” seemingly immoveable market-carts to “mind their eye;” wearing
out the London macadam with their fierce wheels, to the despair of the
commissioners of paving (though my private opinion is, that the paving
commissioners like to see the paving worn out, in order that they may
have the “street up” again); threading their way in a surprisingly
dexterous though apparently reckless manner through the maze of vehicles,
and finding themselves, in an astonishingly short space of time, in
Tottenham Court Road, and Union Street, Borough. What gives these men
their almost superhuman velocity, strength, confidence? They do but carry
cabbages, like other market-folk; but look on the legends inscribed on
these vans, and the mystery is at once explained. “Chaplin and Home,”
“Pickford and Co.,” railway carriers. These vegetable Titans are of
the rail, and raily. They have brought their horns of plenty from the
termini of the great iron roads. Carts and carts, trucks and trucks
have journeyed through the dense night, laden with vegetable produce;
locomotives have shrieked over Chatmoss, dragging cabbages and carrots
after them; the most distant counties have poured the fatness of their
lands at the feet of the Queen-city; but she, like the daughter of the
horse-leech, still cryeth, “Give! give!” and, like Oliver Twist, “asks
for more.” So they send her more, even from strange countries beyond the
sea. Black steamers from Rotterdam and Antwerp belch forth volumes of
smoke at the Tower stairs, and discharge cargoes of peas and potatoes.
The Queen-city is an hungered, and must be fed; and it is no joke, I need
scarcely tell you, to feed London. When the King of Siam has resolved
upon the ruin of a courtier, he makes him a present of a white elephant.
As the animal is thrice sacred in Siamese eyes, the luckless baillee,
or garnishee, or possessor of the brute, dare neither sell, kill, nor
neglect it; and the daily ration of rice, hay, and sugar which the albino
monster devours, soon reduces the courtier to irremediable bankruptcy.
Moral: avoid courts. If this were a despotic country, and her Majesty
the Empress of Britain should take it into her head to ruin Baron
Rothschild or the Marquis of Westminster (and indeed I have heard that
the impoverished nobleman last mentioned is haunted by the fear of dying
in a workhouse), I don’t think she could more easily effect her purpose
than by giving him LONDON and bidding him feed it for a week.

[Illustration: COVENT GARDEN MARKET: EARLY BREAKFAST STALL.]

Very sweet is the smell of the green peas this summer morning; and very
picturesque is it to see the market-women ranged in circles, and busily
employed in shelling those delicious edibles. Some fastidious persons
might perhaps object that the fingers of the shellers are somewhat
coarse, and that the vessels into which the peas fall are rudely
fashioned. What does it matter? If we took this fastidiousness with us
into an analysis of all the things we eat and drink, we should soon fill
up the measure of the title of Dr. Culverwell’s book, by “avoiding”
eating and drinking altogether. The delicate Havannah cigar has been
rolled between the hot palms of oleaginous niggers; nay, some travellers
declare, upon the bare thighs of sable wenches. The snowy lump-sugar has
been refined by means of unutterable nastinesses of a sanguineous nature;
the very daily bread we eat has, in a state of dough, formed the flooring
for a vigorous polka, performed by journeymen bakers with bare feet.
Food is a gift from heaven’s free bounty: take Sancho Panza’s advice,
and don’t look the gift-horse in the mouth. He may have false teeth.
We ought to be very much obliged, of course, to those disinterested
medical gentlemen who formed themselves into a sanitary commission, and
analysing our dinners under a microscope, found that one-half was poison,
and the other half rubbish; but, for my part, I like anchovies to be
red and pickles green, and I think that coffee without chicory in it
is exceedingly nasty. As for the peas, I have so fond a love for those
delicious pulse that I could partake of them even if I knew they had been
shelled by Miss Julia Pastrana. I could eat the shucks; I have eaten them
indeed in Russia, where they stew pea-shells in a sweet sauce, and make
them amazingly relishing.

But sweeter even than the smell of the peas, and more delightful than the
odour of the strawberries, is the delicious perfume of the innumerable
flowers which crowd the north-western angle of the market, from the
corner of King Street to the entrance of the grand avenue. These are
not hot-house plants, not rare exotics; such do not arrive so soon, and
their aristocratic purchasers will not be out of bed for hours. These are
simply hundreds upon hundreds of flower-pots, blooming with roses and
geraniums, with pinks and lilacs, with heartsease and fuschias. There are
long boxes full of mignionette and jessamine; there are little pet vases
full of peculiar roses with strange names; there are rose-trees, roots
and all, reft from the earth by some floral Milo who cared not for the
rebound. The cut flowers, too, in every variety of dazzling hue, in every
gradation of sweet odour, are here, jewelling wooden boards, and making
humble wicker-baskets iridescent. The violets have whole rows of baskets
to themselves. Who is it that calls the violet humble, modest? He (I will
call him he) is nothing of the sort. He is as bold as brass. He comes
the earliest and goes away the latest of all his lovely companions; like
a guest who is determined to make the most of a banquet. When the last
rose of summer, tired of blooming alone, takes his hat and skulks home,
the modest violet, who has been under the table for a great part of the
evening, wakes up, and calls for another bottle of dew—and the right sort.

It seems early for so many persons to be abroad, not only to sell but
to purchase flowers, yet there is no lack of buyers for the perfumed
stores which meet the eye, and well nigh impede the footsteps. Young
sempstresses and milliner’s girls, barmaids and shopwomen, pent up all
day in a hot and close atmosphere, have risen an hour or two earlier, and
make a party of pleasure to come to Covent Garden market to buy flowers.
It is one of heaven’s mercies that the very poorest manage somehow to buy
these treasures; and he who is steeped to the lips in misery will have a
morsel of mignionette in his window, or a bunch of violets in a cracked
jug on his mantelshelf, even as the great lady has rich, savage, blooming
plants in her conservatory, and camelias and magnolias in porphyry
vases on marble slabs. It is a thin, a very thin, line that divides the
independent poor from the pauper in his hideous whitewashed union ward:
the power of buying flowers and of keeping a dog. How the halfpence are
scraped together to procure the violets or mignionette, whence comes
the coin that purchases the scrap of paunch, it puzzles me to say: but
go where you will among the _pauperum tabernas_ and you will find the
dog and the flowers. Crowds more of purchasers are there yet around the
violet baskets; but these are buyers to sell again. Wretched-looking
little buyers are they, half-starved Bedouin children, mostly Irish, in
faded and tattered garments, with ragged hair and bare feet. They have
tramped miles with their scanty stock-money laid up in a corner of their
patched shawls, daring not to think of breakfast till their purchases
be made; and then they will tramp miles again through the cruel streets
of London town, penetrating into courts and alleys where the sun never
shines, peering into doorways, selling their wares to creatures almost
as ragged and forlorn as themselves. They cry violets! They cried
violets in good Master Herrick’s time. There are some worthy gentlemen,
householders and ratepayers, who would put all such street-cries down by
Act of Parliament. Indeed, it must an intolerable sin, this piping little
voice of an eight-years old child, wheezing out a supplication to buy a
ha’porth of violets. But then mouthy gentlemen are all Sir Oracles; and
where they are, no dogs must bark nor violets be cried.

It is past six o’clock, and high ’Change in the market. What gabbling!
what shouting! what rushing and pushing! what confusion of tongues
and men and horses and carts! The roadway of the adjacent streets is
littered with fragments of vegetables. You need pick your way with care
and circumspection through the crowd, for it is by no means pleasant
to be tripped up by a porter staggering under a load of baskets, that
look like a Leaning Tower of Pisa. Bow Street is blocked up by a triple
line of costermongers’ “shallows,” drawn by woe-begone donkies; their
masters are in the market purchasing that “sparrergrass” which they
will so sonorously cry throughout the suburbs in the afternoon. They
are also, I believe, to be put down by the worthy gentlemen who do not
like noise. I wish they could put down, while they are about it, the
chaffering of the money-changers in the temple, and the noise of the
Pharisees’ brushes as they whiten those sepulchres of theirs, and the
clanging of the bells that summon men to thank Heaven that they are not
“as that publican,” and to burn their neighbour because he objects to
shovel hats. King Street, Southampton Street, Russell Street, are full of
carts and men. Early coffee-shops and taverns are gorged with customers,
for the Covent Gardeners are essentially jolly gardeners, and besides,
being stalwart men, are naturally hungry and athirst after their nights’
labour. There are public-houses in the market itself, where they give you
hot shoulder of mutton for breakfast at seven o’clock in the morning! Hot
coffee and gigantic piles of bread-and-butter disappear with astounding
rapidity. Foaming tankards are quaffed, “nips” of alcohol “to keep the
cold out” (though it is May) are tossed off; and among the hale, hearty,
fresh-coloured market-people, you may see, here and there, some tardy
lingerer at “the halls of dazzling light,” who has just crawled away from
the enchanted scene, and, cooling his fevered throat with soda-water, or
whipping up his jaded nerves with brandy and milk, fancies, because he is
abroad at six o’clock in the morning, that he is “seeing life.” Crouching
and lurking about, too, for anything they can beg, or anything they can
borrow, or, I am afraid, for anything they can steal, are some homeless,
shirtless vagabonds, who have slept all night under baskets or tarpaulins
in the market, and now prowl in and out of the coffee-shops and taverns,
with red eyes and unshaven chins. I grieve to have to notice such
unsightly blots upon the Arcadia I have endeavoured to depict; but, alas!
these things ARE! You have seen a caterpillar crawling on the fairest
rose; and this glorious summer sun must have spots on its face. There are
worse on London’s brow at six o’clock in the morning.




SEVEN O’CLOCK A.M.—A PARLIAMENTARY TRAIN.


I know that the part which I have proposed to myself in these papers is
that of a chronological Asmodeus; you, reader, I have enlisted, _nolens
volens_, to accompany me in my flights about town, at all hours of the
day and night; and you must, perforce, hold on by the skirts of my cloak
as I wing my way from quarter to quarter of the immense city, to which
the Madrid which the lame fiend showed his friend was but a nut-shell.
And yet, when I look my self-appointed task in the face, I am astounded,
humiliated, almost disheartened, by its magnitude. How can I hope to
complete it within the compass of this book, within the time allotted
for daily literary labour? For work ever so hard as we penmen may, and
rob ever so many hours from sleep as you may choose to compute—as we are
forced to do sometimes—that you may have your pabulum of printed matter,
more or less amusing and instructive, at breakfast time, or at afternoon
club reading hour, we must yet eat, and drink, and sleep, and go into
the world soliciting bread or favours, we must quarrel with our wives,
if married, and look out the things for the wash, if single—all of which
are operations requiring a certain expenditure of time. We must, we
authors, even have time, an’t please you, to grow ambitious, and to save
money, stand for the borough, attend the board-room, and be appointed
consuls-general to the Baratarian Islands. The old Grub Street tradition
of the author is defunct. The man of letters is no longer supposed to
write moral essays from Mount Scoundrel in the Fleet, to dine at twopenny
ordinaries, and pass his leisure hours in night-cellars. Translators
of Herodotus no longer lie three in a bed; nor is the gentleman who is
correcting the proof-sheets of the Sanscrit dictionary to be found in a
hay-loft over a tripe shop in Little Britain, or to be heard of at the
bar of the Green Dragon. Another, and as erroneous, an idea of the author
has sprung up in the minds of burgesses. He wears, according to some
wiseacres, a shawl dressing-gown, and lies all day on a sofa, puffing a
perfumed _narghilè_, penning paragraphs in violet ink on cream-laid paper
at intervals; or he is a lettered Intriguer, who merely courts the Muses
as the shortest way to the Treasury bench, and writes May Fair novels or
Della Cruscan tragedies that he may the sooner become Prime Minister.
There is another literary idea that may with greater reason become
prevalent—that of the author-manufacturer, who produces such an amount of
merchandise, takes it into the market, and sells it according to demand
and the latest quotations, and the smoke of whose short cutty pipe, as
he spins his literary yarn, is as natural a consequence of manufacture
as the black cloud which gusts from Mr. Billyroller’s hundred-feet-high
brick chimney as he spins _his_ yarns for madapolams and “domestics.” The
author-manufacturer has to keep his books, to pay his men, to watch the
course of the market, and to suit his wares to the prevailing caprice.
And, like the cotton-spinner, he sometimes goes into the “Gazette,”
paying but an infinitesimal dividend in the pound.

Did I not struggle midway into a phrase, some page or so since, and did
it not waltz away from me on the nimble feet of a parenthesis? I fear
that such was the case. How can I hope, I reiterate, to give you anything
like a complete picture of the doings in London while still the clock
goes round? I might take one house and unroof it, one street and unpave
it, one man and disclose to you the secrets of twenty-four hours of his
daily and nightly life; but it is London, in its entirety, that I have
presumed to “time”—forgetting, oh! egregious and inconsistent!—that every
minute over which the clock hand passes is as the shake of the wrist
applied to a kaleidoscope, and that the whole aspect of the city changes
with as magical rapidity.

I should be Briareus multiplied by ten thousand, and not Asmodeus at all,
if I could set down in writing a tithe of London’s sayings and doings,
acts and deeds, seemings and aspects, at seven o’clock in the morning.
Only consider. Drumming with your finger on a map of the metropolis;
just measure a few palms’ lengths, say from Camberwell Gate to the
“Mother Redcap,” on the one hand—from Limehouse Church to Kensington
Gravel Pits, on the other. Take the cubic dimensions, my dear sir; think
of the mean area; rub up those mathematics, for proficiency in whose
more recondite branches you so narrowly escaped being second wrangler,
twenty years since; out with your logarithms, your conic sections, your
fluxions, and calculate the thousands upon thousands of little dramas
that must be taking place in London as the clock strikes seven. Let me
glance at a few, as I travel with you towards that railway terminus
which is our destination. Camberwell Gate: tollbar-keeper, who has been
up all night, going to bed, very cross; tollbar-keeper’s wife gets up
to mind the gate, also very cross. Woodendesk Grove, Grosvenor Park,
Camberwell: Mr. Dockett, wharfage clerk in Messrs. Charter Party and
Co.’s shipping house, Lower Thames Street, is shaving. He breakfasts at
half-past seven, and has to be in the city by nine. Precisely at the
same time that he is passing Mr. Mappin’s razor over his commercial
countenance, Mr. Flybynight, aged twenty-two, also a clerk, but attached
to the Lost-Monkey-and-Mislaid-Poodle-Department (Inland Revenue),
Somerset House, lets himself into No. 7, Woodendesk Grove, next door to
Mr. Dockett’s, by means of a Chubb’s key. Mr. Flybynight is in evening
costume, considerably the worst for the concussion of pale ale bottle
corks. On his elegant tie are the stains of the dressing of some lobster
salad, and about half-a-pint of the crimson stream of life, formerly
the joint property of Mr. Flybynight’s nose and of a cabman’s upper
lip, both injured during a “knock-down and drag-out” fight, supervening
on the disputed question of the right of a passenger to carry a live
turkey (purchased in Leadenhall market) with him in a hackney cab. Mr.
Flybynight has been to two evening parties, a public ball (admission
sixpence), where he created a great sensation among the ladies and
gentlemen present, by appearing with a lady’s cap on his head, a raw
shoulder of mutton in one hand, and a pound of rushlights in the other;
and to two suppers—one of roasted potatoes in Whitechapel High Street,
the second of scolloped oysters in the Haymarket. He paid a visit to
the Vine Street station-house, too, to clear up a misunderstanding as
to a bell which was rung by accident, and a policeman’s hat which was
knocked off by mistake. The inspector on duty was so charmed with Mr.
Flybynight’s engaging demeanour and affable manners, that it was with
difficulty that he was dissuaded from keeping him by him all night, and
assigning him as a sleeping apartment a private parlour with a very
strong lock, and remarkably well ventilated. He only consented to tear
himself away from Mr. Flybynight’s society on the undertaking that
the latter would convey home his friend Mr. Keepitup, who, though he
persistently repeated to all comers that he was “all right,” appeared,
if unsteadiness of gait and thickness of utterance were to be accepted
as evidence, to be altogether wrong. Mr. Flybynight, faithful to his
promise, took Mr. Keepitup (who was in the Customs) home; at least
he took him as far as he would go—his own doorstep, namely, on which
somewhat frigid pedestal he sat, informing the “milk,” a passing
dustman, and a lady in pink, who had lost her way, and seemed to think
that the best way to find it was to consult the pavement by falling
prone thereupon every dozen yards or so—that though circumstances had
compelled him to serve his country in a civil capacity, he was at heart
and by predilection a soldier. In proof of which Mr. Keepitup struck
his breast, volunteered a choice of martial airs, beginning with the
“Death of Nelson,” and ending with a long howl, intermingled with
passionate tears and ejaculations bearing reference to the infidelity
of a certain Caroline, surname unknown, through whose cruelty he
“would never be the same man again.” Mr. Flybynight, safely arrived
at Woodendesk Grove, after these varied peripatetics, is due at the
Lost-Monkey-and-Mislaid-Poodle Office at ten; but he will have a violent
attack of lumbago this morning, which will unavoidably prevent him
from reaching Somerset House before noon. His name will show somewhat
unfavourably in the official book, and the Commissioners will look him
up sharply, and shortly too, if he doesn’t take care. Mr. Keepitup,
who, however eccentric may have been his previous nocturnal vagaries,
possesses the faculty of appearing at the Custom-house gates as the
clock strikes the half-hour after nine, with a very large and stiff
shirt-collar, a microscopically shaven face, and the most irreproachable
shirt, will go to work at his desk in the Long Room, with a steady hand
and the countenance of a candidate for the Wesleyan ministry; but Mr.
Flybynight will require a good deal of soda-water and sal-volatile, and
perhaps a little tincture of opium, before he is equal to the resumption
of his arduous duties. Wild lads, these clerks; and yet they don’t do
such a vast amount of harm, Flybynight and Keepitup! They are very young;
they don’t beat the town every night; they are honest lads at bottom,
and have a contempt for meanness and are not lost to shame. They have
not grown so vicious as to be ashamed and remorseful without any good
resulting therefrom; and you will be astonished five years hence to see
Keepitup high up in the Customs, and Flybynight married to a pretty
girl, to whom he is the most exemplary of husbands. Let me edge in this
little morsel of morality at seven o’clock in the morning. I know the
virtue of steadiness, lectures, tracts, latch-key-prohibitions, strict
parents, young men’s Christian associations, serious tea-parties and
electrifying machines; but I have seen the world in my time, and its
ways. Youth _will_ be youth, and youthful blood _will_ run riot. There is
no morality so false as that which ignores the existence of immorality.
Let us keep on preaching to the prodigals, and point with grim menace
to the draff and husks, and the fatted calf which never shall be theirs
if they do not reform; let us thunder against their dissipation, their
late hours, their vain “larks,” their unseemly “sprees.” It is our duty;
youth must be reproved, admonished, restrained by its elders. It has
been so ever since the world began; but do not let us in our own hearts
think every wild young man is bound hopelessly to perdition. Some there
are, indeed, (and they are in evil case,) who have come to irremediable
grief, and must sit aloof—spirits fallen never to rise again—and watch
the struggling souls. But it must rejoice even those callous ones to see
how many pecks of wild oats are sown every day, and what goodly harvests
of home virtues and domestic joys are reaped on all sides, from the most
unpromising soil. Let us not despair of the tendencies of the age. Young
men will be young men, but they should be taught and led with gentle and
wise counsels, with forbearance and moderation, to abandon the follies of
youth, and to become staid and decorous. Flybynight, with such counsels,
and good examples from his elders—ah, ye seniors! what examples are not
due from you!—will leave off sack and live cleanly like a gentleman; and
Keepitup will not bring his parents’ gray hairs with sorrow to the grave.

Seven o’clock in the morning! I have already ventured a passing
allusion to the “milk.” The poor little children who sell violets and
water-cresses debouch from the great thoroughfares, and ply their humble
trade in by-streets full of private houses. The newsvenders’ shops in
the Strand, Holywell Street, and Fleet Street, are all in full activity.
Legions of assistants crowd behind the broad counters, folding the still
damp sheets of the morning newspapers, and, with fingers moving in swift
legerdemain, tell off “quires” and “dozens” of cheap periodicals. If it
happen to be seven o’clock, and a Friday morning, not only the doors of
the great newsvenders—such as Messrs. Smith and Son and Mr. Vickers—but
the portals of all the newspaper offices, will be crowded with newsmen’s
carts and newsmen’s trucks; and from the gaping gates themselves will
issue hordes of newsmen and flying cohorts of newsboys—boys with
parcels, boys with bags, boys with satchels, men staggering under the
weight of great piles of printed paper. Mercy on us! what a plethora of
brainwork is about, and what a poor criterion of its quality the quantity
manifestly affords! Yon tiny urchin with the red comforter has but
half-a-dozen copies tucked beneath his arm of a journal sparkling with
wit, and radiant in learning, and scathing in its satire, and Titanic in
its vigour; yet, treading on his heels, comes a colossus in corduroy,
eclipsed by a quadrangular mountain of closely-packed paper, quires—nay,
whole reams—of some ragamuffin print, full of details of the last murder
and abuse of some wise and good statesman because he happens to be a lord.

Seven, still seven! Potboys, rubbing their eyes, take down the shutters
of taverns in leading thoroughfares, and then fall to rubbing the
pewter pots till they assume a transcendent sheen. Within, the young
ladies who officiate in the bar, and who look very drowsy in their
curl-papers and cotton-print dresses, are rubbing the pewter counters
and the brass-work of the beer-engines, the funnels and the whisky
noggins, washing the glasses, polishing up the mahogany, cutting up
the pork pies which Mr. Watling’s man has just left, displaying the
Banbury cakes and Epping sausages under crystal canopies. The early
customers—matutinal _habitués_—drop in for small measures of cordials or
glasses of peculiarly mild ale; and the freshest news of last night’s
fire in Holborn, or last night’s division in the House, or last night’s
opera at Her Majesty’s, are fished up from the columns of the “Morning
Advertiser.” By intercommunication with the early customers, who all
have a paternal and respectful fondness for her, the barmaid becomes
_au courant_ with the news of the day. As a rule, the barmaid does not
read the newspaper. On the second day of publication, she lends it to
the dissenting washerwoman or the radical tailor in the court round the
corner, who send small children, whose heads scarcely reach to the top
of the counter, for it. When it is returned, she cuts it up for tobacco
screws and for curl papers. I like the barmaid, for she is often pretty,
always civil, works about fourteen hours a day for her keep and from
eighteen to twenty pounds a year, is frequently a kinless orphan out of
that admirable Licensed Victuallers’ School, and is, in nine cases out of
ten, as chaste as Diana.

I should be grossly misleading you, were I to attempt to inculcate
the supposition that at seven o’clock in the morning only the humbler
classes, or those who have stopped up all night, are again up and
doing. The Prime Minister is dressed, and poring over a savage leader
in the “Times,” denouncing his policy, sneering at his latest measure,
and insulting him personally in a facetious manner. The noble officers
told off for duty of her Majesty’s regiment of Guards are up and fully
equipped, though perchance they have spent the small hours in amusements
not wholly dissimilar from those employed by the daring Flybynight
and the intrepid Keepitup to kill time, and have devoted their vast
energies to the absorbing requirements of morning parade. Many of the
infant and juvenile scions of the aristocracy have left their downy
couches ere this, and are undergoing a lavatory purgatory in the
nursery. Many meek-faced, plainly-dressed young ladies, of native and
foreign extraction, attached as governesses to the aristocratic families
in question, are already in the school-room, sorting their pupils’
copy-books, or preparing for the early repetition of the music lesson,
which is drummed and thrummed over in the morning pending the arrival
of Signor Papadaggi or Herr Hammerer, who comes for an hour and earns a
guinea. The governess, Miss Grissel, does not work more than twelve hours
a day, and she earns perhaps fifty guineas a year against Papadaggi’s
fifteen hundred and Hammerer’s two thousand. But then she is only a
governess. Her life is somewhat hard, and lonely, and miserable, and
might afford, to an ill-regulated mind, some cause for grumbling; but it
is her duty to be patient, and not to repine. What says the pleasing poet?

    “O! let us love our occupations,
    Bless the squire and his relations,
    Live upon our daily rations,
    And always know our proper stations.”[2]

Let us trust Miss Grissel knows her proper station, and is satisfied.

Seven o’clock in the morning; but there are more governesses, and
governesses out of bed, than Miss Grissel and her companions in woe,
in the mansions of the nobility. Doctor Wackerbarth’s young gentlemen,
from Towellem House, New Road, are gone to bathe at Peerless Pool, under
escort of the writing-master. The Misses Gimps’ establishment for young
ladies, at Bayswater, is already in full activity; and the eight and
thirty boarders (among whom there are at present, and have been for
the last ten years, two, and positively only two, vacancies. N.B.—The
daughters of gentlemen only are received)—the eight and thirty boarders,
in curl papers and brown Holland pinafores, are floundering through
sloughs of despond in the endeavour to convey, in the English language,
the fact that Calypso was unable to console herself for the departure of
Ulysses; and into the French vernacular, the information that, in order
to be disabused respecting the phantoms of hope and the whisperings of
fancy, it is desirable to listen to the history of Rasselas, Prince of
Abyssinia. In Charterhouse and Merchant Taylors’ and St. Paul’s, the
boys are already at their lessons, and the cruel anger of Juno towards
Æneas, together with the shameful conduct of Clytemnestra to Agamemnon,
are matters of public (though unwilling) discussion; some private
conversations going on surreptitiously, meanwhile, touching the price of
alleytaws as compared with agates, and the relative merits of almond-rock
and candied horehound. After all, the poor have their privileges—their
immunities; and the couch of the rich is not altogether a bed of roses.
Polly Rabbets, the charity girl, lies snugly in bed, while the honourable
Clementina St. Maur is standing in the stocks, or is having her knuckles
rapped for speaking English instead of French. Polly has a run in the
Dials before breakfast, an expedition to buy a red herring for father,
and perchance a penny for disbursement at the apple-stall. She is not
wanted at school till nine. The most noble the Marquis of Millefleurs,
aged ten, at Eton, has to rise at six; he is fag to Tom Tucker, the army
clothier’s son. He has to clean his master’s boots, fry bacon, and toast
bread for his breakfast. If he doesn’t know his lesson in school, the
most noble the Marquis of Millefleurs is liable to be birched; but no
such danger menaces Jemmy Allbones at the National, or Tommy Grimes at
the Ragged School. If the schoolmaster were to beat them, their parents
would have the _plagosus Orbilius_ up at the police-court in a trice, and
the Sunday newspapers would be full of details of the “atrocious cruelty
of a schoolmaster.”

One more peep at seven o’clock doings, and we will move further afield.
Though sundry are up and doing, the great mass of London is yet sleeping.
Sleeps the cosy tradesman, sleeps the linendraper’s shopman (till eight),
sleeps the merchant, the dandy, the actor, the author, the _petite
maitresse_. Hold fast while I wheel in my flight and hover over Pimlico.
There is Millbank, where the boarders and lodgers, clad in hodden gray,
with masks on their faces and numbers on their backs, have been up and
stirring since six. And there, north-west of Millbank, is the palace,
almost as ugly as the prison, where dwells the Great Governess of the
Land. She is there, for you may see the standard floating in the morning
breeze; and at seven in the morning, she, too, is up and doing. If she
were at Osborne she would be strolling very likely on the white-beached
shore, listening to the sea murmuring “your gracious Majesty,” and “your
Majesty’s ever faithful subject and servant,” and “your petitioner
will ever pray;” for it is thus doubtless that the obsequious sea has
addressed sovereigns since Xerxes’ time. Or if the Imperial Governess
were at Windsor, she might, at this very time, be walking on those
mysterious Slopes on which it is a standing marvel that Royalty can
preserve its equilibrium. When I speak of our gracious lady being awake
and up at seven o’clock, I know that I am venturing into the realms of
pure supposition; but remember I am Asmodeus, and can unroof palaces
and hovels at will. Is it not, besides, a matter of public report that
the Queen rises early? Does not the Court newsman (I wonder whether
that occult functionary gets up early too) know it? Does not everybody
know it—everybody say it? And what everybody says must be true. There
are despatches to be read; private and confidential letters to foreign
sovereigns to be written; the breakfasts, perchance, of the little
princes and princesses to be superintended; the proofs, probably, of the
last Royal etching or princely photograph to be inspected; a new pony
to be tried in the riding-house; a new dog to be taught tricks: a host
of things to do. Who shall say? What do we know about the daily life
of royalty, save that it must be infinitely more laborious than that
of a convict drudging through his penal servitude in Portland Prison?
I met the carriage of H.R.H. the Prince Consort, with H.R.H. inside
it, prowling about Pedlar’s Acre very early the other morning, going
to or coming from, I presume, the South-Western Railway Terminus. When
I read of her Majesty’s “arriving with her accustomed punctuality” at
some rendezvous at nine o’clock in the morning, I can but think of and
marvel at the amount of business she must have despatched before she
entered her carriage. If there were to be (which heaven forfend!) a
coronation to-morrow, the sovereign would be sure to arrive with his or
her “accustomed punctuality;” yet how many hours it must take to try on
the crown, to study the proper sweep of the imperial purple, to learn by
heart that coronation oath which is never, never broken! For my part, I
often wonder how kings and queens and emperors find time to go to bed at
all.

So now, reader, not wholly, I trust, unedified by the cursory view we
have taken of Babylon the Great in its seven-o’clock-in-the-morning
phase, we have arrived at the end of our journey—to another stage
thereof, at least. We have flown from Knightsbridge to Bermondsey,
not exactly as the crow flies, nor yet as straight as an arrow from a
Tartar’s bow; but still we have gyrated and skimmed and wheeled along
somehow, even as a sparrow seeking knowledge on the housetops and corn in
the street kennels. And now we will go out of town.

Whithersoever you choose; but by what means of conveyance? By water?
The penny steamboats have not commenced their journeys yet. The _Pride
of the Thames_ is snugly moored at Essex Pier, and _Waterman_, No. 2,
still keeps her head under her wing—or under her funnel, if you will.
The omnibuses have not yet begun to roll in any perceptible numbers,
and the few stage coaches that are still left (how they linger, those
cheerful institutions, bidding yet a blithe defiance to the monopolising
and all-devouring rail!) have not put in an appearance at the White
Horse Cellar in Piccadilly, the Flower Pot in Bishopsgate Street, or the
Catherine Wheel in the Borough. So we must needs quit Babylon by railway.
Toss up for a terminus with me. Shall it be London Bridge, Briarean
station with arms stretching to Brighton the well-beloved, Gravesend
the chalky and periwinkley, Rochester the martial, Chatham the naval,
Hastings the saline, Dover the castellated, Tunbridge Wells the genteel,
Margate the shrimpy, Ramsgate the asinine, Canterbury the ecclesiastical,
or Herne Bay the desolate? Shall it be the Great Northern, hard by
Battle Bridge and Pentonville’s frowning bastille? No; the fens of
Lincolnshire nor the moors of Yorkshire like me not. Shall it be the
Great Western, with its vast, quiet station, its Palladio-Vitruvian
hotel, and its promise of travel through the rich meadows of Berkshire
and by the sparkling waters of Isis, into smiling Somerset and blooming
Devon? No; cab fares to Paddington are ruinously expensive, and I
have prejudices against the broad gauge. Shall it be the Eastern
Counties? Avaunt! evil-smelling Shoreditch, bad neighbourhood of worse
melodramas, and cheap grocers’ shops where there is sand in the sugar and
birch-brooms in the tea. No Eastern Counties carriage shall bear me to
the pestiferous marshes of Essex or the dismal flats of Norfolk. There is
the South-Western. Hum! The Hampton Court line is pleasant; the Staines,
Slough, and Windsor delicious; but I fancy not the Waterloo Road on a
fine morning. I am undecided. Toss up again. Heads for the Great Western;
tails for the London and North-Western. Tails it is; and abandoning our
aërial flight, let us cast ourselves into yonder Hansom, and bid the
driver drive like mad to Euston Square, else we shall miss the seven
o’clock train.

This Hansom is a most dissipated vehicle, and has evidently been up all
night. One of its little silk window-curtains has been torn from its
fastenings and flutters in irregular festoons on the inward wall. The
cushions are powdered with cigar ashes; there is a theatrical pass-check,
and the thumb of a white kid glove, very dirty, lying at the back.
The long-legged horse with his ill-groomed coat, all hairs on end like
the fretful porcupine his quills, and his tail whisking with derisive
defiance in the face of the fare, carries his head on one side, foams at
the mouth, and is evidently a dissipated quadruped, guilty, I am afraid,
of every vice except hypocrisy. Of the last, certainly, he cannot be
accused, for he makes not the slightest secret of his propensity for
kicking, biting, gibbing, rearing, and plunging, a succession of which
gymnastic operations brings us, in an astonishingly brief space of time,
to George Street, Euston Square; where the cabman, who looks like a
livery-stable edition of Don Cæsar de Bazan, with a horse-cloth instead
of a mantle, tosses the coin given him into the air, catches it again,
informs me contemptuously that money will grow warm in my pocket if I
keep it there so long, and suddenly espying the remote possibility of a
fare in the extreme distance of the Hampstead Road, drives off—“tools”
off, as he calls it—as though the Powers of Darkness, with Lucifer and
Damagorgon at their head, were after him.

I think the Euston Square Terminus is, for its purpose, the handsomest
building I have ever seen, and I have seen a few railway stations. There
is nothing to compare to it in Paris, where the termini are garish,
stuccoed, flimsy-looking structures, half booths and half barracks.
Not Brussels, not Berlin, not Vienna, can show so stately a structure,
for a railway station, _bien entendu_; and it is only, perhaps, in St.
Petersburg, which seems to have been built with a direct reference to
the assumption of the Imperial crown at some future period by the King
of Brobdignag, that a building can be found—the Moscow Railway Terminus,
in fact—to equal in grandeur of appearance our columniated palace of the
iron road. But the Russian station, like all else in that “Empire of
Façades,” is deceptive: a magnificent delusion, a vast and splendid sham.
Of seeming marble without it is; within, but bad bricks and lath and
plaster.

[Illustration: PARLIAMENTARY TRAIN: PLATFORM OF THE LONDON AND
NORTH-WESTERN RAILWAY.]

_Open sesame!_ Let us pass the crowds of railway porters, who have not
much to do just now, and are inclined to lounge about with their hands
in their pockets, and to lean—in attitudes reminding the spectator of
the Grecian statues clad in green velveteen, and with white letters on
their collars—on their luggage trucks, for the passengers by the seven
o’clock train are not much addicted to arriving in cabs or carriages
which require to be unloaded, and there are very few shilling or sixpenny
gratuities to be earned by the porters, for the securing of a comfortable
corner seat with your back to the engine, or that inestimable comfort,
a place in a first-class carriage whose door the guard is good enough
to keep locked, and in which you can make yourself quite at home with a
bottle of sherry, some walnuts, and a quiet game at _écarté_ or _vingt
un_. The seven o’clock trainbands are not exactly of the class who drink
sherry and play cards; they are more given to selling walnuts than to
eating them. They are, for the most part, hard-faced, hard-handed,
poorly-clad creatures; men in patched, time-worn garments; women in
pinched bonnets and coarse shawls, carrying a plenitude of baskets and
bundles, but very slightly troubled with trunks or portmanteaus. You
might count a hundred heads and not one hat-box; of two hundred crowding
round the pay-place to purchase their third-class tickets for Manchester,
or Liverpool, or even further north, you would have to look and look
again, and perhaps vainly after all, for the possessor of a railway rug,
or even an extra overcoat. Umbrellas, indeed, are somewhat plentiful;
but they are not the slim, aristocratic trifles with ivory handles and
varnished covers—enchanter’s wands to ward off the spells of St. Swithin,
which moustached dandies daintily insert between the roof and the
hat-straps of first-class carriages. Third-class umbrellas are dubious
in colour, frequently patched, bulgy in the body, broken in the ribs,
and much given to absence from the nozzle. Swarming about the pay-place,
which their parents are anxiously investing, thirteen-and-fourpence or
sixteen-and-ninepence in hand, are crowds of third-class children. I am
constrained to acknowledge that the majority of these juvenile travellers
cannot be called handsome children, well-dressed children, even tolerably
good-looking children. Poor little wan faces you see here, overshadowed
by mis-shapen caps, and bonnets nine bauble square; poor little thin
hands, feebly clutching the scant gowns of their mothers; weazened little
bodies, shrunken little limbs, distorted often by early hardship, by the
penury which pounced on them—not in their cradles—they never had any—but
in the baker’s jacket in which they were wrapped when they were born,
and which will keep by them, their only faithful friend, until they die,
and are buried by the parish—poor ailing little children are these, and
among them who shall tell how many hungry little bellies! Ah! judges
of Amontillado sherry; crushers of walnuts with silver nut-crackers;
connoisseurs who prefer French to Spanish olives, and are curious
about the yellow seal; gay riders in padded chariots; proud cavaliers
of blood-horses, you don’t know how painfully and slowly, almost
agonisingly, the poor have to scrape, and save, and deny themselves the
necessaries of life, to gather together the penny-a-mile fare. It is a
long way to Liverpool, a long way to Manchester; the only passengers by
the seven o’clock train who can afford to treat the distance jauntily,
are the Irish paupers, who are in process of being passed to their
parish, and who will travel free. O! marvels of eleemosynary locomotion
from Euston Square to Ballyragget or Carrighmadhioul!

But hark! the train bell rings; there is a rush, and a trampling of feet,
and in a few seconds the vast hall is almost deserted. This spectacle
has made me somewhat melancholy, and I think, after all, that I will
patronise the nine o’clock express instead of the PARLIAMENTARY TRAIN.

Let us follow the crowd of third-class passengers on to the vast
platform. There the train awaits them, puffing, and snorting, and
champing its adamantine bit, like some great iron horse of Troy suddenly
gifted with life and power of locomotion. By the way, I wonder how that
same wooden horse we are supposed to read about in Homer, but study
far more frequently in the pages of Lemprière, or in the agreeable
metrical romance of Mr. Alexander Pope, really effected its entrance
into Ilium. Was it propelled on castors, on rollers, or on those
humble wooden wheels that quickened the march of the toy horse of our
nonage—the ligneous charger from Mr. Farley’s shop in Fleet Street,
painted bright cream-colour, with spots resembling red wafers stuck all
over him, a perpendicular mane, and a bushy tail? Very few first or even
second-class carriages are attached to the great morning train. The rare
exceptions seem to be placed there more as a graceful concession to the
gentilities, or the respectabilities, or the “gigabilities,” as Mr.
Carlyle would call them, than with any reference to their real utility
in a journey to the north. Who, indeed, among the bustling Anglo-Saxons,
almost breathless in their eagerness to travel the longest possible
distance in the shortest possible time, would care to pay first-class
fare for a trip to Manchester, which consumes ten mortal hours, when,
by the space-scorning express, the distance may be accomplished, at a
not unreasonable augmentation of fare, in something like five hours? So
the roomy six-seated chariots, with their arm-rests and head-rests, are
well nigh abandoned; and the wooden boxes, which appear to have been
specially designed by railway directors to teach second-class travellers,
who can afford to pay more than third-class fare, that they had much
better pay first-class, and go the entire animal (which, indeed, seeing
how abominable are our second-class carriages in England, is a far
preferable proceeding), are not much better tenanted. Some misanthropic
men, in Welsh wigs and fur caps with flaps turned down over the ears,
peer at us as we pass, pull up the window-frames captiously, as though
they suspected us of a design to intrude on their solitude, and, watch in
hand, call out in hoarse voices to the guard to warn him it is time the
train had started. What is the use of being in a hurry, gentlemen? you
will have plenty of breathing-time at Tring, and Watford, and Weedon, and
some five-and-twenty other stations, besides opportunities for observing
the beauties of nature at remote localities, where you will be quietly
shunted off on to a siding to allow the express to pass you by.

But what a contrast to the quietude of the scarcely-patronised first and
second-class _wagons_ are the great hearse-like caravans in which travel
the teeming hundreds who can afford to pay but a penny a mile! Enter
one of these human menageries where the occupants are stowed away with
little more courtesy or regard to their comfort than might be exemplified
by the master of the ceremonies of one of Mr. Wombwell’s vans. What a
hurly-burly; what a seething mass; what a scrambling for places; what a
shrill turmoil of women’s voices and children’s wailings, relieved, as
in the _Gospodin Pomilaïou_ (the Kyrie Eleison of the Russian churches),
by the deep bass voices of gruff men! What a motley assemblage of men,
women, and children, belonging to callings multifariously varied, yet
all marked with the homogeneous penny-a-mile stamp of poverty! Sailors
with bronzed faces and tarry hands, and those marvellous tarpaulin
pancake hats, stuck, in defiance of all the laws of gravity, at the
back of their heads; squat, squarely-built fellows, using strange and
occasionally not very polite language, much given to “skylarking” with
one another, but full of a simple, manly courtesy to all the females,
and marvellously kind to the babies and little children; gaunt American
sailors in red worsted shirts, with case-knives suspended to their belts,
taciturn men expectorating freely, and when they do condescend to address
themselves to speech, using the most astounding combination of adjective
adjurations, relating chiefly to their limbs and their organs of vision;
railway navvies going to work at some place down the line, and obligingly
franked thither for that purpose by the company; pretty servant-maids
going to see their relatives; Jew pedlars; Irish labourers in swarms;
soldiers on furlough, with the breast of their scarlet coatees open, and
disclosing beneath linen of an elaborate coarseness of texture—one might
fancy so many military penitents wearing hair tunics; other soldiers in
full uniform, with their knapsacks laid across their knees, and their
muskets—prudently divested of the transfixing bayonets—which the old
women in the carriage are marvellously afraid will “go off,” disposed
beside them, proceeding to Weedon barracks under the command of a staid
Scotch corporal, who reads a tract, “Grace for Grenadiers” or “Powder and
Piety,” and takes snuff; journeymen mechanics with their tool-baskets;
charwomen, servants out of place, stablemen, bricklayers’ labourers, and
shopboys.

[Illustration: PARLIAMENTARY TRAIN: INTERIOR OF A THIRD CLASS CARRIAGE.]

Ay, and there are, I am afraid, not a few bad characters among the
crowd: certain dubiously-attired, flash-looking, ragged dandies, with
cheap pins in their foul cravats, and long greasy hair floating over
their coat-collars, impress me most unfavourably, and dispose me to
augur ill for the benefit which Manchester or Liverpool may derive from
their visit; and of the moral status of yonder low-browed, bull-necked,
villanous-looking gentleman, who has taken a seat in a remote corner,
between two stern guardians, and who, strive as he may to pull his
coat-cuffs over his wrists, cannot conceal the presence of a pair of neat
shining handcuffs, there cannot, I perpend, exist any reasonable doubt.
But we must take the evil with the good: and we cannot expect perfection,
not even in a Parliamentary Train.




EIGHT O’CLOCK A.M.—ST. JAMES’S PARK—THE MALL.


Of the great army of sightseers, there are few but have paid a visit
to Portsmouth, and, under the guidance of a mahogany-faced man in a
pea-jacket, who has invariably served in his youth as coxswain to
Admiral Lord Nelson, K.C.B., have perambulated from stem to stern, from
quarterdeck to kelson, that famous ship from whose signal halyards flew
out, fifty-three years since, the immortal watchword “England expects
every man to do his duty,” in Trafalgar Bay. We are (or rather were, till
the epoch of the late passport regulations and the war), an ambitious
army of sightseers in this year of questionable grace, ’59; and nothing
less would serve us then for an autumn trip than a picnic in the Street
of Tombs at Pompeii, a moonlight polka among the rank docks and charlocks
and slimy reptiles of the Roman Colosseum, a yacht voyage up the gulf of
Bothnia, or a four days’ jolting in a _telega_ from Moscow to the fair of
Nishni-Novgorod. But in the days of yore, when this old hat was new, and
Manlius was consul, and the eleven hours’ route to the Continent existed
not, we went a-gipsying in a less ostentatious manner. The Lions in the
Tower, the Horns at Highgate, the Spaniards at Hampstead, the Wandering
Minstrel at Beulah Spa; and on highdays and holidays a stage-coach
and pleasure-boat journey to Portsmouth, Southampton, Netley Abbey,
Carisbrook Castle, and the Undercliff; these filled up the simple measure
of our pleasure-gadding. We are improved now-a-days, and go the grand
tour like my lord; and are wiser, and better, and happier—of course.

When in the noble harbour of Portsmouth you have taken your wife, your
sweetheart, or your friend the intelligent foreigner, to whom you wish
to show the glories of England, and when the cicerone of the great
war-ship has told his parrot-tale about admirals’ quarter-galleries and
officers’ gun-rooms; when at last he has taken you into the cabin, and at
the back shown you the sorrowful inscription painted on the stanchion,
“HERE NELSON DIED!” did never a sudden desire come across you to be left
alone—to have the army of sight-seers banished five hundred miles away—to
be allowed to remain there in the silent cabin among the shadows, to muse
on the memory of the great dead, to conjure up mind-pictures of that
closing scene: the cannon booming overhead; the terrified surgeons with
outspread bandages, and probes, and knives, knowing that their skill was
of no avail; the burly shipmen crying like little children; and alone
tranquil and serene among that sorrowful group, peaceful as an infant in
its cradle, the Admiral, his stars and ribbons gleaming in the lantern’s
fitful rays, but never with so strong a light as the gory ghastliness of
his death wound; the brave yellow-haired Admiral, with the puny limbs
and giant’s heart, waiting to die, ready to die, happy to die, thanking
God that he had done his duty to his king, and meekly saying, “Kiss me,
Hardy.”

That inscription in the _Victory’s_ cabin has been to me the source of
meditation frequent and infinitely pleasant. I love to think, walking
in historical streets and houses, that my feet are treading over spots
where men for ever famous have left an imprint of glory. I peer into the
soil, the stones, the planks, to descry the shadowy mark of Hercules’
foot, of the iron-plated sole of the warrior, the sandalled shoon of the
saint, the dainty heel of the brocaded slipper of beauty. Every place
that history or tradition has made her own is to me a field, not of
forty, but of forty thousand footsteps; and I please myself sometimes
with futile wishes that the boundaries of these footsteps might have been
marked by plates of brass and adamant, as Nelson’s death-place is marked
on board his flagship. It were better, perhaps, to leave the exact spot
to imagination; for though I would give something to know the very window
of the Banqueting House from whence Charles Stuart came out to his death,
and the precise spot where he turned to Juxon and uttered his mysterious
injunction “Remember!” I would not care to know the particular branch of
the tree to which Judas affixed his thrice-earned halter when he hanged
himself: I could spare Mr. Dix the trouble of telling me the identical
spot on the tavern table on which the coroner laid his three-cornered
hat when he held his inquest on the worthless impostor Chatterton—a
“marvellous boy” if you will, but one who perished in his miserable folly
and forgery—and I could well exempt the legitimacy-bemused courtiers of
Louis XVIII. from perpetuating, as they did in brass, the few inches of
soil at Calais first pressed on his return to France by the foot of that
gross fat man.

There are two cities in the world, London and Paris, so full of these
footstep memories, so haunted by impalpable ghosts of the traces of
famous deeds, that locomotion, to one of my temperament, becomes a task
very slow, if not painfully difficult, of accomplishment. ’Tis a long
way from the Luxor Obelisk to the Carrousel; but it’s a week’s journey
when you feel inclined to stop at every half-dozen yards’ distance,
questioning yourself and the ministering spirits of your books, pointing
your fingers to the paving-stones, and saying—Here the guillotine stood;
here Louis died; here the daughter of Maria Theresa cast her last glance
at the cupolas of the Tuileries; here Robespierre was hooted; here
Théroigne de Méricourt was scourged; here Napoleon the Great showed
the little king of Rome to the people; here, on the great Carrousel
Place, he, arrayed in the undying gray coat and little hat, reviewed
the veterans of his guard, many and many a time at EIGHT O’CLOCK IN THE
MORNING.

[Illustration: EIGHT O’CLOCK A.M.: ST. JAMES’S PARK.]

There! I have brought you round to the subject-matter of this article,
and to the complexion of “Twice Round the Clock” again; and the stroke
is, I flatter myself, felicitous—rivalling Escobar or Dom Calmet in
Jesuitry, Metternich and Menschikoff in diplomacy. You thought doubtless
that I was about to launch into an interminable digression; you may
perhaps have said, scoffingly, that Admiral Lord Nelson, K.C.B.,
Maximillien Robespierre, Charles the First’s head, and the Emperor
Napoleon’s cocked hat, could have nothing whatsoever to do with the Mall
of Saint James’s Park at eight o’clock in the morning. You are mistaken.
The allusions to memorable footsteps were all cunningly devised with a
reference to the great Field of Famous Footsteps—the Mall, which, were
the imprint of those bygone pedal pressures marked out with landmarks,
such as those in the _Victory’s_ cabin, would become a very Field of
the Cloth of Brass. And what better time can there be to muse upon the
traditional glories of the Mall and the fame of its frequenters, than
eight a.m. in sweet summer time?

I grant the clown, the dunderheaded moneyspinner who votes that books
are “rubbish,” the cobweb-brained fop who languidly declares reading
to be a “bore,” will find in the broad smooth Mall, just a Mall, broad
and smooth, and nought else—even as Peter Bell found in a primrose by
the river’s brim a yellow primrose, and nothing more. At eight o’clock
in the morning, to clown, dunderhead, and cobweb-brain, the Mall is a
short cut from Marylebone to Westminster; the water-carts are laying the
dust; mechanics are going to work; there are some government offices in
the distance; two big guns on queer-looking carriages; some scattered
children; a good many birds, making rather a disagreeable noise, in
the green trees; and a few cows being milked in a corner. But come
with me, dweller in the past, lover of ancient and pleasant memories,
hand-and-glove friend of defunct worthies, shadowy acquaintances in
ruffs and peaked beards and point lace. Let us deliver dunderhead and
cobweb-brain to the tormentors, and, sitting on a rustic bench beneath
a spreading tree, summon the Famous Footsteps; summon the dead-and-gone
walkers to pace the Mall again. Here they come! a brave gathering, a
courtly throng, a worshipful assemblage, but oft-times a motley horde
and a fantastic crew. Here is Henry the Eighth’s Mall, a park where
that disreputable monarch indulged in “the games of hare and pheasant,
partridge and heron, for his disport and pastime,” and where he had a
deer killed for the amusement of the “Embassador from Muscovie.” Here is
Saint James’s Park in the reign of clever, shrewish, cruel Queen Bess—a
park only used as an appendage to the tilt-yard and a nursery for deer:
here is the “inward park” (now the inclosure and ornamental water), into
which, so late as the commencement of Charles II.’s reign, access to the
public was denied; and where, in 1660, Master Pepys saw a man “basted”
by the keeper for carrying some people over on his back through the
water. Here is Charles II.’s famous Mall, for the first time broad and
smooth, the park planted and reformed by the celebrated French gardener,
Le Nôtre, laid out with fish-ponds and a decoy for water-fowl; the Mall
itself a vista of half a mile in length, on which the game of Pall Mall
was played, and which, always according to curious Samuel Pepys, who
“discoursed with the keeper of the Pall Mall as he was sweeping it,” was
floored with mixed earth, and over all that cockle-shells, powdered and
spread to keep it fast; which, however, in dry weather, turned to dust
and deadened the ball. In this park of Charles II. was the fantastic
little territory of Duck Island, the ground contained within the channels
of the decoy, and which London Barataria had revenues and laws and
governors appointed by the king. The Duke of Saint Simon’s friend, Saint
Evremond, was one of these governors; Sir John Flock another. Close to
Duck Island was Rosamond’s Pond, a piece of water whose name bore a dim
analogy to the _soubriquet_ with which, in later years, Waterloo Bridge
has been qualified; for it was in Rosamond’s Pond that forsaken women
came in preference, at even-song, to drown themselves. There was the
Birdcage Walk, where Mr. Edward Storey kept his Majesty’s aviary, and
dwelt in the snug little hut recently demolished, known as Storey’s Gate.
There was the Mulberry Garden, into which the river Tyburn flows, and so
into Tothill Fields and the Thames; and there was Spring Gardens, where
the beaux went to look at the citizens’ wives; and the citizens’ wives, I
hope, to drink chocolate, but I fear to look at the beaux.

But the famous footsteps? See, see in your mind’s eye, Horatio, how the
shadows of the old frequenters of the Mall come trooping along. Here
is the founder of the feast himself, King Charles the Second, witty,
worthless, and good-humoured, tramping along the broad expanse at _eight_
o’clock in the morning, to the despair of his courtiers, who liked not
walking so fast, nor getting up so early. You can’t mistake the king’s
figure; ’tis that swarthy gentleman, with the harshly-marked countenance,
the bushy eyebrows, the lively kindling gray eye, and the black suit and
perriwig. He walks a little in advance of his suite with an easy, rapid
gait, and at his heels follow a little barking multitude of dogs, black,
black and white, or black and tan, with long silky ears and feathery
tails. We may see him again, and on the Mall, but not at eight o’clock
in the morning. It is the afternoon of a July day, and a court cavalcade
comes flaunting in feathers forth from Whitehall. Here is King Charles,
but in a laced and embroidered suit, and mounted on a gaily-caparisoned
charger. He rides with his hand in that of a lady, in a white laced
waistcoat and crimson petticoat, and who, the chroniclers say, with her
hair dressed _à la negligence_, “looks mighty pretty,” but she is very
dark, and not very well favoured, and is a poor Portuguese lady who has
the misfortune to be Queen of England, and to have the merriest and the
worst husband in Europe. Here is La Belle Stuart, with her hat cocked,
and a red plume, looking, with her sweet eye, little Roman nose, and
excellent _taille_, the greatest beauty that the Clerk of the Acts ever
did see in his life. Here is Lady Castlemaine, with a yellow plume, but
in a terrible temper that the king does not take any notice of her, and
in a rage when she finds that no gentleman presses to assist her down
from her horse. Here is “our royal brother,” James Duke of York, scowling
and sulky, on his way through the Park to Hounslow, to enjoy his prime
diversion of the chase, and escorted by a party of the guards in morions
and steel corslets. Memory be good to us! how the shadows gather around!
His Highness Oliver, Lord Protector of this realm, is being borne along
the Mall in a sedan chair. He crouches uneasily in a corner of the
gilded vehicle, as though he feared that Colonel Titus might be lying
_perdu_ under the linden trees, correcting the proof sheets of “Killing
no Murder.” Sir Fopling Flutter bids his coachman take the carriage to
Whitehall, and walks over the park with Belinda. Now, years later, it is
Jonathan Swift leaving his best gown and perriwig at Mrs. Vanhomrigh’s,
then walking up the Mall, by Buckingham House, and so to Chelsea. It is
not a very well-conducted Mall just now, and Swift tells Stella that he
is obliged to come home early through the park, to avoid the Mohocks.
Now, back again, and to walk with decorous Mr. Evelyn, who is much
shocked to see Nelly Gwynne leaning over her garden wall (overhanging the
park),—she lived at 79, Pall Mall—and indulging in familiar discourse
with “Old Rowley.” Now we are in Horace Walpole’s time, and the
macaroni-cynic of Strawberry Hill is gallanting in the Mall with Lady
Caroline Petersham, and pretty Miss Beauclerc, and foolish Mrs. Sparre.
Now Lady Coventry and Walpole’s niece, Lady Waldegrave, are mobbed in
the park for being dressed in an “outlandish” fashion. Now, back and
back again; and the Duchess of Cleveland is walking across the Mall on
a dark night, pursued by three men in masks, who offer her no violence,
but curse her as the cause of England’s misery, and prophesy that she
will one day die in a ditch, like Jane Shore. Forward, hark forward, and
mad Margaret Nicholson attempts the life of George III., as he passes in
his coach through the Mall to open Parliament. Backward, and James II.
walks across the park from St. James’s, where he had slept, to Whitehall,
to be crowned. A very few years after his coronation, the Dutch Guards
of William Prince of Orange marched across from St. James’s to turn the
unlucky Stuart out of Whitehall. And now, backwards and forwards, and
forwards and backwards, the famous shadows mingle in a fantastic reel, a
mad waltz of extinct footsteps. Sir Roger de Coverley and Mr. Spectator
saunter under the limes; Beau Fielding minces by the side of Margaretta;
Beau Tibbs airs his clean linen and lackered sword hilt; Mr. Pope meets
Lady Mary’s sedan, borne by Irish chair-men—the translator of the “Iliad”
grins spitefully over his shoulder and makes faces at Lady Mary’s black
boy; Sir Plume instructs Sir John Burke in the nice conduct of a clouded
cane; Goldsmith’s good-natured man fraternises with Coleman’s “brother
who could eat beef;” Lord Fanny takes off his three-cornered hat to Mr.
Moore, the inventor of the worm powders; Partridge, the almanack maker,
discusses the motions of the heavenly bodies on the banks of Rosamond’s
Pond with Count Algarotti, and becomes so excited that he nearly adds
“one more unfortunate” to the list of Ophelias in Rosamond’s Pond, by
tumbling into the water; Alfieri meets Lord Ligonier—tells him the
measure of his sword, and makes a rendezvous with him for sunset in Hyde
Park; Lord George Gordon passes Westminster to St. James’s, followed by
a mob of yelling, screaming Protestants. Real people dispute the passage
of the Mall with imaginary personages. The encampment of ’Eighty, the
Temple of Concord, and the Humane Society’s drags, are inextricably mixed
up with scenes from Wycherley and Etherege; and pet passages from the
“Trivia” and the “Rape of the Lock.” I must bring myself back to reason
and St. James’s Park, and eight o’clock in the morning. I must deal
henceforth in realities. Here is one.

It is the morning of the 30th of January, 1649, and a King of England
walks across the frozen park, from St. James’s, where he has slept, to
Whitehall, the palace of his fathers. Armed men walk before, armed men
walk behind and around; but they are no guards of honour. They escort a
prisoner to the scaffold. The High Court of Justice has adjudged Charles
Stuart, King of England, a traitor, and has decreed that he shall be
put to death by severing his head from his body. President Bradshaw
has put off his red robe, the man without a name has put on his black
mask; the axe is sharpened, the sawdust spread, the block prepared, the
velvet-covered coffin yawns; on its lid is already the leaden plate with
the inscription, “King Charles, 1649.”

It is not my fault, dear reader, if the spot which your author and
artist to command have selected for illustration of the eighth hour
ante-meridian, be so rich in historical and literary recollections;
that we may fancy every inch of its surface trodden and re-trodden till
the very soil has sunk, by the feet of the departed great; that the
student, and the lover of old lore, must arrest himself perforce at
every tree, and evoke remembrance at every pace. And centuries hence the
Mall of St. James’s Park will be as famous to our descendants for our
deeds as it is now to us for the presence of our ancestors. Is not the
Mall yet one of the most favoured resorts of the British aristocracy?
Do not the carriages of the nobility and gentry rattle over its broad
bosom to dinner parties, to opera, to concerts, and to balls? We have
seen their chariot lamps a hundred times—we humble pedestrians and
plebeians—gleaming among the tufted trees, wills-o’-the-wisp of Belgravia
and Tyburnia. Is not St. James’s Park bounded now as then by high and
mighty buildings: War Office, Admiralty, Stationery Office, Barracks?
Do not the Duke of York’s steps lead from the Duke of York’s column,
between two _corps de logis_, one occupied by wings—ethereal wings,
though made of brick and stucco, of the House of Carlton, the abode
of George the Great (the great Fritz was called “_der grosse_”) of
England? And the Mall itself? Is it not overlooked by Stafford House,
the palatial; by Marlborough House, the vast and roomy, once sacred to
the memory of the victor of Ramilies and of “Old Sarah!” but now given
up to some people called artists, connected with something called the
English school, and partially used as a livery and bait stable for the
late Duke of Wellington’s funeral car, with its sham trophies and sham
horses? Does not a scion of royalty, no other than his Royal Highness the
Duke of Cambridge, frequently condescend to walk from his lodgings in the
Stable-yard, Saint James’s, across the park to those Horse Guards, whose
affairs he administers with so much ability and success? And, finally,
at the western extremity of the Mall, and on the side where once was the
Mulberry Garden, stands there not now a palace, huge in size, clumsy in
its proportions, grotesque in decoration, mean in gross, frivolous in
detail, infinitely hideous in its general appearance, but above whose
ugly roof floats that grandest and noblest of all banners, the Royal
Standard of England, and whose walls, half hospital, half barrack, as
they remind us of, are hallowed as being part of Buckingham Palace, the
abode of our good, and true, and dear Queen? She lives at the top of the
Mall. She comes out by times on the Mall, in her golden coach, with the
eight cream-coloured horses; her darling little daughter passed along
the Mall to be married; let us hope, and heartily, to see more sons and
daughters yet riding to their weddings through that field of famous
footsteps. Let us hope that we may live to throw up our caps, and cry God
bless them!

Great lords and ladies sweep the Mall no more with hoops and flowing
trains of brocaded paduasoy, nor jingle on the gravel with silver spurs,
nor crunch the minute pebbles with red heels. Broughams and chariots now
convey the salt ones of the earth to their grand assemblies and solemn
merry-makings; and the few aristocrats who may yet pedestrianise within
the precincts, are so plainly attired that you would find it difficult
to distinguish them from plain Brown or Jones walking from Pimlico to
Charing Cross. His Royal Highness strides over from the Stable-yard to
the Horse Guards in a shooting-jacket and tweed trousers, and in wet
weather carries an umbrella. Nay, I have seen another Royal Highness—a
bigger Royal Highness, so to speak, for he is consort to the Queen—riding
under the trees of the Mall on a quiet bay, and dressed in anything but
the first style of fashion. Were it not _scandalum magnatum_ even to
think such a thing, I should say that his Royal Highness’s coat was seedy.

At this early eight o’clock in the morningtide, see—an exception to the
rule, however—perambulating the Mall, a tremendous “swell.” No fictitious
aristocrat, no cheap dandy, no Whitechapel buck or Bermondsey exquisite,
no apprentice who has been to a masquerade disguised as a gentleman, can
this be. Aristocracy is imprinted on every lineament of his moustached
face, in every crease of his superb clothes, in each particular horsehair
of his flowing plume. He is a magnificent creature, over six feet in
height, with a burnished helmet, burnished boots, burnished spurs,
burnished sabre, burnished cuirass—burnished whiskers and moustache.
He shines all over, like a meteor, or a lobster which has been kept
a _little_ too long, in a dark room. He is young, brave, handsome,
and generous; he is the delight of Eaton Square, the cynosure of the
Castor and Pollux Club, the idol of the corps de ballet of her Majesty’s
Theatre, the pet of several most exclusive Puseyite circles in Tyburnia,
the mirror of Tattersall’s, the pillar and patron of Jem Bundy’s ratting,
dog-showing, man-fighting, horse-racing, and general sporting house, in
Cat and Fiddle Court, Dog and Duck Lane, Cripplegate. Cruel country,
cruel fate, that compel Lieutenant Algernon Percy Plantagenet, of the
Royal Life Guards, the handsomest man in his regiment, and heir to £9,000
a year, to be mounting guard at eight o’clock in the morning! He is
mounting guard at present by smoking a cigar (one of Milo’s best) on the
Mall. By and by he will go into his barrack-room and draw caricatures in
charcoal on the whitewashed wall. He will smoke a good deal, yawn a good
deal, and whistle a good deal during the day, and will give a few words
of command. For you see, my son, that we must all earn our bread by the
sweat of our brow, and that the career even of a Plantagenet, with £9,000
a year, is not, throughout, a highway of rose-leaves!

From this gay and resplendent warrior, we fall, alas! to a very prosaic
level. As eight o’clock chimes from the smoky-faced clock of the Horse
Guards, I try in vain (I have dismissed my shadowy friends) to people
the Mall with aristocratic visitants. Alas and indeed! the magnificent
promenade of the park, on which look the stately mansions of the nobles,
is pervaded by figures very mean, very poor and forlorn in appearance.
Little troops of girls and young women are coming from the direction of
Buckingham Palace and the Birdcage Walk, but all converging towards the
Duke of York’s column: that beacon to the great shores of Vanity Fair.
These are sempstresses and milliners’ workwomen, and are bound for the
great Dress Factories of the West End. Pinched faces, pale faces, eager
faces, sullen faces, peer from under the bonnets as they pass along
and up the steps. There are faces with large mild eyes, that seem to
wonder at the world and at its strange doings, and at the existence of a
Necessity (it must be a Necessity, you know), for Jane or Ellen to work
twelve hours a day; nay, in the full London season, work at her needle
not unfrequently all night, in order that the Countess or the Marchioness
may have her ball dress ready.

       *       *       *       *       *

[Illustration: EIGHT O’CLOCK; OPENING SHOP.]

There is another ceremony performed with much clattering solemnity of
wooden panels, and iron bars, and stanchions, which occurs at eight
o’clock in the morning. ’Tis then that the shop-shutters are taken
down. The great “stores” and “magazines” of the principal thoroughfares
gradually open their eyes; apprentices, light-porters, and where the
staff of assistants is not very numerous, the shopmen, release the
imprisoned wares, and bid the sun shine on good family “souchong,”
“fresh Epping sausages,” “Beaufort collars,” “guinea capes,” “Eureka
shirts,” and “Alexandre harmoniums.” In the smaller thoroughfares, the
proprietor often dispenses with the aid of apprentice, light-porter, and
shopman—for the simple reason that he never possessed the services of any
assistants at all—and unostentatiously takes down the shutters of his
own chandler’s, green-grocer’s, tripe, or small stationery shop. In the
magnificent linendrapery establishments of Oxford and Regent Streets, the
vast shop-fronts, museums of fashion in plate-glass cases, offer a series
of animated _tableaux_ of _poses plastiques_ in the shape of young ladies
in morning costume, and young gentlemen in whiskers and white neckcloths,
faultlessly complete as to costume, with the exception that they are
yet in their shirt sleeves, who are accomplishing the difficult and
mysterious feat known as “dressing” the shop window. By their nimble and
practised hands the rich piled velvet mantles are displayed, the _moire_
and _glacé_ silks arranged in artful folds, the laces and gauzes, the
innumerable whim-whams and fribble-frabble of fashion, elaborately shown,
and to their best advantage.

Now, all over London, the shops start into new life. Butchers and bakers,
and candlestick makers, grocers and cheesemongers, and pastrycooks,
tailors, linendrapers, and milliners, crop up with mushroom-like
rapidity. But I must leave them, to revisit them in all their glory a few
hours later. Leave, too, the Park and its Mall, with the cows giving milk
of a decidedly metropolitan flavour, and the children and the nursemaids,
and the dilapidated dramatic authors reading the manuscripts of their
five-act tragedies to themselves, and occasionally reciting favourite
passages in deep diapason on the benches under the trees. Leave, too, the
London sparrows, and—would that we could leave it altogether—the London
smoke, which already begins to curl over and cover up the city like a
blanket, and which will not keep clear of the Mall, even at eight o’clock
in the morning.




NINE O’CLOCK A.M.—THE CLERKS AT THE BANK, AND THE BOATS ON THE RIVER.


It is nine o’clock, and London has breakfasted. Some unconsidered tens
of thousands have, it is true, already enjoyed with what appetite they
might their præ-prandial meal; the upper fifty thousand, again, have not
yet left their luxurious couches, and will not breakfast till ten, eleven
o’clock, noon; nay, there shall be sundry listless, languid members of
fast military clubs, dwellers among the tents of Jermyn Street, and the
high-priced second floors of Little Ryder Street, St. James’s, upon whom
one, two, and three o’clock in the afternoon shall be but as dawn, and
whose broiled bones and devilled kidneys shall scarcely be laid on the
damask breakfast-cloth before Sol is red in the western horizon.

I wish that, in this age so enamoured of statistical information,
when we must needs know how many loads of manure go to every acre of
turnip-field, and how many jail-birds are thrust into the black hole
_per mensem_ for fracturing their pannikins, or tearing their convict
jackets, that some M’Culloch or Caird would tabulate for me the amount of
provisions, solid and liquid, consumed at the breakfasts of London every
morning. I want to know how many thousand eggs are daily chipped, how
many of those embryo chickens are poached, and how many fried; how many
tons of quartern loaves are cut up to make bread-and-butter, thick and
thin; how many porkers have been sacrificed to provide the bacon rashers,
fat and streaky; what rivers have been drained, what fuel consumed, what
mounds of salt employed, what volumes of smoke emitted, to catch and cure
the finny haddocks and the Yarmouth bloaters, that grace our morning
repast. Say, too, Crosse and Blackwell, what multitudinous demands
are matutinally made on thee for pots of anchovy paste and preserved
tongue, covered with that circular layer—abominable disc!—of oleaginous
nastiness, apparently composed of rancid pomatum, but technically known
as clarified butter, and yet not so nasty as that adipose horror that
surrounds the truffle bedecked _pâté de foie gras_. Say, Elizabeth
Lazenby, how many hundred bottles of thy sauce (none of which are genuine
unless signed by thee) are in request to give a relish to cold meat,
game, and fish. Mysteries upon mysteries are there connected with nine
o’clock breakfasts. Queries upon queries suggest themselves to the
inquisitive mind. Speculations upon speculations present themselves to
him who is observant. Are those eggs we see in the coffee-shop windows,
by the side of the lean chop with a curly tail, the teapot with the
broken spout, and the boulder-looking kidneys, ever eaten, and if so,
what secret do the coffee-shop proprietors possess of keeping them from
entire decomposition? For I have watched these eggs for weeks together,
and known them by bits of straw and flecks of dirt mucilaginously
adhering to their shells, to be the selfsame eggs; yet when I have
entered the unpretending house of refreshment, and ordered “tea and an
egg,” I have seen the agile but dingy handmaiden swiftly approach the
window, slide the glass panel back with nimble (though dusky) fingers,
convey an egg to the mysterious kitchen in the background, and in a few
minutes place the edible before me boiled, yet with sufficient marks of
the straw upon it to enable me to discern my ancient friend. Who, again,
invented muffins?—and what becomes of all the cold crossbuns after Good
Friday? I never saw a crossbun on Holy Saturday, and I believe the boy
most addicted to saccharine dainties would scorn one.

So hungry London breakfasts, but not uniformly well, at nine o’clock in
the morning. In quietly grim squares, in the semi-aristocratic North-West
End—I don’t mean Russell and Bloomsbury, but Gordon, Tavistock, Queen,
and Camden, on the one side, and Manchester and Portman on the other—the
nine o’clock breakfast takes place in the vast comfortless dining-room,
with the shining side-board (purchased at the sale of Sir Hector Ajacks,
the great Indian general’s, effects), and the portrait of the master of
the house (Debenham Storr, R.A., pinxit), crimson curtain and column in
foreground, dessert plate, cut orange, and—supposed—silver hand-bell in
front ditto. This is the sort of room where there is a Turkey carpet that
has been purchased at the East India Company’s sale rooms, in Billiter
Street, and which went cheap because there was a hole in one corner,
carefully darned subsequently by the mistress of the house. The master
comes down stairs gravely, with a bald head—the thin, gray hair carefully
brushed over the temples, and a duffel dressing-gown. He spends five
minutes in his “study,” behind the breakfast dining-room; not, goodness
knows, to consult the uncut books on the shelves—uncomfortable works,
like Helps’s “Friends in Council,” that scrap of rusty BACON, and Mr.
Harriet Martineau’s “India,” are among the number; but to break the seals
of the letters ranged for him on the leather-covered table—he reads
his correspondence at breakfast—to unlock, perchance, one drawer, take
out his cheque-book, and give it one hasty flutter, one loving glance,
and to catch up and snuggle beneath his arm the copy of the “Times”
newspaper, erst damped, but since aired at the kitchen fire, which the
newsvender’s boy dropped an hour since down the area. It may be, too,
that he goes into that uselessly (to him) book-furnished room, because
he thinks it a good, a grand, a respectable thing to have a “study” at
all. This is the sort of house where they keep a footman, single-handed—a
dull knave, who no more resembles the resplendent flunkey of Eaton Square
or Westbourne Terrace, than does the cotton-stockinged “greencoat” of
the minor theatres; who is told that he must wear a morning jacket, and
who accoutres himself in a striped jerkin, baggy in the back and soiled
at the elbows, that makes him look like an hostler, related, on the
mother’s side, to a Merry Andrew. The mistress of the house comes down
to nine o’clock breakfast, jingling the keys in her little basket, and
with anxious pre-occupation mantling from her _guipure_ collar to her
false front, for those fatal crimson housekeeping books are to be audited
this morning, and she is nervous. The girls come down in brown-holland
jackets and smartly dowdy skirts, dubious as to the state of their back
hair; the eldest daughter frowning after her last night’s course of
theology (intermingled with the last novel from Mr. Mudie’s). As a rule,
the young ladies are very ill-tempered; and, equally as a rule, there
is always one luckless young maiden in a family of grown-up daughters
who comes down to breakfast with her stockings down at heel, and is
sternly reprimanded during breakfast because one of her shoes comes off
under the table; he who denounces her being her younger brother, the
lout in the jacket, with the surreptitious peg-top in his pocket, who
attends the day-school of the London University, and cribs his sisters’
Berlin-wool canvas to mend his Serpentine yacht sails with. The children
too old to breakfast in the nursery come down gawky, awkward, tumbling,
and discontented, for they are as yet considered too young to partake
of the frizzled bits of bacon which are curling themselves in scorched
agony on the iron footman before the grate, the muffins, which sodden in
yellow butter-pools in the Minton plates on the severely-creased damask
table-cloth, or the dry toast which, shrivelled and forbidding, grins
from between the Sheffield-plated bars of the rack. The servants come
in, not to morning breakfast, but to morning prayers. The housemaid has
just concluded her morning flirtation with the baker; the cook has been
crying over “Fatherless Fanny.” The master of the house reads prayers
in a harsh, grating voice, and Miss Charlotte, aged thirteen, is sent
to her bed-room, with prospects of additional punishment, for eating
her curl-papers during matins. The first organ-grinder arrives in the
square during breakfast; and the master of the house grimly reproves the
children who are beginning to execute involuntary polkas on their chairs,
and glowers at the governess—she is such a meek young creature, marked
with the small-pox, that I did not think it worth while to mention her
before—who manifests symptoms of beating her sad head to the music. How
happy, at least how relieved, everybody is when the master exchanges
his duffel dressing-gown for a blue body-coat, takes his umbrella, and
drives off in his brougham to the city or Somerset House! The children
are glad to go to their lessons, though they hate _them_ at most times,
passably. Miss Meek, the governess, is glad to install herself in her
school-room, and grind “Mangnall’s Questions,” and “Blair’s Preceptor,”
till the children’s dinner, at one o’clock; though she would, perhaps,
prefer shutting herself up in her own room and having a good cry. The
mistress finds consolation, too, in going downstairs and quarrelling
with the cook, and then going upstairs and being quarrelled with by the
nurse. Besides, there will be plenty of time for shopping before Mr.
M. comes home. The girls are delighted that cross papa is away. Papa
always wants to know what the letters are about which they write at the
little walnut-tree tables with the twisted legs. Papa objects to the
time wasted in working the application collars. Papa calls novel reading
and pianoforte practice “stuff,” with a very naughty adjective prefixed
thereunto. This is the sort of house that is neatly, solidly furnished
from top to toe, with every modern convenience and improvement: with
bath-rooms, conservatories, ice cellars; with patent grates, patent
door-handles, dish-lifts, asbestos stoves, gas cooking ranges, and
excruciatingly complicated ventilatory contrivances; and this is also the
sort of house where, with all the conveniences I have mentioned, every
living soul who inhabits it is uncomfortable.

As the clock strikes nine, you see the last school-children flock in to
the narrow alley behind St. Martin’s Lane, hard by the Lowther Arcade,
and leading to the national schools. They have been romping and playing
in the street this half-hour; and it was but the iron tongue of St.
Martin that interrupted that impending fight between the young brothers
Puddicomb, from King Street, Long Acre, who are always fighting, and
that famous clapper-clawing match between Polly Briggs and Susey Wright.
At the last stroke of nine there hurries into the school corridor a
comely female teacher in a green plaid shawl: and, woe be unto her! nine
has struck full ten minutes, when the inevitable laggard of every school
appears, half skurrying, half crawling, her terror combating with her
sluggishness, from the direction of Leicester Square. She is a gaunt,
awkward girl, in a “flibberty-flobberty” hat, a skimping gray cape, with
thunder-and-lightning buttons, an absurdly short skirt, and lace-edged
trousers, that trail over her sandaled shoes. Add to this her slate
and satchel, and she is complete. When will parents cease, I wonder,
to attire their children in this ridiculous and preposterous manner.
Hannah (her name is Hannah, for certain!) left her home in Bear Street in
excellent time for school; but she has dawdled, and loitered, and gloated
over every sweetstuff and picture shop, and exchanged languid repartees
with rude boys. She will be kept in to a certainty this afternoon, will
Hannah!

Now is the matutinal occupation of the milkwoman nearly gone; her last
cries of “Milk, ho!” die away in faint echoes, and she might reasonably
be supposed to enjoy a holiday till the afternoon’s milk for tea were
required; but not so. To distant dairies she hies, and to all appearances
occupies herself in scrubbing her milk pails till three o’clock. I have
a great affection (platonic) for milkwomen. I should like to go down
to Wales and see them when they are at home. What clean white cotton
stockings they wear, on—no, not their legs—on the posts which support
their robust torsos! How strong they are! There are many I should be
happy to back, and for no inconsiderable trifle either, to thrash Ben
Gaunt. Did you ever know any one who courted a milkwoman? Was there ever
a milkwoman married, besides Madam Vestris, in the “Wonderful Woman?”
Yes; I love them—their burly forms; their mahogany faces, handsomely
veneered by wind and weather; their coarse straw bonnets flattened at
the top; their manly lace-up boots, and those wonderful mantles on
their shoulders, which are neither shawl, tippet, cape nor scarf, but a
compound of all, and are of equally puzzling colour and patterns.

The postman is breakfasting in the interval between the eight and the ten
o’clock delivery. Does he take his scarlet tunic off when he breakfasts?
Does he beguile the short hour of refreshment by reading, between snaps
of bread and butter and gulps of coffee, short extracts from “A Double
Knock at the Postman’s Conscience,” by the Reverend Mr. Davis, Ordinary
of Newgate? For if the postman reads not during breakfast-time, I am
wholly at a loss to know, dog-tired as he must be when he comes home from
his rounds at night, when he can find time for pursuing his literary
studies. By the way, where does the postman lodge? I have occupied
apartments in the same house with a policeman; I was once aware of the
private residence of a man who served writs; and I have taken tea in
the parlour of the Pandean pipes to a Punch-and-Judy; but I never knew
personally the abode of a postman. Mr. Sculthorpe and Mr. Peacock know
them but too frequently, to the postman’s cost.

Nine o’clock, and the _grande armée_ of “musicianers” debouches from
Spitalfields, and Leather Lane, Holborn, and far-off Clerkenwell, and,
in compact columns, move westward. Nine o’clock, and the sonorous cry
of “Old clo’!” is heard in sequestered streets chiefly inhabited by
bachelors. Nine o’clock, and another _grande armée_ veers through Temple
Bar, charges down Holborn Hill, escalades Finsbury, captures Cornhill by
a dexterous flank movement, and sits down and invests the Bank of England
in regular form. This is London going to business in the city.

[Illustration: NINE O’CLOCK A.M.: OMNIBUSES AT THE BANK.]

[Illustration: NINE O’CLOCK A.M.: PENNY STEAMBOATS ALONGSIDE THE PIER AT
LONDON BRIDGE.]

If the morning be fine, the pavement of the Strand and Fleet Street looks
quite radiant with the spruce clerks walking down to their offices,
governmental, financial, and commercial. Marvellous young bucks some
of them are. These are the customers, you see at a glance, whom the
resplendent wares in the hosiers’ shops attract, and in whom those wary
industrials find avid customers. These are the dashing young parties who
purchase the pea-green, the orange, and the rose-pink gloves; the crimson
braces, the kaleidoscopic shirt-studs, the shirts embroidered with
dahlias, deaths’ heads, race-horses, sun-flowers, and ballet-girls; the
horseshoe, fox-head, pewter-pot-and-crossed-pipes, willow-pattern-plate,
and knife-and-fork pins. These are the glasses of city fashion, and the
mould of city form, for whom the legions of fourteen, of fifteen, of
sixteen, and of seventeen shilling trousers, all unrivalled, patented,
and warranted, are made; for these ingenious youths coats with strange
names are devised, scarves and shawls of wondrous pattern and texture
despatched from distant Manchester and Paisley. For them the shiniest
of hats, the knobbiest of sticks, gleam through shop-windows; for them
the geniuses of “all-round collars” invent every week fresh yokes of
starched linen, pleasant instruments of torture, reminding us equally
of the English pillory, the Chinese cangue, the Spanish garotte, the
French _lucarne_ to the guillotine (that window from which the criminal
looks out into eternity), and the homely and cosmopolitan dog-collar!
There are some of these gay clerks who go down to their offices with
roses at their button-holes, and with cigars in their mouths; there are
some who wear peg-top trousers, chin-tufts, eye-glasses, and varnished
boots. These mostly turn off in the Strand, and are in the Admiralty or
Somerset House. As for the government clerks of the extreme West-end—the
patricians of the Home and Foreign Offices—the bureaucrats of the
Circumlocution Office, in a word—_they_ ride down to Whitehall or
Downing Street in broughams or on park hacks. Catch them in omnibuses,
or walking on the vulgar pavement, forsooth! The flags of Regent Street
they might indeed tread gingerly, at three o’clock in the afternoon; but
the Strand, and at nine o’clock in the morning! Forbid it, gentility! I
observe—to return to the clerks who are bending citywards—that the most
luxuriant whiskers belong to the Bank of England. I believe that there
are even whisker clubs in that great national institution, where prizes
are given for the best pair of _favoris_ grown without macassar. You may,
as a general rule, distinguish government from commercial clerks by the
stern repudiation of the razor, as applied to the beard and moustaches,
by the former; and again I may remark, that the prize for the thinnest
and most dandy-looking umbrellas must be awarded, as of right, to the
clerks in the East India House—mostly themselves slim, natty gentlemen,
of jaunty appearance, who are all supposed to have had tender affairs
with the widows of East India colonels. You may know the cashiers in the
private banking houses by their white hats and buff waistcoats; you may
know the stock-brokers by their careering up Ludgate Hill in dog-carts,
and occasionally tandems, and by the pervading sporting appearance of
their costume; you may know the Jewish commission agents by their flashy
broughams, with lapdogs and ladies in crinoline beside them; you may know
the sugar-bakers and the soap-boilers by the comfortable double-bodied
carriages with fat horses in which they roll along; you may know the
Manchester warehousemen by their wearing gaiters, always carrying their
hands in their pockets, and frequently slipping into recondite city
taverns up darksome alleys, on their way to Cheapside, to make a quiet
bet or so on the Chester Cup or the Liverpool Steeplechase; you may know,
finally, the men with a million of money, or thereabouts, by their being
ordinarily very shabby, and by their wearing shocking bad hats, which
have seemingly never been brushed, on the backs of their heads.

“Every road,” says the proverb, “leads to Rome;” every commercial
ways leads to the Bank of England. And there, in the midst of that
heterogeneous architectural jumble between the Bank of England itself,
the Royal Exchange, the Poultry, Cornhill, and the Globe Insurance
Office, the vast train of omnibuses, that have come from the West and
that have come from the East—that have been rumbling along the Macadam
while I was prosing on the pedestrians—with another great army of clerk
martyrs outside and inside, their knees drawn up to their chins, and
their chins resting on their umbrella handles, set down their loads of
cash-book and ledger fillers. What an incalculable mass of figures must
there be collected in those commercial heads! What legions of _£. s. d._!
What a chaos of cash debtor, contra creditor, bills payable, and bills
receivable; waste-books, day-books, cash-books, and journals; insurance
policies, brokerage, agio, tare and tret, dock warrants, and general
commercial bedevilment! They file off to their several avocations, to
spin money for others, often, poor fellows, while they themselves are
blest with but meagre stipends. They plod away to their gloomy wharves
and hard-hearted counting-houses, where the chains from great cranes wind
round their bodies, and they dance hornpipes in bill-file and cash-box
fetters, and the mahogany of the desks enters into their souls. Upon my
word, I think if I were doomed to clerkdom, that I should run away and
enlist; but that would avail me little, for I am equally certain that,
were I a grenadier, and my commanding officer made me mount guard, that I
should pop my musket into the sentry-box and run away too.

So the omnibuses meet at the Bank and disgorge the clerks by hundreds;
repeating this operation scores of times between nine and ten o’clock.
But you are not to delude yourself, that either by wheeled vehicle or by
the humbler conveyances known as “Shanks’s mare,” and the “Marrowbone
stage”—in more refined language, walking—have all those who have business
in the city reached their destination. No; the Silent Highway has been
their travelling route. On the broad—would that I could add the silvery
and sparkling—bosom of Father Thames, they have been borne in swift,
grimy little steamboats, crowded with living freights from Chelsea,
and Pimlico, and Vauxhall piers, from Hungerford, Waterloo, Temple,
Blackfriars, and Southwark—straight by the hay-boats, with their lateen
sails discoloured in a manner that would delight a painter, straight
by Thames police hulks, by four and six-oared cutters, by coal-barges,
and great lighters laden with bricks and ashes and toiling towards
Putney and Richmond; by oozy wharves and grim-chimneyed factories; by
little, wheezy, tumbledown waterside public-houses; by breweries, and
many-windowed warehouses; by the stately gardens of the Temple, and the
sharp-pointed spires of city churches, and the great dome of Paul’s
looming blue in the morning, to the Old Shades Pier, hard by London
Bridge. There is landing and scuffling and pushing; the quivering old
barges, moored in the mud, are swaying and groaning beneath trampling
feet. Then, for an instant, Thames Street, Upper and Lower, is invaded
by an ant-hill swarm of spruce clerks, who mingle strangely with the
fish-women and the dock-porters. But the insatiable counting-houses soon
swallow them up: as though London’s commercial maw were an hungered too,
for breakfast, at nine o’clock in the morning.




TEN O’CLOCK A.M.—THE COURT OF QUEEN’S BENCH, AND THE “BENCH” ITSELF.


The author presents his compliments to the “neat-handed Phillis”
who answers (when she is in a good temper, which is but seldom) the
second-floor bell, takes in his letters, brings up his breakfast,
stands in perpetual need of being warned not to light the fire with the
proof-sheets of his last novel, pamphlet on the war, or essay on the
Æolic digamma, or twist into cigar-lights the cheques for large amounts
continually sent him by his munificent publishers, and exercises her
right of search over his tea-caddy and the drawer containing his cravats,
all-round collars, and billet-doux; the author and your servant presents
his compliments to Phillis—ordinarily addressed by Mrs. Lillicrap,
the landlady, as “Mariar, you ’ussey”—and begs her to procure for him
immediately a skin of the creamiest parchment, free from grease, a bottle
of record ink, a quill plucked from the wing of a hawk, vulture, or some
kindred bird of prey, a box of pounce, a book of patterns of German text
for engrossing, and a hank of red tape or green ferret, whichsoever, in
her æsthetic judgment, she may prefer. He would be further obliged if
she would step round to the author’s solicitor, and ask, not for that
little bill of costs, which has been ready for some time, but which he
is not in the slightest hurry for—but for copies of Tidd’s Practice, the
Law List, and Lord St. Leonards’ “Handy Book on Property Law.” For I,
the author, intend to be strictly legal at ten o’clock in the morning.
I serve you with this copy of “Twice Round the Clock” as with a writ;
and in the name of Victoria, by the grace, &c., send you greeting, and
command—no, not command, but beg—that within eight days you enter an
appearance, to purchase this volume. Else will I invoke the powers of
the great _ca. sa._ and the terrible _fi. fa._ I will come against you,
with sticks and staves, and the sheriff of Middlesex shall take you, to
have and to hold, wheresoever you may be found running up and down in
his bailiwick. _Son nutrito di latte legale._ I am fed with law’s milk
at this hour of the morning. Shear me the sheep for vellum, fill me with
quips and quiddities; bind me apprentice to a law stationer in the Lane
of Chancery, over-against Cursitor Street; and let me also send in a
little bill of costs to my publishers, and charge them so much a “folio,”
instead of so much a “sheet.”

This exercitation over, and the necessary stationery brought by Phillis,
_alias_ “Mariar,” I approach my great, grim subject with diffident
respect. What do I know of law, save that if I pay not, the Alguazils
will lay me by the heels; that if I steal, I shall go to the hulks;
that if I kill, I shall go hang? What do I know of _Sinderesis_,
feoffors and feoffees, and the law of tailed lands? What of the Assize
of _Mortdancestor_, tenants in dower, villein entry—of _Sylva cædua_,
which is, I am sure you will be glad to hear, more familiarly known as
the 45th of Edward the Third? These things are mysteries to me. I bought
the _habeas corpus_ once (the palladium of our liberties is an expensive
luxury), but its custodian scarcely allowed me to look at it, and,
hailing a cab, desired me to “look alive.” I have been defendant in an
action, but I never could make out why they should have done the things
to me that they did, and why John Lord Campbell at Westminster should
have been so bitter against me. I never was on a jury; but I have enjoyed
the acquaintance of an Irish gentleman whose presence on the panel was
considered invaluable at state trials, he having the reputation of an
indomitable “boot-eater.” Finally, I have, as most men have, a solicitor,
a highly respectable party, who, of course, only charges me the “costs
out of pocket.” But what is the exact measure of “costs out of pocket?” I
never knew.

Not wholly destitute of legal literature is your servant, however. In
Pope and Arbuthnot’s Reports (_vide_ Miscellanies) I have read the great
case of Stradlings _versus_ Styles, respecting the piebald horses and
the horses that were pied, and have pondered much over that notable
conclusion (in Norman-French) by the reporter—“Je heard no more parceque
j’etais asleep sur mong bench.” I have followed the arguments in Bardell
_versus_ Pickwick: I have seen the “Avocat Patelin” and the “Lottery
Ticket;” I have paced the Salle des Pas Perdus in Paris, and Westminster
Hall, London; I knew a captain once who lived in the equally defunct
“rules” of the Queen’s Bench; and I have played racquets in the area of
that establishment, as an amateur(?). So, then, though, in a very humble
degree, I conceive myself qualified to discourse to you concerning legal
London at ten o’clock in the morning.

The judges of the land—of Queen’s Bench, Exchequer, and Common Pleas,
Chief-Justices, Barons, and Puisne Judges, and Sages of the Court of
Probate, Divorce, and Matrimonial Causes—are mostly jaunty, elderly
gentlemen of cheerful appearance, given in private life to wearing
light neckcloths, buff waistcoats, and pepper-and-salt trousers, and
particularly addicted to trotting down to the Courts of Westminster
mounted on stout hacks—’tis the bishops, _par excellence_, who ride
the cobs—and followed by sober grooms. There are judges who, it is
reported, make up considerable books for the Derby and Oaks—nay, for
the double event. I have seen a judge in a white hat, and I have seen a
vice-chancellor drinking iced fruit effervescent at Stainsbury’s in the
Strand.

Parliament Street and Palace Yard are fair to see, this pleasant morning
in Term time. The cause list for all the courts is pretty full, and
there is a prospect of nice legal pickings. The pavement is dotted
with barristers’ and solicitors’ clerks carrying blue and crimson bags
plethoric with papers. Smart attorneys, too, with shoe-ribbon, light
vests, swinging watch-guards, and shiny hats (they have begun to wear
moustaches even, the attorneys!), bustle past, papers beneath their arms,
open documents in their hands, which they sort and peruse as they walk.
The parti-coloured fastenings of these documents flutter, so that you
would take these men of law for so many conjurors about to swallow red
and green tape. And they do conjure, and to a tune, the attorneys. Lank
office-boys, in hats too large, and corduroys and tweeds too short, and
jackets, stained with ink, too short for them; cadaverous office-runners
and process-servers, in greasy and patched habiliments, white at the
seams; bruised and battered, ruby-nosed law-writers, skulking down to
Westminster in quest of a chance copying job; managing clerks, staid
men given to abdominal corpulence, who wear white neckcloths, plaited
shirt-frills, black satin waistcoats, and heavy watch chains and seals,
worn, in the good old fashion, underneath the vest, and pendulous
from the base line thereof, file along the pavement to their common
destination, the great Hall of Pleas at Westminster. The great solicitors
and attorneys, men who may be termed the princes of law, who are at the
head of vast establishments in Bedford Row and Lincoln’s Inn Fields,
and whose practice is hereditary, dash along in tearing cabs: you look
through the windows, and see an anxious man, with bushy gray whiskers,
sitting inside; the cushions beside and before him littered, piled,
cumbered, with tape-tied papers. He has given Sir Fitzroy three hundred,
Sir Richard five hundred, guineas, for an hour’s advocacy. Thousands
depend upon the decision of the twelve worthy men who will be in the
jury-box in the course of an hour. See! one of them is cheapening apples
at a stall at this very moment, and tells his companion (who has just
alighted from a chaise-cart) that in that little shop yonder Marley
murdered the watchmaker’s shopman. Great lawyers such as these have as
many noble fortunes in their hands as great doctors have noble lives.
Of the secrets of noble reputations, doctors and lawyers are alike
custodians; and, trustworthy.

The briefless barristers would like to patronise cabs, but they can’t
afford those luxuries. They walk down Parliament Street arm-in-arm,
mostly men with bold noses of the approved Slawkenbergius pattern, and
very large red or sandy whiskers. Whiskers cost nothing, noses are
cheap—I had mine broken once for nothing, though it cost me several
pounds sterling to get it mended again. Their briefless clothes are very
worn and threadbare, their hats napless, their umbrellas—they always
carry umbrellas—gape at the mouth, and distend at the nozzle. These
barristers are second wranglers, fellows of their college, prizemen; they
have pulled stroke-oar, and bibbed at wine parties given by marquises.
They are very poor and briefless now. The chambers in the Temple are very
high up; the carpet, ragged; the laundress is a tipsy shrew who pilfers;
the boot-boy insists upon serving up small coal broiled with the mutton
chops. It is but seldom, but very seldom, that they can order a steak
at the “Rainbow,” or demand a bottle of Port from the plump waiter the
“Cock.” No attorneys ascend their staircase; no briefs are frayed in
being pushed through the aperture of their letter-boxes; editors are
deaf, and the only magazine which receives their contributions don’t pay.
They cannot help asking themselves sometimes, sadly and querulously,
poor fellows, of what avail is the grand classical education, tedious
and expensive; the slaving for a degree or for honours; the long nights
spent beneath the glare of the reading lamp, learning and re-learning the
palimpsests of law; of what avail are the joints of mutton and bottles of
heady wine consumed at the keeping-term dinners; of what avail the square
of the hypothenuse, and the knowledge (in the best Latin) that strong men
lived before Agamemnon; of what avail the wig (it is getting unpowdered),
the gown (it is growing threadbare), and the big Greek prize-books
with the College arms emblazoned on the covers? Lo! there is Tom
Cadman, who has been an unsuccessful play-actor and an usher in a cheap
boarding-school, writing leaders for a daily paper in the coffee-room of
the “Albion,” or returning thanks for the press at a champagne dinner;
there is Roger Bullyon, of the Home Circuit, whose only talent is abuse,
who knows no more of law than he does of the conduct to be expected from
a gentleman, who will never, if he live till ninety, be more than a
fluent, insolent donkey, and yet there he is, with more briefs than he
can carry, or his clerk compute the fees on. But console yourselves, oh,
ye briefless ones. Though the race be not to the swift, nor the battle to
the strong, your chance is yet in the lucky-bag; the next dive may bring
it forth splendid and triumphant.

    “No one is so accursed by fate,
    No one so utterly desolate,
    But some heart, though unknown,
    Responds unto his own.”

Mr. Right, the attorney, is coming post-haste after you, his waistcoat
pockets distended with retainers and refreshers. In that tremendous
lottery of the law, as wise Mr. Thackeray terms it, who shall say that
you may not be next the fortunate wretches who shall win the prize—the
_gros lot_? To-day is poverty and heart-sickening hope deferred and
the pawn-shop; but to-morrow may make you the thunderer before the
judicial committee of the Privy Council on the great appeal from Bombay,
Parsetjee-Jamsetjee-Ramsetjee Loll _versus_ Boomajee-Krammajee-Howdajee
Chow. It may make you standing counsel to the Feejee Islands Company, or
defender of group 97 of Railway Bills. So, despair not, briefless man;
but pause before you sell that sheet anchor of hope, of yours, for old
iron.

Barristers in large practice drive over Westminster Bridge’s crazy arches
(the rogues have houses at Norwood and Tulse Hill, with conservatories
and pineries) in small phætons or gleaming clarences, with sleek white
horses. They have wives rustling in sheeny silks and glowing with
artificial flowers, who, their lords being deposited in the temple of
Theseus, are borne straight away to Stagg and Mantell’s, or Waterloo
House; or, perchance, to that glorious avenue of Covent Garden Market,
where they price cucumbers at Mrs. Solomon’s, and bouquets at Mrs.
Buck’s. For, note it as a rule, though it may seem a paradox, people who
have kitchen-gardens and hot-houses are always buying fruit, flowers,
and vegetables. The steady-going old Nisi Prius barristers, in good
practice—sedate fogies—with their white neckcloths twisted like halters
round their necks; pompous old fellows, who jingle keys and sovereigns in
their pockets, as, their hands therein, they prop up the door-jambs of
the robing-room, in converse with weasel-faced attorneys, are borne to
Westminster in cabs. Very hard are they upon the cabman, paying him but
the exact fare, and threatening him with the severest terrors of the law
at the slightest attempt at overcharge; and much are they maledicted by
the badged Jehus as they drive slowly away. These Nisi Prius worthies are
great hands at a rubber of whist, and are as good judges of port-wine as
they are of law.

Whence comes the Chief, the leader, the great advocate of the day, who
carries attorney and solicitor general, chief-justice, chancellor,
peer, written as legibly on his brow as Cain carried the brand?—how he
reaches Westminster Hall, or how he gets away from it, no man can tell.
He will make a four hours’ speech to-day, drive eight witnesses to the
verge of distraction, blight with sarcasm, and sear with denunciation, a
semi-idiotic pig-jobber, the defendant in an action of breach of promise
of marriage, in which the plaintiff is a stay-maker of the mature age
of thirty-seven. What shrieks of laughter will ring through the court
when in burning accents, in which irony is mingled with indignation, the
Chief reads passages from the love-smitten but incautious pig-jobber’s
correspondence, and quotes from his poetical effusions (they _will_ write
poetry, these defendants) such passages as—

    “When you tork
    You are like roast pork.”

Or,

    “Say, luvley chine,
    Will you be mine.”

Two hours afterwards, and the Chief will be on the other side of
Westminster Hall, in the Commons’ House of Parliament, pounding away on
the wrongs of a few people in Staffordshire who object to the odour of
some neighbouring gas-works, and, to use an Americanism, “chawing up”
the ministry at a tremendous rate. How is it that about the same time he
manages to dine with the Merchant Cobblers at their grand old hall on St.
Crispin’s Hill; to take the chair at the festival of the Association for
improving the moral condition of Mudlarks; to make a two hours’ speech
at the meeting for the suppression of street “catch-’em-alive-O’s;” to
look in at half-a-dozen west-end clubs; to hear Bosio—ah! poor Bosio,
ah, poor swan, miasma’d to death in the horrid marshes of Ingria and
Carelia—in the last act of the “Traviata;” and to be seen flitting out
of the bar-parlour of Joe Muttonfist’s hostelry in Mauley Court-yard,
Whitechapel, where the whereabouts of the impending great fight between
Dan Bludyer, surnamed the “Mugger,” and Tim Sloggan, better known as
“Copperscull,” for two hundred pounds a-side, will be imparted to the
patrons of the “fancy?” Tom Stoat, who knows everything and everybody,
says he saw the Chief at the Crystal Palace Flower Show, and it is
certain that he (the Chief) will be at the Queen’s Ball to-night (he has
a dinner party this evening), and that after the opera he will take a
chop and kidney at Evans’s. And after that? What a life! What frame can
bear, what mind endure it! When does he study? when does he read those
mammoth briefs? when does he note those cases, prepare those eloquent
exordia and perorations? Whence comes the minute familiarity with every
detail of the case before him which he seems to possess, the marvellous
knowledge he displays of the birth, parentage, education, and antecedents
of the trembling witnesses whom he cross-examines? What a career! and
see, there is its Hero, shambling into Westminster Hall, a spare,
shrunken, stooping, prematurely-aged man. He has not had a new wig these
ten years, and his silk gown is shabby, almost to raggedness. He is no
doubt arguing some abstruse point of law with that voluble gentleman,
his companion, in the white waistcoat. Let us approach and listen, for I
am Asmodeus and we are eaves-droppers. Point of law! Upon my word, he is
talking about the Chester Cup.

[Illustration: TEN O’CLOCK A.M.: INTERIOR OF THE COURT OF QUEEN’S BENCH.]

In with ye, then, my merry men all, to the hall of Westminster, for
the Court of Queen’s Bench is sitting. It is not a handsome court; it
is not an imposing court. If I were to say that it was a very mean and
ugly room, quite unworthy to figure as an audience-chamber for the
judges of the land, I don’t think that I should be in error. Where are
the lictors and the fasces? Where the throned daïs on which the wise
men of the Archeopagus should properly sit? The bench looks but an
uncomfortable settle! the floor of the court is a ridiculous little
quadrangle of oak, like a pie-board; the witness-box is so small that it
seems capable of holding nothing but the shooting “Jack” of our toyshop
experience; and the jury-box has a strong family likeness to one of
the defunct Smithfield sheep-pens, where sit the intelligent jury, who
have an invincible propensity, be the weather hot or cold, for wiping
their foreheads with blue cotton pocket handkerchiefs. A weary martyrdom
some of those poor jurymen pass; understanding a great deal more about
the case on which they have to deliver at its commencement than at
its termination; bemused, bewildered, and dazzled by the rhetorical
flourishes and ingenious sophistry of the counsel on both sides, and
utterly nonplussed by the elaborately obscure pleas that are put in. But
the usher has sworn them in that they “shall will and truly try” the
matter before them; and try it they must. To a man who has, perhaps, a
matter of sixty or seventy thousand pounds at stake on the issue of a
trial, the proceedings of most tribunals seem characterised by strange
indifference, and an engaging, though, to the plaintiff and defendant, a
somewhat irritating _laisser aller_. The attorneys take snuff with one
another, and whisper jokes. The counsel chat and poke each other in the
ribs; the briefless ones, in the high back rows, scribble caricatures on
their blotting-pads, or pretend to pore over “faggot” briefs, or lounge
from the Queen’s Bench into the Exchequer, and from the Exchequer into
the Bail Court, and so on and into the Common Pleas; the usher nods, and
cries, “Silence,” sleepily; the clerk reads in a droning monotonous voice
documents of the most vital importance, letters that destroy and blast
a life-long reputation of virtue and honour: letters that bring shame
on noble women, and ridicule on distinguished men; vows of affection,
slanderous accusations, outbursts of passion, anonymous denunciations,
ebullitions of love, hatred, revenge. Some one is here, doubtless,
to report the case for to-morrow’s papers, but no active pens seem
moving. The Chief has not assumed his legal harness yet; and the junior
counsel employed in the case are bungling over their preliminaries.
The faded moreen curtains; the shabby royal arms above the judge, with
their tarnished gilding, subdued-looking lion, and cracked unicorn; the
ink-stained, grease-worn desks and forms; the lack-lustre, threadbare
auditory, with woe-be-gone garments and mien, who fill up the hinderpart
of the auditory: though what they can want in the Court of Queen’s Bench
Heaven only knows; the bombazine-clad barristers, in their ill-powdered
wigs—quite fail in impressing you with a sense of anything like grandeur
or dignity. Yet you are in _Banco Reginâ_. Here our sovereign lady
the Queen is supposed to sit herself in judgment; and from this court
emanates the Great Writ of Right—the Habeas Corpus. To tell the truth,
neither counsel, jury, nor audience seem to know or to care much about
what is going on; but there are three persons who sit up aloft—not
exactly sweet little cherubs, for they are very old, wrinkled men—who
know the case like a book, and considerably better than many books; who
have weighed the _pros_ and _cons_ to the minutest hair’s breath, to a
feather’s turn of the scale, who are awake and alive, alive O! to all
the rhetorical flourishes and ingenious sophistry of the advocates, and
who will tell the jury exactly what the case is made of in about a tithe
of the time that the junior counsel would take in enumerating wrongs of
which the plaintiff complains, or whose commission the defendant denies.
It is an edifying sight to watch the presiding judge—that shrivelled
man in petticoats—with his plain scratch wig all awry. Now he hugs his
arms within his capacious sleeves; now he crosses his legs; now, yes,
now he twiddles his judicial thumbs; now he nods his august head, allows
it to recline over one shoulder, and seems on the point of falling off
to sleep; now he leans wearily, his cheek in his hand, his elbow on
the bench, first on one side, then on the other; then he rises, shakes
his old head, yawns, and, with his hands in his pockets, surveys the
outer bar through gold-rimmed spectacles. He seems the most bored, the
most indifferent spectator there; but only wait till the chiefs on both
sides have concluded their eloquent bamboozling of the jury; mark my
Lord Owlett settle his wig and his petticoats then, sort and unfold the
notes he has been lazily (so it seemed) scrawling from time to time, and
in a piping, quavering voice, begin to read from them. You marvel at
the force, the clarity, the perspicuity of the grand old man; you stand
abashed before the intellect, clear as crystal, at an age when man’s
mind as well as his body is oft-times but labour and sorrow; you are
astonished that so much vigour, so much shrewdness, so much eloquence,
should exist in that worn and tottering casket. Goodness knows, I am not
an optimist, and give but too much reason to be accused of _nil admirari_
tendencies; yet I cannot help thinking that if on this earth there exists
a body of men grandly wise, generously eloquent, nobly impartial, and
sternly incorruptible, those men are the judges of England.

Come away though, now, Don Cleophas; we must go further afield. The case
that is “on” just now is not of sufficient interest to detain us; though
here is an episode sufficiently grotesque. An old lady is entitled to
some damages, or to some verdict, or to some money or apology, or, at all
events, something from somebody. My Lord Owlett suggests a compromise,
and instructs counsel to ask her what she will take to settle matters.

“What will you take?” asks the gentleman in the bob-tailed wig of the old
lady.

Now the old lady is very deaf, and merely shakes her head at the counsel,
informing the jury, in confidence, that she is “very hard o’ hearin’.”

“His Lordship wants to know what you will take?” asks the counsel again;
this time bawling as loud as ever he can in the old lady’s ear.

“I thank his lordship kindly,” the ancient dame answers stoutly, “and if
it’s no illconwenience to him, _I’ll take a little warm ale_!”

And, amid a roar of laughter from the spectators, we quit the Court of
Queen’s Bench.

Nor must we linger, either, beneath William Rufus’s carved roof-tree,
so ingeniously heightened, and otherwise transmogrified, by Sir Charles
Barry and his satellites. This is a different Westminster Hall to that
which I knew in my childhood, just after the great fire of ’34. There
was no great stained glass window at the end then, no brazen Gothic
candelabra, no golden House of Lords in the corridor beyond, where the
eye is dazzled with the gilding, the frescoes, the scarlet benches and
rich carpets, and where the Lord High Chancellor sits on the woolsack,
like an allegory of Themis in the midst of a blaze of fireworks. In my
time, the keeper of her Majesty’s conscience and the Great Seal sat in
a panelled room, like a dissenting chapel. Let us hasten forth from the
Great Hall, for it is full of memories. I spoke of famous footsteps on
the Mall, St. James’s; how many thousand footsteps—thousands?—millions
rather, have been lost here in fruitless pacing up and down! Westminster
Hall is always cool: well it may be so; the dust was laid and the air
refrigerated centuries since by the tears and the sighs of ruined
suitors. What a wondrous place the old hall is! what reminiscences it
conjures up—they will _not_ be laid in the Red Sea—of the gorgeous
banquets of the Plantagenets, of the trials of Laud and Strafford,
and of Laud and Strafford’s master; of Mr. Jonathan Wild’s ancestor
walking the hall with a straw in his shoe; of poor little Lady Jane
Grey and Guildford Dudley, her husband, standing their trial here on a
velvet-covered platform in the midst of the hall, for treason to Bloody
Mary. Did they ever cut a state prisoner’s head off in Westminster Hall,
I wonder, as they did Mary Stuart’s in the hall at Fotheringay? The place
is large enough.

       *       *       *       *       *

[Illustration: TEN O’CLOCK A.M.: INTERIOR OF THE QUEEN’S BENCH PRISON.]

Once again I stand within the precincts of the Queen’s Bench; but where
is my Lord Owlett, where the bewigged barristers and the jury-box with
the “twelve honest men” within wiping their semperperspiring foreheads?
I am standing in the centre of a vast gravelled area, bounded on
the south side by a brick wall of tremendous height, and crowned by
those curious arrangements of geometrical spikes known as _chevaux de
frise_. To the north there is a range of ordinary-looking houses, the
numbers of which are painted very conspicuously in white characters on
a black ellipse above the doors, about which, moreover, there is this
peculiarity, that they are always open. If you peep through the yawning
portals, you will see that the staircases are of stone, and that the
roofs of the rooms on the ground-floor are vaulted. There are no barred
windows, no bolts, bars, or grim chains apparent, though from the back
windows of these houses there is a pleasant prospect of another high
wall, equally surmounted with _chevaux de frise_. When the spider
has got the fly comfortably into his web, and has satisfied himself
that he can’t get out, I daresay that he does not take the trouble to
handcuff him. In the midst of this gravelled area stands a pump, known
as the “Dolphin;” to the right of this institution, and somewhat in the
back-ground, is a great square building, called the “State House.” The
rooms here are double the size to those in the houses I have alluded
to, and are accorded by the governor of the place as a matter of favour
to those inmates of the—well, the college—who can afford to fill them
with a sufficient quantity of furniture. Close to the State House is a
strong iron gateway, through which the guardians of the college have a
strong disinclination to allow the under-graduates to pass, unless they
be furnished with a certain mysterious document called “a discharge.”
The guardians themselves are ruddy men with very big keys; but they
seem on the very best terms with the gentlemen whose intended exercise
outside the walls they feel compelled (doubtless through solicitude
for their precious health) to debar, and are continually bidding them
“good morning” in the most affable manner; it being also one of their
idiosyncrasies to rub their noses with the handles of the big keys while
going through the salutation. In days not very remote there were certain
succursals, or chapels of ease, to the college, in the shape of dingy
tenements in the borough of Southwark, extending as far as the Elephant
and Castle; and in these tenements, which were called the “Rules,” such
collegians as were in a position to offer a fantastic guarantee entitled
a “Bail Bond,” were permitted to dwell, and thence they wrote letters
to their friends and relations, stating that the iron was entering into
their souls, and that they were languishing—well, never mind where—in
college. These “rules” were abolished in the early years of her present
Majesty’s reign; and at the same time a stern Secretary of State
prohibited the renewal of a notable saturnalia called “a Mock Election,”
of which no less celebrated an artist than Haydon painted a picture (he
was himself a collegian at the time), which was bought, for considerably
more than it was worth, by King George IV. The saturnalia was fast
falling into desuetude by itself; but the Home Secretary also interfered
to put a stop to the somewhat boisterous conviviality which had reigned
among those collegians who had money, from time immemorial, and which
had converted the Queen’s Bench into a den of the most outrageous and
disgraceful dissipation and revelry. Under the present not very stringent
regulations (considering what a _carcere duro_ is, the other _alma
mater_ of Whitecross Street, to say nothing of the hideous place called
Horsemonger Lane), the collegians are restricted to the consumption of
one quart of beer—which they may have just as strong as ever they like—or
one imperial pint of wine, per diem, at their option; yet it is a very
curious fact, that no collegian who was flush of cash was ever found
to labour under any difficulty in providing sufficient refreshment for
his friends when he gave a wine party in his room. The payment of rent
is unknown in the college; and it is but rarely that the time-honoured
system of “chummage,” or quartering two or mere collegians in one room,
and allowing the richest to pay his companions a stipulated sum to go out
and find quarters elsewhere, is resorted to. As a rule, the collegian on
his arrival, after spending one night in a vaulted apartment close to
the entrance, and which bears a strong resemblance to the Gothic vault
described in “Rookwood”—an apartment known as the “receiving ward”—has
allotted to him, by solemnly-written ticket, a whitewashed chamber of
tolerable size, moderately haunted by mice, and “passably” infested by
fleas. Straightway there starts up, as it were from the bowels of the
earth, a corpulent female rubicund in countenance, tumbled in garments,
and profuse in compliments, assuring him that he is the very “Himage
of the Markis of Scatterbrass, which his aunt let him out by composing
with his creditors,” or “Capting Spurbox, of the Hoss Guards, as ’ad
champagne hevery mornin’, and went through the court payin’ nothink.”
She, for a small weekly stipend—say, five shillings—agrees to furnish
your room; and in an astonishingly short space of time you find the
bare cube transformed into a sufficiently comfortable bed-room and
sitting-room. For eighteenpence a week extra you may have a double green
baize door with brass nails, like a verdant coffin, and white dimity
curtains to your windows, with real tassels. In the train of the stout
tumbled female, there always follows a gaunt woman of no particular age,
with ropy hair, a battered bonnet, and scanty garments apparently nailed
to her angular form, who expresses, with many curtsies, her desire to
“do for you.” Don’t be alarmed; she simply means that for three or four
shillings a week she will clean your room, boil your kettle, and bring up
the dinner, which has been cooked for you in the common kitchen of the
college. She, too, has an acolyte, a weazened old man in a smock frock
and knee shorts (though I think that he must be dead or have left college
by this time[3]) who for a shilling a week will make your boots shine
like mirrors; who resides here, and has resided here for many years,
because he can’t or won’t pay thirty pounds, and who is reported to be
worth a mint of money. So here the collegian lives, and makes as merry as
he can under adverse circumstances. The same tender precautions adopted
by the authorities of the college to prevent the unnecessary egress
of those in _statu pupillari_, are enforced to preserve a due state
of morality among them. There is a chapel, as there is an infirmary,
within the walls; the lady collegians, of whom there is always a small
number in hold, are kept in jealous seclusion. Dicing and card-playing
are strictly prohibited, and contumacious contravention of the rules
involves the probability of the recalcitrant student being immured in a
_locus penitentiæ_ called the “Strong Room.” There he is kept for four
and twenty hours, _without tobacco_. Horrible punishment! This is in the
college attached to her Majesty’s Bench. Pshaw! Why should I beat about
the Bench, or the bush, any longer, or even endorse the quibble adopted
by those collegians who wish to have their letters addressed to them
genteelly, of “No. 1, Belvidere Place?” That which I have been describing
is a debtors’ jail—the Queen’s Prison, in fact.

And what of the collegians—the prisoners—themselves? It is ten o’clock
in the morning, and they are sauntering about in every variety of shabby
deshabille, smoking pipes after their meagre breakfasts, walking arm
in arm with one another, or with friends who have come to see them,
and whose ingress is permitted from nine a.m. until seven p.m. None
are allowed to enter after that hour; but those visitors already in
are allowed to stop till nine in the evening. Some of the collegian
prisoners, poor fellows, have women and little children with them, who
are very silly and sentimental, in their illogical way; but you may
depend on it that, in nine out of ten of these groups, the staple theme
of conversation is the probability of the captive being “out next week.”
They are always going to be out next week, these caged birds; but they
die sometimes in the Bench, for all that.

Don’t you think, too, that it would be as graceful as expedient to draw
a veil over these broken-down men? Even the felons in Pentonville are
allowed to wear masks in the exercise-yard. Why should I, whose sternest,
strongest aim it is to draw from Life, and from the life only, but who
wish to pluck the mote from no man’s eye, to cast a stone at no glass
house built on the pattern of mine own, expatiate in word-pictures upon
the dilapidated dandies, the whilom dashing bucks in dressing-gowns out
at elbows, and Turkish caps with tassels, set, with a woe-begone attempt
at jaunty bearing, on one side, the decayed tradesmen, the uncertificated
bankrupts, the cankers of a calm world and a long peace, that prowl and
shuffle through the yards of a debtors’ prison? Why, every man of the
world has acquaintances, if not friends, there. Why, poor old Jack, who
gave the champagne dinners we were so glad to be invited to, has been in
the Bench for months. Yonder broken-winged butterfly, relapsing, quite
against the order of nature, into a state of grubhood again, may have
gone through his Humanities with the best of us, and may say _Hodie mihi,
cras tibi_. To-day he is in jail; but to-morrow I, you, my brother the
millionaire, may be taken in execution; and who shall say that we shall
have the two pounds twelve wherewith to purchase the _habeas corpus_?




ELEVEN O’CLOCK A.M.—TROOPING THE GUARD, AND A MARRIAGE IN HIGH LIFE.


I have the fortune, or misfortune, to live in a “quiet street,” and am
myself an essentially quiet man, loving to keep myself in the Queen’s
peace, and minding my own business, though devoutly wishing that people
would not mind it for me in quite so irritating a degree. I sleep soundly
when in health, and never question Mrs. Lillicrap’s mystifying items in
her weekly bill, of “mustard, vinegar, and mending,” or “pepper, postage
stamps, and mother-o’-pearl buttons.” I never grumble at the crying of
babies, remembering that a wise and good doctor once told me that those
dear innocents pass the days of their nonage in a chronic state of
stomach-ache and congestion of the brain, and console myself with that
thought. I can even support, without much murmuring, the jangling of
the pupils’ piano at Miss Besom’s establishment for young ladies, next
door. Distance, and a party-wall, lend enchantment to the sound, and I
set no more store by it than I do by the chirruping of the birds in the
town-bred foliage at the extremity of Buckingham Street, or the puffing
and snorting of the halfpenny steamboats at the “Fox-under-the-Hill.” I
am so quiet, that I can allow the family of a distant blood-relation to
reside in the parlours for twelve months, without troubling myself about
their health; and I never yet rebelled at the perverse orthography of the
washerwoman, who persists in spelling my half-hose thus: “Won pare sox.”
When I die, I hope that they will lay me in a very quiet church-yard in
Kent, that I know, where some one who cared for me has been mouldering
away peacefully these four years, where the clergyman’s blind white
pony will browse upon the salad that I am eating by the roots; where
the children will come and have famous games—their silver voices and
pattering feet upon the velvet turf make out a pleasant noise, I wot;
and where they will write “_Requiescat in pace_” upon my gravestone; if,
indeed, I leave maravedis enough behind me for Mr. Farley to cut me an
inscription withal.

Yet, quiet as I am, I become at Eleven o’Clock in the Morning on every
day of the week save Sunday a raving, ranting maniac—a dangerous lunatic,
panting with insane desires to do, not only myself but other people, a
mischief, and possessed, less by hallucination than by rabies. For so
sure as the clock of St. Martin’s strikes eleven, so sure does my quiet
street become a pandemonium of discordant sounds. My teeth are on edge
to think of them. The “musicianers,” whose advent from Clerkenwell and
the East-end of London I darkly hinted in a preceding chapter, begin
to penetrate through the vaster thoroughfares, and make their hated
appearance at the head of my street. First Italian organ-grinder,
hirsute, sunburnt, and saucy, who grinds airs from the “Trovatore” six
times over, follows with a selection from the “Traviata,” repeated
half a dozen times, finishes up with the “Old Hundredth” and the
“Postman’s Knock,” and then begins again. Next, shivering Hindoo, his
skin apparently just washed in walnut juice, with a voluminous turban,
dirty white muslin caftan, worsted stockings and hob-nailed shoes,
who, followed by two diminutive brown imps in similar costume, sings
a dismal ditty in the Hindostanee language, and beats the tom-tom
with fiendish monotony. Next comes a brazen woman in a Scotch cap, to
which is fastened a bunch of rusty black feathers, apparently culled
from a mourning coach past service. She wears a faded tartan kilt,
fleshings, short calico trews, a velveteen jacket, tin buckles in her
shoes, and two patches of red brick-dust on her haggard cheeks, and
is supposed to represent a Scottish highlander. She dances an absurd
fling, interpolated occasionally with a shrill howl to the music of
some etiolated bagpipes screeded by a shabby rogue of the male sex, her
companion, arrayed in similar habiliments. Next come the acrobats—drum,
clarionet, and all. You know what those nuisances are like, without
any extended description on my part. Close on their heels follows the
eloquent beggar, with his numerous destitute but scrupulously clean
family, who has, of course, that morning parted with his last shirt.
Then a lamentable woman with a baby begins to whimper “Old Dog Tray.”
Then swoop into the street an abominable band of ruffians, six in
number. They are swarthy villains, dressed in the semblance of Italian
goatherds, and are called, I believe, _pifferari_. They play upon a kind
of bagpipes—a hideous pig-skin-and-walking-stick-looking affair, and
accompany their droning by a succession of short yelps and a spasmodic
pedal movement that would be a near approach to a sailor’s hornpipe, if
it did bear a much closer resemblance to the war-dance of a wild Indian.
Add to these the Jews crying “Clo’!” the man who sells hearthstones,
and the woman who buys rabbit-skins, the butcher, the baker, and the
boys screaming shrill Nigger melodies, and rattling pieces of slate
between their fingers in imitation of the “bones,” and you will be able
to form an idea of the quietude of our street. From the infliction of
the soot-and-grease-bedaubed and tambourine-and-banjo-equipped Ethiopian
serenaders, we are indeed mercifully spared; but enough remains to turn a
respectable thoroughfare into a saturnalia.

I can do nothing with these people. I shout, I threaten, I shake my fist,
I objurgate them from my window in indifferent Italian, but to no avail.
They defy, scorn, disregard, make light of me. They are encouraged in
their abominable devices, not merely by the idlers in the street, the
servant-maids gossiping at the doors, the boys with the baskets, and
the nurse children, but by the people at the windows, who seem to have
nothing to do but to look from their casements all day long. There is
an ancient party of the female persuasion opposite my humble dwelling,
who was wont to take intense interest in the composition of my literary
essays. She used to bring her work to the window at first; but she never
did a stitch, and soon allowed that flimsy pretext to fall through,
and devoted herself with unaffected enjoyment to staring at me. As I
am modest and nervous, I felt compelled to put a stop to this somewhat
too persevering scrutiny; but I disdained to adopt the pusillanimous
and self-nose-amputating plan of pulling down the window blinds. I
tried taking her portrait as she sat, like an elderly Jessica, at the
casement, and drew horrifying caricatures of her in red chalk, holding
them up, from time to time, for her inspection; but she rather seemed
to like this last process than otherwise; and I was obliged to change
my tactics. The constant use of a powerful double-barrelled Solomon’s
race-glass of gigantic dimensions was first successful in discomposing
her, and ultimately routed her with great moral slaughter; and she now
only approaches the window in a hurried and furtive manner. I daresay
she thinks my conduct most unhandsome. She and the tall man in the long
moustaches at number thirteen, all the pupils at the ladies’ school next
door, the two saucy little minxes in black merino and worked collars at
number nine, and that man with the bald head shaped like a Dutch cheese,
in the parlour at number nine, who is always in his shirt sleeves, drums
with his fingers on the window panes, and grins and makes faces at the
passers-by, and whom I conscientiously believe to be a confirmed idiot,
are all in a league against me, and have an alliance, offensive and
defensive, with the musical _canaille_ below. They cry out “Shame” when I
remonstrate with those nuisances: they shout and jeer at me when I sally
forth from the door, and make rabid rushes at the man with the bagpipes:
they inquire derisively whether I consider myself lord of the creation?
I am tempted—desperately tempted—to avail myself of my rights as a
Civis Romanus, to summon the aid of the police, and to give one of the
grinders, howlers, or droners in charge. Mr. Babbage, the arithmetician,
does it; why should not I? What progress can I make in “Twice Round the
Clock” in the midst of this hideous din? But then I remember, with much
inward trouble, that I have in public committed myself more than once
in favour of street music—that I have laughed at the folly of putting
down bagpipes and barrel-organs by act of Parliament. I remember, too—I
hope in all its force and Truth—a certain axiom, that the few must
always suffer for the enjoyment of the many—that we are not all sages in
decimals and logarithms—or people writing in books and newspapers—that
the sick, the nervous, the fastidious, and the hypochondriacal, are but
drops of water in a huge ocean of hale, hearty, somewhat thick-skinned
and thick-eared humanity, who like the noisy vagabonds who are my
bane and terror in the quiet street, and admire their distressing
performances. Some men cannot endure a gaping pig; to many persons the
odour of all roots of the garlic family is intolerable. I hate cats. I
had an aunt who said that she could not “abide” green as a colour. Yet
we should not be justified, I think, in invoking the terrors of the
legislature against roast pork, onions, cats, and green peas. Mr. Babbage
must pursue his mathematical calculations in a study at the back of his
house, and I must hie me to the Reading-room of the British Museum, or
turn out for a stroll.

And in this stroll, which, if the weather be fine, almost invariably
leads towards one or other of the parks, I am frequently permitted
to witness the imposing ceremony of “trooping the guard” in the
Palace-yard, St. James’s. Why her Majesty’s Foot Guards should be
“trooped” at eleven o’clock in the morning, and in what precise
evolutions the operation of “trooping” consists, I am unable to state.
Eleven o’clock, too, does not seem always a rigidly adhered-to hour; for,
on the mornings of the days consecrated to our “Isthmian games,” to the
cosmopolitan Derby, and the more aristocratic, but equally attractive
Ascot Cup, the time taken is nine instead of eleven, doubtless for the
convenience of the heavy guardsmen, who, with heavy cigars protruding
from their heavy moustaches, and heavy opera-glasses slung by their
sides, go solemnly down to the races in heavy drags.

To the uninitiated, “trooping the guard” appears to consist in some
hundred and fifty grenadiers in full uniform, their drums and fifes and
their brass band at their head, marching from the Horse Guards, across
the parade ground, and along the Mall to the Palace-yard, where the
Queen’s colours are stuck into a hole in the centre, where the officer on
guard salutes them, where the other officers chat in the middle of the
quadrangle, and where officers and men, and a motley crowd of spectators,
listen to the enlivening strains of the brass band playing selections
from the popular operas of the day. No complicated manœuvres seem to be
performed; the automaton-like inspection of the “troops” takes place on
the other side of the park; and when the colours are firmly fixed, and
left in charge of a sentry, the “troops” file off again, the officers
repairing to their clubs, and the soldiers to their barracks, while the
brass bandsmen at once subside into private life, and become civilians of
decidedly Cockney tendencies.

Hungry men are said, sometimes, to lull the raging of their appetites by
sniffing the hot, and, to some noses, fragrant breeze which is emitted
from between the gratings of an eating-house. To some the contemplation
of eel pies, smoking rounds of beef, rumpsteak pies, and pen’orths of
pudding, shining in the glory of dripping, and radiant with raisins, is
almost as satisfying as the absolute possession of those dainties. It is
certain that contented spirits do yet exist, by whom the sight of the
riches and the happiness of others is accepted as a compensation for the
wealth and the felicity which they do not themselves enjoy. It is a very
pleasant mental condition, this—to be able to stare a pastrycook’s window
out of countenance, and partake of, in imagination, the rich plum-cakes,
the raspberry-tarts, and the lobster-patties, without coveting those
dainties; to walk up Regent Street, and wear, mentally, the “ducks of
bonnets,” the Burnouse cloaks and the Llama shawls, which poverty forbids
us to purchase; to walk through the Vernon or Sheepshanks collections,
and hang up the delightful Landseers, Websters, and Mulreadys in
fantastic mind-chambers of our own; to call Hampton Court and Windsor
our palaces, and St. James’s and the Green our parks; to fancy that the
good people who have horses and carriages, and jewels, and silks, and
satins, have but a copyhold interest in them, and that the fee-simple of
all these fine things is in us. Such imaginative optimists can sit down
unmurmuringly to a Barmecide feast; the “Court Circular” pleases them
as much as an invitation to the Queen’s ball; a criticism on “Lucrezia
Borgia” at the opera delights them as much as an actual stall at Covent
Garden; and Mr. Albert Smith’s Egyptian Hall ascent of Mont Blanc, and
his more recent Chinese entertainment, are to them quite as full of
interest and adventure as a real pilgrimage to Chamouni, a toilsome
scramble up the “Grands Mulets,” a sail in a sampan on the Canton river,
or a “fightee pigeon” with the “Braves” in Hog Lane.

[Illustration: ELEVEN O’CLOCK A.M.: TROOPING THE GUARD AT ST. JAMES’S
PALACE.]

The immortal young ladies who have been occupied in their eternal
crochet-work any time since the siege of Troy, and who are called the
Fates, have decided that it is better for me to be Alone. I am condemned
for life to soliloquise. None of the young women with whom I have (to
adopt the term current in domestic service) “kept company,” would,
in the end, have anything to do with me. They were very punctual in
sending me cards—one sent me cake, but that was long ago—when they were
married. One said I squinted, another that I was ill-tempered, and a
third wondered at my impudence. Joan went off to Australia to join
her cousin the digger, who, having done well at Bendigo, had written
home for a wife, as he would for a Deans’ revolver. Sarah married the
linendraper (I am happy to state that he manifested himself stupid
and ferocious, and went, commercially, to the dogs within six months
after marriage); as for Rachel, she positively fell in love with the
tailor who came to measure me for my wedding suit, and married _him_. A
nursemaid with a perambulator nearly tripped me up the other day, and
sitting in that infantile chariot was Rachel’s eldest. Even the young
lady who sold sardines at Stettin, and who, while I was waiting three
years since for the ice to break up in the Baltic, undertook to teach
me the prettiest German I ever heard in Deutschland, evinced a decided
partiality for a certain baker with a Vandyke beard, who was a member of
the Philharmonic Society of that town on the Oder, and at length jilted
me for a trumpeter in a dragoon regiment, a burly knave in a striped
and fringed uniform, all red and yellow, like a flamingo. The heartless
conduct of the grocer’s daughter towards me has already been recorded in
print. So I am alone. Not repining, however, but taking pleasure in other
people’s children, with the additional consolation of not having their
little frocks and perambulators to pay for, and passably content to sit
on a mile-stone by the great roadside, and smoke the calumet of peace,
watching the wain of life, with youth on the box and pleasure in the
dickey, tear by, till the dust thrown up by the wheels has whitened my
hair, and it shall be time enough to think of a neat walking funeral for
One.

Now, do you understand why I alluded to the pleasures of imagination in
connection with the contemplation of cook-shops, pictures, and palaces?
Now, do you comprehend how a hopelessly solitary man—if you put a single
grain of philosophic _hachisch_ into that pacific calumet of his—can
derive so much pleasure and contentment from the sight of other folk’s
weddings? I say nothing of courtship, which, on the part of a third
party, argues a certain amount of, perhaps, involuntary eavesdropping and
espionage, but which, when the boys and girls love each other sincerely,
is as delightful a sight as the sorest of eyes, the sorest of hearts,
could desire to witness. What pretty ways they have, those simple young
“lovyers!” what innocent prattlings and rompings, what charming quarrels
and reconciliations! Edward would dance with Miss Totterdown last
night; Clara flirted most shamefully with Wertha Bjornsjertnjöe, the
Scandinavian poet, and Lady Walrus’s last lion. What confiding billings
and cooings! how supremely foolish they are! and what an abhorrent thing
is common-sense in love at all! Wondrously like ostriches, too, are
Jenny and Jemmy Jessamy. They hide their pretty heads in each other’s
bosoms, and fancy they are totally invisible. They have codes of masonic
telegraphy, as legible as Long Primer to the meanest understanding.
I reckon among my friends a professor of photography in fashionable
practice, and marvellous are the stories he has to tell of the by-play of
love that takes place sometimes in his glass studio. For you see, when,
in order to “focus” a young couple before him, he throws the curtain of
the camera over his head, Jenny and Jemmy Jessamy are apt, in the sweet
ignorance of love, to fancy that the operator can’t see a bit what is
going on; so Jenny arranges Jemmy’s hair, and gives the moustache a
twist, and there is a sly kiss, and a squeeze, and a pressure of the
foot or so, and a variety of harmless endearing blandishments, known to
our American cousins (who are great adepts at sweet-hearting) under the
generic name of “conoodling,” and all of which are faithfully transmitted
through the lens, and neatly displayed in an inverted position on the
field of the camera, to the edification of the discreet operator. Oh,
you enamoured young men and women, you don’t know that the eyes of
domestic Europe are always fixed on you, and that your pretty simperings
and whimperings form a drama which becomes the source of infinite
amusement and delight to the philosophic bystanders. And is it not much
better so, and that our lads and lasses should court in the simple,
kindly Anglo-Saxon way, than that we should adopt foreign manners, and
marry our wives, as in France, starched and prim from the convent or
the boarding-school? Away with your morose, sulky, icy, ceremonious
courtships. The Shepherd in Virgil, the moralist said, grew acquainted
with Love, and found him a native of the rocks. But he did not dwell
there in sulky solitude, I will be bound. The rock was most probably the
Rocher de Cancale, where he sat and ate _dinde truffée_, and quaffed
Chambertin, with his Psyche, in a new bonnet and cream-coloured gloves,
by his side. And they went to the play afterwards, and had merry times of
it, you may be sure.

[Illustration: ELEVEN O’CLOCK A.M.: A WEDDING AT ST. JAMES’S CHURCH,
PICCADILLY.]

I am very fond of weddings, and, to abandon for a moment the egotism
and engrossing self-sufficiency which so delightfully characterise my
sex, I fancy that the sight of the solemnisation of matrimony has equal
charms for that better part of creation, whose special vocation it is,
under all circumstances, to be married and happy, but who are oft-times,
alas! as hopelessly celibate as the Trappist. One can scarcely go to a
wedding without seeing some of these brave knights-errant, these _preux
chevalières_ of womanhood, these uncloistered nuns, these hermits in a
vale of wax lights and artificial flowers, clustering in the galleries,
or furtively ensconced in pews near the altar. They are very liberal
to the pew-openers, these kind old maids, and are always ready with
smelling-bottles if there be any fainting going on. They take their part
in the crying with praiseworthy perseverance, and echo the responses
in heartrending sobs; they press close to the bride as she comes down
the aisle on the arm of her spouse, and eye her approvingly and the
bridesmaids criticisingly; then go home, the big Church Service tucked
beneath their mantles—go home to the solitary mutton chop and bleak
shining hearth, with the cut paper pattern grinning through the bars
like a skeleton. There are some cynics who irreverently call old maids
“prancers,” and others who, with positive brutality, accuse them of
leading monkeys in a place which I would much rather not hear of, far
less mention. They are, to be sure, somewhat stiff and starched, have
uncomfortable prejudices against even the moderate use of mild cigars,
and persist in keeping hideous little dogs to snap at your ankles; but
how often would the contemptuous term “old maid,” were its reality
known, mean heroic self-sacrifice and self-denial—patience, fortitude,
unrepining resignation? No man, who is not a Caliban or Miserrimus,
need remain, his life long, a bachelor. The Siamese twins married; the
living skeleton was crossed in love, but afterwards consoled himself
with a corpulent widow; the hunch-backed Scarron found a beautiful woman
to love and nurse him; and General Tom Thumb turned benedict the other
day. But how many women—young, fair, and accomplished, pure and good and
wise—are doomed irrevocably to solitude and celibacy! Every man knows
such premature old maids; sees among a family of blooming girls one who
already wears the stigmata of old maidenhood. It chills the blood to see
these hopeless cases, to see the women resign themselves to their fate
with a sad meek smile—to come back, year after year, and find them still
meek, smiling, but sad, confirmed old maids. It is ill for me, who dwell
in quite a Crystal Palace of a glass house, to throw so much as a grain
of sand at the windows opposite, but I cannot refrain from sermonising
my fellows on their self-conceited bachelorhood. What dullards were
those writers in the “Times” newspaper about marriage and three hundred
a year! Did Adam and Eve have three halfpence a year when they married?
Has the world grown smaller? Are there no Australias, Americas, Indies?
Are there no such things as marrying on a pound a week in a top garret,
and ending in a mansion in Belgrave Square? no such things as toil,
energy, perseverance? husband and wife cheering one another on, and in
wealth at last pleasantly talking of the old times, the struggles and
difficulties? We hear a great deal now-a-days about people’s “missions.”
The proper mission of men is to marry, and of women to bear children;
and those who are deterred from marriage in their degree (for we ought
neither to expect nor to desire Squire B. to wed Pamela every day) by the
hypocritical cant about “society” and “keeping up appearances,” had much
better send society to the dogs and appearances to the devil, and have
nothing more to do with such miserable sophistries.

This diatribe, which I sincerely hope will increase the sale of
wedding-rings in the goldsmiths’ shops forty-fold, brings me naturally
to the subject of the second cartoon, by which the ingenious artist who
transcribes my inky men and women into flesh and blood, has chosen to
illustrate the hour of eleven o’clock in the morning. Here we are at a
fashionable wedding at St. James’s Church, Piccadilly.

If I had the tongue or pen of Mr. Penguin, the urbane and aristocratic
correspondent of the “Morning Post,” I should give you quite a vivid,
and at the same time a refined, description of that edifying spectacle—a
marriage in high life. How eloquent, and, by turn, pathetic and humorous,
I could be on the bevy of youthful bridesmaids—all in white tulle over
pink glacé silk, all in bonnets trimmed with white roses, and with
bouquets of camelias and lilies of the valley! How I could expatiate,
likewise, on the appearance of the beauteous and high-born bride, her
Honiton lace veil, her innumerable flounces; and her noble parents, and
the gallant and distinguished bridegroom, in fawn-coloured inexpressibles
and a cream-coloured face; and his “best man,” the burly colonel of the
Fazimanagghur Irregulars; and the crowd of distinguished personages who
alight from their carriages at the little wicket in Piccadilly, and pass
along the great area amid the cheers of the little boys! They are all so
noble and distinguished, that one clergyman can’t perform the ceremony,
and extra parsons are provided like extra oil-lamps on a gala night at
Cremorne. The register becomes an autograph-book of noble and illustrious
signatures; the vestry-room has sweet odours of Jocky Club and Frangipani
lingering about it for hours afterwards; the pew-opener picks up white
satin favours tied with silver twist. A white rose, broken short off at
the stem, lies unregarded on the altar-steps; and just within the rails
are some orange-blossoms from the bride’s coronal. For they fall and die,
the blossoms, as well as the brown October leaves. Spring has its death
as well as autumn: a death followed often by no summer, but by cold and
cruel winter. The blossoms fall and die, and the paths by the hawthorn
hedges are strewn with their bright corses. The blossoms droop and die:
the little children die, and the green velvet of the cemetery is dotted
with tiny grave-stones.

See, the bridal procession comes into garish Piccadilly, and, amid fresh
cheers and the pealing of the joy-bells, steps into its carriages.

    “Happy, happy, happy pair!
    None but the brave,
    None but the brave,
    None but the brave, deserve the fair.”

So sings Mr. John Dryden, whilom poet laureate. Let us hope that the
brides of St. James’s are all as fair as the bridegrooms are brave, and
that they all commence a career of happiness by that momentous plunge
into the waters of matrimony at eleven o’clock in the morning. With which
sincere aspiration, I will clap an extinguisher on the Hymeneal torch,
which I have temporarily lighted, and so to read the births, marriages,
and deaths in the “Times.”




NOON.—THE JUSTICE-ROOM AT THE MANSION-HOUSE, AND THE “BAY TREE.”


The red-whiskered, quick-tempered gentleman, who carried the shiny
leather bag and the bundle of sticks—umbrella and fishing-rods tied
together like the fasces of a Roman lictor—and who wore a cloak
gracefully over his forty-shilling suit of heather tweed, “thoroughly
well shrunk,” the gentleman who, at Morley’s Hotel, Trafalgar Square,
and at twenty minutes before twelve, engaged a Hansom cabman, No. 9,009,
and bade him drive “like anything” (but he said like something which I
decline to mention) to the London Bridge Terminus of the South-Eastern
Railway, has thrust his bundle of sticks, &c., through the little
trap-door in the cabriolet’s roof, and has savagely ordered the driver to
stop, or to drive him to Jericho, or to the deuce. But the high-towering
Jehu of 9,009 cannot drive to the dominions of the deuce, even as did
“Ben,” that famous Jarvey of the olden time, immortalised in the ballad
of “Tamaroo.” He can drive neither to the right nor to the left, nor
backwards nor forwards; for he is hemmed in, and blocked up, and jammed
together in the middle of the Poultry; and just as a sarcastic saloon
omnibus driver behind jeeringly bids him “keep moving,” accompanying the
behest by the aggressive taunt of “gardner;” and just as the charioteer
of the mail-cart in front affectionately recommends him not to be in
a hurry, lest he should injure his precious health, Twelve o’Clock is
proclaimed by the clock of St. Mildred’s, Poultry; and cabman 9,009 has
lost his promised extra shilling for extra speed, and the red-whiskered
gentleman has lost his temper, and the train into the bargain, and
there will be weeping at Tunbridge Wells this afternoon, where a young
lady, with long ringlets and a white muslin jacket, will mourn for her
Theodore, and will not be comforted—till the next train arrives.

It is noon, high noon, in the City of London. Why did not the incautious
cabman drive down Cannon Street, the broad and unimpeded? or why did
he not seek his destination by crossing Waterloo Bridge—he of the red
whiskers would have paid the toll cheerfully—and tread the mazes of
Union Street, Borough? Perhaps he was an inexperienced cabman, new
to its dædalian ways. Perhaps he was a prejudiced and conservative
cabman, adhering to the old Poultry as the corporation adhered to the
old Smithfield, and detesting newfangled thoroughfares. Perhaps he
was a misanthropic cabman, whose chief delight was to make travellers
lose trains. If such be the case, he has his wicked will now; and the
red-whiskered gentleman, sulkily alighting, scowlingly pays him his
legal fare, leaves him grumbling, and retires himself moodily muttering,
conscious that he has nearly two hours before him through which to kick
his heels, and not knowing what on earth to do with himself. Be of good
cheer, red-whiskered, shipwrecked one. Comfort ye, for I am here, the
wanderer of the clock-face, and the dweller on the threshold of time. I
will show you brave sights, and make your heart dance with mulligatawny
soup and Amontillado sherry at the “Cock,” in Threadneedle Street. You
are not hungry yet? Well, we will stroll into the Stereoscopic Company’s
magnificent emporium in Cheapside, and mock our seven senses with the
delusions of that delightful toy, which, if Sir David Brewster didn’t
invent, he should properly have invented. You care not for the arts?
Shall we cross by King Street, and have a stare at Guildhall, with Gog
and Magog, and the monument that commemorates Beckford’s stern resolve to
“stand no nonsense” from George III.? Or we may stroll into Garraway’s,
and mark how the sale of sandwiches and sherry-cobblers may be combined
with the transfer of land and the vending of freehold houses. There
is the auction-mart, too, if you have a fancy to see Simony sales by
auction, and advowsons of the cures of immortal souls knocked down for
so many pounds sterling. There is the rotunda of the Bank of England,
with its many-slamming, zinc-plated doors, and its steps and flags worn
away by the boots of the ever-busy stockbrokers. We will not go into the
Dividend Office, for I have no dividends to draw now, and the sight makes
me sad; neither will we enter the Great Hall where William the Third’s
statue is (prettily noticed by Mr. Addison in a full-bottom-wigged
allegory in the “Spectator”), and where the urbane clerks are for ever
honouring the claims upon the old lady in Threadneedle Street; giving
“notes for gold” and “gold for notes.” We will not enter, because we
don’t want any change just now; and one of the Brothers Forrester, who
is sure to be hovering about the court-yard, in conversation with yonder
cock-hatted beadle in blazing scarlet, might think we came for gold or
notes that didn’t belong to us. The Bullion Office we cannot visit, for
we haven’t an order of admission; and there is one place especially, O
rubicund-headed traveller, where we will be exceedingly cautious not to
show our faces. That place is the interior of the Stock Exchange. I am
not a “lame duck;” I never, to my knowledge, “waddled;” I never attempted
to pry into the secrets of the “bulls” and the “bears;” my knowledge
of stockjobbing is confined to the fact that I once became possessed,
I scarcely know how, only that I paid for them, of fifty shares in a
phantom gold-mining company; that I sold them, half an hour afterwards,
at half-a-crown premium to a mysterious man in a dark room, up a court
off Cornhill, who to every human being who entered his lair handed a
long list covered with cabalistic figures, with the remark that it was
“very warm,” and which—the list, not the weather—I believe contained
the current prices of stocks, though it might have related to the
market value of elephants, for aught I knew; that I pocketed the fifty
half-crowns, and that I have never heard anything of the phantom company
from that day to this. Vice-Chancellor somebody will be down upon me
some day as a “contributory,” I suppose, and I shall be delivered over
to the tormentors; but, meanwhile, I will tell you why I won’t take my
red-whiskered friend into the Stock Exchange—why I should like mine enemy
to go there as soon as convenient. I have heard such horrible stories
of the tortures inflicted by the members of the “House,” upon unwary
strangers who have strayed within its precincts; of the savage cries of
“two hundred and one,” the shrieks, the yells, the whistles, and the
groans; the dancing round the captive, the covering him with flour, the
treading on his miserable toes, the buffeting of his wretched ears, the
upripping of his unhappy coat-collar, and chalking of his luckless back;
the “bonneting,” the “ballooning,” and the generally fiendish cruelties
which intruders upon the speculators for the “account” have to suffer,
that I would sooner venture without permission behind the scenes of a
well-regulated theatre, or attempt to beard the lion in his den, or walk
up, unannounced, into the sanctum of the editor of the “Times” newspaper,
or pay a morning call in a Choctaw wigwam, myself being a Pawnee or a
Sioux, at war with my friends the C.’s, or pass through Portugal Street,
Cursitor Street, or Chancery Lane, at any hour of the day or night, if
my affairs should happen to embarrassed, than trust myself to the tender
mercies of the members of the Stock Exchange. They are the staunchest and
most consistent of Conservatives.

Whither, then, away! Why, bless me, how stupid I have been! The
Mansion House police-court opens at noon precisely, and we may enjoy,
gratuitously, the sight of the Corporation Cadi, the Cæsar of Charlotte
Row, the great Lord Mayor of London himself, dispensing justice to
all comers. By the way, I wish his Lordship would render unto us one
little modicum of justice, combined with equity, by ridding us of the
intolerable swarm of ragged, disgusting-looking juvenile beggars, who
beset pedestrians at the doors of Messrs. Smith, Payne, and Smith’s
banking-house, and of the scarcely less intolerable importunities of the
omnibus cads who are wrestling for old ladies and young children on the
very threshold of the Mansion House. Here we are at the Municipal Hall of
London’s Ædiles; architecture grand but somewhat gloomily florid, like
George the First, say, in a passion, his bulbous Hanoverian jaw flaming
from his perturbed perriwig—glowering, half-angry, half-frightened, as
he tears his embroidered coat-tail from the grasp of Lady Nithsdale,
and obstinately refuses pardon for that poor Jacobite lord yonder
cooped up in the gloomy Tower under sentence of death, but who, thanks
to his wife’s all-womanly devotion (well did Madame de Lavallete
imitate her bright example to save _her_ chivalrous husband just one
hundred years afterwards), will cheat the headsman’s axe and George’s
Hanoverian malice yet. The attic storey was evidently clapped on as an
afterthought, and threatens to tumble over on to the portico; the whole
is profusely ornamented, like everything civic, and reminds me generally
of a freestone model of the Lord Mayor’s state carriage, squared in the
Corinthian manner, and the gilt gingerbread well covered with smoke and
soot.

Not by that door in the basement will we enter, which is flanked by
announcements relative to charity dinners, and youths who have absconded
from their friends. Within that eternally-gaslit office is the place
of business of the Eumenides of finance, whose grim duty it is to
pursue forgers and bank-robbers through the world. There dwell, for
thief-catching purposes, the terrible Forresters. Not by that door in
Charlotte Row. Don’t you see the handsome carriage, with the fat, brown,
gaudily harnessed horses drawn up before it, and the superb powdered
footmen sucking their bamboo-cane tops? How odd it is that you can always
tell the difference between a footman appertaining to one of the high
civic dignitaries, and the flunkey of a real patrician. The liveries, on
a drawing-room day, for instance, are equally rich, equally extravagant
in decoration, and absurd in fashion; both servitors sport equally large
cocked-hats, equally long canes, and have an equal amount of powder
dredged over their heads; yet, on either flunkey’s brow are the stigmata
“East” or “West” of Temple Bar, stamped as legibly as the brand of Cain.
The door in Charlotte Row is his Lordship’s private entrance; and her
Ladyship is very probably at this moment preparing to go out for an
airing. Not by that other lateral door in George Street—that low-browed,
forbidding-looking portal. That is the prisoners’ entrance. There the
grim cellular van brings and waits for the victims of Themis. There it
sets down and takes up, if not the chief actors, at least those who are
most deeply interested in the moving drama which is every day enacted in
the police tribunal of the Mansion House.

[Illustration: NOON: THE JUSTICE-ROOM AT THE MANSION HOUSE.]

So—up this broad, roomy flight of granite steps on the Lombard Street
side of the Mansion House frontage—on through a double barrier of
swing-doors at the corresponding angle beneath the portico; and in less
time than it would take to accept a bill (an operation in comparison to
the celerity of which a pig’s whisper is an age, and the pronunciation
of the mystic words “Jack Robinson” a life-long task), we are within
the sanctuary of municipal justice. The first thing that strikes the
stranger, accustomed as he may be to frequenting other police-courts,
is the unwonted courtesy of the officials, and their gorgeous costumes.
About Bow Street, Lambeth, Westminster, there hangs an indefinable but
pervading miasma of meanness and squalor. A settled mildew seems to
infest the walls and ceiling, a chronic dust to mantle the furniture
and flooring. No one connected with the court, officially or otherwise,
with the single exception of the Magistrate—who, always smug and clean
shaven, and in a checked morning neckerchief and a high shirt collar,
looks like a judicial edition of Major Pendennis—seems to have had his
clothes brushed for a week or his boots blacked for a month. A dreadful
jail-bird odour ascends from the ill-favoured auditory. The policemen
are shabby in attire and morose in manner. The buckles of their belts
are dull, and their buttons tarnished. They hustle you hither and
thither, and order you in or out in a manner most distressing to your
nerves; and the gloomy usher thrusts a ragged Testament into your hands,
and swears you as though he were swearing _at_ you. But at the Mansion
House there is a bluff, easy-going, turtle-and-venison-fed politeness
generally manifest. You enter and you emerge from the court without being
elbowed or shoved. The city policemen are more substantial-looking,
well to do, and better natured men than their metropolitan _confrères_.
Some of them have the appearance of small freeholders, and others, I am
sure, have snug sums in the savings’ banks. As to the jailers, ushers,
court-keepers, warrant-officers, marshalmen, and other multifarious
hangers-on of civic justice, they are mostly men of mature age, rosy,
bald and white-headed sages, who remember Sir John Key and the great
Sir Claudius Hunter, and mind the time when Mr. Alderman Wood rode on
horseback at the side of Queen Caroline’s hearse, on the occasion of
the passage of that injured lady’s funeral procession through the city.
As to their attire, it is positively—if I may be allowed the use of a
barbarism—“splendiferous.” Stout broadcloth, bright gilt buttons, with
elaborate chasings of civic heraldry, scarlet collars, with deep gold
lace: none of your paltry blue blanketing, horn buttons, and worsted
gloves. No doubt, when in full uniform, the “splendiferous” functionaries
all wear cocked-hats. Maybe, feathers. There is one weazened creature who
flits in and out of a side door, to the left of the Lord Mayor’s chair,
and is perpetually handing up printed forms to his Lordship or to the
chief clerk. I don’t know exactly what he is, whether the Lord Mayor’s
butler, or the sword-bearer’s uncle, or the city-marshal’s grandfather,
or the water-bailiff’s son-in-law; but the front of his coat is profusely
ornamented with bars of gold braid, like pokers from Crœsus’s kitchen,
and on his shoulders he wears a pair of state epaulettes, the which give
him somewhat of a military appearance, and, contrasting with his civilian
spectacles and white neckcloth, would produce an effect positively
sublime if it were not irresistibly ludicrous. The home of Beadledom—its
last home, I am afraid, after the exhaustion of the Windsor uniform, and
that of the Elder Brethren of the Trinity House—will be at the Mansion
House.

The architect who has contrived the new Justice-room in this stately
edifice must have been, if not a man of genius, at least one of original
conceptions. The old police-court—sacred to the manes of Mr. Hobler—was
simply a Cave of Trophonius and Den of Despair. There was no light in
it—“only darkness visible;” and when you peered at the misty prisoner
in the dock, you were always reminded of Captain Macheath in his cell,
when the inhuman Mr. Lockit wouldn’t allow him any more candles, and
threatened to clap on extra fetters in default of an immediate supply on
the captain’s part of “garnish” or jail fees. But the Palladio who has
arisen to remedy these defects has contrived to introduce a considerable
amount of light—only it labours under the trifling disadvantage of being
all in the wrong place. The Lord Mayor, with his back to the window,
sits in a reflected light, just as does Wilkie’s portrait of the Duke of
York; and the fine effect of the city arms carved on his chair, to say
nothing of his Lordship’s gold chain and furred robe, is thereby totally
lost. Mr. Goodman and the clerks, who are all very gentlemanly-looking
individuals, much given to all-round collars and parting their hair down
the middle, fill up commitments and make out summonses in a puzzling
haze of chiaro oscuro; the reporters are compelled to pore over their
“Times” with their noses close to the paper (for no one ever saw a police
reporter do anything save read the newspaper, though we are sure to read
a verbatim narrative of the case in which we are interested next day),
and the general audience is lost in a Cimmerian gloom. To make amends,
there is plenty of light on the ceiling, and some liberal patches of
it on the walls, and a generous distribution of its bounty on the bald
heads, golden epaulettes, and scarlet collars of the marshalmen. We can’t
have everything we want, not even in the way of Light. Let us be thankful
that there is some of it about, even as it behoves us to be exceedingly
grateful that there is such a vast amount of wealth in the world. Other
people possess it—only, we don’t.

This, then, is the justice-room of the Mansion House. I have not given
you, _seriatim_, a George Robins’s catalogue of its contents, but by bits
and bits I trust you will have been enabled to form a tolerably correct
mind-picture of its contents. My Lord Mayor in the chair, clerks before
him, reporters to the right, marshalmen left; spectacled official at the
desk in the left-hand corner—the summoning officer, I think—audience not
too tightly packed into a neat pen at the back of the court; dock in the
centre, and the prisoner—Ah! the prisoner!

Did it never strike you, in a criminal court of assize—“the judges all
ranged, a terrible show,” the solemn clerk of the arraigns gazing over
the indictment, the spectators almost breathless with excited curiosity,
rays from opera glasses refracted from the gallery, Regent Street bonnets
and artificial flowers relieving the dark mass of the menfolk’s dress,
the bar bewigged, the eloquent advocate for the defence thundering forth
genteel philippics against the eloquent counsel for the prosecution—did
it never strike you, I say, what a terrible fuss and bother, and calling
on Jupiter to lift a wagon wheel out of a rut, what a waste of words,
and show, and ceremonial all this became, when its object, the End to
all these imposing means, was one miserable creature in the dock, with
spikes, and rue, and rosemary before him, accused of having purloined
a quart pot? As for the prisoner who is this day arraigned before the
mighty Lord Mayor—but first stand on tiptoe. There he is, God help him
and us all! a miserable, weazened, ragged, unkempt child, whose head, the
police reports will tell us to-morrow, “scarcely reached to the railing
of the dock.” He has been caught picking pockets. It is not his first,
his second, his third offence. He is an incorrigible thief. The great
Lord Mayor tells him so with a shake of his fine head of hair. He must
go to jail. To jail with him. He has been there before. It is the only
home he ever had. It is his preparatory school for the hulks. The jail
nursing-mother to thousands, and not so stony-hearted a step-mother as
the streets. He is nobody’s child, nobody save the police knows anything
about him, he lives nowhere; but in the eyes of the law he is somebody.
He is a figure in a tabular statement, a neat item to finish a column in
a report, withal. He is somebody to Colonel Jebb and Mr. Capper of the
Home Office, and, in the end, the Ordinary of Newgate, the sheriffs, and,
especially, somebody to CALCRAFT. He is somebody to whip, somebody to
put to the crank, and into “punishment jackets,” and to “deprive of his
bed and gas,” and gag, and drench with water, and choke with salt, and
otherwise torture _à la mode de_ Birmingham (Austin’s improved method),
somebody to build castellated jails for, somebody to transport, somebody
to hang.

There are reformatories, you say, for such as these. Yes, those admirable
institutions do exist; but do you know, O easily-satisfied optimist!
that police magistrates every day deplore that reformatories, niggardly
subsidised by a State grudging in every thing but jails, and gyves, and
gibbets, are nine tenths of them full, and can receive no more inmates,
even though recommended to them by “the proper authorities?” But the
streets are fuller still of strayed lambs, and though wolves devour them
by the score each day, the tainted flock of lost ones still increases and
increases.

I must tell you, that before the “case of wipes,” as an irreverent
bystander called the _procès_ of the pickpocket, was gone into (a
good-for-nothing rascal that _filou_, deservedly punished, of course),
what are called the night charges were disposed of. As I shall have
something to say of the manners and customs of these night charges
at another hour in the morning and in another place, I will content
myself with informing you now, that a blue bonnet and black silk velvet
mantle, charged with being drunk and disorderly in Cheapside the night
before, were set at liberty without pecuniary mulct, it being her, or
their, first offence; but a white hat with a black band, surmounting
a rough coat, cord trousers, and Balbriggan boots, who had fought
four omnibus conductors, broken eighteen panes of glass, demolished
sundry waiters, and seriously damaged the beadle of the Royal Exchange
(off duty, and enjoying the _dulce deripere in loco_ in the shape of
cold whiskey-and-water in a shady tavern somewhere up a court of the
Poultry)—all in consequence of their (or his) refusal to pay for a bottle
of soda-water, was fined in heavy sums—the aggregate cost of his whistle
being about six pounds. The white hat was very penitent, and looked (the
face under it likewise) very haggard and tired, and, in addition to his,
or its, or their penalty, munificently contributed half a sovereign to
the poor box. My Lord Mayor was severe but paternal, and hoped with
benignant austerity that he might never see the white hat there again;
in which hope, and on his part, I daresay the white hat most cordially
joined.

I never could make out what they are always doing with paupers at the
Mansion House. I never pay his Lordship a visit without finding a bevy
of the poor things pottering about in a corner under the care of some
workhouse official, and being ultimately called up to be exorcised or
excommunicated, or, at all events, to have something done to them, under
the New Poor Law Act. This morning there are at least a dozen of them,
forlorn, decrepit, shame-faced, little old men, cowering and shivering,
although the day is warm enough, in their uncomfortable-looking gray
suits. Pauper females seem to be at a discount at the Mansion House,
save when, brazen-faced, blear-eyed, and dishevelled, they are dragged
in droves to the bar to be committed to Holloway prison, for a month’s
hard labour, for shivering innumerable panes of glass, throwing cataracts
of gruel about, and expressing an earnest desire to lacerate with sharp
cutlery the abdominal economy of the master of the City of London Union.
Of incarnations of male impecuniosity, there is a lamentable plenty and
to spare.

The pickpocket is succeeded by a distinguished burglar, well known
in political—I beg pardon, in police—circles. There is no absolute
charge of felony against him at present, and the only cause for his
appearance to-day is his having been unfortunate enough to fall in
with an acquaintance, who knew him by sight, in the shape of a city
police-constable, who forthwith took him into custody for roaming about
with intent to commit a felony. My Lord having heard a brief biographical
sketch of his career, and being satisfied that he is a “man of mark”
in a felonious point of view, sends him to Holloway for three months,
which, considering that the fellow has committed, this time, at least,
no absolute crime, seems, at the first blush, something very like a
gross perversion of justice, and an unwarrantable interference with the
liberty of the subject. When subsequently, however, I gather that a few
inconsiderable trifles, such as a “jemmy,” a bunch of skeleton keys, a
“knuckle duster,” and a piece of wax candle, all articles sufficiently
indicative of the housebreaker’s stock-in-trade, have been found in his
possession, I cease to quarrel with the decision, and confess that my
burglarious friend’s incarceration, if not in strict accordance with law,
is based on very sound principles of equity. After the housebreaker,
there are two beggar women and a troop of ragged children—twenty-one
days; and a most pitiable sight to see and hear—beggar woman, children,
and sentence, and their state of life into which it has _not_ pleased
Heaven to call, but cruel and perverse man to send them. Then an Irish
tailor who has had a slight dispute with his wife the night before, and
has corporeally chastised her with a hot goose—a tailor’s goose, be it
understood—to the extent of all but fracturing her skull. He is sent for
four months’ hard labour, which is rather a pleasurable thing to hear,
although I should derive infinitely more delectation from the sentence if
it included a sound thrashing.

But, holloa! we have been here three-quarters of an hour, and it is
close upon one o’clock. Come, my red-whiskered friend, I think we have
had enough of the Mansion House Justice-room. Let us make a bow to his
Lordship, and evaporate. You want some lunch, you say—you are hungry now;
well, let us go and lunch accordingly; but where?

I mentioned Garraway’s and the Cock. There is the Anti-Gallican, famous
for soups. There is Birch’s, with real turtle, fit for Olympian deities
to regale upon. There is Joe’s in Finch Lane, if you feel disposed for
chop or steak, sausage or bacon, and like to see it cooked yourself
on a Brobdignagian gridiron. No: you want something simple, something
immediate; well, then, let us go to the Bay Tree.

I never knew exactly the name of the street in which the Bay Tree is
situated. I know you go down a narrow lane, and that you will suddenly
come upon it, as a jack-in-the-box suddenly comes upon you. The first
time I was taken there was by a friend, who, just prior to our arrival
at the house of refection, took me up a dark entry, showed me a small
court-yard, and, at its extremity, a handsome-looking stone building.
_That is Rothschild’s_, he said, and I thought I should have fainted. I
am not a City man, and when I come eastward, it is merely (of course) to
make a morning call on my friend the Governor of the Bank of England, or
the Secretary for India for the time being, at his palace in Leadenhall
Street. When I travel in foreign parts, my brougham (of course) takes
me to the London Bridge Terminus. Authors never come into the City
now-a-days, save to visit their bankers or their publishers. Authors ride
blood horses, dine with dukes, and earn ten thousand a year. Such, at
least, is the amount of their income surmised to be by the Commissioners
of Income Tax, when they assess them arbitrarily and at such a figure
their opposing creditors declare their revenue should be estimated, when
they petition the Court for the Relief of Insolvent Debtors.

I never sat down in the Bay Tree; though its premises include, I believe,
vast apartments for smoking and punch-bibbing purposes. I never looked
one of the innumerable assistants (are they barmen or barmaids?) in the
face. I was always in such a hurry. All I know of the establishment is,
that it is a capital place to lunch at, and that everything is very
excellent and very cheap; and that the thousands who resort to it between
eleven and three, always seem to be in as desperate a hurry as I am.




ONE P.M.—DOCK LONDON AND DINING LONDON.


This modest series of papers brought me, at the time of their
composition, into great trouble, which was very nearly resulting in my
complete discomfiture. Perhaps the severest of my trials was having to
write the book at all, possessing, as is my misfortune, of course, a
constitutional disinclination for the avocation to which I have devoted
myself (as a _gagne pain_, or bread-winning mean). I didn’t so much mind
the ladies and gentlemen, who, since the commencement of the periodical
in which these articles were originally published—ladies and gentlemen
personally quite unknown to me—who overwhelmed me with correspondence;
some denouncing, others upbraiding, many ridiculing, and a few—a
very few—eulogising yours to command. I didn’t so much object to the
attentions of those professional begging-letter writers, who are good
enough to include authors in their list of possible contributaries, and
who were profuse lately in passionate appeals (in bold, clerkly hands)
for pecuniary assistance; for though, like Bardolph, I have nothing, and
cannot even coin my nose for guineas, or my blood for drachmas, it is
not the less flattering to a man’s minor vanities to receive a begging
letter. I can imagine an old pauper out for a holiday, coming home to
the workhouse, quite elated at having been accosted in the street by a
mendicant, and asked for a halfpenny. I could bear with equanimity—nay,
could afford to smile at—the people who went about saying things (who
_are_ the people who go about saying things, I wonder!) who ingeniously
circulated reports that I was dead; that I wrote these papers under a
pseudonym; that they were plagiarisms from some others written twenty
years ago; and that I never wrote them at all. I disregarded such
insinuations serenely; for who among us is exempt from such bald chat?
The very stupidest have their Boswells—the very meanest have those to
envy them, as well as the Great and Learned! There are people at this
very moment, who are going about saying that Jones has pawned his plate,
that the bailiffs are in Thompson’s country house, that Robinson has
written himself out, that Brown has run away with Jenkins’s wife, that
Muggins has taken to brandy-and-water, that Simpkins murdered Eliza
Grimwood, that Larkins cut Thistlewood’s head off, and that Podgers
was tried at the Old Bailey, in the year ’thirty-five, for an attempt
to set the Thames on fire. But I was infinitely harassed while the
clock was ticking periodically—the efforts I had to make to keep it
from running down altogether!—by the great plague of “Suggesters.” From
the metropolitan and suburban postal districts, from all parts of the
United Kingdom—the United Kingdom, pshaw! from the Continent generally,
and from across the broad Atlantic (fortunately, the return mail from
Australia was not yet due)—suggestions poured in as thickly as letters of
congratulation on one who has just inherited a vast fortune. If there had
been five hundred in lieu of four-and-twenty hours in “Twice Round the
Clock,” the Great Suggestions I received had stomach for them all. The
Suggesters would take no denial: I was bound under terrific penalties to
adopt, endorse, carry out, their hints,—else would they play the dickens
with me. I _must_ have a sing-song meeting for nine p.m.; the committee
of a burial club at ten; the dissecting-room of an hospital at eleven; a
postal receiving-house, a lawyer’s office, a rag, bones, and bottle shop,
the tollgate of Waterloo Bridge, and the interior of a Hammersmith ’bus,
at some hour or other of the day or night. The Suggestions were oral as
well as written. Strange men darted up on me from by-streets, caught at
my button with trembling fingers, told me in husky tones of their vast
metropolitan experience, and impressed on me the necessity of a graphic
tableau of Joe Perks, the sporting barber’s, at one o’clock in the
morning. Low-browed merchants popped from shady shell-fish shops, and,
pointing to huge lobsters, asked where they could send the crustaceous
delicacies with their compliments, and how excellent a thing it would
be to give a view of the aristocracy supping at Whelks’s celebrated
oyster and kippered salmon warehouse after the play. And, finally, a shy
acquaintance of mine, with a face like an over-ripe Stilton cheese, and
remotely connected with the Corporation of London—he may be, for aught I
know, a ticket-porter in Doctors’ Commons, or a hanger-on to the water
bailiff—favoured me with an occult inuendo that a word-picture of the
Court of Common Council will be the very thing for four p.m., fluttering
before my dazzled eyes a phantom ticket for the Guildhall banquet. In
vain I endeavoured to convince these respectable Suggesters, that the
papers in question were not commenced without a definite plan of action;
that such plan, sketched forth years since, duly weighed, adjusted,
and settled, after mature study and deliberation, not only so far as
I am concerned, but by “parties” deeply learned in the mysteries of
London Life, and versed in the recondite secret of pleasing the public
taste, had at length been put into operation, and was no more capable
of alteration than were the laws of the Medes and Persians. But all to
no purpose did I make these representations. The Suggesters wouldn’t be
convinced; their letters continued to flow in. They found out my address
at last (they have lost it now, ha, ha!), and knocked my door down;
bringing me peremptory letters of introduction from people I didn’t know,
or didn’t care five farthings about, or else introducing themselves
boldly, in the “Bottle Imp” manner, with an implied “You must learn to
love me;” they nosed me in the lobby, and saw me dancing in the hall, and
my only refuge at last was to go away. Yes; the pulsations of time had to
beat behind the dial of a clock in the rural districts; and these lines
were written among the hay and the ripening corn, laughing a bitter laugh
to think that the postman was toiling up the quiet street in London with
piles of additional suggestions, and that the Suggesters themselves were
waiting for me in my usual haunts, in the fond expectation of a button to
hold, or an ear to gloze suggestions within.

I tried the sea-shore; but found London-super-Mare sweltering, stewing,
broiling, frying, fizzing, panting, in the sun—like Marseilles, minus the
evil odours—to such an extent, and so utterly destitute of shade, that I
was compelled to leave it. The paint was blistering on the bright green
doors; the shingly pavement seemed to cry out “Come and grill steaks on
me!” the pitch oozed from the seams of the fishing-boats; the surf hissed
as it came to kiss the pebbles on the beach; the dial on the pier-head
blazed with concentric rays; the chains of the suspension bridge were
red hot; the camera obscura glared white in the sunshine; the turf on
the Steyne was brown and parched, like a forgotten oasis in a desert;
the leaves on the trees in the pavilion gardens glittered and chinked in
the summer breeze, like new bright guineas; the fly-horses hung their
heads, their poor tongues protruding, their limbs flaccid, and their
scanty tails almost powerless to flap away the swarms of flies, which
alone were riotous and active of living creation, inebriating themselves
with saccharine suction in the grocers’ shops, and noisily buzzing their
scanmag in private parlours; the flymen dozed on their boxes; the pushers
of invalid perambulators slumbered peacefully beneath the hoods of
their own Bath chairs; the ladies in the round hats found it too hot to
promenade the cliff, and lolled instead at verandahed windows, arrayed
in the most ravishing of muslin morning wrappers, and conversed languidly
with exquisites, whose moustaches were dank with moisture, and who had
scarcely energy enough to yawn. The captivating amazons abandoned for the
day their plumed hats, their coquettish gauntlets, their wash-leather
sub-fusk garments with the straps and patent-leather boots, and deferred
their cavalcades on the skittish mares till the cool of the evening;
the showy dragoon officers confined themselves, of their own free will,
to the mess-room of their barracks on the Lewes road, where they sipped
sangaree, smoked fragrancias, read “Bell’s Life,” and made bets on every
imaginable topic. The hair of the little Skye terriers no longer curled,
but hung supine in wiry hanks; the little children made piteous appeals
to their parents and guardians to be permitted to run about without
anything on; the two clerks at the branch bank, who are sleepy enough in
the coldest weather, nodded at each other over the ledgers which had no
entries in them. The only sound that disturbed the drowsy stillness of
the streets was the popping of ginger-beer corks; and the very fleas in
the lodging-houses lost all their agility and vivacity. No longer did
they playfully leap—no longer archly gyrate; they crawled and crept,
like their low relatives the bugs, and were caught and crushed without
affording the slightest opportunity for sport. It was mortally hot at
London-super-Mare, and I left it. Then I tried that English paradise
of the west, Clifton; but woe is me! the Downs were so delightful;
the prospect so exquisitely lovely; the Avon winding hundreds of feet
beneath me, like a silver skein, yet bearing big three-masted ships on
its bosom; the rocks and underwood so full of matter for pleasant, lazy
cogitation, that I felt the only exertion of which I was capable, to be
writing sonnets on the Avon and its sedgy banks, or making lame attempts
at pre-Raphaelite sketches in water-colours; or thinking about doing
either, which amounts to pretty nearly the same thing. So I came away
from Clifton too, and hung out my sign HERE. (It is THERE now: swallows
have come and gone, snows have gathered and melted, babies prattle now
who were unborn and unthought of then.) Ye shall not know where Here was
situated, oh, ye incorrigible Suggesters. No more particular indices
of its whereabouts will I give, even to the general public, than that
close to my study was a dry skittle-ground, where every day—the hotter
the better—I exercised myself with the wooden “cheese” against the seven
and a-half pins which were all that the dry skittle-ground could furnish
forth towards the ordinary nine; that over-against this gymnastic course
was an _étable_, a “shippon,” as they call it in the north, where seven
cows gravely ruminated; and that, at the end of a yard crowded with
agricultural implements which old Pyne alone could draw, there was a
Stye, from which, looking over its palings,

    “All start, like boys who, unaware,
    Ranging the woods to find a hare,
    Come to the mouth of some dark lair:
    Where, growling low, a fierce old bear
    Lies amid bones and blood.”

Not that any fierce or ancient member of the ursine tribe resided
therein; but that it was the residence of a horrific-looking old sow, a
dreadful creature, that farrowed unheard-of families of pigs, that lay
on her broadside starboard the live-long day, winking her cruel eye,
and grunting with a persistent sullenness. The chief swineherd proudly
declared her to be “the viciousest beast as ever was,” and hinted darkly
that she had killed a Man. The chief swineherd and I were friends. He was
my “putter-up” at skittles, and did me the honour to report among the
neighbouring peasantry, that “barrin’ the gent as cum here last autumn,
and was off his head” (insane, I presume); I was “the very wust hand at
knock-’em-downs he ever see.” It is something to be popular in the rural
districts; and yet I was not three miles distant from the Regent Circus.

       *       *       *       *       *

My eyes are once again turned to the clock face. It is One o’Clock in
the Afternoon, and I must think of London. Come back, ye memories: open
Sesame, ye secret chambers of the brain, and let me transport myself away
from the dry skittle-ground, the seven grave cows and the vicious sow,
to plunge once more into the toil and trouble of the seething, eddying
Mistress City of the world.

There are so many things going on at one o’clock in the day; the steam of
life is by that time so thoroughly “up,” that I am embarrassed somewhat
to know which scenes would be the best to select from the plethora of
tableaux I find among my stereoscopic slides. One o’clock is the great
time for making business appointments. You meet your lawyer at one; you
walk down to the office of the newspaper you may happen to write for,
and settle the subject of your leading article, at one. One o’clock is a
capital hour to step round to your stockbroker, in Pope’s Head Alley,
Cornhill, and do a little business in stocks or shares. At one o’clock
the Prime Minister, or his colleagues, have resignation enough to listen
(with tolerable patience) to some half dozen deputations who come to
harangue them about nothing in particular; at one o’clock obliging
noblemen take the chair at public meetings at the Freemasons’, or the
London Tavern. At one o’clock—from one to two rather—the aristocracy
indulge in the sumptuous meal known as “lunch.” At one o’clock that vast,
yet to thousands unknown and unrecked of city, which I may call Dock
London, is in full activity after some twenty minutes’ suspension while
the workmen take _their_ lunch.

The ingenious and persevering artist who constructed that grand model of
Liverpool, which we all remember in the Exhibition of 1851, and which
is now in the Derby Museum of the city of the Liver, did very wisely in
making the Docks the most prominent feature in his model, and treating
the thoroughfares of the town merely as secondary adjuncts. For the Docks
are in reality Liverpool, even as the poet has said that love is of man’s
life a part, but woman’s whole existence. Our interest in the Queen of
the Mersey commences at Birkenhead, and ends at Bramley Moore Dock, on
the other side. I say Bramley Moore Dock, because that was the last
constructed when I was in Liverpool. Some dozens more may have been built
since I was there. Docks are like jealousy, and grow continually by what
they feed on. We can ill afford to surrender so noble a public building
as St. George’s Hall, so thronged and interesting a thoroughfare as Dale
Street; yet it must be confessed that the attention of the visitor to
Liverpool is concentrated and absorbed by the unrivalled and magnificent
docks. So he who visits Venice, ardent lover of art and architecture
as he may be, gives on his first sojourn but a cursory glance at the
churches and palaces; he is fascinated and engrossed by the canals and
the gondolas. So the stranger in Petersburg and Moscow has at first
but scant attention to bestow on the superb monuments, the picturesque
costumes; his senses are riveted upon the golden domes of Tzaaks and the
Kremlin. Liverpool is one huge dock; and from the landing-stage to West
Derby island, everything is of the docks and docky. The only wonder seems
to be that the ships do not sail up the streets, and discharge their
cargoes at the doors of the merchants’ counting-houses. But in London,
in the suburbs, in the West-end, in the heart of the city oft-times,
what do we know or care about the docks? There are scores of members of
the Stock Exchange, I will be bound, who never entered the dock gates,
and those few who have paid a visit to Dock London, may merely have gone
there with a tasting-order for wine. When we consider that in certain
aristocratic circles it is reckoned to be rather a breach of etiquette
than otherwise to know anything about the manners and customs of the
dwellers on the other side of Temple Bar, even as the by-gone snob-cynic
of fashion and literature professed entire ignorance as to the locality
of Russell Square, and wanted to know “where you changed horses” in a
journey to Bloomsbury—unless, indeed, my Lord Duke or my Lady Marchioness
happen to be a partner in a great brewing and banking firm, under which
circumstances he or she may roll down in her chariot to the city to
glance over the quarterly balance sheet of profit; when we consider that
this world of a town has cities upon cities within its bosom, that in the
course of a long life may never be visited; when we think of Bermondsey,
Bethnal Green, Somers Town, Clerkenwell, Hoxton, Hackney, Stepney, Bow,
Rotherhithe, Horsleydown—places of which the great and titled may read
every day in a newspaper, and ask, languidly, where they are,—we need no
longer be surprised if the Docks are ignored by thousands, and if old men
die every day who have never beheld their marvels.

Coming home from abroad often, with an intelligent foreigner, I persuade
him to renounce the Calais route and the South-Eastern Railway, and
even to abjure the expeditious run from Newhaven. I decoy him on board
one of the General Steam Navigation vessels at Boulogne, and when his
agonies of sea-sickness have, in the course of half a dozen hours or
so, subsided—when we have passed Margate, Gravesend, Erith, Woolwich,
Greenwich even—when I have got him past the Isle of Dogs, and we are
bearing swiftly on our way towards the Pool—I clap my intelligent
foreigner on the back, and cry, “Now look around (Eugène or Alphonse,
as the case may be); now look around, and see the glory of England.
Not in huge armies, bristling with bayonets, and followed by monstrous
guns; not in granite forts, grinning from the waters like ghoules from
graves; not in lines of circumvallation, miles and miles in extent; not
in earthworks, counter-scarps, bastions, ravelins, mamelons, casemates,
and gunpowder magazines—shall be found our pride and our strength. Behold
them, O intelligent person of foreign extraction! in yonder forest of
masts, in the flags of every nation that fly from those tapering spars
on the ships, in the great argosies of commerce that from every port in
the world have congregated to do honour to the monarch of marts, London,
and pour out the riches of the universe at her proud feet.” After this
flourishing exordium—the sense of which you may have heard on a former
occasion, for it forms part of my peroration on the grandeur of England,
and, if my friends and acquaintances are to be believed, I bore them
terribly with it sometimes—I enter into some rapid details concerning
the tonnage and import dues of the port of London; and then permit the
intelligent foreigner to dive down below again to his berth. Sometimes
the foreign fellow turns out to be a cynic, and declares that he cannot
see the forest of masts for the fog, if it be winter—for the smoke, if it
be summer.

But the docks of London—by which, let me be perfectly understood, (I do
not, by any means, intend to confine myself to the London Docks) I speak
of Dock London in its entirety: of the London and St. Katherine’s, of
the East and West India, and the Victoria Docks—what huge reservoirs are
they of wealth, and energy, and industry! See those bonding warehouses,
apoplectic with the produce of three worlds, congested with bales of
tobacco and barrels of spices; with serons of cochineal, and dusky,
vapid-smelling chests of opium from Turkey or India; with casks of
palm-oil, and packages of vile chemicals, ill-smelling oxides and
alkalis, dug from the bowels of mountains thousands of miles away, and
which, ere long, will be transformed into glowing pigments and exquisite
perfumes; with shapeless masses of india rubber, looking inconceivably
dirty and nasty, yet from which shall come delicate little cubes with
which ladies shall eraze faulty pencil marks from their landscape copies
after Rout and Harding—india rubber that shall be spread over our coats
and moulded into shoes, yea, and drawn out in elastic ductility, to
form little filaments in pink silk ligatures—I dare not mention their
English appellation, but in Italian they are called “_legaccie_”—which
shall encircle the bases of the femurs of the fairest creatures in
creation; with bags of rice and pepper, with ingots of chocolate and
nuggets and nibs of cocoa, and sacks of roasted chicory. The great hide
warehouses, where are packed the skins of South American cattle, of
which the horns, being left on the hides, distil anything but pleasant
odours, and which lie, prone to each other, thirsting for the tan-pit.
See the sugar warehouses, dripping, perspiring, crystallising with sugar
in casks, and bags, and boxes.[4] How many million cups of tea will be
sweetened with these cases when the sugar is refined! how many tomesful
of gossiping scandal will be talked to the relish of those saccharine
dainties! what stores of barley-sugar temples and Chantilly baskets for
the rich, of brandyballs and hardbake for the poor, will come from those
coarse canvas bags, those stained and sticky casks! And the huge tea
warehouses, where the other element of scandal, the flowery Pekoe or the
family Souchong, slumbers in tinfoiled chests. And the coffee warehouses,
redolent of bags of Mocha and Mountain, Texan and Barbadian berries.
And the multitudinous, almost uncataloguable, mass of other produce:
shellac, sulphur, gum-benzoin, ardebs of beans and pulse from Egypt,
yokes of copper from Asia Minor; sponge, gum-arabic, silk and muslin
from Smyrna; flour from the United States; hides, hams, hemp, rags, and
especially tallow in teeming casks, from Russia and the Baltic provinces;
mountains of timber from Canada and Sweden; fruit, Florence oil, tinder,
raw cotton (though the vast majority of that staple goes to Liverpool),
indigo, saffron, magnesia, leeches, basket-work, and wash-leather! The
ships vomit these on the dock quays, and the warehouses swallow them up
again like ogres. But there is in one dock, the London, an underground
store, that is the Aaron’s rod of dock warehouses, and devours all the
rest. For there, in a vast succession of vaults, roofed with cobwebs
many years old, are stored in pipes and hogsheads the wines that thirsty
London—thirsty England, Ireland, and Scotland—must needs drink. What
throats they have, these consumers! what oceans of good liquor their
Garagantuan appetites demand! Strange stories have been told about these
docks, and the thirsty souls who visit them with tasting-orders; how the
brawny coopers stride about with candles in cleft sticks, and, piercing
casks with gimlets, pour out the rich contents, upon the sawdust that
covers the floor, like water; how cases of champagne are treated as of
as little account as though they were cases of small beer; how plates of
cheese-crumbs are handed round to amateurs that they may chasten their
palates and keep them in good tone of taste; how the coopers are well
nigh infallible in detecting who are the tasters that visit these “wine
vaults” with a genuine intention of buying, and who the epicureans, whose
only object in visiting the London Docks is to drink, gratuitously on
the premises, as much good wine as they can conveniently carry. Strange,
very strange stories, too, are told of the occasional inconvenience into
which the “convenient carriage” degenerates; of respectable fathers of
families appearing in the open street, after they have run the tether of
the tasting-order, staggering and dishevelled, and with bloodshot eyes,
their cravats twisted round to the backs of their necks like bagwigs,
and incoherently declaring that cheese always disagreed with them. I am
candidly of opinion, however, that the majority of these legends are
apocryphal, or, in the rare cases when they have a foundation in fact,
belong to the history of the past, and that commercial sobriety, in the
highest order, is the rule in the wine vaults of the London Docks.

[Illustration: ONE O’CLOCK P.M.: DOCK-LABOURERS RETURNING TO WORK.]

But the Ships! Who shall describe those white-sailed camels? who shall
tell in graphic words of the fantastic interlacing of their masts and
rigging, of the pitchy burliness of their bulging sides; of the hives
of human ants who in barges and lighters surround them, or swarm about
their cargo-cumbered decks? Strange sight to see, these mariners from
every quarter of the globe; of every variety of stature and complexion,
from the swarthy Malay to the almost albino Finn; in every various
phase of picturesque costume, from the Suliote of the fruitship, in his
camise and capote, to the Yankee foremast-man in his red shirt, tarry
trousers, and case-knife hung by a strand of lanyards to his girdle. But
not alone of the maritime genus are the crowds who throng the docks.
There are lightermen, stovedores, bargees, and “lumpers;” there are
passengers flocking to their narrow berths on board emigrant ships; there
are entering and wharfingers’ clerks travelling about in ambulatory
counting-houses mounted on wheels; there are land rats and water rats,
ay, and some that may be called pirates of the long-shore, and over
whom it behoves the dock policemen and the dock watchmen to exercise a
somewhat rigid supervision—for they will pick and steal, these piratical
ne’er-do-weels, any trifle, unconsidered or not, that comes handy to
their knavish digits; and as they emerge from the dock-gates, it is
considered by no means a breach of etiquette for an official to satisfy
himself, by a personal inspection of their garments, that they don’t
happen to have concealed about them, of course by accident, such waifs
and strays as a bottle of Jamaica rum, a lump of gutta percha, a roll of
sheet copper, or a bundle of Havannah cigars.

But a clanging bell proclaims the hour of one, and the dock-labourers,
from Tower Hill to the far-off Isle of Dogs, are summoned back to their
toil. Goodness and their own deplenished pockets only know how they have
been lunching, or on what coarse viands they have fed since noon. Many
have not fed at all; for, of the motley herd of dock-labourers, hundreds,
especially in the London Docks—where no recommendation save strength is
needed, and they are taken on their good behaviour from day to day—are
of the Irish way of thinking; and, wonderfully economical, provident,
self-denying are those much maligned Hibernians when they are earning
money. They are only spendthrifts and indolent when they have nothing.
They will content themselves with a fragment of hard, dry bread, and the
bibulous solace of the nearest pump, and go home cheerfully at dusk to
the unsavoury den—be it in Whitechapel or in Bloomsbury or in far-off
Kensington, for they prefer strangely to live at the farthest possible
distance from their place of daily toil—where their ragged little robins
of children dwell like so many little pigs under a bed. And there they
will partake of a mess of potatoes, with one solitary red herring smashed
up therein, to “give it a relish.” They will half starve themselves, and
go as naked as the police will permit them to go; but they will be very
liberal to the priest, and will scrape money together to bring their
aged and infirm parents over from the “ould country.” That is folly and
superstition, people will say. Of course, what people say must be right.

Some dock-labourers lunch on too much beer and too little bread; for
they are held in thraldom by certain unrighteous publicans, who still
pursue, with great contentment and delectation to themselves, but to the
defrauding, ruin, and misery of their customers, the atrocious trade,
now well nigh rooted from the manufacturing and mining districts, known
as the “tommy-shop” system. I think I need scarcely explain what this
system is, for, under its twin denomination of “truck,” it has already
formed a subject for Parliamentary inquiry. Let it suffice to say, that
the chief feature in the amiable system consists in giving the labourer
a fallacious and delusive credit to the amount of his weekly wages, and
supplying him with victuals and drink (chiefly the latter) at an enormous
rate of profit. The labourer is paid by his foreman in tickets instead
of cash, and invariably finds himself at the end of the week victimised,
or, to use a more expressive, though not so genteel a term, diddled,
to a heart-rending extent. Dock-labourers who are in regular gangs and
regularly employed, are the greatest sufferers by this unjust mode of
payment. As to the casual toilers who crowd about the gates at early
morning in the hope of being engaged for a working day, they are paid
half a crown, and are free to squander or to hoard the thirty pence as
they list. That industrious and peaceable body of men, the coalwhippers,
groaned for a long period under the iniquities of the truck system; they
are now protected by a special Act of Parliament, renewed from time to
time; but the dock-labourers yet eat their bread leavened by a sense of
injustice. There are none to help them; for they have no organisation,
and very few friends. It is perfectly true that the dock-companies have
nothing whatsoever to do with the social servitude under which their
labourers groan; and that it is private speculators who work the system
for their own aggrandisement; but the result to the labourer is the same.
I don’t think it matters to Quashie, the negro slave, when he is beaten,
whether the cowhide be wielded by Mr. Simon Legree, the planter, or by
Quimbo, the black driver.

Look at these labourers, and wonder. For it is matter for astonishment to
know that among these meanly-clad, frequently ragged men, coarse, dirty,
and repulsive in aspect, there are very many who have been tenderly bred
and nurtured; who have been, save the mark, gentlemen! who have received
University educations and borne the Queen’s commission. And here also are
the draff and husks of foreign immigration; Polish, German, and Italian
exiles. They have come to this—down to this—up to this, if you choose;
come to the old, old level, as old as Gardener Adam’s time, of earning
the daily bread by the sweat of the brow. It were better so than to
starve; better so than to steal.

[Illustration: ONE O’CLOCK P.M.: DINING ROOMS IN BUCKLERSBURY.]

What time the dock-labourers have finished lunch, another very
meritorious class of human ants begin their prandial repasts. With just
one thought at the vast number of merchants’, brokers’, shipping-agents’,
warehousemen’s, wholesale dealers’ counting-houses that exist in London
city, you will be able to form an idea of the legions of clerks, juniors
and seniors, who, invariably early-breakfasting men, must get seriously
hungry at one p.m. Some I know are too proud to dine at this patriarchal
hour. They dine, after office hours, at Simpson’s, at the Albion, at the
London, or, save us, at the Wellington. They go even further west, and
patronise Feetum’s, or the Scotch Stores in Regent Street, merely skating
out, as it were, for a few minutes at noon, for a snack at that Bay Tree
to which I have already alluded. Many, and they are the married clerks,
bring neat parcels with them, containing sandwiches or bread-and-cheese,
consuming those refreshments in the counting-house. In the very great
houses, it is not considered etiquette to dine during office-hours,
save on foreign-post nights. As to the extremely junior clerks, or
office-boys, as they are irreverently termed, they eat whatever they
can get, and whenever they can get it, very frequently getting nothing
at all. But there are yet hundreds upon hundreds of clerks who consume
an orthodox dinner of meat, vegetables, and cheese—and on high days
and holidays pudding—at one p.m. Their numbers are sufficient to cram
almost to suffocation the eating-houses of Cheapside, the Poultry, Mark
Lane, Cornhill, and especially Bucklersbury. Of late years there has
been an attempt to change the eating-houses of Cheapside into pseudo
“restaurants.” Seductive announcements, brilliantly emblazoned, and
showily framed and glazed, have been hung up, relating to “turtle” and
“venison;” salmon, with wide waddling mouths, have gasped in the windows;
and insinuating mural inscriptions have hinted at the existence of
“Private dining-rooms for ladies.” Now, whatever can ladies—though I have
the authority of Mr. Charles Dibdin and my own lips for declaring that
there are fine ones in the city—want to come and dine in Cheapside for?
At these restaurants they give you things with French names, charge you a
stated sum for attendance, provide the pale ale in silver tankards, and
take care of your hat and coat; but I like them not—neither, I believe,
do my friends, the one-o’clock-dining clerks. Either let me go to
Birch’s or the Anti-Gallican, or let me take my modest cut of roast and
boiled, my “one o’ taters,” my “cheese and sallary,” at an eating-house
in Bucklersbury—such a one as my _alter ego_, Mr. M’Connell, has here
presented for your edification. And his pictured morals must eke out my
written apophthegms—for this sheet is full.




TWO P.M.—FROM REGENT STREET TO HIGH CHANGE.


I breathe again. I see before me, broad-spread, a vista of gentility. I
have done, for many hours to come, with shabby subjects. No more dams
I’ll make for fish—in Billingsgate; nor scrape trencher, nor wash dish,
at second-rate eating-houses; nor fetch firing at requiring in Covent
Garden or the Docks. Prospero must get a new man, for Caliban has got a
new master: Fashion, in Regent Street.

I declare that when I approach this solemnly-genteel theme, my frame
dilates, my eyes kindle, my heart dances. I experience an intense desire
to array myself in purple and fine linen, knee shorts, lace ruffles,
pink silk stockings, diamond buckles, and a silver-hilted sword; to
have my hair powdered, and my jewelled _tabatière_ filled with scented
rappee; to sit with my feet on a Turkey carpet, before a table inlaid
with _marqueterie_, wax candles in silver sconces (the candles all
green, with fillagree _bobeches_) on either side; and then—while my
Dulcinea in a hoop petticoat, a point lace apron, red-heeled _mules_, a
_toupet_ and a _mouche_ on the left cheek, her feathered fan, painted by
Fragonard on the finest chicken-skin, lying beside her—plays the minuet
from “Ariadne” in an adjoining and gilded _salon_, decorated in the
_Style Pompadour_, on the harpsichord; and on pink scented note-paper,
with a diamond pointed pen and violet ink—the golden pounce-box at my
elbow—then under these circumstances and with these luxurious appliances
around me, I think I could manage to devote myself to the task of
inditing matter concerning Regent Street in the smoothest dythrambics.
This is rather a violent contrast to the dry skittle-ground, the cows,
and the depraved sow which inspired me in the last chapter; but only
take my subject into consideration: only permit me to inoculate you
with one drop of the ethereal nectar which should be quaffed by every
writer who would look upon Regent Street from a proper point of view.
Ladies and gentlemen moving in the polite circles have—but that is long
ago—accused me of being of Bohemia, and to that manner born; of writing a
great deal too much about the Virginian weed in its manufactured state,
and the fermented infusion of malt and hops; publishers have refused
to purchase my novels because they contained too many descriptions of
“low life;” because my heroes and heroines were too frequently ragged
and forlorn creatures, who didn’t go into “society,” who didn’t go to
church, who were never seen at the May meetings in Exeter Hall, but who
went to public-houses and penny-gaffs instead. Oh, lords and ladies! oh,
brilliant butterflies of society! oh, respectable people of every degree!
whose ear coarse language wounds, but who would have, believe me, to
undergo much coarser deeds from the ragged ones you despise, were it not
for the humble efforts of us poor pen-and-ink missionaries; O salt ones
of the earth! think that you are but hundreds among the millions of the
tattered and torn, who have never studied the “Handbook to Etiquette,”
nor heard of Burke and Debrett, and who would eat peas with their knives
if they had any peas to eat—Heaven help them! They are around and about
you always. I have no greed of gain in advocating their cause, for I am
unknown to them, and am of your middle class, and am as liable to be
stoned by the ragged ones for having a better coat than they any day. But
woe be to you, respectables, if you shut your ears to their plaints and
your eyes to their condition. For the stones may fly thick and fast some
day; there may be none to help you, and it may be too late to cry for
help.

I have heard Regent Street compared to the Boulevard des Italiens, to
Unter-den-Linden at Berlin, to Broadway at New York, to the Montagne
de la Cour at Brussels, to the Corso de’ Servi at Milan, to the Toledo
at Naples, to George Street, Sydney, and to the Nevskoi Perspective at
Petersburg. In my opinion, Regent Street is an amalgamation of all these
streets, and surpasses them all. Their elements are strained, filtered,
refined, condensed, sublimated, to make up one glorious thoroughfare.
Add to this, the unique and almost indescribable _cachet_ which the
presence of English aristocracy lends to every place it chooses for
its frequentation, and the result is Regent Street. Of the many cities
I have wandered into and about, there is but one possessing a street
that can challenge comparison with—and that, I must confess, well nigh
equals—the street that Nash, prince of architects, built for the fourth
George. At a right angle from the pleasant waters of the river Liffey,
there runs a street, wide in dimensions, magnificent in the proportions
of its edifices, splendid in its temples and its palaces, though many of
the latter, alas! are converted now into hotels, now into linen-drapers’
shops; but on a golden summer’s afternoon, when you see, speeding towards
the column of Nelson in the distance, the glittering equipages of the
rich and noble, who yet have their dwelling in Eblana; the clattering
orderlies, on sleek-groomed horses, and with burnished accoutrements,
spurring from the Castle towards the Post Office—and, beauty of beauties,
the side walks on either hand converted into parterres of living flowers,
the grand and glorious Irish girls, with their bright raiment and
brighter eyes; you will acknowledge that Regent Street has a rival, that
beyond St. George’s Channel is a street that the triumphal procession of
a Zenobia or a Semiramis might pass down, and that the queen of streets
is Sackville Street, Dublin.

Do you know, youth of the present generation—for I fondly hope that I
have good store of juveniles among my readers—that Regent Street has its
antiquities, its archæologia, its topographical curiosities? Mr. Peter
Cunningham knows them all by heart; I am not about to steal from the
“Handbook of London” of our modern Camden; but will just tell you, in
my desultory way, that, in the days when the Mews reared their head, an
unsightly mass of brick buildings, in the area which is now Trafalgar
Square; when Carlton House loomed at the eastern end of Pall Mall,
instead of the ugly post erected as a monument of national gratitude to
the Royal Duke who paid nobody; when the Golden Cross, Charing Cross,
was hemmed in by a cobweb mass of dirty tenements, and Hungerford Market
was yet a mass of fishy hovels ungraced by Hungerford Hall and Mr.
Gatti’s penny-ice shop; when the old “Courier” newspaper office stood
(over-against Mr. Cross’s older Exeter ’Change, with the elephant’s tusks
displayed outside, the shops beneath, and Chunee and the wild beasts all
alive and roaring upstairs) in the space that now forms the approach
to Waterloo Bridge; and when the vicinity of Temple Bar was blocked up
by a brick-and-mortar _cloaca_, since swept away to form what is now
termed Picket Place. Are you at all aware, neophytes in topographical
lore, that the area of Regent Street the superb, was occupied by mean
and shambling tenth-rate avenues, among which the chiefest was a large,
dirty highway, called Great Swallow Street? Old Fuller (I don’t know why
he should be called “old” so persistently, for he did not attain anything
like a venerable age) was in the habit of collecting information for the
“Worthies of England” from the tottering crones who sat spinning by the
ingle-nook, and from the white-headed grand-sires sunning themselves
on the bench by the almshouse door. In like manner, I owe much of the
information I possess on the aspect of London streets, at the time just
previous to my nonage, to communing with nurses and nurses’ female
friends. The good folks who tend children, seldom deem that the little
pitchers they say jestingly have long ears, will suck their lore in so
greedily, or retain it so long.

My personal acquaintance with Regent Street dates from the year
’thirty-two, when I remember a great scrambling procession of operatives,
with parti-coloured flags, emblazoned with devices I could not read,
passing down it. Mrs. Esner, who was then attached to my person in a
domestic capacity (she often calls upon me now, and, saying that she
“nussed” me, expatiates on the benefits of a pound of green tea), told
me that these operatives belonged to the “Trades Union.” She said—though
the good woman must have exaggerated—that they were half a million in
number, and I recollect her portending, in a grave low voice, that there
would be riots that night. I don’t think that any occurred; but long
after, whenever I saw a crowd I used to ask whether “there would be any
riots” that night, just as I might have inquired whether there would be
any bread-and-butter for tea. This was about the time that they used to
call the great Duke of Wellington “Nosey,” and “Sawbones,” and to break
his windows. I was too young to know then, that the Athenians grew tired
of hearing Aristides called “The Just;” and that a nation once grumbled
at having to pay for the palace it had bestowed upon that John Churchill,
Duke of Marlborough, who won the battle of Blenheim. I think, too, there
must have been something about the Cholera in my earliest recollections
of Regent Street; yet, no: I lived in North Audley Street at that time,
and opposite the mansion of the great Earl of Clarendon; for, as clearly
as though it were yesterday, I see now in the eye to which the attention
of Horatio, friend of Hamlet Prince of Denmark, was directed—a hot autumn
afternoon. I am at the nursery-window in sad disgrace, and pouting
because I have wrenched the sprightly wooden hussar from the horse
which had the semi-circle of wire with the bullet at the end fixed in
his stomach, and who used, with that impetus, to swing so deftly. There
is much commotion in the great earl’s mansion; for one of the servants
partook too plentifully last night of gooseberry-fool after a rout his
lordship gave—where are the “routs” and the “gooseberry-fools” now?—and
she is dead this morning of cholera morbus. My female _entourage_ are
unanimously exacting in calling it cholera “morbus.” The undertaker’s men
bring the body out; the shell gleams white in the afternoon’s sunshine,
and it is begirt with cords; “for,” says the domestic oracles behind
me, “it was so mortal swole that it would ’ave bust else.” A horrible
rumour runs about, that the coffin has been “pitched and sealed.” What
can “pitching and sealing” mean? There is a great crowd before the
earl’s door, who are violent and clamorous, because rumour—a servant’s
hall, an area gate, a coachman from-the-house-to-his-wife-in-the-mews
rumour—bruits it about that the body has not been washed. My nurse says
that they will have to send for the “padroll” with “cut-lashes.” All
these things sink into my little mind; and then the whole sequel, with
a train of years behind it, fade away, leaving me with but one more
recollection—that we had a twopenny cottage-loaf boiled in milk that day
for dinner, which was consequently swollen to twice its natural size; and
which the Eumenides of the nursery authoritatively assured me was, with
brown sugar, the “best puddin’ out.” I know now that congested loaf to
have been an insipid swindle.

I am again in Regent Street, but at another window, and in another
house. There is no nurse now, but a genteel young woman, aged about
thirty—she asked me once, for fun, how old she was, and I guessed, in
all youthful seriousness, fifty, whereupon she slapped me—to take care
of me. Her name is Sprackmore, she has long corkscrew ringlets, and is
very pious, and beneath her auspices I first study the “Loss of the
_Kent_ East Indiaman,” and the “Dairyman’s Daughter.” She has fits,
too, occasionally. I am just of that age to be a hollow-eyed little boy
in a tunic, with a frill and a belt, and to be dreadfully afraid of
the parent I used a year before to love and caress with such fearless
confidence. They say I am a clever child, and my cleverness is encouraged
by being told that I am not to ask questions, and that I had much better
go and play with my toys than mope over that big volume of Lyttelton’s
“History of England,” lent to me by Mr. Somebody, the lawyer—I see him
now, very stout and gray, at the funeral whenever any of us dies: of
which volume—it is in very shabby condition—I break the top-cover off
by letting it fall from the chair, which is my reading-desk. I suffer
agonies of terror and remorse for months, lest the fracture should be
discovered, though I have temporarily repaired it by means of a gimlet
and a piece of twine. Then, one bright day, my cousin Sarah gives me a
bright five-shilling piece—I take her to the opera now, but she always
remembers my childish dependence upon her, and insists upon paying the
cab home—and take Lyttelton’s “History,” still with great fear and
trembling, to a bookbinder’s in Broad Street, Golden Square, who tells me
that the “hends is jagged,” and that there must be a new back, lettering,
and gilding to the book. He works his will with it, and charges me four
shillings and sixpence out of the five shilling-piece for working it; but
to tell of the joyful relief I feel when I bring Lyttelton’s “History”
back safe and sound! I do not get rid of my perturbation entirely,
however, till I have rubbed the back against the carpet a little to
soil it, in order that it may not look too new. Oh! the agonies, the
Laocoon-like conscience windings, the Promethean tortures, that children
suffer through these accidental breakages! Oh! the unreasoning cruelty
of parents, who punish children for such mischances! So I am the little
boy in a tunic; and I daresay that, with my inquisitiveness, and my
moping over books, I am an intolerable little nuisance. I am at the
Regent Street window, and much speculation is rife as to whether the
King, who is lying mortally sick at Windsor, is dead. For it is within
a few minutes of eleven, and at that time the well-known troop of Horse
Guards pass on their way to St. James’s; and it is reasonably inferred
that, if King William be gathered to his fathers, the standard will be
furled. The Guards pass; they wore helmets, with plumes above them shaped
like black mutton chops—not the casques with the flowing horse-hair they
wear now; and to be sure the standard is furled, in a species of drab
umbrella case. The King is dead for sure; nay, he does not die for a full
week afterwards; the flag was merely furled because the day was dark and
lowering, presaging rain.

[Illustration: TWO O’CLOCK P.M.: REGENT STREET.]

I told you hours since that I lived in the house in Regent Street
in which the Marquis de Bourbel forged his letters of credit.[5] I
think that I am qualified to speak of the place, for, walking down it
the other day, I counted no less than eleven houses, between the two
circuses, in which I had at one time dwelt. But they were all early,
those remembrances, and connected with the time when the colonnade of
the Quadrant existed—“_La ville de Londres_,” as the foreign engravers
of pictorial note-paper used grandiloquently to call it. Whatever
could have possessed our Commissioner of Woods and Forests to allow
those unrivalled arcades to be demolished! The stupid tradesmen, whose
purblind, shop-till avarice led them to petition for the removal of the
columns, gained nothing by the change, for the Quadrant, as a lounge in
wet weather, was at once destroyed; and I see now many of the houses,
once let out in superior apartments, occupied as billiard-rooms and
photographic studios, and many of the shops invaded and conquered by
cheap tailors. The Quadrant colonnade afforded not only a convenient
shelter beneath, but it was a capital promenade for the dwellers in the
first-floors above. The _entresols_ certainly were slightly gloomy; and
moustached foreigners, together with some gaily-dressed company still
naughtier, could with difficulty be restrained from prowling backwards
and forwards between Glasshouse Street and the County Fire Office. But,
perambulating Regent Street at all hours of the day and night, as I do
now frequently, I see no diminution in the number of moustached, or
rouged, or naughty faces, whose prototypes were familiar to me, years
agone, in the brilliant Quadrant. As to the purlieus of the County Fire
Office, they are confusion, and a scandal to London and its police.
The first-floor balconies above were in my childhood most glorious
playgrounds. There I kept preserves of broken bottles and flowerpots; on
those leads I inscribed fantastic devices in chalk and with penknives,
drawing silver diagrams through the cake of dust and dried refrain that
covered the metal; and often have I come to domestic grief through an
irresistible propensity for poaching on the balconies of the neighbours
on either side. Still in a state of tunic-hood, I remember a very tall,
handsome gentleman, with a crimson velvet under-waistcoat—I saw his
grave in Perè la Chaise last winter—who was my great aider and abettor
in these juvenile escapades. He had a wondrous weapon of offence called
a “sabar-cane,” a delightful thing (to me then), half walking-stick,
half pea-shooter, from which he used to discharge clay pellets at the
vagrant cats on the adjoining balconies. He it was who was wont to lean
over the balcony, and fish for people’s hats with a salmon-hook affixed
to the extremity of a tandem-whip; he it was who came home from the Derby
(quite in a friendly manner) to see us one evening, all white—white hat,
white coat, white trousers, white waistcoat, white neckerchief, white
boots, to say nothing of the dust and the flour with which he had been
plentifully besprinkled at Kennington Gate. He had won heavily on some
horse long since gone to grass for ever, was very merry, and insisted
upon winding-up our new French clock with the snuffers. He it was who
made nocturnal excursions from parapet to parapet along the leads,
returning with bewildering accounts of bearded men who were gambling
with dice at No. 92; of the tenor of the Italian Opera, who, knife in
hand, was pursuing his wife (in her nightdress) about the balcony, at
No. 74; and of Mademoiselle Follejambes, the _premier sujet_ of the same
establishment, who was practising _pirouettes_ before a cheval glass at
the open window of No. 86, while Mademoiselle Follejambe’s mamma, with
a red cotton pocket-handkerchief tied round her old head, was drinking
_anisette_ out of a tea-cup. You must be forbearing with me, if, while I
speak of Regent Street, I interlard my speech with foreign languages a
little. For, from its first erection, the Quadrant end of Regent Street
has been the home of the artistic foreigners who are attracted to London
during the musical and operatic season, less by inclination for the
climate and respect for the institutions of England, than by a profound
admiration for the circular effigies, in gold, (with neatly milled edges)
of her Majesty the Queen, which John Bull so liberally bestows on those
who squall or fiddle for him, provided they be of foreign extraction.
Let me not be too unjust, however, to Bull. Find him but a real English
tenor, and J. B. will smother him in bank-notes, and deafen him with
plaudits. From the balconies of Regent Street, I have seen the greatest
_cantatrici_ and _ballerine_ of this age. The Grand Cham of tenors,
who has _never_ been replaced—no signor Mario, no Signor Giuglini, no
Signor Mongini, no Signor Tamberlik, no Mr. Sims Reeves, no Mr. George
Perren—the incomparable Rubini, had lodgings opposite, once, to where
we dwelt, at a shawl shop. I have watched the sedulous care which that
eminent man took of his health, marvelled at the multitudinous folds
of silk or woollen stuff, like the turban of an Asiatic, with which he
encircled his invaluable throat when he took out-door exercise. I have
seen, through his open window, the basso of basso’s, Papa Lablache, the
man with the lion’s head, the Falstaffian abdomen, and the ten times
stentorian lungs, eat maccaroni for twenty-seven consecutive minutes,
till he seemed determined to outdo all the ribbon-swallowing conjurors
who had ever lived. We used to say that he was practising for Leporello.
He had a kindly heart, Papa Lablache, and preserved a kindly remembrance
of the hearty English people, among whom he made his fortune. Though he
would sometimes facetiously declare, that when his voice was no longer
fit to be heard in a Continental city, he would come to England to
settle, and sing “_Fra questi sordi_” among these deaf ones—for whom
he would still be quite good enough—his heart never cooled towards the
old country; and, moribund at Naples, when the supreme Hour was fast
arriving, he raised himself on his couch, and essayed to sing a song he
loved very well—“Home! sweet Home!” But, as the silver cord loosened, he
murmured, “_Mi manca la voce_”—“My voice fails me;” and so died.

To say nothing of a dreadful German basso, one of the regular
line-of-battle ship voices, with 56-pounders on the first deck, who was
once a next-door neighbour in the Quadrant, and when he used to call for
his servant thus,“PAOOLO!” shook the flower-pots on our own balcony;
or of an egregious fiddler, with long hair, who, in imitation of his
predecessor, Paganini, gave out that he had sold himself to the devil,
but who was, I believe, an arrant humbug with a mania for practising in
the open air—it may have been as a medium of advertisement—and used to
attract large crowds in the street beneath listening to his complicated
fiddlements. Yet I must spare a word for Madame—I really forget whom, but
it ended with “heim,” I think—who had the six-and-thirty Austro-Sclavonic
children who used to perform the mirror dance and other terpsichorean
feats at her Majesty’s Theatre and whom she used to drill on the balcony
like soldiers. They made a tremendous noise, these tiny _figurantes_,
and in the hours of recreation were not unaccustomed to fight among
themselves. Then Madame Somethingheim would sally forth on the balcony
and cut savagely into their poor young bodies with a switch, and after
much howling on their part, and chasing to and fro on hers, restore peace.

The colonnades are as fruitful to me in recollections as the balconies.
How many miles of daily walks have I gone over, the hand of a toddling
little sister in mine, and with strict injunctions not to stray beyond
the shadow of the columns, and with prohibitions, under dreadful menaces,
of venturing in Air Street on the one side or Vigo Lane on the other!
I wore, I remember, then, an absurd blue cloak, too short for me, and
lined with red, and with a brass clasp somewhat resembling the ornament
on a cartouch box. This cloak chafed and fretted me, and was the bane
and terror of my existence; for I knew, or fancied I knew, that every
passer-by must know that it had never been made for me, which, indeed,
it never had, having formerly been of far larger dimensions and the
property of an officer in his Majesty’s light infantry. I believe that
there was a domestic ukase promulgated for our benefit against crossing
the road; but we did cross it nevertheless, with many looks to the right
and the left, not only to secure ourselves against threatening carriage
wheels, but with reference to the possible appearance of parents and
guardians. There was a delightful bird-stuffer’s shop at the corner of
a court, with birds of paradise, parrots, and hummingbirds of gorgeous
plumage, and strange creatures with white bodies and long yellow beaks
and legs that terrified while they pleasured us. Then there was the
funeral monument shop, with the mural tablets, the obelisks, the broken
columns, the extinguished torches, and the draped urns in the window,
and some with the inscriptions into the bargain, all ready engraved in
black and white, puzzling us as to whether the tender husbands, devoted
wives, and affectionate sons, to whom they referred, were buried in
that grisly shop—it had a pleasant, fascinating terror about it, like
an undertaker’s, too. There was Swan and Edgar’s, splendid and radiant,
then as now, with brave apparel (how many times have I listened to the
enthusiastic cheers of Swan and Edgar’s young men, on the occasion of
the proprietors giving their annual banquet to their _employés_?), and
even then replete with legends of dishonest fares, who caused a cab to
halt at the Regent Street entrance, got out, said they would be back
in a moment, and then darting through the crowded shop, knavishly
escaped at the Piccadilly end. There was the Italian statuary shop, with
Canova’s Graces, the crouching Venus, and the birds round a vase in
alabaster; and, above all, there was Mrs. Lipscombe’s shop—I don’t mean
the staymaker’s, but the one next to that, the filter shop, with the
astonishing machines for converting foul and muddy water, like gruel,
thick and slab, into a sparkling, crystal stream. What a miracle it
seemed to me that the goblet, filled to the brim, and yet into which,
from the filter above, drops continually fell, never overflowed! How I
used to watch the little cork ball, kept in a continually bounding state
of agitation by the perpendicular jet of water—watch it with almost
breathless agitation, when, every now and then, the centre of gravity
would be lost, and the little ball would tumble in the basin beneath—the
whole was covered by a glass shade—till, caught up once more, it would be
sent in eddying whirls higher than ever! I have seen the same experiment
tried since with bigger balls—and of marble—very like twenty-four
pounders—at the _Grandes Eaux_ of Versailles, and in the gardens of
Peterhoff. Stone Neptunes and Tritons surrounded the basin, and the jets
of water, forty feet high, sent the spray flying in the faces of the
spectators; but none of these hydraulic displays ever came up, in my
opinion, to the tiny squirt, with the little cork ball, underneath the
glass shade, in Mrs. Lipscombe’s window. Does she make stays and sell
filters yet, I wonder! What a curious mixture of avocations! I know of
none stranger since the names of M. Fenwick de Porquet and Mrs. Mary
Wedlake were amalgamated, and inquiries as to whether we “bruised our
oats yet,” were alternated with pressing questions of “_Parlez vous
Français?_”

When I thus walked the Regent Quadrant, twenty years since, it was
haunted by a class of men, now, I am happy to believe, almost entirely
extinct. We have plenty of rogues in our body corporate yet. The turf
has its blacklegs and touts; the nightside of London is fruitful in
“macemen,” “mouchers,” and “go-alongs.” You must not be angry with me
for using slang terms; for did not a clergyman, at a highly-respectable
institution, deliver a lecture on slang the other day, and did not the
“Times” quote him? We are not free from skittle-sharps, card-cheats,
“duffers,” and ring-droppers; nay, even at remote country race-courses,
you may find remnants of the whilom swarming tribe of “charley-pitchers,”
the knavish gentry who pursue the games of “under seven or over seven,”
“red, black, leather and star,” or inveigle the unwary with “three little
thimbles and one small pea.” But a stern and righteous legislation has
put down nine-tenths of the infamous dens where any fool who chose
to knock was fleeced to the last lock of wool. If a man wants to be
vicious (in the gambling way) now, he must have the _entrée_ to the
abodes of vice, and a nodding acquaintance with the demon. A neophyte
is not allowed to ruin himself how and where he likes. In the days
of which I make mention, Regent Street and its purlieus abounded in
open gambling houses, and to the skirts of these necessarily hung on
a deboshed regiment of rogues, who made their miserable livings as
runners, and decoy-ducks, and bravos to these abominable nests. They
were called “Greeks,” and two o’clock in the afternoon was their great
time for turning out. From what infected holes or pestiferous garrets in
Sherrard, or Brewer, or Rupert Street, they came, I know not; but there
they were at the appointed hour, skulking with a half sheepish, half
defiant stride up and down Regent Street. Miserable dogs mostly, for
all their fine clothes—always resplendently, though dirtily, attired.
They wore great white coats, shiny hats, and mosaic jewellery, which was
just then coming into fashion. There was another fashion, in which they
very nearly succeeded, by adopting, to drive out, and make permanently
disreputable: that of wearing moustaches. They used to swagger about, all
lacquered, pomatumed, bejewelled, and begrimed, till I knew them all by
sight and many of them by name and repute. There was Jack Cheetham, the
lord’s son, he who was thrown out of the window at Frascati’s, and killed
the Frenchman in the Bois de Vincennes. There was Captain Dollamore,
who married the rich widow, and was arrested for her milliner’s bill
the week afterwards. There was Charley Skewball; he was called Charley,
but he was a baronet, had once been a gentleman, and was the greatest
rogue unhung. Mr. Thackeray knows these men well. They are his Count
Punters, Major Loders, M. de Caramboles, Hon. Algernon Deuceaces; but
they are extinct among us as a class, O Titmarsh; and simple people, who
read your admirable novels, wonder whom the monsters are that you draw.
They are dead; they are at the hulks; they are feebly punting at the few
remaining gambling places on the Rhine: they flaunted in the bad prime
of their manhood when I was a child. I have outgrown them; and only now
and then, when I am out very late, collecting materials for “Twice Round
the Clock,” I come upon a stray Jack or Charley—ragged and drivelling,
his fine feathers all moulted or smirched, his occupation quite gone—who
sidles up to me and calls me “Your honour,” and with salt-rheumy lips,
whimpers forth a supplication for “A penny towards a night’s lodging.”

When our dear Queen Victoria was crowned, I began to lose sight of Regent
Street—lost sight of it by degrees altogether, and came not back to it,
as an observer, for many years. I rather avoided the place, for I had a
bitter baptism of physical misery in the beginning of my working life:
wanting food and raiment, not through prodigality (that came afterwards),
but through sheer penury and friendlessness. And Regent Street, for all
my querulous childhood, was associated with too many memories of happier
days gone for ever. You know what the Italian rhymester says—

          “Nessun maggior dolore
    Che ricordarsi del tempo felice
    Nella Miseria.”

An Englishman has stolen the thought in some lines about “a sorrow’s
crown of sorrow,” whose summing up I forget; but the sense of the passage
is that the times are exceedingly hard, when, destitute and footsore, you
pass by a house, and glance at the windows once lighted up by feasting
in which you participated; when you think of the rooms, once swept by
the robe of the woman whom you loved, but that now, house, windows,
rooms, are the portion of strangers. I say I went away from Regent
Street, and came not back. There were reasons. I became of the Strand
and Fleet Street a denizen, and Temple Bar entered into my soul. For I
was affiliated to a great mystery of Masonry, called Literature, and had
to follow the behests of my mother lodge. You don’t see much of Regent
Street, during your apprenticeship, if you begin at the lowermost degree,
I can assure you. Now I am a master-mason, free and accepted, and can
hold my own; albeit I shall never be an Office-bearer, or “Grand,” of my
lodge, or rise to the superlatives of the Royal Arch or the Thirty-third.

Behold Regent Street at two p.m., in the accompanying cartoon. Not
without reason do I declare it the most fashionable street in the world.
I call it not so for the aristocratic mansions it might possess; for
the lower parts of the houses are occupied as shops, and the furnished
apartments are let, either to music or operatic celebrities or to
unostentatious old bachelors. But the shops themselves are innately
fashionable. There was a dash of utilitarianism mingled with the slightly
Bohemian tinge of my Regent Street of twenty years ago; there were
bakers’ shops, stationers, and opticians, who had models of steam engines
in their windows. There was a grocer not above selling orange marmalade,
brown sugar, and Durham mustard. I remember buying a penny cake of
chocolate of him one morning; but I find the shop now expanded into a
magnificent emporium, where are sold wines, and spirits, sweetmeats
and preserves, liqueurs and condiments, Bayonne ham, Narbonne honey,
Bologna sausages, Russian caviare, Iceland moss, clotted cream, and
_terrines_ of _pâté de foie gras_. Indeed, Regent Street is an avenue
of superfluities—a great trunk-road in Vanity Fair. Fancy watchmakers,
haberdashers, and photographers; fancy stationers, fancy hosiers, and
fancy staymakers; music shops, shawl shops, jewellers, French glove
shops, perfumery, and point lace shops, confectioners and milliners:
creamily, these are the merchants whose wares are exhibited in this
Bezesteen of the world.

[Illustration: TWO O’CLOCK P.M.: HIGH CHANGE.]

Now, whatever can her ladyship, who has been shopping in Regent Street,
have ordered the stalwart footman, who shut the carriage door with a
resounding bang, to instruct the coachman to drive her to the Bank for?
Her ladyship’s own private bank is in a shiningly aristocratic street,
by Cavendish Square, embosomed among green trees. She does not want to
buy ribbons or lace on Ludgate Hill, artificial flowers in St. Paul’s
Churchyard, or fine linen in Cheapside. No; she has a very simple reason
for going into the city: Sir John, her liege lord, is on ’Change. He will
be there from half-past two to three, at which hour High ’Change, as it
may be called, closes, and she intends to call for him, and drive him to
the West-end again. By your leave, we will jump up behind the carriage,
heedless of the stalwart footman; for we are in the receipt of fern-seed,
and invisible.

Going on ’Change seems to be but a mechanical and mercantile occupation,
and one that might with safety be entrusted to some confidential clerk;
yet it is not so; and the greatest magnates of commerce and finance,
the Rothschilds, the Barings, the Huths, the legions of London’s
merchant-princes, are to be found chaffering in the quadrangle every
day. In the old Exchange, they used to point out the particular column
against which the elder Rothschild was wont to lean. They called the old
man, too—marvellous diplomatist in financial combinations as he was—the
Pillar of the Exchange. You know that the colonnades—whose ceilings are
painted in such elaborate encaustic, and with such a signal result in
ruin from damp and smoke—are divided into different promenades, variously
designated, according to the nations of the merchants who frequent them.
Thus—there are the Italian Walk, the Spanish Walk, the Portuguese Walk,
the Danish Walk, and—a very notable walk it is too—the Greek Walk.
Here you may see, jabbering and gesticulating, the crafty, keen-eyed,
sallow-faced Smyrnians, Suliotes, Zantrites, and Fanariotes, individuals
much given to speculations in corn, in which, if report does them no
injustice, they gamble most egregiously.

Three o’clock strikes—or rather chimes—from the bell-tower of Mr. Tite’s
new building. The quadrangle of the Exchange is converted into an
accurate model of the Tower of Babel. The mass of black-hatted heads—with
here and there a white one, like a fleck of foam on the crest of a
wave—eddies with violence to and fro. Men shout, and push, and struggle,
and jostle, and shriek bargains into one another’s ears. A stranger might
imagine that these money and merchandise dealers had fallen out, and were
about to fight; but the beadle of the Exchange looks on calmly; he knows
that no breach of the peace will be committed, and that the merchants and
financiers are merely singing their ordinary pæan of praise to the great
god Mammon. Surely—if there be not high treason in the thought—they ought
to pull down Mr. Lough’s statue of Queen Victoria, which stands in the
centre of the quadrangle, and replace it by a neat effigy of the Golden
Calf.




THREE P.M.—DEBENHAM AND STORR’S AUCTION-ROOMS, AND THE PANTHEON BAZAAR.


The travelled reader has visited that astonishing _atelier_ of mosaics
and _pietra dura_ in Florence maintained at the charges of the late
Grand Duke of Tuscany, (he has been signally kicked off thronedom, since
the first writing of these presents), and has watched with admiring
amazement the patient ingenuity with which the artisans adjust the tiny
little vitreous and metallic fragments, that, firmly imbedded in paste,
make the fruits and flowers, the birds and angels of the mosaic. What
an impossible task it is, apparently, to form the microscopic bits into
comely shapeliness, symmetrical in form and glowing with rich colours!
yet how deftly the artists accomplish their task! how the work grows
beneath their nimble hands! What astonishing memories these _maître_
mosaicists must have, remembering to a pin’s point where the high lights
on the petals of a rose will fall, and storing up in their minds archives
of the eyelashes of the Madonna, precedents for every scintillation of
the rays in the golden nimbus round His head! The mosaicists of Rome, and
Florence, and Venice—though the glorious art has well-nigh died out in
the Adriatic city—are the real administrative reformers, after all. The
right thing in the right place is their unvarying motto, and they are
never found putting the round men in the square holes, or _vice versâ_.

I have been led into this train of thought by the contemplation of the
exigencies of “Twice Round the Clock.” Time, my slave for once, though
he has been my stern and cruel master for years and years, and at whom I
mean to throw a dart when this series shall be completed—Time, who is my
bond servant, to fetch and carry, to hew wood and draw water for yet a
span, has culled from the wild garden of Eternity, and thrown at my feet,
a heterogeneous mass of hours, minutes, and seconds, and has said with a
mocking subserviency—“There, my master, there are the hours of the day
and night, and their minutest subdivisions; try and paste them on your
printed calendar; try and reconcile your men and women to them; try and
apportion in its proper measure of time each grain of sand to the futile
rivings and strivings of your conceited humanity. You have stumbled on
from hour to hour since the sun was young, telling, with indifferent
success, the good and bad deeds that are done in London as the relentless
needle pushes round and round the dial. Here, then, is Three o’Clock
in the Afternoon. Take it; see what you can make of it, and much good
may it do you!” And as Time, or the vagrant thought I have embodied for
the nonce, says this, he sticks his tongue into his cheek, as though he
thought that three o’clock in the afternoon were rather a poser to me.

Old man with the scythe and hour-glass, I defy thee! I will admit that
three o’clock post meridian, requires much deliberation and cogitation,
in order to give the millions of human marionettes, of whom I hold,
temporarily, the strings, their suitable employment; but it is rather
from a profusion than a paucity of scenes and things germane to the
hour that I am embarrassed. At three, ’Change is still going on, though
its busy time, the acmè of its excitement, is over. As the clock
strikes four, the city of London is in full pant; the clerks rush up
Cheapside, and dive down the wealthy narrow lanes, their bursting
bill-books (secured by leather-covered chains tied round their bodies)
charged with “three months after date, please pay to the order,”
which they cram into letter-boxes for acceptance. The private banking
houses in Lombard Street are in an orderly uproar of finance. The
rattling of shovels is incessant; office-boys cast thousands of pounds,
in notes, bills, and money, to the cashier, carelessly, across the
counter, paying vast sums in to their masters’ accounts; and the mighty
partners—in checked neckerchiefs, buff waistcoats, and creaking boots:
tremendous bank-partners, who are baronets, and members of Parliament,
lords even—stalk back from ’Change, pay a farewell visit to the bank
parlour, have a short but solemn confab with confidential subordinates,
relative to coming transactions at the clearing-house, and then enter
their carriages, and are borne to clubs, to the House of Commons, to
Greenwich dinners, or, perchance, if they have a dinner-party at home,
to their magnificent villas at Putney and Roehampton. What a colony
of bankers dwell there! the _sommités_ of the _haute finance_ seem to
entertain as decided a partiality for the banks of the Thames, as the
stockbrokers do for Brixton and Tulse Hill. Rare lives these money
keepers lead—scattering in the West that which they gather in the East.
Graperies, pineries, conservatories, ice-houses, dinner-parties, balls,
picnics; all these do they enjoy: they, their comely wives and handsome
daughters. They marry into the aristocracy! they have countesses and
marchionesses in their list of partners. It is not so many centuries
ago since the bankers were humble sellers of gold plate, dwelling in
Lombard Street and the Chepe, and following the great courtiers round the
quadrangle of the Exchange, intreating their lordships’ honours to be
allowed to keep their cash. Worthy individuals, however, are the majority
of these bankers, and it is but very rarely indeed that they make ducks
and drakes of their customers’ moneys. They are not so very proud either,
for all their splendid carriages and horses; and here, upon my word, is
Baron Lionel de Rothschild tearing up Ludgate Hill in a common Hansom
cab; but he, like the bad man whom Martial in an epigram declares not to
be so much vicious as vice itself, is less a Banker than a Bank.

As three o’clock grows old, and the tide of business shows unmistakeable
indices of an ebb at no very remote period, so far as the city is
concerned, that same business is at the West-end in its extremest
activity. The shops of the West Strand, Piccadilly, Oxford and Regent
Streets, are thronged with customers, chiefly ladies; the roadway
is encumbered with carts and carriages; and street avocations—the
minor commerce of the mighty mart—are in full swing. Thick-necked and
beetle-browed individuals, by courtesy called dog-fanciers, but who
in many cases might with as much propriety answer to the name of
dog-stealers—forbidding-looking gentry, in coats of velveteen, with large
mother-o’-pearl buttons, and waistcoats of the neat and unpretending
moleskin—lurk about the kerbs of the purlieus of Regent Street and
Waterloo Place (the police drive them away from the main thoroughfares),
with the little “dawgs” they have to sell tucked beneath their arms, made
doubly attractive by much washing with scented soap, and the further
decoration of their necks with pink or blue ribbons. Here is the little
snub-nosed King Charles—I hope the _retroussé_ appearance of his nasal
organ is not due to the unkind agency of a noose of whipcord—his feathery
feet and tail, and his long silky ears, sweeping the clean summer
pavement. Here is the Newfoundland pup, with his bullet head and clubbed
caudal-appendage, winking his stupid little eyes, and needing, seemingly,
an enormous amount of licking into shape. Here is the bull-dog, in his
full growth, with his legs bowed, his tail inclining to the spiral, his
broad chest, thin flanks, defined ribs, moist nozzle, hare lip, bloodshot
eyes, protruding fang, and symmetrical patch over one eye; or else, in
a state of puppyhood, peeping from his proprietor’s side-pocket, all
pink and white like a morose sucking-pig become a hermit. Here is the
delightful little toy English terrier, with his jet-black coat, erect
neck, and tan paws; and here the genuine Skye, gray or brown, like an
unravelled ball of worsted. See, too, grimacing at all who come to view,
like a mulatto at a slave auction, who fancies himself good-looking, the
accomplished French poodle, with his peaked nose, woolly wig, leggings,
and tail band, and his horrible shaved, salmon-coloured body. He can
dance; he can perform gun-drill; he can fall motionless, as though dead,
at the word of command; he can climb up a lamp-post, jump over a stick,
hop on one leg, carry a basket in his mouth, and run away when he is
told that a policeman is coming. You can teach him to do anything but
love you. These, and good store of mongrels and half-breeds that the
dealer would fain palm upon us as dogs of blood and price, frisk and
fawn about his cord-trouser covered legs; but where is the toy-dog _par
excellence_, the playful, snappish, fractious, facetious, charming,
utterly useless little dog, that, a quarter of a century since, was the
treasure of our dowagers and our old maids? Where is the Dutch pug? Where
is that Narcissus of canine Calibanism, with his coffee-coloured coat,
his tail in a ring like the blue-nosed baboon’s, his crisped morsels of
ears, his black muzzle, his sharp, gleaming little teeth, his intensely
red lips and tongue? Is he extinct, like the lion-dog from Malta, the
property of her Majesty the Queen, and the “last of his race,” whom
courtly Sir Edwin Landseer drew? Are there no more Dutch pugs? They must
exist somewhere. Cunning dealers owning _recherché_ kennels in the New
Road or at Battle Bridge, or attending recondite “show clubs,” held at
mysterious hostelries in the vicinity of Clerkenwell, must yet have some
undoubted specimens of the pug for sale. There must be burghers yet, in
the fat comfortable houses at Loo by the Hague, or in the plethoric,
oozy vicinage of Amsterdam—there must be Tietjens, and Tenbroecks,
and van Ramms, and van Bummels, whose pride it is, amidst their store
of tulip bulbs, china vases, cabinet pictures by Breughel and Ostade,
lacquer-work from Japan, and spice-boxes from Java, to possess Dutch
pugs in the flesh. But the creature is seen no more in London streets,
and we must be content with him on Hogarth’s canvases, in Linacre’s
engravings, or modelled in china, as we see him in the curiosity shops.
I have indeed seen the elephant—I mean the Dutch pug—alive and snarling,
once in my life. He was led by a bright scarlet ribbon—scarlet, mind,
not pink or blue—attached to his silver collar; and there must have
been something in the appearance of my youthful legs (I was but five,
and they were bare, plump, and mottled) that excited his carnivorous
propensities, for, long as is the lapse of time, I remember that he
rushed at me like a coffee-coloured tiger. His mistress was a Duchess,
the grandest, handsomest Duchess that had ever lived (of course, I except
Georgina of Devonshire) since the days of that Grace of Queensberry
of whom Mr. Thackeray was good enough to tell us in the “Virginians.”
She, my Duchess, wore a hat and feathers, diamonds, and a _moustache_—a
downy nimbus round her mouth, like that which Mr. Philip insinuates
rather than paints in his delightful Spanish girls’ faces. I see her
now, parading the cliff at Brighton, with her black velvet train—yes,
madam, her train—held up by a page. She was the last duchess who drove
down to Brighton in a coach and six. She was the last duchess who at
Twelfth-night parties had a diamond ring baked in the cake which was to
be distributed by lots. Before she came to her coronet, she had been a
singing woman at a playhouse, had married a very foolish rich old banker,
and, at his death, remarried a more foolish and very poor duke. But she
was an excellent woman, and the relative to whom she left the bulk of her
wealth, is one of the most charitable, as I am also afraid she is one of
the most _ennuyée_, ladies in England. I am proud of my reminiscence. It
is not every one that has seen a Dutch pug and the Duchess of St. Albans
alive.

Body of me! here am I wasting my time among the dog-fanciers—(when
the name of the man in the iron mask, the authorship of “Junius,” the
murderer of Caspar Hauser, and the date of the laws of Menu, shall be
known, it shall also be patent to all men why trafficking in dogs and
horses seem necessarily connected with roguery)—here am I descanting
on poodles and pug-dogs, when, with quick observant eyes, I should be
noting the hundred little trades that are being driven at three o’clock
in the afternoon. The feverish industry—the untiring perseverance—the
bitter struggle, and all for yon scanty morsel of bread, and a few
inches of space for repose at night in a fourpenny lodging-house! Follow
the kerb-stone from the County Fire Office to St. Martin’s Lane. See
the itinerant venders of catch-’em-alive-o’s, of cheap toys, of quires
of writing-paper, sealing-wax and envelopes, all for the small charge
of one penny; see the industrials who have walking-sticks, umbrellas,
gutta-percha whips, aërated balls, locomotive engines and statuettes
of Napoleon in glass phials, that make us wonder, as with flies in
amber, however they, the engines and statuettes, got there; the women
who have bouquets to dispose of—how many times have they been refreshed
beneath the pump, this droughty day?—the boys and girls in looped and
windowed raggedness striving to sell fruit, flowers, almanacks, pencils,
fusees—anything, to keep the wolf from the door. He is always at the
door, that wolf—always at that yawning portal, and his name is Famine.
The worst of the brute is, that he comes not alone—that he has a friend,
a brother wolf with him, who hankers round the corner, and is always
ready to pop in at the door at the slightest suspicion of a summons.
This wolf is a full-paunched rogue, and liberal, too, of succulent, but
_poisoned_ food to his friends. This is the thief wolf, the gallows wolf,
the Calcraft wolf. _Lupus carnifex_. He keeps up an incessant whining
baying, which, being interpreted, means, “Work no more. See how hard the
life is. What’s the good of working? Come and Steal.” Look here, my lords
and gentlemen—look here, my right honourable friends—look here, my noble
captains—look here, your honours’ worships—come out of your carriages,
come out of your clubs, come out of your shooting-boxes in the Highlands,
and your _petites maisons_ in the Regent’s Park, and look at these faded
and patched creatures. I tell you that they have to rise early and go to
bed late—that they have to work hours and hours before they can turn one
penny. They have never been taught; they are seldom fed, and more seldom
washed; but _they don’t steal_. I declare that it is a wonder they do
not—a marvel and a miracle they do not. They remain steadfastly honest;
for, in the troubled sea of their lives, Almighty Mercy has planted a
Pharos, or light-house. The night is pitchy black oft enough; the light
revolves—is for a time invisible—and the poor forlorn, tempest-torn
man watches the blank horizon in all but mute despair; but the blessed
gladdening gleam comes round again, as we have all seen it many a time on
the ocean, and, sighing, the honest man resolutely keeps on his course.

Following the kerb-stone myself from the before-mentioned County Fire
Office to St. Martin’s Lane, and passing through Leicester Square—which,
what with the Alhambra “Palace” and its hideous American posters, the
Great Globe, and the monster _cafés chantants_, I begin to be rather
uncertain about recognising—passing, not without some inward trembling,
the stick shop at the corner of the lane, while on either side of the
portal those peculiarly ugly carved clubs—the very Gog and Magog of
walking-stickery—keep watch and ward, I cut dexterously through the
living torrent that is flowing from Charing Cross toward St. Giles’s
(they were villages once, Charynge and Saint Gyles’s—ha! ha!) and
commence the ascent of New Street, a feat well nigh as disagreeable, if
not as perilous, as that of Mont Blanc. I hate this incorrigible little
thoroughfare; this New Street. It is full of bad smells, mangy little
shops, obstructions, and bad characters. There is a yawning gin-palace at
its south-western extremity. The odours of its eating-houses—especially
of a seedy little French _pension bourgeoise_ about half way up—are
displeasing to my nostrils. The cigars vended in New Street are the
worst in London, and the sweetstuff shops are mobbed—yes, mobbed—by
children in torn pinafores who _never_ have any pocket handkerchiefs.
Of late days, photographers have hung out their signs and set up their
lenses in New Street; and if, passing through the street, you escape
being run over by a wagon or upset by an inebriated market-gardener, you
run great risks of being forcibly dragged into the hole tenanted by a
photographic “artist,” and “focussed,” willy nilly. Thoroughfares, almost
inconceivably tortuous, crapulous, and infamous, debouch upon New Street.
There is that Rose Street, or Rose Alley, where, if I be not wrong in my
topography, John Dryden, the poet, was waylaid and cudgelled; and there
is a wretched little haunt called Bedfordbury, a devious, slimy little
reptile of a place, whose tumble-down tenements and reeking courts spume
forth plumps of animated rags, such as can be equalled in no London
thoroughfare save Church Lane, St. Giles’s. I don’t think there are five
windows in Bedfordbury with a whole pain of glass in them. Rags and
filthy _loques_ are hung from poles, like banners from the outward walls.
There is an insolent burgher of Bedfordbury, who says I owe him certain
stivers. Confound the place! its rags, its children, its red herrings,
and tobacco-pipes crossed in the windows, its boulders of whitening, and
its turpentine-infected bundles of firewood!

The pursuit of New Street, thus maledicted, brings me to King Street,
Covent Garden, a broad, fair, well-conducted public way, against which I
have no particular prejudice; for it leads up to Covent Garden Market,
which I love; and it contains within its limits the Garrick Club.

Before, however, you come to the Garrick, before you come to the
coffee-shop where there is that strange collection of alarming-looking
portraits; before you come to Mr. Kilpack’s cigar divan and
bowling-alley, you arrive at the door of an unpretending, though roomy
mansion, the jambs of whose portals are furnished with flattering
catalogues relative to “this day’s sale,” and the pavement before whose
frontage is strewn with fragments of straw and shreds of carpeting. It is
strange, too, if you do not see half a dozen or so burly-looking porters
lounging about the premises, and a corresponding number of porter’s
knots, the straw stuffing bulging occasionally from rents in their
sides, decorating the railings, as the pint pots do the iron barriers of
the licensed victuallers. This mansion contains the great auction-room
of Messrs. Debenham and Storr. Let us enter without fear. There is
scarcely, I think, so interesting an exhibition in London; yet, in
contradistinction to the majority of London exhibitions, there is nothing
to pay.

In this monstrous amalgam of microcosms, London, a man may, if he
will only take the trouble, find that certain places, streets, rooms,
peculiar spots and set apart localities, are haunted by classes of people
as peculiar as the localities they affect, and who are seldom to be
found anywhere else. In the early forenoon, long before business hours
commence, the benches of the piazza of the Royal Exchange have their
peculiar occupants—lank, mystic-looking men, mostly advanced in years,
and shiny in threadbare blackclothdom. They converse with one another
seldom, and when they do so, it is but in furtive whispers, the cavernous
mouth screened by the rugose hand, with its knotted cordage of veins and
its chalkstoned knuckles, as though the whisper were of such commercial
moment that the locutor feared its instantaneous transport to the ears
of Rothschild or Baring, and the consequent uprising or downfalling
of stocks or corn, silk or tallow. Who are these men, these Exchange
ghosts, who haunt the site of Sir Thomas Gresham’s old “Burse?” Are they
commission agents come to decay, bankrupt metal brokers, burnt-out,
uninsured wharfingers, lame ducks of the Stock Exchange, forced even
to “waddle” from the purlieus of Capel Court? There they sit day after
day—their feet (lamentably covered with boots of fastidious bigness, for,
alas! the soles are warped, the sides crack, the heels are irrevocably
lopsided) beating the devil’s tattoo on the stone pavement, their big
cotton umbrellas distilling a mouldy moisture, or a pair of faded Berlin
gloves, quite gone and ruined at the fingers, lying on the bench beside
them. Their battered hats oscillate on their heads through overloading
with tape-tied papers, and oft-times, from the breast-pocket of their
tightly-buttoned coats, they drag leathern pocketbooks, white and frayed
at the edges like the seams of their own poor garments, from which
pocketbooks they draw greasy documents, faded envelopes, sleezy letters,
which have been folded and refolded so often that they seem in imminent
danger of dropping to pieces like an over-used passport at the next
display. With what an owl-like, an oracular, look of wisdom they consult
these papers! What are they all about? The bankruptcy of their owners
thirty years ago, and the infamous behaviour of the official assignees
(dead and buried years since)? their early love correspondence? their
title-deeds to the estates in Ayrshire, and the large pasture lands in
the Isle of Skye? Who knows? But you never see these ghostly time-waiters
anywhere but on ’Change, and out of ’Change hours. Directly the
legitimate business of that place of commercial re-union commences, they
melt away imperceptibly, like the ghost of Hamlet’s father at cock-crow,
coming like shadows and so departing.

The dreadful night dens and low revelling houses of past midnight London,
the only remnants left among us of the innumerable “finishes” and
saloons and night-cellars of a former age, have also their peculiar male
population, stamped indelibly with the mint-mark of the place, and not to
be found out of it, save in the dock of the adjacent police-court. Where
these _ruffiani_, these copper captains and cozening buz-gloaks, are to
be found during the day, or even up to midnight—for in the gallery even
of any decent theatre they would not be admitted—must remain a secret;
perhaps, like the ghoules and afrits, the bats and dragons of fable,
they haunt ruinous tombs, deserted sepulchres, church-yards sealed up
long since by the Board of Health; but so soon as two or three o’clock
in the morning arrives, they are to be found wherever there are fools to
be fleeced or knaves to plot with. You study their lank hair and stained
splendid stocks, their rumpled jay’s finery and rascal talk, their cheap
canes and sham rings; but they, too, fade away with the dawn—how, no
man can say, for the meanest cabman would scorn to convey them in his
vehicle—and are not beheld any more till vagabondising time begins again.

“Supers,” too—or theatrical supernumeraries, to give them their full
title—are a decidedly distinctive and peculiar race; and though reported,
and ordinarily believed, to exercise certain trades and handicrafts in
the daytime, such as shoemaking, tailoring, bookbinding, and the like,
my private belief is that no “super” could exist long in any atmosphere
remote from behind the scenes or the vicinity of the stage-door of a
theatre. Look, too, at the audience of a police court: look at the
pinched men who persist in attending the sittings of the Insolvent
Debtors’ Court in Portugal Street, or hang about the dingy tavern
opposite, and who consume with furtive bites Abernethy biscuits and
saveloys, half hidden in the folds of blue cotton pocket-handkerchiefs.
Yes, the proverb reads aright—as many men, so many minds; and each man’s
mind, his idiosyncrasy, leads him to frequent a certain place till he
becomes habituated to it, and cannot separate himself therefrom. There
are your men who delight in witnessing surgical operations, and those
who never miss going to a hanging. There is a class of people who have
a morbid predilection for attending coroners’ inquests, and another
who insist upon going to the Derby, be the weather wet or dry, cold or
hot, though they scarcely know a horse’s fore from his hind legs, and
have never a sixpenny bet on the field. There is a class who hang about
artists’ studios, knowing no more of painting than Mr. Wakley does of
poetry; there are the men you meet at charity dinners, the women you meet
at marriages and christenings. Again, there is a class of eccentrics,
who, like the crazy Earl of Portsmouth, have an invincible _penchant_ for
funerals—“black jobs,” as the mad lord used to call them; and finally,
there are the people who haunt SALES BY AUCTION.

[Illustration: THREE O’CLOCK P.M.: DEBENHAM AND STORR’S AUCTION-ROOMS.]

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.

But from a chest of drawers to a box of dominoes, from a fur coat to a
silver-mounted horsewhip, from a carpenter’s plane to a case of lancets,
from a coil of rope to a silk neck-tie, from a dragoon’s helmet to a
lady’s thimble, there seems scarcely an article of furniture or wearing
apparel, of use or superfluity, that is not to be found here. Glance
behind that counter running down the room, and somewhat similar to the
narrow platform in a French _douane_, where the luggage is deposited to
be searched. The porters move about among a heterogeneous assemblage of
conflicting articles of merchandise; the clerk who holds aloft the gun
or the clock, or the sheaf of umbrellas, or whatever other article is
purchased, hands it to the purchaser, when it is knocked down to him,
with a confidential wink, if he knows and trusts that customer, with a
brief reminder of “money” and an out-stretched palm, signifying that a
deposit in cash must be forthwith paid in case such customer be not known
to him, or, what will sometimes happen, better known than trusted. And
high above all is the auctioneer in his pulpit, with his poised hammer,
the Jupiter Tonans of the sale.

And such a sale! Before I have been in the room a quarter of an hour, I
witness the knocking down of at least twenty dress coats, and as many
waistcoats and pairs of trousers, several dozen shirts, a box of silk
handkerchiefs, two ditto of gloves, a roll of best Saxony broadcloth,
a piece of Genoa velvet, six satin dresses, twelve boxes of artificial
flowers, a couple of opera glasses, a set of ivory chessmen, eighteen
pairs of patent leather boots—not made up—several complete sets of
carpenters’ tools, nine church services, richly bound, a carved oak
cabinet, a French bedstead, a pair of china vases, a set of harness,
three boxes of water colours, eight pairs of stays, a telescope,
a box of cigars, an enamel miniature of Napoleon, a theodolite, a
bronze candelabrum, a pocket compass, twenty-four double-barrelled
fowling-pieces (I quote _verbatim_ and _seriatim_ from the catalogue),
a parrot cage, three dozen knives and forks, two plated toast-racks, a
Turkey carpet, a fishing-rod, winch, and eelspear, by Cheek, a tent by
Benjamin Edgington, two dozen sheepskin coats, warranted from the Crimea,
a silver-mounted dressing-case, one of eau-de-Cologne, an uncut copy of
Macaulay’s “History of England,” a cornet-à-piston, a buhl inkstand, an
eight-day clock, two pairs of silver grape-scissors, a poonah-painted
screen, a papier-maché work-box, an assortment of variegated floss-silk,
seven German flutes, an ivory casket, two girandoles for wax candles, an
ebony fan, five flat-irons, and an accordion.

There! I am fairly out of breath. The mere perusal of the catalogue
is sufficient to give one vertigo. But whence, you will ask, the
extraordinary incongruity of the articles sold? We know when a gentleman
“going abroad” or “relinquishing housekeeping,” and who is never—Oh dear,
no!—in any manner of pecuniary difficulty, honours Messrs. So-and-So with
instructions to sell his effects, what we may look forward to when the
carpets are hung from the windows with the sale-bills pinned thereon,
and the auctioneer establishes a temporary rostrum on the dining-room
table. We know that after the “elegant modern furniture” will come
the “choice collection of pictures, statuary, and _virtù_,” then the
“carefully-selected library of handsomely-bound books,” and then the
“judiciously assorted stock of first-class wines.” But what gentleman,
what tradesman, what collector of curiosities and odds and ends even,
could have brought together such an astounding jumble of conflicting
wares as are gathered round us to-day! The solution of the enigma
lies in a nutshell, and shall forthwith be made manifest to you. The
articles sold this afternoon are all _pawnbrokers’ pledges unredeemed_,
and this is one of Messrs. Debenham and Storr’s quarterly sales, which
the law hath given, and which the court awards. Your watch, which your
temporary pecuniary embarrassments may have led you to deposit with a
confiding relative thirteen months since, which your renewed pecuniary
embarrassments have precluded you from redeeming, and which your own
unpardonable carelessness has made you even forget to pay the interest
upon, may be among that angling bundle of time-pieces which the clerk
holds up, and on which the auctioneer is, at this very moment, descanting.

The eloquence of the quarterly sale does not by any means resemble the
flowery Demosthenic style first brought into fashion among auctioneers
by the distinguished George Robins. Here are no ponds to be magnified
by rhetoric into fairy lakes, no little hills to be amplified into
towering crags, no shaven lawns to be described as “boundless expanses
of verdure.” The auctioneer is calm, equable, concise, but firm, and the
sums realised by the sale of the articles are reasonable—so reasonable,
in fact, that they frequently barely cover loan and interest due to the
pawnbroker. But that is his risk; and such is the power of competition
in trade, that a London pawnbroker will often lend more upon an article
than it will sell for. In the provinces the brethren of the three golden
balls are more cautious; and in Dublin they are shamefully mean in
their advances to their impoverished clients; but it is in Paris _par
excellence_, that the great national pawning establishment, the Mont de
Piété, manifests the most decided intention, by the microscopic nature of
its loans, of taking care of itself.

Much noise, much dust, and an appreciable amount of confusion, must
necessarily, my patient friend and companion, exist at every auction,
though it must be admitted, to the credit of Messrs. Debenham and
Storr, that their proceedings are always marked by as much regularity
and decorum as the nature of their transactions will admit of. For
auctioneering is the Bohemianism of commerce; and whether it be the
purser of a man-of-war selling the effects of a deceased Jack Tar before
the mainmast; an impromptu George Robins, with a very large beard,
knocking down red flannel shirts, jack-boots, and gold rocking-cradles at
the Ballarat diggings; my former friends, the fish salesmen, brandishing
their account-books over their piscine merchandise in Billingsgate; or
the courtly Robins, _in propriâ personâ_, eloquently bepuffing the Right
Hon. the Earl of Cockletops’s broad acres, which he has been honoured
with instructions to sell, in consequence of the insolvency of his
Lordship, there always enters into the deed of selling something wild,
something picturesque, and something exciting. It is strange, too, how
soon the virtues of auctioneering are apt to degenerate into vices; and
how thin a barrier exists between its legitimate commercial business and
an imbroglio of roguish chaffering.

So is it on the turf. There, on the velvet verdant lawn before the Grand
Stand at Epsom, sits, or stands, or reclines, my Lord the immaculate
owner of Podasokus or Cynosure. Betting-book in hand, he condescends to
take the odds from Mr. Jones, who may have been a journeyman carpenter
ten years since, but whose bare word is good now for a hundred thousand
pounds. The peer and the plebeian bet together amicably; they respect
their parole agreements; they would disdain to admit the suspicion of a
fraud in their transactions; they are honourable men both, though they
might, I acknowledge, do something better for a livelihood than gamble
on the speed of a racehorse; yet, all honourable men as they are on the
turf, within two feet of them, _outside_ the Grand Stand railing, are
some hundreds of turfites depending for their existence upon exactly
the same means—betting, but who cheat, and lie, and cozen, and defraud,
and swagger about in an impudent boastfulness of roguery, till the most
liberal-minded member of the non-cheating community must regret, almost,
that the old despotic punishments are gone out of vogue, and that a few
of these rogues’ ears cannot be nailed to the winning post, a few of them
tied up to the railings of the Grand Stand and soundly swinged, and a
few more placed in neat pillories, or commodious pairs of stocks beneath
the judge’s chair. Like the honourable betters inside, and the thievish
touts outside, electioneering is apt to suffer by the same disreputable
companionships; and within a few stones’ throw of Garraway’s, there
may be pullulating an infamous little watch-box of dishonesty, where a
thick-lipped, sham Caucasian auctioneer, is endeavouring, with the aid
of confederates as knavish as he, to palm off worthless lamps, lacquered
tea-trays, teapots of tin sophisticated to the semblance of silver, and
rubbishing dressing-cases, upon unwary country visitors, or even upon
Cockneys, who, were they to live to the age of Methuselah, would never be
thoroughly initiated into the ways of the town.

And now stand on one side: the auction company—it is nearly four
o’clock—stream forth from Debenham’s. I spoke of the amateurs of
auctions—the people who persist in attending them, but who rarely
appear to become purchasers of anything. There is not much difficulty,
however, in discerning who the people are who are really bidding and
really buying. Here they come, bagged and bundled, and gesticulating and
jabbering. They are Jews, my dear. They are the hook-nosed, ripe-lipped,
bright-eyed, cork-screw ringleted, and generally oleaginous-looking
children of Israel. They cluster, while in the sale-room, round the
auctioneer and his clerk, who (the last) seems to have an intimate
acquaintance with them all. They nod and chuckle, and utter Hebrew
ejaculations, and seem, all the while that the sale is proceeding, to
be in an overboiling state of tremour and nervous excitement. A sale
by auction is to them as good—better—than a play; so is everything on
this earth, in, about, or in the remotest connection with which, there
is something that can be bought, or something that can be sold, or
something that can be higgled for. If ever you attend auctions, my friend
and reader, I should advise you not to bid against the Jews. If it seem
to you that any one of the Caucasian Arabs has set his mind upon the
acquisition of an article, let him bid for it and buy it, a’goodness
name; for if you meddle with the matter, even by the augmentation of a
sixpence, he will so bid and bid against you, that he will bid you, at
last, out of your hat, and out of your coat, and out of your skin, and
out of your bones; even as the cunning man of Pyquag, that Diedrich
Knickerbocker tells of, questioned Anthony van Corlear, the trumpeter,
out of his fast-trotting nag, and sent him home mounted on a vile calico
mare.

There are some here, who are dissatisfied with the bargains they have
made, and are squabbling in a lively manner on the foot pavement. Mark,
I entreat you, among them, those dusky-faced females, mostly given to
the loose and flabby order of corpulency, who are shabbily dressed,
yet with a certain tendency to the wearing of lace bonnets, and faded
cashmeres, and who have moreover a decided penchant for golden bangles
and earrings, and rings with large stones that do not shine. You cannot
make up your mind at once that they are Jewesses, because they have a
conflicting facial resemblance to Gipsies. During the sale they have been
reclining, not to say squatting, on the broad goods counter in shabby
state, like second-hand sultanas, making bids in deep contralto voices,
or mysteriously transmitting them through the intermediary of glib Jew
boys with curly heads. These commercial females must be reckoned among
the million and one mysteries of London. I imagine them to be the ladies
dwelling in remote suburbs or genteel neighbourhoods gone to decay, who,
in the columns of the “Times,” are always expressing a desire to purchase
second-hand wearing apparel, lace, jewellery, and books, for the purpose
of exportation to Australia, and for which they are always willing to
pay ready money, even to the extent of remitting post-office orders in
immediate return for parcels from the country. They, too, I think, must
keep the mysterious “ladies’ wardrobe shops” known to the Abigails in
aristocratic families, and which are, a little bird has told me, not
altogether unknown to the patrician occupants of the noblest mansions
of the realm. Thus, there seems to be a perpetual round of mutation and
transmutation going on among clothes. The natural theory of reproduction
here seems carried to its most elaborate condition of practice; and,
bidding adieu to Debenham and Storr’s, the chaffering Jews, and the
dusky ladies’ wardrobe women, my mind wanders to Rag Fair, thence to
the emporium of Messrs. Moses and Son, and thence, again, to Stultze,
Nugee, and Buckmaster, and I end in a maze of cogitation upon the “Sartor
Resartus” of Thomas Carlyle.

Come, let us struggle into the open, and inhale the flower-laden breeze
that is wafted from Covent Garden market. There, we are in King Street;
and, I declare, there is my aunt Sophy’s brougham, with my identical aunt
and my cousin Polly in the interior of the vehicle. They are bound, I
will go bail, either to the Soho Bazaar or to the Pantheon, in Oxford
Street. Jump up behind; fear no warning cry of “whip behind” addressed to
the coachman by malevolent street boy, disappointed in his expectations
of an eleemosynary ride. Remember, we are invisible; and as for the
dignity of the thing, the starched, buckramed, and watchspringed-hooped
skirts of my female relatives take up at least three and a half out of
the four seats in the brougham: the remaining moiety of a place being
occupied, as of right, by my aunt’s terrier, Jip, who threatens vengeance
with all his teeth on any one who should venture to dispossess him.

I told you so. They have passed Charles Street, Soho, whisked by the
Princess’s Theatre, and alighted beneath the portico of the Pantheon.
The affable beadle (whose whiskers, gold-laced hat-band, livery buttons,
and general deportment, are as superior to those the property of the
beadle of the Burlington Arcade, as General Washington to General Walker)
receives the ladies with a bow. He is equalled, not surpassed, in
polished courtesy, by his brother beadle at the conservatory entrance in
Great Marlborough Street, who bows ladies out with a dignified politeness
worthy of the best days of Richelieu and Lauzun.

So into the Pantheon, turning and turning about in that
Hampton-Court-like maze of stalls, laden with pretty gimcracks, toys,
and _papier maché_ trifles for the table, dolls and children’s dresses,
wax flowers and Berlin and crotchet work, prints, and polkas, and
women’s ware of all sorts. Up into the gallery, where you may look down
upon a perfect little ant-hill of lively industry. And, if you choose,
into that queer picture-gallery, where works by twentieth-rate masters
have been quietly accumulating smoke and dust for some score years, and
where the only conspicuous work is poor shiftless Haydon’s big nightmare
picture of “Lazarus.” They have lately added, I believe, a photographic
establishment to the picture-gallery of the Pantheon; but I am doubtful
as to its success. It requires a considerable amount of moral courage to
ascend the stairs, or to enter the picture department at all. The place
seems haunted by the ghosts of bygone pictorial mediocrities. It is the
lazar-house of painting—an hospital of incurables in art.

[Illustration: THREE O’CLOCK P.M.: THE PANTHEON BAZAAR.]

I am not aware whether any of my present generation of readers—people
are born, and live and die, so fast now-a-days—remember a friend of
mine who dwelt in an out-of-the-way place called Tatty-boy’s Rents, and
whom I introduced to the public by the name of Fripanelli. He was a
music-master—very old, and poor, and ugly; almost a dwarf in stature,
wrinkled, decrepit; he wore a short cloak, and the boys called him
“Jocko;” indeed, he was not at all unlike a baboon in general appearance.
But Fripanelli in his time—a very long time ago—though now brought
to living in a back slum, and teaching the daughters of chandlers’
shopkeepers, had been a famous professor of the tuneful art. He knew old
Gaddi—Queen Caroline’s Gaddi—well: he had been judged worthy to preside
at the pianoforte at Velluti’s musical classes; and he had even written
the music to a ballet, which was performed with great _éclat_ at the
King’s Theatre, and in which the celebrated Gambalonga had danced. To
me, Frip. had an additional claim to be regarded with something like
curiosity mingled with reverence; for he had positively been, in the
halcyon days of youth, the manager of an Italian opera company, the place
of whose performance was—wherever do you think?—the Pantheon, in Oxford
Street. Now, as I stand in the lively bazaar, with the prattling little
children, and the fine flounced ladies, I try to conjure back the days
when Fripanelli was young, and when the Pantheon was a theatre. From here
in the vestibule—where the ornamented flower-pots, and the garden-chairs
of complicated construction, and the busts with smoky cheeks and noses,
and marvellously clubbed heads of hair, have their _locus standi_—from
here sprang the grand staircase. There was no Haydon’s picture of Lazarus
for our grandfathers and grandmothers in hoops and powder—you must
remember that Fripanelli looks at least two hundred and fifty years of
age, and is currently reported to be ninety—to stare at as they trotted
up the degrees. Yonder, in the haven of bygone mediocrities in the
picture-gallery, may have been the crush-room; the rotunda at the back
of the bazaar, where now the vases of wax-flowers glimmer in a perpetual
twilight, must have been the green-room; the conservatories were
dressing-rooms, and the stage door was undoubtedly in Great Marlborough
Street. How I should have liked to witness the old pigtail operas and
ballets performed at the Pantheon, when Fripanelli and the century were
young. “Iphigenia in Aulis,” “Ariadne in Naxos,” “Orestes and Pylades,”
“Daphnis and Chloë,” “Bellerophon,” “Eurydice,” the “Clemency of Titus,”
the “Misfortunes of Darius,” and the “Cruelty of Nero”—these were the
lively subjects which our grandfathers and grandmothers delighted to have
set to Italian music. Plenty of good heavy choruses, tinkle-tankling
instrumental music, plaintive ditties, with accompaniments on the fife
and the fiddle, and lengthy screeds of droning recitatives, like the
Latin accidence arranged for the bagpipes. Those were the days of the
unhappy beings of whom Velluti and Ambrogetti were among the last whom
a refined barbarity converted into _soprani_. The Italians have not
many things to thank the first Napoleon for; yet to his sway in Italy
humanity owes the abolition of _that_ atrocity. They dig up some of the
worthy old pigtail operas now, and perform them on our modern lyric
stage. A select audience of fogies, whose sympathies are all with the
past, comes to listen, and goes to sleep; and “Iphigenia in Aulis,” or
“Ariadne in Naxos,” is consigned to a Capuletian tomb of limbo. Days of
good taste are these, my masters, when aristocratic ears are tickled by
the melodious naughtinesses of the great Casino-and-Codliver-oil opera,
the “Traviata;” by the Coburg melodrama, mingled with Mrs. Ratcliffe’s
novel, and finished with extracts from Guicciardini’s “Annals”—called
the “Trovatore,” [who was it fried that child, or broiled him, or ate
him: Azucena, Leonora, the Conde di Luna, Mrs. Harris, all or any of
them?] or by the sparkling improbabilities of “Rigoletto,” with its
charming Greenacre episode of the murdered lady in the sack. We manage
those things so much better now-a-days. And the ballets, too; do you
know positively that in the pig-tail opera times, the lady dancers wore
skirts of decent length? do you know that Guimard danced in a hoop
that reached nearly to her ankles, and that Noblet wore a corsage that
ended just below her armpits, and a skirt that descended far below her
knees? Do you know, even, that Taglioni, and Ellsler, and Duvernay,
the great terpsichorean marvels of twenty years since, disdained the
meretricious allurements of this refined and polished age, that calls
garters “elastic bands,” and winces at a grant of twenty pounds a year
for providing living models for the students of the Dublin Academy?—that
strains at these gnats, and swallows the camel of a ballet at the opera!
Oh, stupid old pig-tail days, when we could take our wives and sisters
to hear operas and see ballets, without burning with shame to think that
we should take, or they suffer themselves to be taken, to witness a
shameless exhibition, fit only for the _blasé_ patricians of the Lower
Empire!

In the memoirs of old Nollekens, the sculptor, you will find that he
was an assiduous frequenter of the Italian Opera at the Pantheon, to
which he had a life admission—it did not last _his_ life though, I am
afraid—and that he sat in the pit with his sword by his side, and a
worsted comforter round his neck. This must surely, however, have been
before the days of Fripanelli’s management. It is hard to say, indeed,
for the Pantheon has been so many things by turns and nothing long.
Once, if I mistake not, there was wont to be an exhibition of wax-work
here; once, too, it was famous as a place for masquerades of the most
fashionable, or, at least, of the costliest description. Here Charles Fox
and Lord Maldon, with dominoes thrown over their laced clothes, and masks
pressed upon their powdered perukes, reeled in from the chocolate houses
and the E. O. tables; here, so the legends say, the bad young prince, who
afterwards became a worse old king, the worthless and witless wearer of
the Prince of Wales’s three ostrich plumes—here George III.’s eldest born
met the beautiful Perdita. He ill-treated her, of course, afterwards,
as he ill-treated his wives (I say wives, in the plural number, do you
understand?) and his mistresses, his father, his friends, and the people
he was called upon to govern. He lied to, and betrayed, them all; and he
was _Dei gratiâ_, and died in the odour of civil list sanctity, and they
have erected a statue to his disreputable memory in Trafalgar Square.

Soft, whisper low, tread softly: the Pantheon was once a church! Yes,
there were pews in the area of the pit, and free-sittings in the
galleries. There is a singing, buffooning place in Paradise Street,
Liverpool, where they dance the Lancashire clog-hornpipe, yell comic
songs on donkeys’ backs, perform acrobatic feats, juggle, strum the
banjo, clank the bones, belabour the tambourine, stand on their heads,
and walk on the ceiling. This place is called the Colosseum, _but it was
once a chapel_. The pews, with very slight alteration, yet exist, and on
the ledges where the hymn-books were wont to lie, stand now the bottles
of Dublin stout and ginger-pop. I do not like these violent revolutions,
these galvanic contrasts. They are hideous, they are unnatural, they are
appalling. To return to the Pantheon—I still follow the legends—after it
had been a masquerading temple and a wax-work show, and then a church,
it was changed once more into a theatre; but _mark what followed_. One
Saturday night the company were playing “Don Giovanni,” and midnight had
struck before the awful tramp of the Commendatore was heard re-echoing
through the marble corridors of the libertine’s palace, and the last
tube of maccaroni stuck in Leporello’s throat; but when, the finale
being at its approach, and to cap the climax of the catastrophe, twelve
demons in flame-coloured garments, and bearing torches flaming with
resin, rose from trap-doors to seize the guilty Don, the manager, who
had been watching the scene from the wing, rushed on the stage with
a screech of horror, crying out, “_There are thirteen! There are
thirteen!_” And so there were! A solitary demon, with flaming eyes, a
tail of incredible length, and bearing _two_ torches, appeared, no man
knew whence—_he_ hadn’t come up a trap to the foot-lights (the audience
screaming and fainting by scores), danced a ghastly _pas seul_, cut six,
and disappeared in a blaze of livid-coloured fire, which had _not_ been
provided in the usual iron pans by the property man.[6] Whether he took
Don Giovanni or the manager away with him the legend does not state; but
it is certain that the latter went bankrupt a month afterwards, of course
as a punishment for his sins; whereupon the lease of the Pantheon was
purchased by a sober-minded speculator, who forthwith converted it into a
bazaar, as which it has greatly thriven ever since.

I am very fond of buying toys for children; but I don’t take them to
the Pantheon for that purpose. I fear the price of the merchandise
which the pretty and well-conducted female assistants at the stalls
have to sell. I have been given to understand that incredible prices
are charged for India-rubber balls, and that the quotations for drums,
hares-and-tabors, and Noah’s arks, are ruinously high. I have yet
another reason for not patronising the Pantheon as a toy mart. It
frequently happens that I feel slightly misanthropic and vicious in my
toy-dealing excursions, and that my juvenile friends have sudden fits
of naughtiness, and turn out to be anything but agreeable companions.
Woe betide the ill-conditioned youngsters who cause me to assume the
function of a vicarious “Bogey!” But I serve them out, I promise you.
To use a transpontine colloquialism, ungenteel but expressive, I “warm
them.” Not by blows or pinches—I disdain that; not by taking them into
shops where they sell unwholesome pastry or deleterious sweetstuff—I
have no wish to impair their infantile powers of digestion; though both
processes, I have been given to understand, are sometimes resorted to
by child-quellers; but I “warm” them by taking them into toy shops and
buying them _ugly toys_. Aha! my young friends! who bought you the old
gentleman impaled on the area railing while in the act of knocking at his
own street door, and who emitted a dismal groan when the pedestal on
which he stood was compressed? Who purchased the monkey with the horrible
visage, that ran up the stick? who the dreadful crawling serpent, made
of the sluggishly elastic substance—a compound of glue and treacle, I
believe—of which printers’ rollers are made, and that unwound himself
in a shudderingly, reptile, life-like manner on the parlour carpet? Who
brought you the cold, flabby toad, and the centipede at the end of the
India-rubber string, with his heavy chalk body and quivering limbs, the
great-grandfather of all the irreverent daddy-long-legs who wouldn’t
say their prayers, and were taken, in consequence, by those elongated
appendages, and thrown, with more or less violence, downstairs? This is
about the best method I know for punishing a refractory child. There is
another, an almost infallible and Rarey-like process of taming juvenile
termagants in the absence of their parents; but it entails a slight
modicum of physical cruelty. Say that you are left alone with a child,
too young to reason with, and who _won’t_ behave himself. Don’t slap
him: it is brutal and cowardly on your part; besides, it _leaves marks_,
and you don’t want to make an enemy of his mother. Don’t make faces at
him: it may spoil the beauty of your own countenance, and may frighten
him out of his little wits. _Shake him._ Shake him till he becomes an
animated whirligig. He isn’t appalled; he is only bewildered. He doesn’t
know what on earth the unaccustomed motion means: then wink at him, and
tell him that you will do it again if he doesn’t behave himself; and it
is perfectly wonderful to see to what complete submission you can reduce
him. It is true that a grown person must be a callous brute to try such
measures with a defenceless infant; but let that pass—we can’t get on in
the world without a little ruffianism. I have heard, even, that in the
matrimonial state a good shaking will from time to time—but soft!

The young ladies who serve behind the counters at the Pantheon, are much
given to working the spiky cobweb collars in which our present belles
delight, and which are worked in guipure, or crotchet, or application, or
by some other process with an astounding name of which I am profoundly
ignorant. To their lady customers they behave with great affability.
The gentlemen, I am pleased, though mortified to say, they treat with
condescension mingled with a reserved dignity that awes the boldest
spirit. It is somewhat irritating, too, to know that they can be as merry
as grigs among themselves when they so choose; and it is a bending of the
brows, a clinching of the fists, and a biting of the lips matter, to see
them flitting from stall to stall, romping with one another in a pastoral
manner, and retailing merry anecdotes, which may possibly be remarks on
your personal appearance. Yet I have known a man with large whiskers
(he went to the bad, and to Australia, and is now either high in the
government or in the police over there) to whom a young lady assistant in
the Pantheon, on a very wet day, once lent a silk umbrella. But he was
always a bold man, and had a winning way with the sex.

It is time, if you will excuse my mentioning it, that we should quit this
labyrinth of avenues between triple-laden stalls, all crowded with ladies
and children, whose voluminous _jupons_—the very babes and sucklings
wear crinoline now—render locomotion inconvenient, not to say perilous.
Pass the refreshment counter, where they sell the arrowroot cakes,
which I never saw anywhere else, and let us enter the conservatory—a
winter garden built long ere Crystal Palaces or Jardins d’Hiver were
dreamt of, and which to me is as pleasant a lounge as any that exists
in London: a murmuring fountain, spangled with gold and silver fish,
and the usual number of “winking bubbles beading at the brim;” and good
store of beautiful exotic plants and myriad-hued flowers. The place is
but a niche, a narrow passage, with a glass roof and a circle at the end,
where the fountain is, like the bulb of a thermometer; but to me it is
very delightful. It is good to see fair young faces, fair young forms,
in rainbow, rustling garments, flitting in and about the plants and
flowers, the fountain and the gold fish. It is good to reflect how much
happiness and innocence there must be among these pretty creatures. The
world for them is yet a place for flirting, and shopping, and dancing,
and making themselves as fair to view as they and the looking-glass and
the milliner can manage. The world is as yet a delightful Pantheon,
full of flowers—real, wax, and artificial, and all pleasant—sandal-wood
fans, petticoats with worked edges, silk stockings, satin shoes, white
kid gloves, varnished broughams, pet dogs, vanille ices, boxes at the
opera, tickets for the Crystal Palace, tortoise-shell card-cases,
enamelled visiting-cards, and scented pink invitation notes, with “_On
dansera_” in the left-hand bottom corners, muslin slips, bandoline,
perfumes, ballads and polkas with chromo-lithographed frontispieces,
and the dear delightful new novels from Mudie’s with uncut leaves, and
mother-o’-pearl paper knives with coral spring handles to cut them
withal. They have kind mammas and indulgent port-wine papas, who bring
them home such nice things from the city. They sit under such darling
clergymen, with curls in the centre of their dear white foreheads; they
have soft beds, succulent dinners, and softly-pacing hacks, on which to
ride in coquettish-looking habits and cavalier hats. John the footman
is always anxious to run errands for them; and their additional male
acquaintance is composed of charming creatures with white neckcloths,
patent leather boots, irreproachable whiskers, and mellow tenor voices.
Oh! the delightful world; sure, it is the _meilleur des mondes possible_,
as Voltaire’s Doctor Pangloss maintained. It is true that they were at
school once, and suffered all the tyranny of the “calisthenic exercises”
and the French mark, or were, at home, mewed up under the supervision
of a stern governess, who set them excruciating tasks; but, oh! that
was such a long time since, they were so young then—it was ever such a
long time ago. You silly little creatures! it was only the day before
yesterday, and the day after to-morrow——. But “gather ye rosebuds while
ye may,” and regard not old Time as he is a-flying. For my part, I will
mingle no drop of cynicism in the jewelled cup of your young enjoyment;
and I hope that the day after to-morrow, with unkind husbands and
ungrateful children, with physic-bottles and aches and pains, and debts
and duns, may never come to you, and that your pretty shadows may never
be less.

You see that I am in an unusual state of mansuetude, and feel for the
nonce inclined to say, “Bless everybody”—the Pope, the Pretender, the
Pantheon, the pretty girls, and the sailors’ pig-tails, though they’re
now cut off. Every sufferer from moral _podagra_ has such fits of
benevolence between the twinges of his gout. But the fit, alas! is
evanescent; and I have not been ten minutes in the conservatory of
the Pantheon before I begin to grumble again. I really must shut my
ears in self-defence against the atrocious, the intolerable screeching
of the parrots, the parroquettes, the cockatoos, and the macaws, who
are permitted to hang on by their wicked claws and the skin of their
malicious beaks to the perches round the fountain. The twittering of the
smaller birds is irritating enough to the nervously afflicted; but the
parrots! ugh! that piercing, long-continued, hoarse shriek—it is like a
signal of insane communication given by a patient at Hanwell to a brother
lunatic at Colney Hatch. The worst of these abominable birds is, that
they cannot or will not talk, and confine themselves to an inarticulate
gabble. However, I suppose the fairest rose must have its thorns, and the
milkiest white hind its patch of darker colour; so it is incumbent on us,
in all charity, to condone the ornithological nuisance which is the main
drawback to a very pretty and cheerful place of resort. Only, I should
like to know the people who buy the parrots, in order that I might avoid
them.

As we entered by Oxford Street, with its embeadled colonnade, it becomes
our bounden duty to quit the building by means of that portal which I
assumed to have been in days gone-by the stage-door of the pig-tail
opera-house, and which gives egress into Great Marlborough Street. I
can’t stand the parrots; so, leaving my aunt (I wish she would lend me
a hundred pounds), and my cousin (I wish she would lend me a kiss, and
more sincerely do I wish that either of them existed in the flesh, or
elsewhere but in my turbid imagination); leaving these shadowy relatives
genteelly bargaining (they have already purchased a _papier maché_
inkstand and a coral wafer-stamp), I slip through the conservatory’s
crystal precincts, inhale a farewell gust of flower-breeze, pass through
a waiting-room, where some tired ladies are resting till their carriages
draw up, and am genteelly bowed out by affable beadle No. 2.

And now, whither away? Shall I cross the road, and commence the first
of a series of six lessons in dancing from Miss Leonora Geary? Shall I
visit the harp and pianoforte establishment of Messrs. Erard, and try
the tone of an “upright grand?” Shall I hie me to Marlborough Street
police-court, and see how Mr. Bingham or Mr. Hardwick may be getting
on? No: I think I will take a walk down Regent Street (one cannot too
frequently perambulate that delightful thoroughfare at the height of the
season), turn off by Vigo Lane, and take a stroll—a five minutes’ stroll,
mind, for I have an appointment close to St. George’s Hospital, and Mr.
Decimus Burton’s triumphal arch, as soon after four as possible—down the
Burlington Arcade.

I remember once refecting myself at a public dinner—the Tenth Anniversary
Festival of the Hospital for Elephantiasis, I think it was—when my next
neighbour to the right (to the left was a rural dean) was a gentleman in
a white waistcoat that loomed large like the lateen sail of a Palermian
felucca, and whose convivial countenance was of the exact hue and texture
of the inside of an over-ripe fig. He took remarkably good care of
himself during dinner time, had twice spring soup, and twice salmon and
cucumber, led the waiters a terrible life, and gathered quite a little
grove of bottles of choice wine round him. I am bound to say that he
was not selfish or solitary in his enjoyment, for he pressed a peculiar
Sautern upon me, and an especial Chateau Lafitte (the landlord must have
known and respected him), with a silver label hanging to its bottle
neck, like the badge of a Hansom cabman. He also recommended gosling to
me, as being the very thing to take after lamb, in a rich husky voice,
that did one good to hear. At the conclusion of the repast, after we
had dabbled with the rosewater in the silver-gilt shield, which it is
the custom to send round, and which nobody knows exactly what to do
with—I always feel inclined to upset it, for the purpose of eliciting an
expression of public feeling, and clearing the atmosphere generally; and
when the business of the evening, as the absurd system of indiscriminate
toast-giving is termed, had commenced, and the professional ladies and
gentlemen were singing something about the “brave and bearded barley” in
execrable time and tune, of course in the most preposterously irrelevant
connection with the health just drank—either the Army and Navy, or the
two Houses of Parliament—my neighbour with the ripe fig countenance
turned to me, and wiping his moist lips with his _serviette_, whispered
these remarkable words: “Sir, a public dinner is the sublimation of an
assemblage of superfluities.” He said no more during the evening, filled
up his name, however, for a handsome amount in the subscription-list (his
name was announced amid thunders of applause by the secretary, but I
really forget whether he was a general or a wholesale grocer), and went
away in anything but a superfluous state of sobriety. But his words sank
deep into my mind, and they bring me at once to the Burlington Arcade.

Which is to me another sublimate of superfluities: a booth transplanted
bodily from Vanity Fair. I don’t think there is a shop in its _enceinte_
where they sell anything that we could not do without. Boots and
shoes are sold there, to be sure, but what boots and shoes? varnished
and embroidered and be-ribboned figments, fitter for a fancy ball or
a lady’s chamber, there to caper to the jingling melody of a lute,
than for serious pedestrianism. Paintings and lithographs for gilded
boudoirs, collars for puppy dogs, and silver-mounted whips for spaniels,
pocket handkerchiefs, in which an islet of cambric is surrounded by
an ocean of lace, embroidered garters and braces, fillagree flounces,
firework-looking bonnets, scent bottles, sword-knots, brocaded sashes,
worked dressing-gowns, inlaid snuff-boxes, and falbalas of all
descriptions; these form the stock-in-trade of the merchants who have
here their tiny _boutiques_. There are hair-dressers’ shops too; but I
will be bound that their proprietors would not be content with trimming
a too luxuriant head of hair. They would insist upon curling, oiling,
scenting, and generally tittivating you. They would want you to buy
amandine for your hands, kalydor for your hair, dentifrice, odonto,
_vinaigre de toilette_, hair-brushes with ivory backs, and tortoiseshell
pocket-combs with mirrors appended to them. They would insist that you
could not live without _pommade Hongroise_ and _fixatures_ for the
moustaches, or Frangipani for the pocket-handkerchief. I have very
few ambitions, but one is to become the proprietor of a house in the
Burlington Arcade, and forthwith to open a chandler’s shop in the very
midst of its vanities and its whim-whams. The reproof, I trust, would
be as stern, though I am afraid it would have as little effect, as that
of the uncompromising patriots of the reign of terror, who planted the
parterres of the Tuileries gardens with potatoes. To the end of time, I
perpend, we shall have this hankering after superfluities, and little
princesses will ask their governesses why the people need starve for want
of bread, when there are such nice Bath buns in the confectioners’ shop
windows.

But the clock of St. James’s warns me that I am due at Hyde Park Corner,
and passing by yet another beadle, I emerge into Piccadilly.




FOUR P.M.—TATTERSALL’S, AND THE PARK.


Was there not a time when Hyde Park Corner was the Ultima Thule of
London, and Kensington was in the country?—when Hammersmith was far
away—a district known only to washerwomen and nursery gardeners—and
Turnham Green and Kew were places where citizens took their wives to
enjoy the perfection of ruralisation? Was it not to the Hercules’ Pillars
at Hyde Park Corner that Squire Western sent his chaplain to recover the
snuff-box, which the worthy landed-gentleman and justice of the peace had
left there when he halted to bait? Was not Hyde Park Corner a rendezvous
for highwaymen, where they listened with eagerness for “the sound of
coaches;” and parted, some towards Fulham, some towards Hounslow, some
towards the Uxbridge road, where they might meet full-pouched travellers,
and bid them “stand and deliver?” I remember, myself, old Padlock House
at Knightsbride, standing in the midst of the roadway, like Middle Row
in Holborn, or the southern block of Holywell Street in the Strand,
with the padlock itself fixed in the grimy wall, which, according to the
legendary wishes of a mythical testator, was never to be pulled down till
the lock rotted away from its chain, and the chain from the brick and
mortar in which it was imbedded. The cavalry barracks at Knightsbride
seemed to have been built in the year One, and we boys whispered that
the little iron knobs on the wall of the line of stables, which are, it
is to be presumed, intended for purposes of ventilation (though I am
not at all certain about the matter yet) were miniature portholes, at
which fierce troopers, with carbines loaded to the muzzle, and ready
pointed, kept guard every day, in order to repel the attacks of the
“Radicals.” Alack-a-day! but the “Radicals” seem to be getting somewhat
the better of it at this present time of writing. Kensington High Street
seemed to belong to a hamlet of immense age; the old church was a very
cathedral—built, of course, by William of Wykeham; and as for Holland
House, there could not be any doubt about that. It came in naturally with
the Conqueror, and the first Lord Holland.

Hyde Park Corner before the battle of Waterloo must have been a strange,
old-fashioned-looking place. No Apsley House: the site was occupied
by the old woman who kept the apple-stall, or the bun-house, or the
curds and whey shop, and who wouldn’t be bought out, save at enormous
prices, by his late Grace, Field-Marshal Arthur Duke of Wellington. No
triumphal arch; and, thank good taste, no equestrian statue of the late
F. M. Arthur Dux, &c., on the summit thereof. No entablatured colonnade,
with nothing to support, towards the Park. No Achilles statue. A mean,
unpicturesque, common-place spot, I take it. What could you expect of
an epoch in which the Life Guards wore cocked hats and pig-tails, the
police-officers red waistcoats and top boots, when the king _de jure_
was mad, and the king _de facto_ wore a wig and padded himself? A bad
time. We have a lady on the throne now who behaves as a sovereign should
behave, and London grows handsomer every day.

I declare that it does; and I don’t care a fig for the cynics—most of
them ignorant cynics, too—who, because they have accomplished a cheap
tour to Paris, or have gone half-way up the Rhine, think themselves
qualified to under-rate and to decry the finest metropolis in the world.
I grant the smoke—in the city—and I confess that the Thames is anything
but odoriferous in sultry weather, and is neither so blue nor so clear as
the Neva; but I say that London has dozens and scores of splendid streets
and mansions, such as I defy Paris, Vienna, Berlin, or St. Petersburg—I
know their architectural glories by heart—to produce. I say that Pall
Mall beats the Grand Canal at Venice; that Regent Street, with a little
more altitude in its buildings, would put the Boulevard des Italiens to
shame; and that Cannon Street makes the Nevskoi Perspective hide its
diminished head. Some of these days, when I can get that balance at the
banker’s I have been waiting for so long, I shall sit down and indite a
book entitled, “A Defence of London, Architecturally Considered,” the
which I shall publish at my own expense, as I am certain no publisher
would purchase the copyright.

Take Hyde Park Corner. Between the Brandenburg Thor at Berlin and the
Puerta del Sol at Madrid, you will not find a gayer, more picturesque,
more sparkling scene. Ugly and preposterous as is the man in the cocked
hat, who holds the rolling-pin and is wrapped in the counterpane, on
the top of the arch, we are not for ever giving ourselves wry necks
in the attempt to look up at him; and the arch itself is noble and
grandiose. Then, opposite, through the _a giorno_ of Mr. “Anastasius”
Hope’s colonnade, that supports nothing, you catch a glimpse of the leafy
glories of Hyde Park—carriages, horses, horsewomen, Achilles’ statue,
and all. And again, to the right of the arch, is St. George’s Hospital,
looking more like a gentleman’s mansion than an abode of pain; and to
the left the ever-beautiful, ever-fresh, and ever-charming Green Park.
And then far away east stretches the hill of Piccadilly, a dry Rialto
(only watch it at night, and see the magical effects of its double line
of gas-lamps); and westward the new city that the Londoners have built
after their city was finished, beyond the Ultima Thule. Magnificent lines
of stately mansions, towering park gates, bring us to the two gigantic
many-storeyed edifices at Albert Gate, which were for a long time
christened “Gibraltar,” because they were supposed to be impregnable,
no tenant having been found rich or bold enough to “take them.” Taken
they both were at last, however. The further one, or at least its lower
portion, has been for a considerable period occupied by a banking
company; while the near one—ah! that near Gibraltar, has had two strange
tenants—the representatives of two strange fortunes. There dwelt the
Railway King, a gross, common, mean man, who could not spell very well,
Rumour said: but to him—being king of iron roads and stuffed with shares
even to repletion, such shares being gold in those days, not dross—came
the nobles of the land, humbling themselves on their gartered knees, and
pressing the earth with their coroneted brows, and calling him King of
Men, that he might give them shares, which he gave them. So this gross
man was “hail fellow well met” with the nobles, and was drunk at their
feasts and they at his, and he sat in the Parliament House, and made laws
for us; and when he sent out cards of invitation, the wives and daughters
of the nobles rose gladly in the night season, and having painted their
faces and bared their necks, and put tresses of dead men’s hair on their
heads, they drove in swift chariots to Albert Gate, and all went merry as
a marriage bell.

    “But, hush! hark! a deep sound strikes like a rising knell!”

It was indeed the great knell of universal railway smashdom, the St.
Sepulchre’s boom of found-out humbug. So down went the Railway King, and
down into the kennel toppled the iron crown—not so much of Lombardy, this
time, as of those Lombards whose arms are three golden spheres. An iron
crown to moralise over, that; and of which, as of a red-hot halfpenny,
the motto reads appositely—“_Guai a chi la tocca_,” “Woe be to him who
touches it.”

Albert Gate, the near house, yet saw lighted rooms, and great revelry
and feasting, and a brave tenant; no other than Master Fialin Persigny,
Ambassador of France. Courtly, witty, _rusé_ Persigny Fialin! the nobles
and princes were as glad to come to his merry-makings as in the old time,
when the now broken-down Railway Stag held high court there. Crafty
Fialin! he must have rubbed his hands sometimes, with a sly chuckle, as,
from the upper chambers of his splendid house, he tried to descry, far
off at Kensington, a now waste spot where once stood GORE HOUSE. And, oh!
he must have sung—“What a very fine thing it is to be Ambassador-in-law
to a very magnificent three-tailed Bashaw of an Emperor, and to live at
Albert Gate.” Not so many years since, though, master and man were glad
to take tea at Gore House, with the beautiful Woman who wrote books,
and the handsome Count who painted portraits; when the Bashaw’s bills
were somewhat a drug in the discount market, and his ambassador did not
precisely know how to make both ends meet. All of which proves that the
world is full of changes, and that fortune is capricious, and that master
and man have made an uncommonly good thing of it.

Don’t be afraid of a sudden raid on my part towards the lands that lie
beyond Brentford. My present business lies close to Hyde Park Corner,
close to St. George’s Hospital. We have but to turn down Lower Grosvenor
Place, and lo and behold, we are at our destination—TATTERSALL’S.

I suppose the British Empire could not progress prosperously without
Tattersall’s; so, I suppose, we must cry Tattersall’s and the
Constitution! Tattersall’s and our Ancient Institutions! Tattersall’s
and Liberty! And, indeed, of the last there seems in reality to be much
liberty, and equality, and fraternity in all connected with horse-racing;
and at Tattersall’s, though the resort of the most patrician turfites,
the democratic element is appreciably strong. So long as both parties
pay their bets, dukes and dustmen, Jews and jockeys, seem to meet
upon a cheerful footing of “man to man” at this peculiarly national
establishment.

The astute prophets who vaticinate in the Sunday newspapers, and who
never can, by the remotest chance of possibility, be wrong in their
calculations, are in the habit of speaking of the sporting transactions
at Tattersall’s as “Doings at the Corner.” I think it would be slightly
more appropriate if they were to characterise them as “Doings at the
Corners,” for of corners, and a multiplicity of them, Tattersall’s seems
made up. It is easy enough to distinguish the whereabouts of the great
temple of horse-racing, for from Hyde Park Corner far down Grosvenor
Place, you will find at FOUR O’CLOCK (business has been going on
throughout the afternoon), a serried line of vehicles, with the horses’
heads towards Pimlico. Equipages there are here of every description and
grade. Lordly mail phætons, the mettlesome steeds impatiently champing
at the bit, and shaking their varnished, silver-mounted, crest-decorated
harness; slim, trim, dainty gentlemen’s cabriolets (I am sorry to see
that those most elegant of private vehicles are becoming, year after
year, fewer in number), with high wheels and tall gray horses, and
diminutive, topbooted tigers, squaring their little arms over the
aprons; open carriages and pairs, with parasolled ladies within (for
even rank and beauty do not disdain to wait at Tattersall’s while my
Lord or Sir John goes inside to bet, and perhaps also to put something
on the favourite for Lady Clementina or the Honourable Agnes); gigs and
dog-carts, sly little broughams with rose-coloured blinds and terriers
peeping from beneath them, and whose demure horses look as though they
could tell a good many queer stories if they chose; taxed carts, chaise
carts, and plain carts, that are carts and nothing else. I should not be
at all surprised indeed to see, some fine afternoon, a costermonger’s
“shallow,” donkey, greenstuff-baskets and all, drawn up before
Tattersall’s, while its red ’kerchiefed, corduroyed, and ankle-jacked
proprietor stepped down the yard to inquire after the state of the odds.
There is, you may be sure, a plentiful sprinkling of Hansom cabs among
the wheeled things drawn up. The Piccadilly cabmen are exceedingly
partial to fares whose destination is Tattersall’s. Such fares are always
pressed for time, and always liberal; and they say that there are few
Jehus on the stand between the White Horse Cellar and Hyde Park Corner
who do not stand to win or lose large sums by every important racing
event.

When you arrive at a building called St. George’s School of Medicine, and
at the door of which, at most times of the day, you will find lounging
a knot of medical students, who should properly, I take it, in this
sporting locality, have a racing and “down-the-road” look, but who, on
the contrary, have the garb and demeanour of ordinary gentlemen—(What
has become of the old medical student whom Mr. Albert Smith used to
caricature for our amusement, with his shaggy overcoat, white hat, lank
hair, short thick stick, staring shawl, short pipe, and slangy manners
and conversation? Is he extinct as a type, or did he never exist, save in
the lively imagination of that popular writer, and whom I hope all good
luck will attend?)—When you have passed this edifice, sacred to Galen,
Celsus, Hippocrates, and the rest of the Faculty of Antiquity, it will
be time for you to turn down a narrow lane, very like one leading to an
ordinary livery-stable, and to find yourself suddenly in a conglomeration
of “corners.” At one corner stands a building with a varnished oak
door, that does not ill resemble a dissenting chapel with a genteel
congregation, and fronting this, screened from the _profanum vulgus_ by
a stout railing, sweeps round a gravelled walk, surrounding a shaven
grass-plat of circular form. This is the famous “Ring,” of which you have
heard so much; and the building that resembles a dissenting chapel is
none other than Messrs. Tattersall’s subscription rooms. Within those to
ordinary mortals unapproachable precincts, the privacy of which is kept
with as much severity as the interior of the Stock Exchange, the great
guns of the turf discharge their broadsides of bets. They do not always
confine themselves to the interior, however; but, when the weather is
fine and betting hot, particularly on settling days, when there is an
immense hubbub and excitement possessing every one connected with the
turf, from the smallest stable-boy up to Lords Derby and Zetland, they
come forth into the open, and bet round the grass plat. Now cast your
eyes to the right (you are standing with your back to Grosvenor Place),
and you will see a low archway, passing through which a hand points to
you the spot where Mr. Rarey, the horse-tamer, had his office; while
on the other side is a counting-house, somewhat dark and mysterious in
aspect, where the names and prices of more racers and hunters than you
or I ever heard of are entered in Tattersall’s bulky ledgers. Beyond the
archway stretches a spacious court-yard, the centre occupied by a species
of temple, circular in form, with painted wooden pillars and a cupola,
surmounted by a bust of George IV. Beneath the cupola is the figure of
a fox sedent and regardant, something like the dog of Alcibiades, and
looking, in troth, very cunning and foxy indeed. To the right, looking
from the archway, are stables, with a covered penthouse in front; to the
left, another archway, with more stables and coach-houses.

[Illustration: FOUR O’CLOCK P.M.: TATTERSALL’S.]

Tattersall’s is a curious sight at all times, and has something
pervading it quite _sui generis_. Even when the ring is deserted by
the gentleman turfites, and when no sales by auction of race-horses,
hunters, carriage-horses, carriages, or fox-hounds, are proceeding in
the court-yard (the auctioneer’s rostrum is close to the king-crowned,
fox-decorated temple), there is ample food for observation and amusement
in the contemplation of the extraordinary array of hangers-on, who, at
all times and seasons, summer and winter, are to be found about the
purlieus of the Corner. I do not so much speak of the mere grooms,
stable-boys, coachmen, and helpers, who have horses to mind or carriages
to look after. You may find their prototypes down every mews, and in
every livery-stable. The originals to whom I allude are to be seen
only here, and on race-courses, hanging about the grand-stand and
the weighing-house. They are entirely different to the nonchalant
individuals who, in short coats, and a straw in their mouths, haunt
the avenues of Aldridge’s Repository, in St. Martin’s Lane. They would
appertain, seemingly, to a superior class; but from top to toe—laterally,
horizontally, vertically, and diagonally—they are unmistakeably
horse-flesh loving, and by horse-flesh living, men. It is not but you
will find white neckcloths and black broadcloth in their attire, but
there is a cut to the coat, a tie to the neckcloth, that prevents the
possibility of error as to their vocation. They are sporting men all
over. Hard-featured, serious-looking, spare-limbed men mostly, much given
to burying their hands in their coat-pockets (never in their trousers),
and peaceably addicted to the wearing of broad-brimmed hats. Now, the
general acceptation of a “sporting” man would give him a tall, shiny
hat, with a narrow brim, and considerably cocked on one side; yet I do
verily believe that, were these men attired in buttonless drab, brown
beavers, striped worsted hose, and buckles, that they would preserve
the same sporting identity. They are the wet Quakers of the turf. What
the exact nature of their multifarious functions about horses may be,
I am not rightly informed. I conjecture them to be trainers, country
horse-dealers, licensed victuallers with a turn for sporting, gentlemen
farmers who “breed a colt” occasionally, or, maybe, perfectly private
individuals led by an irresistible penchant to devote themselves to the
study and observation of horses, and led by an uncontrollable destiny to
hang, their lives-long through, about the Corner. Hangers-on of a lower
grade there are in plenty. Striped-sleeved waistcoats, corduroy or drab
cloth smalls and leggings; nay, even the mighty plush galligaskins of
coachmanhood, top boots, fur and moleskin caps, sticks with crutches
and a thong at the end, to serve, if needful, as whips; horseshoe scarf
pins, and cord trousers made tight at the knees, and ending in laced-up
boots. These—the ordinary paraphernalia of racing attire—are to be met
with at every step; while the bottommost round of the sporting ladder is
to be found in a forlorn creature in a stained ragged jerkin, that once
was scarlet, matted hair, and naked feet. _He_ hangs about the entrance,
calls everybody “captain,” and solicits halfpence with a piteous whine.
I suppose he is a chartered beggar, licensed to pursue his harmless
mendicancy here. Perhaps he may have kept hounds and harriers, carriages
and horses—may have spent ten thousand a year, gone to the dogs, and
turned up again at Tattersall’s. Who knows? You had better give him the
benefit of the doubt, and, commiserating his ragged-robin appearance,
bestow sixpence on him.

Now let us take a peep at the magnates who are jotting down the current
state of the odds in betting-books. Look at them well, and wonder. Why,
all the world’s a ring, and all the men and women in it merely betters.
To come more nearly towards exactitude, it seems as though a good portion
of at least the male part of the community had sent representatives to
Tattersall’s, while the genuine sporting element does not seem by any
means so strong as you might reasonably expect. The genus “swell,” with
his long surtout, double-breasted waistcoat, accurately-folded scarf,
peg-top trousers, eyeglass, umbrella, and drooping moustache, is perhaps
predominant. And our friend the “swell” is indeed a “welcome guest,”
in the “ring,” for he has, in the majority of instances, plenty of
money, is rather inclined to bet foolishly—not to say with consummate
imbecility—so long as his money lasts he pays with alacrity, and it takes
a long time to drain him dry even at betting, which is a forcing engine
that would empty another Lake of Haarlem of its contents in far less time
than was employed to drain the first.

Your anxious sporting man, with lines like mathematical problems in his
shrewd face, is not of course wanting in the assemblage. Here, too, you
shall see the City dandy, shining with new clothes and jewellery, who
has just driven down from the Stock Exchange to see what is going on at
“Tat’s,” and who is a member of the “Ring” as well as of the “House.”
But those, perhaps, who seem the most ardent in their pursuit of the
fickle goddess, as bearing on the Doncaster St. Leger, are certain florid
elderly gentlemen, in bright blue body coats, with brass buttons and
resplendent shirt-frills, and hats of the antique elegant or orthodox
Beau Brummel form and cock.

Such is the outward aspect of the Ring. Into its penetralia, into the
mysteries of its combinations, I, rash neophyte, do not presume to
inquire. They are too awful for me. I am ignorant of them, nor, if I
knew, should I dare to tell them. I should expect the curtain of the
temple to fall down and overwhelm me, as befell the rash stranger who
ventured to watch from, as he thought, a secure point of espial, the
celebration of the mysteries of Isis at Thebes. Besides, I never could
make either head or tail of a betting-book. _Poeta nascitur non fit_, say
the Latins. _On devient cuisinier mais on nait rôtisseur_—“One may become
a cook, but one is born a roaster,” say the French; and I verily believe
that the betting-man is to the manner born, and that if he does not feel
an innate vocation for the odds, he had much better jump into a cauldron
of boiling pitch than touch a betting-book—which theory I offer with
confident generosity for the benefit of those young gentlemen who think
it a proper thing and a fast thing to make up a book for the Derby or the
Oaks, whether they understand anything about the matter or not.

To all appearances, the Ring and the Subscription-room, with the adjacent
avenues for the outsiders (you should see the place on the Sunday
afternoon before the Derby) are quite sufficient to take up all the
accommodation which the “Corner” can afford; but there are many other
things done within Messrs. Tattersall’s somewhat crowded premises. There
is the auctioneering business; the sales, when whole studs are brought to
the hammer, and thousands of pounds’ worth of horseflesh are disposed
of in the course of a few minutes. There are the days for the sale of
all manner of genteel wheeled vehicles, which have been inspected on the
previous day by a committee _de haut goût_, of which ladies belonging to
the _élite_ of fashion are not unfrequently members. For the cream of
nobility is, oft-times, not too proud to ride in second-hand carriages.

One more episode of “Corner” life, and I must quit the queer, motley
scene. Down below the Subscription-room is another corner occupied by an
old-fashioned hostelry, called the “Turf Tap,” and here the commonalty of
Tattersall’s frequenters are to be found at any hour of the day, occupied
with the process of sustentation by liquid refreshment. And yet, though
the place is almost entirely “used” by sporting men, it has very little
the appearance of a “sporting” public-house. No portraits of “coaching
incidents,” or famous prize-fighters, decorate its walls; no glass-cases
containing the stuffed anatomies of dogs of preternaturally small size,
and that have killed unheard-of numbers of rats in a minimum of minutes,
ornament its bar-parlour; no loudly-boisterous talk about the last fight,
or the next race coming off, echoes through its bar; and the landlord
hasn’t a broken nose. The behaviour of the company is grave and decorous,
almost melancholy; and on the bench outside, wary-looking stablemen,
and sober grooms, converse in discreet undertone on “parties” and
“events,” not by them, or by any means, to be communicated to the general
public. Tattersall’s is a business-like place altogether, and even its
conviviality is serious and methodical.

I think I should like to ride a horse and take a turn in Rotten Row, if I
only knew how to accomplish the equestrian feat; but I am really afraid
to adventure it. There are some people who do things capitally which they
have never been taught; and who ride and drive, as it were, by intuition.
Irishmen are remarkable for this faculty, and I do not regard as by
any means a specimen of boastfulness, the reply of the young Milesian
gentlemen to the person who asked him if he could play the fiddle, that
he did not know, but that he dared say he could, _if he tried_. But I
am afraid that the mounting of the easiest-going park hack would be
too much for your obedient servant, and that the only way of insuring
security, would be to get inside the animal and pull the blinds down; or,
that being zoologically impossible, to have my coat skirts nailed to the
saddle; or to be tied to the body of my gallant steed with cords, in the
manner practised in the remotest antiquity by the young men of Scythia on
their first introduction to a live horse, and their commencement of the
study of equitation. I passed three days once at the hospitable mansion
of a friend in Staffordshire, who, the morning after my arrival, wanted
me to do something he called “riding to hounds.” I said, “Well out of
it,” respectfully declined the invitation, and retired to the library,
where I read Roger de Wendover’s “Flowers of History” till dinner time.
I daresay the ladies, who all rode like Amazons, thought me a milk-sop;
but I went to bed that night without any broken bones. I have an
acquaintance, too, a fashionable riding-master at Brighton, a tremendous
creature, who wears jack-boots, and has a pair of whiskers like the
phlanges of a screw-propeller. He has been obliging enough to say that he
will “mount” me any time I come his way, but I would as soon mount the
topmost peak of Chimborazo.

[Illustration: FOUR O’CLOCK P.M.: THE PARK.]

I beg to state that this short essay on horsemanship is _àpropos_ of
Hyde Park and notably of Rotten Row, into which I wander after quitting
Tattersall’s, and where, leaning over the wooden rails, I contemplate
the horsemen and horsewomen caracoling along the spongy road with
admiration, not unmixed with a little envy. What a much better, honester
world it would be if people would confess a little more frequently to
that feeling of envy? For Envy is not always, believe me, grovelling in
a cavern, red-eyed and pale-faced, and gnawing a steak sliced off her
own liver. Envy can be at times noble, generous, heroic. If I see a gay,
gallant, happy, ingenious boy of eighteen, and for a moment envy him his
youth, his health, his strength, his innocence, the golden prospect of a
sunshiny futurity, that stretches out before him, does it follow that I
wish to deprive him of one of those gifts, or that I bear him malice for
possessing them? I declare it does not follow. I say to him—_I, curre_!
“Good luck have thou, with thine honour—ride on;” and as I go home to my
garret, if I envy the bird as he sings, need I shoot him? or the dog as
he lies winking and basking in the sun, need I kick him? or the golden
beetle trudging along the gravel, need I trample on him? But people cry
fie upon the envy that is harmless, and must needs assume a virtue if
they have it not; and concerning that latter quality my private belief
is, that if Virtue were to die, Hypocrisy would have to go into the
deepest mourning immediately.

I am glad to say that I am not by any means alone as I lean over the
rails. Whether it is that they can’t or won’t ride, I know not; but I
find myself surrounded by groups of exquisites, who, to judge by their
outward appearance, must be the greatest dandies in London. For once in
a day, I see gentlemen dressed in the exact similitude of the emblazoned
cartoons in the “Monthly Magazine of Fashion.” I had always, previously,
understood those pictorial prodigies to be gross caricatures of, and
libels on, at least the male portion of the fashionable world. But I find
that I am mistaken. Such peg-top trousers! such astounding waistcoat
patterns! such lofty heels to the varnished boots! such Brobdignagian
moustaches and whiskers! such ponderous watch-chains, bearing masses
of coins and trinkets! such bewildering varieties of starched, choking
all-round collars! such breezy neckties and alarming scarves! Ladies,
too—real ladies—promenade in an amplitude of crinoline difficult to
imagine and impossible to describe; some of them with stalwart footmen
following them, whose looks beam forth conscious pride at the superlative
toilettes of their distinguished proprietresses; some escorted by their
bedizened beaux. Little foot-pages; swells walking three, sometimes
four, abreast; gambolling children; severe duennas; wicked old bucks,
splendidly attired, leering furtively under the bonnets—what a scene of
more than “Arabian Nights” delight and gaiety! And the green trees wave
around, around, around; and the birds are on the boughs; and the blessed
sun is in the heavens, and rains gold upon the beauteous Danaës, who
prance and amble, canter and career, on their graceful steeds throughout
the length of Rotten Row.

The Danaës! the Amazons! the lady cavaliers! the horsewomen! can any
scene in the world equal Rotten Row at four in the afternoon, and in
the full tide of the season? Bois de Boulogne, Course at Calcutta,
Cascine at Florence, Prado at Madrid, Atmeidan at Constantinople—I
defy ye all. Rotten Row is a very Peri’s garden for beautiful women on
horseback. The Cliff at Brighton offers, to be sure, just as entrancing
a sight towards the end of December; but what is Brighton, after all,
but London-super-Mare? The sage Titmarsh has so christened it; and the
beauties of Rotten Row are transplanted annually to the vicinity of the
Chain Pier and Brill’s baths. Watch the sylphides as they fly or float
past in their ravishing riding-habits and intoxicatingly delightful hats:
some with the orthodox cylindrical beaver, with the flowing veil; others
with roguish little wide-awakes, or pertly cocked cavaliers’ hats and
green plumes. And as the joyous cavalcade streams past, (I count the male
riders absolutely for nothing, and do not deem them worthy of mention,
though there may be marquises among them) from time to time the naughty
wind will flutter the skirt of a habit, and display a tiny, coquettish,
brilliant little boot, with a military heel, and tightly strapped over it
the Amazonian riding trouser.

Only, from time to time, while you gaze upon these fair young daughters
of the aristocracy disporting themselves on their fleet coursers, you
may chance to have with you a grim town Diogenes, who has left his tub
for an airing in the park; and who, pointing with the finger of a hard
buckskin glove towards the graceful _écuyères_, will say: “Those are not
all countesses’ or earls’ daughters, my son. She on the bay, yonder,
is Laïs. Yonder goes Aspasia, with Jack Alcibiades on his black mare
Timon: see, they have stopped at the end of the ride to talk to Phryne
in her brougham. Some of those dashing delightful creatures have covered
themselves with shame, and their mothers with grief, and have brought
their fathers’ gray hair with sorrow to the grave. All is not gold that
glitters, my son.”




FIVE O’CLOCK P.M.—THE FASHIONABLE CLUB, AND THE PRISONERS’ VAN.


The English are the only “Clubable” people on the face of the earth.
Considering the vast number of clubs which are more or less understood
to flourish all over the Continent, and in the other hemisphere, it is
within possibility that I shall be accused of having uttered something
like a paradox; but I adhere to my dictum, and will approve it Truth. Not
but that, concerning paradoxes themselves, I may be of the opinion of Don
Basilio in the “Barber of Seville,” expressed with regard to calumny.
“Calumniate, calumniate,” says that learned casuist; “calumniate, and
still calumniate, _something will always come of it_.” So, in a long
course of paradoxes, it is hard but that you shall find a refreshing
admixture of veracity.

Do you think you can call the French a “clubable” nation, because in
their revolutions of ’89 and ’48 they burst into a mushroom crop of
clubs? Do you think that the gentleman whom a late complication of
political events brought into connection with a committee of Taste,
consisting of twelve honest men assembled in a jury-box, and whom, the
penny-a-liners were kind enough to inform us, was in his own country
known as “Bernard le Clubbiste,” could be by any means considered as what
we called a “club-man?” Could he be compared with Jawkins or Borekins,
Sir Thomas de Boots, Major Pendennis, or any of the Pall Mall and St.
James’s Street bow-window loungers, whom the great master of club
life has so inimitably delineated? No more than we could parallelise
the dingy, garlic-reeking, revolutionary club-room on a three-pair
back at the bottom of a Paris court-yard, with its “tribune,” and its
quarrelsome patriots, to the palatial Polyanthus, the Podasokus or
the Poluphlosboion. French clubs ever have been—and will be again,
I suppose, when the next political smash affords an opportunity for
the re-establishment of such institutions—mere screeching, yelling,
vapouring “pig-and-whistle” symposia; full of rodomontading stump
orators, splitting the silly groundlings’ ears with denunciations of the
infamous oppressors of society—the society that wears pantaloons without
patches, and has one-and-ninepence in its pockets; yelping for communism,
equal division of property, and toothpicks, solidarity, nationalities,
and similar moonshine-and-water ices; “demanding heads,” with fierce
imprecations about universal fraternity, till their own troublesome
bodies—for society’s mere peace and quietness’ sake—are securely
shackled and straight-waistcoated up, and carted away in police-vans
to deep-holded ships, whence, after much salutary sea-sickness, they
are shot out on the shores of conveniently pestilential Cayennes and
Nouka-Hivas. A plague on such clubs and clubbists, say I, with their long
hair, flapped waistcoats, and coffee-shop treasonable practices. They
have done more harm to the cause of Liberty than all the wicked kings and
kaisers, from Dionysius to the late Bomba—now gone to his reward, and who
is enjoying it, I should say, hot and hot by this time—have done to the
true and heaven-ordained principle of royalty.

In Imperial Paris there are yet clubs of another sort existing, though
jealously watched by a police that would be Argus-eyed if its members
were not endowed with a centuple power of squinting. There are clubs—the
“Jockey,” the “Chemin de Fer,” and establishments with great gilded
saloons, and many servitors in plush and silk stockings; but they are
no more like our frank English clubs than I am like Antinous. Mere
gambling shops and arenas for foolish wagers; mere lounging-places for
spendthrifts, sham gentlemen, gilt-fustian senators, and Imperialist
patricians, with dubious titles, who haunt club-rooms, sit up late,
and intoxicate themselves with alcoholic mixtures—so aping the hardy
sons of Britain, when they would be ten times more at home in their own
pleasant, frivolous Boulevard _cafés_, with a box of dominoes, a glass
of sugar-and-water, and Alphonso the _garçon_ to bring it to them. Such
pseudo-aristocratic clubs you may find, too, at Berlin and Vienna,
scattered up and down north Italy, and in Russia, even, at Petersburg
and Moscow, where they have “English” clubs, into which Englishmen are
seldom, if ever, admitted. Some English secretaries of legation and
long-legged _attachés_, have indeed an _ex-officio_ entry to these
continental clubs, or “_cercles_,” where they come to lounge and yawn
in the true Pall Mall fashion; but they soon grow tired of the hybrid
places; and the foreigners who come to stare and wonder at them, go away
more tired still, and, with droll shrugs, say, “_Que c’est triste_!”
The proper club for a Frenchman is his _café_; for, without a woman to
admire him or to admire, your Monsieur cannot exist; and in the slowest
provincial town in France there is a _dame de comptoir_ to ogle or be
ogled. The Russian has more of the clubable element in him; but clubs
will never flourish in Muscovy till a man can be morally certain that the
anecdote he is telling his neighbour will not be carried, with notes and
emendations, in half an hour, to the Grand Master of Police. As for the
German, put him in a beer-shop, and give him a long pipe with his mawkish
draught, and—be he prince, professor, or peasant—he will desire no better
club; save, indeed, on high convivial occasions, when you had best
prepare him a cellar, where he and his blond-bearded, spectacled fellows
may sit round a wine-cask, and play cards on the top thereof.

I don’t exactly know how far the English club-shoot has been grafted on
the trunk of American society, but I can’t believe that the club-proper
flourishes there to any great extent. I like the Americans much,
recognising in them many noble, generous, upright, manly qualities; but I
am afraid they are too fond of asking questions—too ignorant or unmindful
of the great art of sitting half an hour in the company of a man whom
you know intimately, without saying a word to him, to be completely
clubable. Moreover, they are a people who drink _standing_, delighting
much to “liquor up” in crowded bar-rooms, and seldom sitting down to
their potations—a most unclubable characteristic. All sorts of convivial
and political _réunions_ exist, I am aware, in the United States, to
a high degree of organisation; and I have heard glowing accounts of
the comfortable, club-like guard-rooms and stations of the New York
volunteers and firemen; but I can’t exactly consider these in the light
of clubs. They are not exclusive enough—not concrete enough—not subject
to the rigid but salutary discipline of that _Imperium in Imperio_, or
rather, _Rempublicam in Republicâ_, the committee of a club.

In England, the Ancient Order of Druids were undeniably the first
clubmen, keeping things remarkably snug, and delighting much in
house-dinners at the sign of the Misletoe, where a roasted Ancient Briton
was no rare dish. It might aid, too, to clear up the puzzling enigma
of Stonehenge—who built it, and how, and why?—if we were to look upon
Druidism in a purely club-light. I should like to know whence the money
came which the Megatherium or the Mastodon Clubs in Pall Mall cost to
build. We know that Captain Threadbare, late of the Rifles, that the
Hon. Jemmy O’Nuffin, respectively members of those grand _cénacles_,
didn’t find the money; that they never paid anything towards their clubs,
save the entrance fee and the subscription; and that they dine there,
nine months out of the year, for eighteen-pence. Other members did,
do, will do the same; yet there the club stands, stately and superb,
with its columns of multi-coloured marbles, its stately halls, its
sumptuous furniture, its army of liveried lacqueys. A belted earl might
ruin himself in building such a mansion; yet Captain Threadbare and
Jemmy O’Nuffin call it their club, and it is theirs to all intents and
purposes. Cunning men, when you express excusable wonder at the thing,
whisper, “Debentures!” and debentures seem in truth to have been the
seven hundred times seven gifted servants, who have hoisted this Fortunio
of a place to its proud position. Why should not Stonehenge have been
built by debentures?

The old Saxon Wittenagemotte must have been strongly impregnated with
the club element; and the resemblance of clubs to parliaments has come
down to this day. What, after all, is our much-vaunted British House
of Commons but a club of the first water, somewhat more exclusive than
its brethren of St. James’s, and black-balling its scores of candidates
every general election? It has its reading-rooms, coffee-rooms, and
smoking-rooms; the members lounge in and out, and loll on forms and
benches, just as they would do in Pall Mall; and while some five hundred
members indulge in the real _dolce far niente_ of club life, smoking, and
reading, and dawdling, and dozing, and refreshing themselves, and never
troubling themselves about club matters, save when they are called upon
to vote, the affairs of the club (and of the nation too, by the way)
are managed by a snug little committee, who do all the work and all the
talking, and are continually popping themselves into snug little berths
connected with the management of that other great club which lies beyond
the walls of St. Stephen’s, and is called the Country.

And the middle ages, sunk as the unthinking believe them to have been in
barbarism, had their clubs, and brave ones too. Thorough clubmen were the
old Freemasons; secret and sturdy, and swift in action; and it’s O! to
see the club-houses they erected in the fanes that are yet the pride and
glory of our cathedral towns. When you look at their crenelated towers,
and at the strange sculptures in the rich spandrils of their arches, in
their groins and corbels, in their buttresses and great rose windows,
and cunningly-traced roodscreens and carved bench-ends, you shall find
copious store of club-marks, and secret signs, and passes only known to
themselves, and, grotesque and frivolous as to the uninitiated they seem,
truly drawn from the innermost arcana of the great mystery of masonry.
The old Vehmgericht, too, with its grim symbols, and warnings of the cord
and dagger—may not that be considered as a club? The Flagellants and
the Rosicrucians, were not those queer sects clubs? and what were the
Council of Trent, and the Diet of Worms, but select clubs, frequented by
ecclesiastical and political “swells?”

I am not about to confound the convivial club—with its one room and its
quaint rules, ancient or modern—with its latest perfection, all Portland
stone and plate-glass, gas chandeliers, and luxurious ottomans. Before,
however, I come to the fashionable club of 1859, I may be permitted, I
hope, to discourse for awhile on the jovial clubs, high, low, and middle
class, which have made this metropolis cosy and picturesque for at least
two centuries.

There can be little doubt that the Restoration gave a marvellous
incentive to club-life in London. On the one hand, the sour Puritans
and fierce Independents, driven into holes and corners by the advent of
Charles II., had other places of meeting than the conventicles where
they offered their surreptitious worship; and at these stray places of
re-union, they comforted and refected themselves in their own grim,
uncomfortable fashion. On the other hand, the Cavaliers had their riotous
assemblages, where they met to sing “Down among the dead men,” and
drink their king’s health on their knees; the revival of humorous and
theatrical literature filled the taverns and coffee-houses with wits and
dramatists, instead of pedants and theologians; table companions formed
into knots, and knots into throngs, and these at length formed themselves
into clubs, where they could jest and criticise, argue and carouse, at
their ease, without the fear of interlopers; and though, so late as the
days of Foote and Chatterton, a stranger of good address and brilliant
conversation could form a rallying coffee-house acquaintance with the
most famous wits of the town, it was difficult for him to be admitted
into their inner circle; even as, in our own time, a man may find
plenty of conversation in a railway carriage or an hotel coffee-room,
at a German Spa or a charity dinner, but must not feel surprised if
his voluble acquaintance of the previous evening cut him dead the next
time he meets him. The change of succession at the Revolution gave an
impetus both to the establishment and to the exclusiveness of the clubs.
While William, the Dutchman, held his uneasy, hooked-nose pre-eminence
in this country, innumerable were the dim taverns in whose securest
rooms stealthy clubs, with cabalistic names, were held; where, when
the club-room doors were tightly closed, Captain Henchman, late of
Roper’s horse, turned out to be Father Slyboots, high up in the order
of Jesus, where sympathy was openly avowed for Sir John Fenwick, and
the exiles of St. Germains were yet spoken of as the possessors of the
Crown; and where, after William’s death, the health of “the little
gentleman in black velvet,” meaning the molehill over which, according
to the Jacobites, the king’s horse had stumbled, when William fell and
dislocated his collar-bone, was enthusiastically drunk. It would have
been hard, too, if the days of Queen Anne—the Augustan era in which
Swift, Gay, Pope, Addison, Prior, Bolingbroke, Somers, and Dorset, held
their glorious sway of intellect—had not been fruitful in the production
of clubs; and it is to the first quarter of the eighteenth century that
we may trace the birth of our most famous clubs. The accession of George
the First, embittering as it did a new question of the succession to
the throne, gave a fresh lease of popularity to the Jacobite clubs,
which had languished somewhat during the reign of Anne, for sheer want
of something to conspire about. They were held all over London: in
taverns and mug-houses, in the purlieus of Westminster and the Mint in
Southwark, and in the multitudinous courts and alleys about Cornhill and
the Exchange. How I should like to have seen one of these old honest,
wrong-headed Jacobite club meetings! There was our old friend Captain
Henchman, _alias_ Father Slyboots, grown gray in conspiring; always in
active correspondence with Rome and St. Germains, Douai and St. Omer,
and, as of yore, fiercely hunted by Mr. Secretary’s messengers, from his
Majesty’s Cockpit, at Whitehall. There were old Roman Catholic baronets
and squires, from Lancashire and Cheshire, who would as soon have thought
of surrendering their ancestral faith in the false and fickle Stuarts, as
of abandoning their old shields of arms and trees of descent; there were
hot-headed young counsellers from the Temple; and otherwise steady-going
Jacobite mercers, and goldsmiths, and vintners, whose loyalty to the
dethroned house had somewhat of a commercial tinge in it, as you see
now radical hatters and grocers proud to blazon the Royal arms above
their doors, and the Lord Chamberlain’s warrant in their windows, as
“purveyors, by appointment, to her most Gracious Majesty.” The landlord
was a staunch Jacobite, of course; how, indeed, should he be otherwise?
His grandfather had fought at Naseby field; and his father had furnished
one of King Charles the Second’s madams with clove-gillyflower water, and
had never been paid for it. The drawer was Jacobite to the backbone (he
turned traitor afterwards, it is true; was the means of hanging half the
club, and retired with a handsome competence to the plantations, where
he was exceedingly prosperous in the export of tobacco and the import of
kidnapped children, and died elder and deacon)—but who but he brought in
the great China bowl filled with a clear fluid, across which the company
drank, with clasped hands, the toast of “The king over the water.” Ah,
days of furious party and faction differences, but of self-sacrificing
honour and loyalty, ye shall return no more! It was lucky for the
Jacobite club-men when their convivialities were not interrupted by the
irruption through the window of a party of the Foot Guards, who had
climbed over the adjoining tiles. Traitors were always in their camp:
spies always watching them. The English ambassador in Paris knew of their
goings on, and revealed their bacchanalian machinations to wary Mr.
Secretary at the Cockpit; and every now and then would come a tide of
evil days, and the venue of the club would be changed; Father Slyboots
would go into closer hiding, baffling pursuit as a verger of Westminster
Abbey, compounding with skippers of smuggling luggers for conveyance to
Dunkirk or Fecamp, crouching in the “priest’s hole” of some old Roman
Catholic mansion of the North country, or indeed, good man, as the times
were very bad, purchasing a stout horse and betaking himself to the road
with Captain Macheath and Cornet O’Gibbet, and Duvalising travellers,—of
course confining himself to those who were of the Hanoverian way of
thinking. Not the first honest man who has turned highwayman: besides,
was it not for the greater glory of Church and King? When the club had
its next meeting, it might be in ’16 or in ’46 (for the century was quite
gray-headed before the Jacobite clubs quite died out), there would be a
lamentable hiatus here and there in the list of members. Where was Sir
William Flowerdeluce?—Shot at Sheriffmuir. Where Colonel Belmain?—Hanged
at Carlisle. Where young Christopher Layer, the barrister, gallant,
devoted, enthusiastic?—His head was rotting on a spike, over Temple Bar,
within sight of his old chambers. Where Jemmy Dawson, the pride, the pet,
the pearl of the Jacobites, the dashing swordsman of Townley’s ill-fated
Manchester Regiment?—Go ask the judge and jury, go ask the hangman, go
ask the veiled lady in the black coach, who follows the fatal hurdle to
Kennington Common, and sits out the hideous drama, and when she sees
the heart of him she loves cast into the flames, and his fair limbs
dismembered by the executioner, swoons and dies.

I have been reading a little old book, bearing the date of 1725, which
professes to give a “Complete Account” of the principal clubs of
London and Westminster. Its authorship is anonymous; yet I think I can
discern traces of a certain fine Roman hand, well-known to me, in its
composition, and I don’t think I am in error in ascribing it to Mr. Ned
Ward, the scurrilous though amusing author of the “London Spy.” Its
contents must be taken, of course, _cum grano salis_, with the other
lucubrations of that diverting vagabond; yet I am ready to believe
that many of his clubs were then existent. Some of them, indeed, have
come down to our own times. According to the writer of the “Complete
Account,” there was the “Virtuous Club,” established as a succursal to
the Royal Society (which, indeed, was little more than a club at its
commencement), at the Golden Fleece, a tavern in Cornhill, whence they
moved to the Three Tuns, in Southwark: a queer locality, indeed, for
the white-neckclothed savants, who now have their habitat in Burlington
House. The chronicler treats them somewhat contemptuously, as collectors
of “pickled maggots and mummies’ toenails,” and seems considerably
to prefer the “Surly Club,” held at some out-of-the-way place near
Billingsgate Dock, whose members had “a stoker to attend their fire”—I
did not know the appellation “stoker” was so old—a skinker to ignify
their pipes, and a chalk accountant to keep a trencher register of the
club reckoning, lest the landlord below should be tempted to augment
the scot by means of a double-notched chalk. The principal feature
of the “Surly Club” appeared to lie in the members being all surly,
ill-tempered, wrangling chuffs, who were bound to abuse each other and
the world generally, at their every time of meeting. I believe that
there are London clubs, not yet extinct, which carry out the principles
of the “Surly Club” in a remarkably undeviating manner. Then there
was the “Split-Farthing Club,” instituted by a society of usurers and
money-spinners, who met together in the dark, in order to avoid the
expense of candle or lamp-light, and of which the Hopkins immortalised by
Pope was a distinguished member. The “Ugly Club” (which yet flourishes,
I believe,) owed its foundation to a superlatively ugly fellow by the
name of Hatchet (whence the term “hatchet-faced”), who had a nose of
such immense size, that he was one day in the street charged by a
butcher-boy with overturning a tray full of meat, when his head was at
least a foot distant therefrom. A violent attempt was made to break up
the “Ugly Club” by a committee of spinsters, who made unheard-of attempts
to marry the members _en masse_, but in vain. Jack Wilkes was elected
perpetual president of the “Ugly Club,” early in the reign of George
III., and Honorè Gabriel Riquetti, Count de Mirabeau, who had some slight
connection with the first French Revolution, was unanimously chosen an
honorary member on his visit to England. I must not forget to mention
the “Unfortunate Club,” held at the sign of the “Tumbledown Dick,” in
the Mint. To have been at least once bankrupt (a fraudulent failure was
preferred), or to have come in some way in collision with the laws of
the country, was a _sine quâ non_ in the qualification for a member of
the “Unfortunates.” The Market Women’s, or “Flat-cap Club,” was at one
time quite a fashionable place of meeting, being frequented by many of
the wild gallants from the Rose, and Tom King’s coffee-house, who treated
the lady company to burnt brandy and flowing “Winchesters” (_i. e._,
Winchester measures) of “powerful three thread”—our modern porter. Then
there was the “Lying Club,” among whose voluminous rules were these,
that the chairman was to wear a blue cap and a red feather, and that if
any member, in the course of an evening, told a lie more impudent and
egregious than he, the chairman, could manage to cap, he was at once
to vacate the chair in favour of the superior Mendax. There was a very
stringent rule, inflicting a severe fine upon any member who should
presume, between the hours of nine and eleven of the clock, to tell one
word of truth, unless, indeed, he prefaced it with the rider of “By your
leave, Sir Harry”—Sir Harry Gulliver being the name of the original
chairman of the club. There was the “No-Nose Club,” the “Beggars’ Club,”
the “Thieves’ Club,” and the “Northern or Yorkshire Tyke’s Club;” and, to
sum up, there was a horrific assembly, founded in the reign of Charles
II., and called the “Man-killing Club.” The members of this savage
corporation were debased Life-guardsmen, broken-down bullies, and old
scarified prize-fighters. The prime qualification for membership was the
commission of homicide. The “Mohocks,” “Scourers,” and “Sweaters” of
Queen Anne’s time, were, as may readily be imagined, highly prominent
members of this murderous fraternity, which might have flourished much
longer but for the interference of the Sheriff’s hangman in ordinary, who
disposed of the members with such amazing despatch and persistence, that
the club could not at last form a quorum, and was so dissolved.

The “Irish Fortune-hunters’ Club” I am somewhat chary of recognising, for
I am afraid that it existed only in the lively fancy of Mr. Ned Ward or
his imitator. There is, indeed, a copy of some resolutions of the club
appended to the “Complete Account,” but I am inclined to consider them
apocryphal. Leave, by these resolutions, is given to Captain Donahoo to
change his name to Talbot Howard Somerset; Captain Macgarret is empowered
to change the place of his nativity from Connemara to Cornwall; and
Lieutenant Dunshunner is presented with a suit of laced camlet at the
club expense, in order to his successfully prosecuting his suit with
Miss Bridget Tallboys, “with ten thousand pounds fortune; in the event
of which happy consummation, he is to repay the price of the suit with
interest, and moreover to release from his captivity at the Gate-house
the club secretary, therein confined on suspicion of debt.”

Very different is the bran-new modern club whose interior my faithful
artist has depicted, and whose appearance at five o’clock in the
afternoon I am now called upon to describe. Gentlemen members of clubs,
these gorgeous palaces are but the growth of one generation. Your
fathers had, it is true, their Wattier’s, the Cocoa-Tree, White’s, and
Boodle’s, but those were considerably more like gambling-houses than
clubs. To obtain admission was exceedingly difficult, and to remain a
member was, save to men of immense fortune, absolutely ruinous. Hundreds
of the superior middle-classes, nay, even of the aristocracy, who would
consider themselves social Pariahs now-a-days, if they did not belong to
one or more clubs, were perfectly content, a score of years since, to
frequent the coffee-rooms of hotels and taverns. A modern London club
is the very looking-glass of the time; of the gay, glittering, polished,
improved utilitarian, material age. Nothing more can be done for a
palace than the fitters-up of a modern club have done for it. The march
of upholstering intellect is there in its entirety. It must be almost
bewildering to the modest half-pay captain or the raw young ensign, to
the country gentleman, the book-worm fellow of his college, or the son of
the country squire, fresh from dog-breaking and superintending the drains
on his father’s estate, to find themselves suddenly transferred from
the quiet lodgings in St. Alban’s Place, the whitewashed barrack-room,
the ivy-grown parsonage, the tranquil oak-sporting rooms of “Keys” or
“Maudlin,” the dull comfort of the country mansion-house, to this great
hectoring palace, of which he is the twelve-hundreth part proprietor,
and where he may live on the fatness of the land, and like a lord of
the creation, for twenty guineas entrance fee, and a subscription
of ten guineas a year. He has a joint-stock proprietorship in all
this splendour; in the lofty halls and vestibules; in the library,
coffee-rooms, newspaper and card-rooms; in the secretary’s office in
the basement, and in the urbane secretary himself; in the kitchen,
fitted with every means and appliance, every refinement of culinary
splendour, and from whence are supplied to him at cost prices dishes
that would make Lucullus wild with envy, and that are cooked for him,
besides, by the great _chef_ from Paris, Monsieur Nini Casserole, who
has a piano and a picture-gallery in the kitchen—belongs, himself, to a
club, little less aristocratic than his masters’, and writes his bills
of fare upon laced-edged note-paper. From the gorgeous footmen in plush
and silk-covered calves, which the flunkeys of duchesses could scarcely
rival, to the little foot-page in buttons; from the letter-racks to the
French-polished peg on which he hangs his hat in the hall; from the
books in the library to the silver spoons in the plate-basket; from the
encaustic mosaic on the pavement of the hall to the topmost turreted
chimney-pot—he has a vested interest in all. He cannot waste, he cannot
alienate, it is true; he can but enjoy. Debentures have taken care of
that; yet the fee-simple is in part his; he is the possessor of an
entailed estate; yet, for all purposes of present enjoyment, he sits
under his own roof on his own ground, and eats his own mutton off his
own plate, with his own knife and fork. Oh! the wonderful workings of
debentures, and the inestimable benefits they confer on genteel persons
with expensive tastes and small incomes! Do you know that a man may drink
wines at his club, such as, were he to order them at an hotel, the head
waiter would hold up his hands at the extravagance of the order, or else
imagine that he had Rothschild or Mr. Roupell dining in No. 4 box; nay,
might perchance run round to the chambermaid to ask how much luggage
the gentleman had. Rare ports, “worn-out ports,” grown colourless from
age and strength, that cannot be looked at without winking—wondrous
bitter Sherries—strange yellow Rhine wines, that gurgle in the glass
when poured out—Claret that has made bankrupt the proprietors of the
_vignobles_ who grew them, or else sent them mad to think their stock was
out—indescribable Cognacs—Maraschinos and Curaçoas that filtrate like
rich oil: all these are stored by special wine-merchants in the cellars
of the club. The chief butler himself, a prince among the winepots, goes
forth jauntily to crack sales, and purchases, standing, the collections
of cunning amateurs in wines. You shall smoke such cigars at a club
as would make Senor Cabana himself wonder where they were purchased.
Everything is of the best, and everything is cheap; only the terms are,
as the cheap tailors say, “for ready money.” Tick is the exception, not
the rule, at a club; though there have been Irish members who have run
goodly scores in their time with the cook and the waiter.

A man may, if he be so minded, make his club his home; living and
lounging luxuriously, and grazing to his heart’s content on the abundant
club-house literature, and enjoying the conversation of club friends.
Soap and towels, combs and hair-brushes, are provided in the lavatories;
and there are even some clubs that have bed-rooms in their upper storeys,
for the use of members. In those that are deficient in such sleeping
accommodation, it is only necessary to have a tooth-brush and an attic in
an adjacent bye-street; all the rest can be provided at the club. Thus
it is that, in the present generation, has been created a type peculiar
thereunto—the club-man. He is all of the club, and clubby. He is full
of club matters, club gossip. He dabbles in club intrigues, belongs to
certain club cliques, and takes part in club quarrels. No dinners are
so good to him as the club dinners; he can read no journals but those
he finds in the club news-paper-room; he writes his letters on the club
paper, pops them into club envelopes, seals them with the club seal,
and despatches them, if they are not intended for postage, by the club
messengers. He is rather sorry that there is no club uniform. He would
like, when he dies, to be buried in a club coffin, in the club cemetery,
and to be followed to the grave by the club, with members of the
committee as pall-bearers. As it is, when he has shuffled off this mortal
coil, his name appears on a board among the list of “members deceased.”
That is his epitaph, his hatchment, his _oraison funêbre_.

[Illustration: FIVE O’CLOCK P.M.: THE FASHIONABLE CLUB.]

The great complaint against clubs is, that they tend towards the
germination of selfishness, exclusiveness, and isolation; that they are
productive of neglect of home duties in married men, and of irrevocable
celibacy in bachelors. Reserving my own private opinion on this knotty
point, I may say that it is a subject for sincere congratulation that
there are no ladies’ clubs. We have been threatened with them sometimes,
but they have always been nipped in the bud. It is curious to see how
fiercely this tolerant, liberal, large-headed creature, Man, has waged
war against the slightest attempt to establish a club on the part of the
gentler sex. From the Parisian malecontents of the first revolution, who
broke into the lady assemblies of the _Jacobines_ and _Tricoteuses_, and
broke up the clubs in question by the very expeditious process of turning
the fair members into the street, after subjecting them to a castigation
whose use is ordinarily confined to the nursery; from those ungallant
anti-clubbists (they all belonged to clubs themselves, you may be sure)
to Mr. Mark Lemon, who, in a _petite comédie_, brought the guns of satire
to bear with terrible effect on an incipient agitation for lady clubbism,
such institutions, on the part of the ladies, have always been put down,
either by violence or by ridicule. The Tyrant Man is even, I am informed,
disposed to look with jealousy on the “committees of ladies” which
exist in connection with some deserving charities, and on the “Dorcas
societies” and “sewing circles” of provincial towns; and all meetings to
advocate the rights of woman, he utterly abhors.

I daresay that you would very much like to know the name of the
particular club, the tableau of which adorns this sheet, and would feel
obliged if I would point out the portraits of individual members: you
would be very much pleased to be told whether it is the Carlton, the
Reform, the Travellers’, the Athenæum, the Union, the United Service
Senior or Junior, the Guards, the Oriental, the Oxford and Cambridge, the
Parthenon, the Erectheum, the Wyndham, Whyte’s, Boodle’s, or the Army
and Navy. No, Fatima; no, Sister Anne. You shall not be told. Clubbism
is a great mystery, and its adepts must be cautious how they explain its
shibboleth to the outer barbarians. Men have been expelled from clubs ere
now for talking or writing about another member’s whiskers, about the cut
of his coat, and the manner in which he eats asparagus. I have no desire
for such club-ostracism; for though, Heaven help me, I am not of Pall
Mall or St. James’s, I, too, have a club whose institutes I revere. “_Non
me tua fervida terrent, dicta, Ferox_:” I fear not Jawkins, nor all the
Borekins in Borekindom; but “_Dii me terrent, et Jupiter hostis_:” I fear
the awful committee that, with a dread complacency, can unclub a man for
a few idle words inadvertently spoken, and blast his social position for
an act of harmless indiscretion.

Clubs, after all, are rather pleasant institutions than otherwise, yet
they have not escaped the lash of the moralist. Turning over, as I
dismiss the subject, the leaves of my little old book, I come on the
following passage: “Though the Promotion of Trade, and the Benefits that
arise from Conversation, are the Specious Pretences that every Club or
Society are apt to assign as a Reasonable Plea for their Unprofitable
Meetings, yet more Considerate Men have found by Experience that the End
thereof is a Promiscuous Encouragement of Vice, Faction, and Folly, and
the Unnecessary Expense of that Time and Money which might much better be
Employed in their own Business, or spent with much more Comfort in their
Several Families.” I don’t say what the ladies’ verdict will be on this
opinion, though I can divine it; but I take off my hat to the moralist,
capital letters and all, and, leaving him to grumble, will be off to the
club.

Stay, stay, _siste viator_: I have an appointment. When have I not? I
begin to think that I am the Wandering Jew, and there is decidedly no
rest for the soles of my feet. Still the cry is “onward.” Wherever that
club of mine may be situated, it is clear that I must bend my course
towards Bow Street, Covent Garden.

And why to Bow Street, an’t please you? To gaze upon the resuscitated
glories of the Royal Italian Opera? To dine at Nokes’s succulent
restaurant, where erst was the “Garrick’s Head?” To obtain an order for
admission to the workhouse from the relieving officer of the Strand Union
Office? To hire theatrical costumes at Mr. May’s? or to bail a friend
out of the station-house? Not so. And yet my business has something to
do with the metropolitan police. I wish to witness the departure of the
PRISONERS’ VAN.

About five p.m. the ladies and gentlemen who, through the arbitration
of Mr. Hall, Mr. Jardine, or Mr. Henry, stipendiary magistrates, have
settled their little differences with Justice, are conveyed to those
suburban residences, in which, for the benefit of their health, and in
the interests of society, it is judged necessary, _par qui de droit_,
they shall for a stated term abide. The vehicle which bears them to
their temporary seclusion enjoys different names; some technical,
others simply humorous. By some it is called “Her Majesty’s Carriage,”
from the fact that the crown and the initials “V. R.” are painted on the
panels. More far-fetched wags call it “Long Tom’s Coffin.” The police
and the reporters, for shortness, call it “The Van.” In this vehicle the
malefactors who have in the course of the day been arraigned before the
tribunal of the Bow Street Police-court, are conveyed to the various
jails and houses of correction in and about the metropolis, there to
undergo the several terms of imprisonment and hard labour, as the case
may be, to which they have been sentenced. Sometimes the court sits late,
and the van does not take its departure before half-past five; but five
is the ordinary time when the great black, shining, cellular omnibus,
drawn by two strong horses, with its policeman driver, and policeman
conductor in a snug little watch-box, rolls away from Bow Street. It
is a prison on wheels, a peripatetic penitentiary, a locomotive hulk.
Criminals both in and out of prison regard it with a species of terror,
not unmixed with admiration, and, as is their wont, they have celebrated
it in that peculiar strain of ballad poetry for which London roguery has
been so long distinguished. In that celebrated collection of dishonest
epics, the “Drury Lane Garland,” in fit companionship with “Sam Hall,”
“County Jail,” “Seven years I got for priggin’,” and the “Leary Man,” I
find a ballad on the subject of the Bow Street chariot of disgrace, of
which the refrain is—

    “Sing Wentilator, separate cell,
    Its long, and dark, and hot as well.
    Sing locked-up doors—git out if you can,
    _There’s a crusher outside the prisoners’ wan!_”

A “crusher,” or policeman, there is indeed, not only in the little
watch-box on the exterior, to which I have alluded, but in the narrow
corridor between the cells into which the carriage is divided in the
interior. It is the former functionary’s duty to keep the outer door
securely locked; the latter to take care that no communication takes
place between the passengers confined in this penal omnibus, either
through the ventilators on the roof, or by talismanic tappings at the
panels which divide them.

[Illustration: FIVE O’CLOCK P.M.: THE PRISONERS’ VAN.]

When the hour of departure arrives, you see the pavement and carriage-way
of Bow Street studded with a choice assemblage of the raggedry,
ruffianry, felonry, misery, drunkardry, and drabbery, whom the infamous
hundred of Drury, and the scarcely less infamous tithing of Covent, have
cast out into a thoroughfare which, two hours hence, will be re-echoing
to the wheels of carriages bearing noble lords and ladies to listen to
the delicious Bosio (alas!) in the “Traviata,” or the enchanting notes
of Tamberlik in “Otello.” London is full of violent contrasts; but this
is the grimmest in the whole strange catalogue. See, the warder in the
watch-box has descended from his perch, and with a patent key opened
the portal of the van, revealing a second janitor inside. And now the
passengers destined for the lugubrious journey come tumbling out of
the court door, and down the steps towards the van. Some handcuffed,
some with their arms folded, or their hands thrust in their pockets in
sullen defiance; some hiding their faces in their grimy palms for very
shame. There are women as well as men, starved sempstresses, and brazen
courtezans in tawdry finery. There are wicked graybeards, and children
on whose angel faces the devil has already set his indelible brand.
There are ragged losels rejoicing to go to jail as to a place where
they shall at least have bread to eat and a bed to lie on; there are
dashing pickpockets in shiny hats and pegtop trousers braided down the
seams. There are some going to prison for the first, and some for the
fiftieth time. One by one they are thrust rather than handed into the
van. The shabby crowd gives a faint, derisive cheer, the door bangs,
the policeman-conductor ensconces himself in his watch-box, and the
Prisoners’ Van drives off.

The Pharisee thanked Heaven that he was not “as that Publican.” Down
on your knees, well-nurtured, well-instructed youth, and thank Heaven
for the parents and friends, for the pastors and masters, to whose
unremitting care and tenderness, from your cradle upwards, you owe it
that you are not like one of these miserable Publicans just gone away
in the prisoners’ van. But thank Heaven humbly, not pharisaically. A
change at nurse, the death of a parent—one out of the fifty thousand
accidents that beset life—might have thrown you into the sink of misery
and want, foulness and crime, in which these creatures were reared,
and you might have been here to-day, not gazing on the spectacle with
a complacent pity, but trundled with manacles on your wrists into this
moving pest-house, whose half-way house is the jail, and whose bourne is
the gallows.




SIX P.M.—A CHARITY DINNER, AND THE NEWSPAPER WINDOW AT THE GENERAL
POST-OFFICE.


Some years ago, at the cozy little dining club held in my friend
Madame Basque’s back-parlour, in the Rue de la Michodière, and the
city of Paris, I had the advantage of the friendship of one of the
most intelligent and humorous of the American gentlemen. There is
such a personage—the vulgar, drawling, swearing, black-satin-vested,
stove-pipe-hatted, whittling, smoking, expectorating, and dram-drinking
Yankee loafers, who infest the Continent, notwithstanding; and a very
excellent sample of the accomplished and unpretending gentleman was the
American in question. He had paid a visit to England, in which country
his sojourn had been of about three months’ duration; but he frankly
confessed to me that having come purposely unprovided with those usually
tiresome and worthless figments, letters of introduction—the very
Dead-Sea apples of hospitality, goodly on the exterior, and all dust and
ashes within—he had not, with the exception of his banker, who asked him
to dinner once as a courteous acknowledgment of the ponderosity of his
letter of credit, possessed one single acquaintance, male or female,
during his stay in the metropolis of the world. I asked him whether he
had not felt very lonely and miserable, and sufficiently inclined, at
the end of the first week, to cast himself over any given bridge into
the river Thames. Not in the slightest degree, he replied. I politely
hinted that perhaps, as an American, he possessed the genial facility,
common to his countrymen, of making himself at home wheresoever he
went, and of forming agreeable travelling acquaintances, occasionally
ripening into fast friends, by the simple process of saying “Fine day,
stranger.” Not at all, he replied. He kept himself to himself, and
indeed he was of a disposition, save in casual moments of unbending,
quite surprising for its saturnine taciturnity. At all events, I urged,
he could not have amused himself much by prowling about the streets,
sleeping at hotels, dining in coffee-rooms, frequenting theatres and
singing-rooms, and wandering in and out of museums; but I was wrong
again, he said. He had seldom been so jolly in his life. I began to think
either that he was quizzing me—“gumming” is the proper Transatlantic
colloquialism, I think—or else that he was the Happy Man described in
the Eastern apologue. But then, the Happy Man had, as it turned out,
no shirt; and my American was remarkable for displaying a vast amount
of fine linen, both at breast and wristbands, profusely decorated with
studs, chains, and sleeve-buttons. How was it, then, I asked, giving the
enigma up in sheer bewilderment. “Wall,” answered my friend with his own
peculiar dry chuckle, “I used to ride about all day on the tops of the
omnibuses; and very fine institutions for seeing life in a philosophical
spirit, those omnibuses of yours are, sir.” He said Sir—not “Sirree,”
as Anglo-Americans are ordinarily assumed to pronounce that title of
courtesy. I understood him at once; saw through him; had done the same
thing myself; and admired his penetrative and observant aptitude.

Never ride inside an omnibus—I apostrophise, of course, the men folks;
for till arrangements are made (and why should they _not_ be made?) for
hoisting ladies in an easy-chair to the breezy roof—they can manage such
things on board a man-of-war—the vehicular ascent is incommodious, not
to say indecorous, for the fair sex. But Ho, ye men, don’t ride inside.
A friend of mine had once his tibia fractured by the diagonal brass rod
that crosses the door; the door itself being violently slammed to, as
is the usual custom, by the conductor. Another of my acquaintance was
pitched head foremost from the interior, on the mockingly fallacious cry
of “all right” being given—was thrown on his head, and killed. Inside
an omnibus you are subjected to innumerable vexations and annoyances.
Sticks or parasols are poked in your chest and in the back of your neck,
as a polite reminder that somebody wants to get out, and that you must
seize the conductor by the skirt of his coat, or pinch him in the calf
of the leg, as an equally polite request for him to stop; you are half
suffocated by the steam of damp umbrellas; your toes are crushed to
atoms as the passengers alight or ascend; you are very probably the next
neighbour to persons suffering under vexatious ailments, such as asthma,
simple cold in the head, or St. Vitus’s dance; it is ten to one but that
you suffer under the plague of babies; and, five days out of the seven,
you will have a pickpocket, male or female, for a fellow-passenger. The
rumbling, the jumbling, the jolting, and the concussions—the lurking ague
in the straw when it is wet, and the peculiar omnibus fleas that lurk in
it when it is dry, make the interior of one of these vehicles a place of
terror and discomfort; whereas outside all is peace. You have room for
your legs; you have the fresh air; you have the lively if not improving
conversation of the driver and the conductor, and especially of the
right-hand box-seat, who is invariably in some way mysteriously connected
with dogs and horses, and a great authority thereupon. Finally, you have
the inestimable advantage of surveying the world in its workings as you
pass along: of being your own Asmodeus, and unroofing London in a ride
from the White Horse Cellar to Hammersmith Gate. The things I have seen
from the top of an omnibus!—more markedly in the narrow streets through
which, from the main thoroughfare being blocked up by the incessant
paving, lighting, sewerage, or electric telegraph communications of
underground London, one is compelled to pass. Now a married couple
enjoying an animated wrangle in a first-floor front; now a servant-maid
entertaining a policeman, or a Life Guardsman, with a heart’s devotion
and cold shoulder of mutton, in a far-down area; now a demure maiden
lacing her virgin bodice before a cracked triangle of a looking-glass, at
an attic window; now lords and ladies walking with parasols and lapdogs,
and children in the private gardens of noble mansions, screened from the
inquisitive pedestrians by sullen brick walls; now domestics hanging out
the clothes in back-yards (seen over the roofs of one-storey houses),
malicious birds of prey waiting, doubtless, round the corner for the
fell purpose of pecking off their noses, while the astute King is in
his counting-house on the second floor counting out his money, and the
Queen, with the true gentleness of womanhood, is in the front kitchen,
eating bread and honey in confident security, recking little of the
four-and-twenty blackbirds baked in a pie, or of the song of sixpence—or
rather of five shillings—which I am this day singing about them all, in
consideration of an adequate pocketful of rye. So shall you look down
and see those things; but chiefly shall you enjoy delectation and gather
experience from the sight of the men and women who are continually
passing beneath you in carriages and in cabs; yea, and in carts and
barrows. Varied life, troubled life, busy, restless, chameleon life.
The philosopher may learn much by reading the tradesmen’s names over
the shop-fronts, which—he will never read them as he passes along the
pavement—will give him quite a new insight into nomenclature. But only
let him consider the carriages and the cabs, and he may learn wisdom in
the ways of mankind in every rood of ground he traverses.

Sweethearting in cabs and carriages; passionate appeals for mercy; men
brawling and fighting; lunatics being borne away to captivity; felons,
shackled and manacled to the chin, being taken to jail, and perhaps
to death, by stern policemen and jailers; frantic women kneeling on
carriage-floors, women with dishevelled hair, streaming eyes, clasped
hands raised to a Heaven which is never deaf but is sometimes stern, a
weeping child clinging to their disordered dress, and money and jewels
cast carelessly on the carriage cushions; gamblers carding and dicing;
knaves drugging fools; debtors in the charge of sheriff’s officers;
roysterers gone in drink; the “fatal accident” on its way to the
hospital, lying all bruised and bloody across the policeman’s knee; the
octogenarian in his last paralytic fit, and the mother suckling her first
infant. All these dramas on four wheels may be seen by him on the top of
the omnibus, who may, if of a caustic turn, rub his hands, and cry, “Aha!
little do you reck that a chiel is above you taking notes, and, faith,
that he’ll print them!”

You see, there are some elements of sadness, nay, of deep and terrible
tragedy, in these vehicular panoramas—the unconscious show-vans; but at
Six o’Clock in the Evening the cabs and carriages on which you look down
offer, mostly, a far pleasanter spectacle. They are full of people going
out to dinner. Some in broughams, coupés, double-bodied carriages, and
the occupants of these are ladies and gentlemen, attired in the full
panoply of evening costume, and whom, at the first blush, you might take
for members of the highest aristocracy. But they are not so. They simply
belong to the first-class genteel circles, the very superior middle
ranks; the dwellers in Lower Belgravia—Brompton, Kensington, and Pimlico;
or in Lesser Tyburnia—Bayswater and Notting Hill. They have all the
airs and graces, all the allurements, of the titled and the exclusive;
but they have not the genuine Hall-mark of nobility and fashion; they
are but Britannia metal, electro-gilt in a very superior manner. The
undeniable Patricians, the satraps of our modern Persian splendour, do
not dine (would not supper be a more appropriate term?) till half-past
seven, or even eight, post meridian. They can have, I should imagine, but
scant appetites for their dinner at that advanced period of the evening,
unless, indeed, they partake of it in the ancient Roman manner, lolling
on the _triclinium_, crowning themselves with flowers, and following,
between the courses, the swinish examples of Apicius and Lucullus.
Better, I take it, a mutton chop at the Cock, or the Cheshire Cheese,
than these nasty Ancient Roman repasts. It is true our moderns stay their
aristocratic stomachs early in the afternoon with a copious lunch of hot
meats and generous wines; and they say that her blessed Majesty herself,
like a good, sensible woman, makes her real dinner at two o’clock, with
her little children, in the nursery, and takes but a mere bite and sup at
the grand stall-fed feast of gold plate in the evening.

But there are plenty of good dinners going on at six o’clock in the
evening, and plenty of good diners-out to attend them. Masters in
Chancery, who are renowned judges of port-wine, dine at six. Six, for
half-past, is the dinner-hour for East India Directors. Let us hope that
their dinners will continue to be as good as of yore, though the new
India Bill leaves them nothing to direct. Members of Parliament, during
the session, dine whenever they can, and sometimes not at all; but on
“no House” days, six o’clock—always taken with a reservation for the
half-past, for “six o’clock sharp” is entirely gone out of fashion, save
with Muswell Hill stock-brokers, Manchester Square proctors, Bedford Row
solicitors, and people who live in Bloomsburia—is the great time for them
to drop into their clubs, sneer over the evening papers, gnash their
teeth because there may happen to be no leading articles eulogistic or
abusive of them therein, and _prendre des informations_, as the French
say (though why I could not just as well say it in English, save that
the cook at the club is a Frenchman, puzzles me), about what there
may be good for dinner. But I must not forget that I am on the top of
an omnibus, looking down on the people in the broughams and the cabs.
Admire that youthful exquisite, curled, and oiled, and scented into a
sufficient semblance of the “Nineveh Bull,” with whom Mr. Tennyson was so
angry in “Maud.” His glossy hair is faultlessly parted down the occiput
and down the cranium behind. White as the fleece of Clarimunda’s sheep
is his body linen. Stiff as the necks of the present generation is his
collar. Black as Erebus is his evening suit. Shining like mirrors are
the little varnished tips of his jean-boots. Severe as the late General
Picton is the tie of his cravat. This _gracilis puer_ is going to dine
in Thurlow Square, Brompton. That gold-rimmed lorgnon you see screwed
into his face, to the damaging distortion of his muscles, will not be
removed therefrom—nor during dinner, nor during wine-taking, nor during
the evening party which will follow the dinner, nor during the “little
music,” the dancing, the supper, the shawling, the departure, and the
drive home to his chambers. He will eat in his eyeglass, and drink in his
eyeglass, and flirt and polk in his eyeglass. I am almost persuaded that
he will sleep in his eyeglass (I knew a married lady who used to sleep
in her spectacles, which led to a divorce: _she_ alleged the cause to
be systematic cruelty, but what will not an enraged woman say?); and I
should not be in the least surprised if he were to die in his eyeglass,
and be buried in his eyeglass, and if the epitaph on his gravestone were
to be “_veluti in speculum_.”

Down and down again, glance from the omnibus summit, and see in that
snug, circular-fronted brougham, a comfortable couple, trotting out to
dinner in the Alpha Road, St. John’s Wood. Plenty of lobster sauce they
will have with their salmon, I wager; twice of boiled chicken and white
sauce they will not refuse, and oyster patties will they freely partake
of. A jovial couple, rosy, chubby, middle-aged, childless, I opine, which
makes them a _little_ too partial to table enjoyments. They should be
well to do in the world, fond of giving merry, corpulent little dinners
of their own, with carpet dances afterwards, and living, I will be bound
(our omnibus is ubiquitous, remember) at Maida Hill, or Pine Apple Gate.
There is another couple, stiff, starched, angular, acrimonious-looking.
Husband with a stern, Lincoln’s Inn conveyancing face, and pilloried in
starch, with white kid gloves much too large for him. Wife, with all
manner of tags, and tags, and odds and ends of finery fluttering about
her: one of those women who, if she had all the rich toilettes of all
King Solomon’s wives on her, would never look well dressed. I shouldn’t
like to dine where they are going. I know what the dinner will be like.
Prim, pretentious, dismal, and eminently uncomfortable. There will be a
saddle of mutton not sufficiently hung, the fish will be cold, the wines
hot, and the carving-knives will be blunt. After dinner the men will talk
dreary politics, redolent of stupid Retrogression, and the women will
talk about physic and the hooping-cough. Yet another couple—husband and
wife? A severe swell, with drooping moustaches of immense length, but
which are half whiskers. Transparent deceit! A pretty lady—gauzy bonnet
and artificial flowers, muslin jacket, skirts and flounces oozing out at
the sides of the carriage; hair _à la_ Eugénie, and a Skye terrier with
a pink ribbon. I know what _this_ means. Greenwich, seven o’clock dinner
(they are rather late, by the way, but they pass us on London Bridge, and
the coachman will drive rapidly), water souché, whitebait, brown bread
and butter, and iced punch; cigar on balcony, and contemplation of the
moon. Ride on, and be happy. Rejoice in your youth—and never mind the
rest. It will come, O young man, whether you mind it or not.

Hallo! there he is. I thought so. With a red face, shaven to the
superlative degree of shininess, with gills white and tremendous, with
a noble white waistcoat, and from time to time nervously consulting his
watch, lest he should be half a minute behind time with the spring soup,
rides by in a swift Hansom, the old gentleman who is going to a Charity
Dinner. Blessings on his benevolent, gastronomic old head, he never
misses one. He is going as quick as double fare will convey him to the
London Tavern. Quick! oh thou conductor, let me descend, for I must take
a Hansom too, and follow my venerable friend to the London Tavern; and,
by cock and pye, I will go dine there too.

I think my readers must be by this time sufficiently acquainted with the
fact that I am endowed with a very nervous temperament. Indeed, were I to
say that I start at my own shadow, that I do fear each bush an officer,
that I am continually in terror of Sudden Death, that I would rather not
go upstairs in the dark, and that (which is not at all incompatible with
a nervous organisation) in circumstances of real moment, in imminent
life-peril, in a storm, in a balloon, in a tumult, and in a pestilence, I
am perfectly master of myself, and, with a complete Trust and Reliance,
am quite contented and happy in my mind: when I state this, I don’t think
I need blush to own that I am as mortally afraid now of the boys in the
street as in the old days when they pelted me with sharp stones because
I preferred going to school quietly instead of playing fly-the-garter in
the gutter. I am afraid of my last schoolmaster (he is quite bankrupt
and broken, and pays me visits to borrow small silver occasionally),
and yet call him reverentially, “Sir.” I am afraid of ladies—not of the
married ones, in whom I take great delight, talking Buchan’s “Medicine,”
Acton’s “Cookery,” and Mrs. Ellis with them, very gravely, till they
think me a harmless fogey, hopelessly celibate, but sensible; not of the
innocent young girls, with their charming _naïveté_ and pretty sauciness;
but of the “young ladies,” who are “out,” and play the piano, and sing
Italian songs—of which, Lord bless them! they know no more than I do of
crochet-work—and who fling themselves, their accomplishments, and their
low-necked dresses, at men’s heads. I am afraid of policemen, lest in
an evanescent fit of ill temper they should take me up, and with their
facile notions of the obligations of an oath, swear that I was lurking
about with intent to commit a felon; and, transcendentally, I am afraid
of waiters. I watch them—him—the Waiter, with great awe and trembling.
Does he know, I ask myself, as he fills my tumbler with iced champagne,
that half-and-half is a liquid to which I am more accustomed? Does he
know that, sumptuously as I dine to-day, I didn’t dine at all yesterday?
Is he aware that Mr. Threadpaper is dunning me for that dress-coat with
the watered-silk facings? Can he see under the table that the soles of my
boots are no better than they should be? Is it within his cognizance that
I have not come to the Albion, or the London Tavern, or the Freemasons’,
as a guest, but simply to report the dinner for the “Morning Meteor?”
Does he consider the shilling I give him as insufficient? Shilling! He
has many more shillings than I have, I trow. He pulls four pounds in
silver from his pocket to change one a crown-piece. To-day he is Charles
or James; but to-morrow he will be the proprietor of a magnificent
West-end restaurant, rivalling Messrs. Simpson and Dawes at the Divan,
or Mr. Sawyer at the London. So I am respectful to the waiter, and fee
him largely but fearfully; and, were it not that he might take me for a
waiter in disguise, I would also call him “Sir.”

I no sooner arrive at the London Tavern, _pari passu_ with the old
gentleman with the gills and the white neckcloth, than I feel myself
delivered over to the thraldom of waiterdom. An urbane creature, who
might pass for a Puseyite curate, were not the waitorial stigmata
unmistakeably imprinted on him, meets me, and tells me in an oleaginous
undertone, which is like clear turtle-soup, that the Anniversary Festival
of the Asylum for Fatuous Monomaniacs is on the second floor to the
right. A second waiter meets me at the foot of the stair-case, and
whispers discreetly behind the back of his hand, “Two storeys higher,
sir.” A third waylays me benevolently on the first-floor landing, and
mildly ravishes from me my hat and stick, in return for which he gives
me a cheque much larger than my dinner ticket; which last is taken
from me on the second floor by a beaming spirit, the bows of whose
cravat are like wings, and who hands me to a Dread Presence—a stout,
severe man with a gray head, who is in truth the head-waiter at this
Anniversary Festival, and who with a solemn ceremony inducts me into the
reception-room.

Here, in a somewhat faded, but intensely respectable-looking apartment,
I find about fifty people I don’t know from Adam, and who are yet all
brothers or uncles or cousins-german, at the least, of my rubicund
white-waistcoated friend. And, to tell the truth, I don’t know him
personally, though his face, from meeting him at innumerable festivals,
is perfectly familiar to me. So are those of the other fifty strangers. I
have heard all their names, and all about them; but one is not expected
to remember these things at public dinners. You take wine with your
next neighbour; sometimes converse with him about eating and drinking,
the merits of the charity, the late political tergiversation of the
chairman, the heat of the weather, the fine voice of Mr. Lockey, and the
pretty face of Miss Ransford, and there an end. Your interlocutor may
be to-morrow the lawyer who sues you, the author whose book you will
slaughter in a review, the Commissioner of Insolvency who may send you
back for eighteen months. To have met a man at a public dinner is about
as valid a claim to the possession of his acquaintance, as to have met
him in the Kursaal at Hombourg, or on the steps of the St. Nicholas
Hotel at New York. After some twenty years of public dining together, it
is not, I believe, considered a gross breach of etiquette to make the
gentleman who has been so frequently your fellow _convive_ a very distant
bow should you meet him in the street; but even this is thought to be a
freedom by some rigid sticklers for decorum.

In genteel society, the half hour before dinner is generally accepted
as a time of unlimited boredom and social frigidity, but there you have
the relief, if not relaxation, of staring the guests out of countenance,
making out a mental list of the people you would not like to take wine
with, and turning over the leaves of the melancholy old albums, every
page of which you have conned a hundred times before. But in the half
hour (and it frequently is a whole one) before a public dinner, you have
no albums or scrapbooks to dog’s-ear. There is no use in staring at your
neighbours: the types of character are so similar—big and crimsoned
sensuous faces looming over white waistcoats, with a plentiful sprinkling
among them of the clerical element. You can’t smoke, you can’t (that is,
I daren’t) order sherry and bitters. If you look out of the window, you
see nothing but chimney pots, leads, and skylights, with a stray vagrant
cat outrunning the constable over them; and the best thing you can do is
to bring an amusing duodecimo with you, or betake yourself to one of the
settles, and twiddle your thumbs till dinner-time. But, joy, joy, here
are quails in the conversational famine; here is a welling spring in the
wilderness. The door opens, and the sonorous voice of the head-waiter
announces THE CHAIRMAN.

Very probably he is a lord. A philanthropic peer, always ready and
willing to do a kind turn for anybody, and to the fore with his
chairmanship, his set speeches, and his fifty-pound note for “fatuous
monomaniacs,” “intellectual good-for-nothings,” or “decayed bailiffs.” He
may be a regular dining-out lord, a not very rich nobleman, who has grown
gray in taking the chair at charity dinners, and who is not expected
to give anything to the institution save the powerful weight of his
presence and influence. He may be a young lord, fresh caught, generously
eager (as are, I am rejoiced to say, the majority of our young lords
now-a-days) to vindicate the power and willingness for usefulness of his
order; striving to show that there is not so much difference between
his coronet and the Phrygian cap, save that one is made of velvet and
the other of red worsted (ah! that irreconcileable red worsted), very
impulsive, very imprudent, sometimes slightly imbecile, but full of good
intentions and honest aspirations; or he may be a member of Parliament,
a veteran of the back benches, burning to make up for his silence in
the House by his eloquence in the forum of a tavern dinner. He may be
a worthy banker or merchant, who gets through the speech-making before
him in a business-like manner, and does not allow it in the least to
interfere with the consumption of his proper quantum of wine; or he may
be, as is very frequently the case, a lion—the “great gun”—the last blast
of Fame’s trumpet for the hour: a lawyer, a traveller, a philosopher, or
an author, whom the managing committee have secured, just as the manager
of a theatre would secure a dwarf, a giant, a wild beast tamer, a blind
piper, or a sword swallower, to enhance the receipts of the exhibition.

About thirty of the fifty people I don’t know from Adam gather
immediately in a circle round the chairman. The few who have the honour
to be on speaking terms with him jostle him sociably, and shake hands
with him with a rueful expression of contentment. Those who don’t know
him rub their hands violently, breathe hard, stare fixedly at him,
and whisper to one another that he is very like his portrait, or that
he isn’t at all like his portrait, or that he is getting old, or that
he looks remarkably young, or some equally relevant banalities. The
remaining twenty guests gather in the window-bays, and stare at nothing
particular, or else read the printed prospectus of the Asylum for Fatuous
Monomaniacs, and wonder how many of the fine list of stewards announced
may be present on the occasion. As for the chairman, he takes up a
position with his back safely glued (so it seems) to the mantelpiece, and
preserves a dignified equanimity, working his head from side to side in
his white neckcloth like that waxen effigy of Mr. Cobbett, late M.P. for
Oldham, which terrifies country cousins by its vitality of appearance
(those drab smallclothes and gaiters were a great stroke of genius) at
Madame Tussaud’s.

By this time a crowd of more people you don’t know from Adam, and
often outnumbering the fifty in the waiting-room, have gathered on the
staircase, the landing, and have even invaded the precincts of the dining
saloon, where they potter about the tables, peeping for the napkins
which may contain the special cards bearing their name and denoting their
place at the banquet. These are the people who _do_ know one another;
these are the stewards, patrons of the charity, or gentlemen connected
with its administration. They are all in a very excellent temper, as men
need be who are about to partake of a capital dinner and a skinful of
wine, and they crack those special jokes, and tell those special funny
stories, which you hear nowhere save at a public dinner. Then, at the
door, you see a detachment of waiters, bearing fasces of long, blue
staves, tipped with brass, which they distribute to sundry inoffensive
gentlemen, whose real attributes are at once discovered, and who are
patent to the dining-out world as Stewards. They take the staves, looking
very much ashamed of them; and, bearing besides a quaint resemblance to
undertakers out for a holiday, and in a procession, which would be solemn
if it wasn’t funny, precede the chairman to his place of honour.

The tables form three sides of an oblong quadrangle: sometimes the
horse-shoe form is adopted. In the midst, in a line with the chairman,
and as close to his august presence as is practicable, is a table of some
ten or a dozen _couverts_, devoted to some modestly-attired gentlemen
(some of them not in evening costume at all), whose particular places
are all assigned to them; who for a wonder seem on most intimate terms
mutually, and take wine frequently with one another; who are waited upon
with the most sedulous attention, and have the very best on the table,
both in the way of liquids and solids, at their disposal. They apply
themselves to the consumption of these delicacies with great diligence
and cheerfulness; but they do not seem _quite_ sufficiently impressed
with the commanding merits of the Royal Asylum for Fatuous Monomaniacs.
I wonder what special business brings these gentlemen hither. At some
distance from this table, towards the door, but still in a line with
the chairman, you see a pianoforte, and a couple of music-stands;
partially concealed behind a crimson baize screen, beneath the gallery
at the end, sit some stalwart individuals, of martial appearance, and
superbly attired in scarlet and gold lace, whom you might easily, at
first, mistake for staff officers, but whom their brass trombones and
ophicleides speedily proclaim to be members of the band of one of the
regiments of Guards. And high above all, supported on the sham scagliola
Corinthian columns, with the gilt capitals, is a trellised balcony, full
of ladies in full evening dress. What on earth those dear creatures want
at such gatherings,—what pleasure they can derive from the spectacle
of their husbands and friends over-eating and sometimes over-drinking
themselves, or from the audition of stupid speeches, passes my
comprehension. There they are, however, giggling, fluttering, waving tiny
pocket-handkerchiefs, and striving to mitigate the meaty miasma of the
place by nasal applications to their bouquets or their essence bottles;
and there they will be, I presume, till public dinners go out of fashion
altogether.[7]

[Illustration: SIX O’CLOCK P.M.: A CHARITY DINNER.]

I do not think I am called upon to give the bill of fare of a public
dinner. I have no desire to edit the next republication of Ude, or
Doctor Kitchener, Soyer, or Francatelli; besides, I could only make your
and my mouth water by expatiating on the rich viands and wines which
“mine host” (he is always mine host) of the Albion, the London Tavern,
or the Freemasons’, provides for a guinea a-head. You remember what I
told you the friend with the face like an over-ripe fig said of public
dinners—that they were the sublimation of superfluities; and, indeed, if
such a repast be not one of those in which a man is called upon to eat
Italian trout, Dutch dory, Glo’ster salmon, quails and madeira, Cherbourg
pea-chicks, Russian artichokes, Macedonian jellies, Charlottes of a
thousand fruits, Richelieu puddings, vanilla creams, Toulouse leverets,
iced punch, hock, champagne, claret, moselle and burgundy, port, sherry,
kirschwasser, and pale brandy, I don’t know the meaning of the word
superfluity at all.

Some three hours after the company have sate down to dinner; after
the “usual loyal and constitutional toasts,” with the usual musical
honours; after the toast of the evening—“Prosperity to the Royal Asylum
for Fatuous Monomaniacs”—with its accompanying (more or less) eloquent
speech from the noble or distinguished chairman, beseeching liberal
pecuniary support for so deserving an institution; after the prompt and
generous response, in the way of cheques and guineas, from the guests;
after a tedious programme of glees and ballads has been got through,
and the chairman has discreetly vanished to his carriage; after the
inveterate diners-out, who _will_ tarry long at the wine, have received
one or two gentle hints that coffee awaits their acceptance in an
adjoining apartment; and about the time that the feast begins to wear
a somewhat bleared and faded aspect (the lights cannot grow pale till
they are turned off, for these are of the Gas Company’s providing), the
waiters slouch about with wooden trays, full of ruined dessert-plates,
cracked nuts, muddy decanters, and half-emptied glasses; cherry stalks,
strawberry stems, squeezed oranges, the expressed skins of grapes, litter
the tables; chairs are standing at all sorts of eccentric angles; and
crumpled and twisted napkins are thrown pell-mell about. There is an
end to the fine feast: the cates are eaten, the wine drunk. Lazarus the
beggar might have taken his rags out of pawn (had he indeed any such rags
to mortgage), and his thin-limbed little brats might have grown plump and
rosy on a tithe of the money that has been wasted this night in guttling
and guzzling. Wasted? Oh! say not wasted, Cynic; take the mote from thine
own eye. Grumbler, for shame! I have done ill, I think, to caricature
the name even of any public charity. Let the “Fatuous Monomaniacs” be
numbered with the rest of my exploded fantastic conceits. Let this rather
be remembered: that the tavern feast of superfluities is prolific in
generous and glorious results; that from this seemingly gross and sensual
gathering spring charity, love, mercy, and benevolence. Pardon the rich
dinners and rare wines; look over the excess in animal enjoyments;
forgive even the prosy speeches; for _the plate has gone round_.
To-morrow Lazarus shall rejoice in his rags, and blind Tobias shall lift
up his hands for gratitude; the voice in Rama shall be bushed and Rachel
shall weep no more; and all because these good gentlemen with the rosy
faces and the white waistcoats have dined so well. For these dinners are
for the benefit of the sick and the infirm, the lunatic and the imbecile,
the widow and the orphan, the decayed artist and the reduced gentlewoman,
the lame, the halt, the blind, the poor harlot and the penitent thief,
and they shall have their part in these abundant loaves and fishes; and
the sublimation of superfluities must be condoned for the sake of those
_voluntary contributions_ which are the noblest support of the noble
charities in England. Remember the story of the Pot of Ointment. These
superfluities yield a better surplus than though the spikenard was sold
for an hundred-pence and given to the poor.

A very cream of waiters has taken good care of me during the evening. He
now fetches me my walking gear, and as he pockets my modest “largesse,”
whispers confidentially that he has had the honour of “seeing me afore;”
and, blushing, I remember that I have met him at private parties. It is
well for me if I can slip downstairs quietly, hail a cab, and drive to
one of the operas; for an act of the “Trovatore” or “Lucrezia Borgia”
are, in my opinion, far better than Seltzer water in restoring the
balance of one’s mind after an arduous public dinner. But it oft-times
happens that a man in your memorialist’s position has to pass a _quart
d’heure de Rabelais_, worse than paying the bill, after one of these
festive meetings. For, in a roomy apartment downstairs, lighted by waxen
tapers, such things as pens, ink, and paper, coffee, cognac, and cigars,
are, by the forethought of the liberal proprietors of the establishment,
laid out for the benefit of those merry gentlemen you saw upstairs at the
small table in a line with the chairman, where they were so well taken
care of; and if circumstances compel me to be in a merry mood to-night,
I must hie me into this roomy chamber, and scribble a column or so of
“copy” about the dinner, which will appear to-morrow morning in the
“Meteor.” Rubbing my eyes as I glance over the damp sheet between my own
warm ones in bed, I wonder who ever could have written the report of all
those elegant speeches. It seems at least a year since I dined with the
“Fatuous Monomanaics.”

       *       *       *       *       *

This is again six o’clock p.m., but not by any means on the same evening.
The occasion could have no possible connection with going out to dinner,
for it happens to be six o’clock “sharp:” and, moreover, it is on Friday,
a day on which it is supposed to be as unlucky to go out to dinner as
to go to sea, to marry, to put on a new coat, to commence a new novel,
to cut your nails, or buy tripe. Now, what can I be doing in the city
on this Friday evening? Certainly not to perform any of the operations
alluded to above. Scarcely on business. Bank, Exchange, wharfs,
Custom-house, money-market, merchants’ counting-houses, are all closed,
and the inner city, the narrow winding lanes, that almost smell of money,
are deserted. What am I doing so close to St. Paul’s Cathedral, and why
do I turn off by St. Martin’s-le-Grand? For the simple reason, that
Friday evening is the very best one in the seven to witness the spectacle
I am going to see—Newspaper Fair at the General Post Office.

In the vast vestibule, or hall, of the establishment so admirably
presided over by Mr. Rowland Hill (for I do not reckon the aristocratic
placeman who is, turn and turn about, Whig or Tory, its nominal chief,
for much), and whose fostering care has made it (with some slight
occasional shortcomings) the best-managed and most efficient national
institution in Europe, you may observe, in the left-hand corner from
the peristyle, and opposite the secretary’s office (tremendous “counts”
are the clerks in the secretary’s office, jaunty bureaucrats, who ride
upon park hacks, and are “come for” by ringlets in broughams at closing
time, but who get through their work in about half the time it would
take the ordinary slaves of the desk, simply because their shrewdness
and knowledge of the world enables them to “see through a case” before
the average man of tape and quill can make up his mind to docket a
letter) a huge longitudinal slit in the panelling above, on which is the
inscription “For newspapers only.” And all day long, newspapers only,
stringed or labelled, are thrust into this incision; and the typographed
lucubrations of the some five hundred men who, for salaries ranging from
twenty shillings to twenty pounds per week, have to think, and sometimes
almost feel, in the Anglo-Saxon tongue, for some sixty millions of people
(I say nothing of the re-actionary influence upon foreign nations), go
forth to the uttermost ends of the earth. But as six o’clock approaches
(and six o’clock sharp is the irrevocable closing time for the departure
of newspapers by the current night’s mail), they open a tall window
above, and the newspapers are no more thrust, but flung in.

[Illustration: SIX O’CLOCK P.M.: THE NEWSPAPER WINDOW AT THE GENERAL
POST-OFFICE.]

It is on this congenial ground that I meet those juvenile friends to whom
I introduced a large circle of acquaintances, even in the second hour
of “Twice Round the Clock”—I mean the newspaper boys. In another page
I said, jestingly, that I was afraid of boys. I must except from the
category the newspaper boys. I have been sadly harassed and teazed by
them in their out-of-door or bagful state, when they go round to purchase
newspapers: for I once happened to be editor of a cheap journal, at whose
office there was no editor’s room. I was compelled, occasionally, to read
my proofs behind the counter, in the presence of the publisher and his
assistant, and I have endured much mental pain and suffering from the
somewhat too demonstrative _facetiæ_ of the young gentlemen engaged in
the “trade.” Verbal satire of the most acutely personal nature was their
ordinary mode of procedure; but, occasionally, when the publication (as
sometimes happened) was late in its appearance, their playfulness was
aggravated to the extent of casting an old shoe at me, and on one signal
occasion a bag of flour. Still the newspaper boy is the twin-brother of
the printer’s devil; and, much as I have seen of those patient, willing
little urchins, I should be a brute if I were hard to them, here.

The newspaper boys are, of course, in immense array at the six o’clock
fair on Friday evening. They are varied, as currants are by sultanas in a
dumpling, by newspaper men, who, where the boys struggle up to the window
and drop in their load, boldly fling bags full, sacks full, of journals
into the yawning casement. There is a legend that they once threw a boy
into the window, newspapers and all. But at six o’clock everything is
over—the window is closed—and newspaper fair is adjourned to the next
Friday.




SEVEN O’CLOCK P.M.—A THEATRICAL GREEN-ROOM, AND “BEHIND THE SCENES.”


Dear friends and readers, we are approaching the sere and yellow leaf
of our peregrinations “round the clock.” As the year wanes, as golden
August points to the culminating glories of the year, but with oft-times
a dark and impetuous storm presaging the evil days of winter that
are to come, so I feel, hour after hour, that our (to me) pleasant
intercommunications are destined to cease. You have been very forbearing
with me, have suppressed a justifiable petulance at my short-comings, my
digressions, my wayward fancies and prejudices, because you know (I hope
and trust) that I am always your faithful servant and willing scribe,
that (errors excepted, as the lawyers say) I have but one aim and end in
these papers—to tell you the truth about London, its life and manners; to
describe what I have seen, to tell you what I know; and to place before
you, very timidly and under all correction, certain things which, in my
opinion, it behoves you, and all who have a faith in the better part of
humanity, to think about. Indeed, it is a very great privilege for a
writer to be placed face to face with a hundred thousand critics every
week, in lieu of half a hundred every half-year or so. He is flouted, and
jeered, and scouted, and scolded, and remonstrated with, every time the
penny post comes in; but he makes friends every week. He knows that his
words are winged; he knows that he appeals to men who will understand
his views, and to women who will sympathise with him; and though he may
be as a pedlar, carrying about petty wares—ribbons, and tags, and small
jewellery, and soap, and sweetstuff—he is vain enough to imagine that
he can carry cheerfulness and content into many households; and that
in speaking our common language of hopes and fears, likes and dislikes,
he does not belie his cognomen of a “Welcome Guest.” If he—if I—thought
otherwise, I would tear this sheet, sell my reversion, buy an annuity
of £20 a year, and join the convent of La Trappe, to wear a cowl, sing
matins and complins, eat black radishes, and dig my own grave, to-morrow.

Seven o’clock post meridian has brought us at least the artificial
abnegation of daylight, and has subjected us to the _régime_ of gaslight.
You had a twinkle of that unwholesome vapour, under the head of public
dinners; but henceforth Sol will shine no longer on our labours. It is
seven o’clock in the evening, and we are going to the play.

When I state that the subjects of this article are a Theatrical
Green-Room, and “Behind the Scenes,” I anticipate some amount of
intellectual commotion among the younger, and especially the “fast”
portion, of my readers. Jaunty young clerks, and incipient men about
town, dwelling in decorous country boroughs, will be apt to fancy that I
am about to launch into a deliriously exciting account of those charmed
regions which lie beyond the stage-door; that my talk will be altogether
of spangles, muslin, skirts, and pink tights. Nay, even my young lady
readers may deceive themselves with the idea that I shall draw a glowing
picture of the dangerous, delightful creatures who flutter every night
before theatrical audiences, and of the dear, naughty, wicked, darling
marquises, earls, and baronets who lounge behind the scenes. _Helas! il
n’en est rien._ I know all about green-rooms, wings, and prompt-boxes. I
have been in the artistes’ _foyer_ of the Grand Opera, in the flies of
her Majesty’s, and in the mezzanine floor of the Princess’s. I am not
about to be cynical, but I must be prosaic, and mean to tell you, in a
matter-of-fact way, what the green-room and behind the scenes of a London
theatre are like at seven o’clock.

It is strange, though, what a fascination these forbidden regions
exercise over the uninitiated. I never knew any one yet who was actuated
by an inordinate desire to visit the vestry-room of a church, or to see
the cupboard where the rector and curate’s surplices are suspended on
pegs, or where the sacramental wine is kept. It is but seldom that I have
seen anybody who evinced a particular curiosity to see a pawnbroker’s
ware-room, at the top of the spout, or to become acquainted with the
arcana of a butcher’s slaughter-house (though I must confess, myself,
to having once, as a schoolboy, subscribed fourpence, in company with
about ten others, to see a bullock killed)—yet everybody wants to go
“behind the scenes.” Some twenty months since, I had business to settle
with a firm of solicitors, haughty, precise, distant, and sternly
business-like, who dwelt in Bedford Row. I think that some one who was
a client of the firm had a judgment against me, to which was witness
one Frederick Pollock, at Westminster; but let that pass. I settled the
matter, and thought myself well out of the firm and its clutches, when
the penultimate junior partner, a middle-aged, respectable man, with a
prematurely-bald head, asked me to dinner at Verrey’s. He was good enough
to allow me to order the repast, and politely deferred to my preference
for _Macon vieux_ over hot sherry; but, towards the cheese, he hinted
that a man of the world, such as I seemed to be, ought never to be in
difficulties (I have been hopelessly insolvent since the year ’27, in
which I was born), and that he would esteem it a very great favour if
I would take him “behind the scenes” some night. Yes; this man of tape
and quill, of green ferret and pounce, of sheepskins and abominable
processes, positively wanted to see the Eleusinian mysteries of the
interior of a London theatre. I showed them to him, and he is grateful
still. I meet him occasionally at places of public resort. He is next
to senior partner now, but he never hints at six-and-eightpence when I
ask a legal question; and his most valuable act of friendship is this,
that whenever the Sheriff of Middlesex is moved to run up and down in
his bailiwick, with a special reference to my disparagement, I receive
a mysterious message, generally conveyed by a battered individual, who
wipes his face on the sleeve of his coat, and is not averse to taking
“something short,” that there is “something out” against me, and that I
had better look sharp. Whereupon I look out as sharp as I can for the
most convenient tenth milestone out of Babylon.

Now, friend and fellow-traveller of mine, do you mind transforming
yourself for the nonce into the friendly solicitor, and coming with me
“behind the scenes?” I know that with these continual metamorphoses I
am making a very golden ass of Apuleius of you; but it is all, believe
me, for your benefit. I don’t want you to stand a dinner at Verrey’s. I
only want you to put on the slippers of patience and the spectacles of
observation, and to follow me.

There is, the moralist hath said, a time for all things, and that much
libelled institution, a theatre, has among its Bohemian faults of
recklessness and improvidence, the somewhat rare virtue of punctuality.
Even those events of its daily life which depend for the extent of
their duration upon adventitious circumstances, are marked by a
remarkably well-kept average. Theatrical rehearsals generally commence
at ten o’clock in the morning; and though it will sometimes happen, in
the case of new pieces about to be produced—especially pantomimes and
_spectacles_, that the rehearsal is prolonged to within a few minutes of
the rising of the curtain for the evening performance, the usual turning
of an ordinary rehearsal’s, or series of rehearsals’ lane, is four
o’clock p.m. Then the _répétitêur_ in the orchestra shuts up his fiddle
in its case, and goes home to his tea. Then the young ladies of the
_corps de ballet_, who have been indulging in saltatory movements for the
last few hours, lay aside their “practising dresses”—generally frocks of
ordinary material, cut short in the manner immortalised by that notable
pedlar, Mr. Stout, in his felonious transaction with the little old woman
who fell asleep by the king’s highway—and subside into the long-flounced
garments of common life, which are to be again replaced so soon as
seven o’clock comes, by the abridged muslin skirts and flesh-coloured
continuations of ballet-girlhood. The principal actresses and actors
betake themselves to dinner, or to a walk in the park, or give themselves
a finishing touch of study in the parts they are not yet quite perfect
in, or, it may be, mount the steep theatrical stairs to the mountainous
regions where dwell the theatrical tailor and tailoress—I entreat them to
excuse me, the _costumier_ and the mistress of the robes—with whom they
confer on the weighty subject of the dresses which they are to wear that
evening. The carpenters abandon work; the scene-shifters, whose generic
name in technical theatrical parlance is “labourers,” moon about the back
part of the stage, seeing that the stock of scenery for the evening is
all provided, the grooves duly blackleaded and the traps greased, and all
the “sinks” and “flies,” ropes and pulleys, and other theatrical gear
and tackle, in due working order. For, you see, if these little matters
be not rigidly and minutely attended to, if a rope be out of its place
or a screw not rightly home, such trifling accidents as mutilation and
loss of life are not unlikely to happen. That the occurrence of such
casualties is of so extreme a rarity may be ascribed, I think, to the
microscopic care and attention which these maligned theatrical people
bestow on every inch of their domain behind the scenes. They have to
work in semi-darkness, and under many other circumstances of equal
disadvantage; but, next to a fire-engine station and the ’tween decks
of a man-o’-war, I do not think that I can call to mind a more orderly,
better-disciplined, better-tended place than that part of a theatre which
lies behind the foot-lights.

Now, mouse-like, from undiscovered holes, patter softly mysterious
females in tumbled mob-caps and battered bonnets, who, by the way, have
been pottering stealthily with brooms and brushes about the pit and boxes
in the morning, disappearing towards noon. They proceed to disencumber
the front of the house of the winding-sheets of brown holland in which it
has been swathed since last midnight. These are the “cleaners,” and when
they have made the house-clean and tidy for the audience of the evening,
dusted the fauteuils, and swept the lobbies, they hie them behind the
scenes, see that the proper provision of soap and towels exists in the
dressing-rooms, perhaps lend a hand to the scene-shifters, who are
completing _their_ afternoon’s labour by scientifically irrigating the
stage with watering-pots; or, if a tragedy is to be performed, spreading
the green baize extending to the foot-lights—that incomprehensible
green baize—that field _vert_ on which Paris dies combatant, and Hamlet
lies rampant, and without whose presence it is considered by many
dramatic sages no tragedy could possibly be enacted.[8] Meanwhile, the
property-man has brought to the verge of the wings, or laid out in trays
and hampers, ready to be conveyed below by his assistants, the necessary
paraphernalia and appurtenances for the pieces in that night’s bill.
Shylock’s knife and scales, Ophelia’s coffin, Claude Melnott’s easel
and maulstick, Long Tom Coffin’s mob-cap; the sham money, sham words,
sham eatables and drinkables of this unreal and fantastic world, are
all prepared. Presently the myrmidons of the wardrobe will take the
required costumes from their frowning presses, and convey them to the
dressing-rooms, ready for the histrionics who are to wear them. High
up above all, above ceiling, and flies, and chandelier, in his lofty
skylighted studio, the scene-painter throws down his “double-tie” brush,
bids his colour-grinder clean his boots, indulges in a mighty wash, and
dresses himself for the outward world. He improves marvellously by the
change. But ten minutes since he was an almost indescribable scarecrow,
in a tattered suit of canvas and list slippers, and bespattered from head
to foot with dabs of colour. And now he turns out a trim gentleman, with
a watch-chain, a moustache, an eye-glass, and kid gloves, and he walks
off as gingerly to the artistic or literary club to which he may belong,
as though he had never heard of size or whitewash in his life.

By five o’clock the little industries that have prevailed since the
rehearsal ended are mostly completed; and the theatre becomes quite
still. It is a complete, a solemn, almost an awful stillness. All the
busy life and cheerful murmur of this human ant-hill are hushed. The rows
of seats are as deserted as the degrees of some old ruined amphitheatre
in Rome. The stage is a desert. The “flies” and “borders” loom overhead
in cobweb indistinctness. Afar off the dusky, feeble chandelier, looks
like a moon on which no sun condescends to shine; and were it not for
one ray of golden afternoon sunlight, that from a topmost window shines
obliquely through the vast dimness, and rescues the kettle-drums in the
orchestra from tenebrose oblivion, you might fancy this place, which two
hours hence will be brilliantly lighted up, full of gorgeous decorations
and blithesome music, and a gay audience shouting applause to mimes and
jesters and painted bayadères, chasing the golden hours with frolic
feet—you might fancy the deserted theatre to be a Valley of Dry Bones.

Only two functionaries are ever watchful, and do not entertain the
slightest thought, either of suspending their vigilance, or of leaving
the theatre. At the entrance, in his crabbed little watch-box by the
stage-door, the grim man in the fur cap, who acts as Cerberus to
the establishment, sits among keys and letters for delivery. Of a
multifarious nature is the correspondence at a stage-door. There are
County Court summonses, seductive offers from rival managers to the
popular tragedian of the day, pressing entreaties for orders, pink
three-cornered notes scented and sealed with crests for the _première
danseuse_, frequently accompanied by pinned-up _cornets_ of tissue-paper
containing choice bouquets from Covent Garden. There are five-act
tragedies, and farces, written on official paper for the manager;
solicitations for engagements, cards, bills, and applications for benefit
tickets. But the grim man at the stage-door takes no heed of them, save
to deliver them to their proper addresses. He takes no heed either
(apparently) of the crowds of people, male and female, who pass and
repass him by night and by day, from Monday till Saturday. But he knows
them all well, be assured; knows them as well as Charon, knows them as
well as Cerberus, knows them as well as the turnkey of the “lock” in a
debtor’s prison. Scene-shifter or popular tragedian, it is all one to
him. He has but to obey his _consigne_ to let no one pass his keyed and
lettered den who is not connected with the theatre, or who has not the
_entrée_ behind the scenes by special managerial permission; and in
adhering to that, he is as inflexible as Death. And while he guards the
portal, Manager Doldrum sits in his easy-chair in his manuscript-littered
private room upstairs. The rehearsal may be over, but still he has work
to do. He has always work to do. Perhaps he anticipates a thin house
to-night, and is busy scribbling orders which his messenger will take
care shall permeate through channels which shall do the house no harm. Or
he may be glancing over a new farce which one of the accredited authors
of the theatre has just sent in, and with black-lead pencil suggesting
excisions, additions, or alterations. Or perhaps he tears his hair and
gnashes his teeth in dignified privacy, thinking with despair upon the
blank receipts of the foregone week, murmuring to himself, “Shall I
close! shall I close?” as a badgered and belated Minister of State might
ask himself, “Shall I resign?”

I wonder how many people there are who see the manager airing his white
waistcoat in his especial stage-box, or envy him as he drives away from
the theatre in his brougham, or joyfully takes his cheque on Ransom’s
for that last “stunning” and “screaming” new farce that forty pounds
were given for, and that ran four nights; I wonder how many of these
outsiders of the theatrical arcana know what a persecuted, hunted dog,
a genteel galley-slave, a well-dressed Russian serf, is the theatrical
manager. He may well be coarse and _brusque_ in his manners, captious and
pettish in conversation, remiss in answering letters, averse to parting
with ready money for manuscripts which are often never acted, and more
often never read. Do you know the life he leads? Mr. Pope’s existence
at Twickenham (or Twitnam), about the period when he instructed “good
John,” his man, to say that he was sick, or dead, was a combination of
halcyon days compared to the life of a theatrical manager. Are there sons
“destined their fathers’ souls to cross,” who “pen a stanza when they
should engross?” are there men with harum-scarum lunatic projects, with
tomfool notions that they are tragedians, with tragedies and farces, to
estimate whose real value one should make a handsome deduction for the
injury done to the paper on which they are written? are there madcap
young ladies, newly-whipped at boarding-school, who fancy that they have
the vocal powers of Grisi or Bosio, or the tragic acquirements of Ellen
Tree or Helen Faucit (excuse the Kean and Martin marital prefixes: the
old names are _so_ pleasant)? are there mad mothers who vehemently insist
that their skimping daughters can dance like Rosati or Pocchini? are
there “guardians,” in other words the proprietary slaveholders of dwarfs
and contorsionists, precocious pianists, and female violoncellists? are
there schemers, knaves, Yankee speculators, foreign farmers of singers
with cracked voices, bores or insipid idlers—they all besiege the
theatrical manager, supplicate, cajole, annoy, or threaten him. If he
doesn’t at once accede to their exorbitant terms, they forthwith abuse
him scurrilously out of doors. He is a robber, an impostor, a miser, a
Jew. He has been transported. He is insolvent. He came out ten years
since in the provinces, and in light comedy, and failed. He beats his
wife. He was the ruin of Miss Vanderplank, and sent men into the house
to hiss and cry out “pickles” when Toobey the tragedian was performing
his starring engagements, because, forsooth, Toobey did not draw. He owes
ten thousand pounds to Miss Larke, the _soprano_. He buys his wardrobe
in Petticoat Lane. He drinks fearfully. He will be hung. I have been an
editor, and know the amenities that are showered on _those_ slaves of the
lamp; the people who accuse you of having set the Thames on fire, and
murdered Eliza Grimwood, if you won’t accept their interminable romances,
and darkly insinuate that they will have your heart’s blood if you
decline to pay for poems copied from the annuals of eighteen hundred and
thirty-six; but to find the acme of persecution and badgering commend me
to a theatrical manager.

Return we to our muttons. The theatre sleeps a sound, tranquil sleep for
some hundred minutes; but about six it begins to wake again to fresh
life and activity. At half-past six it is wide awake and staring. The
“dressers,” male and female, have arrived, and are being objurgated by
incensed performers in their several _cabinets de toilette_, because they
are slow in finding Mr. Lamplugh’s bagwig, or Mademoiselle Follejambe’s
white satin shoes. The call-boy—that diminutive, weazened specimen of
humanity, who has never, so it seems, been a boy, and never will be
a man—has entered upon his functions, and already meditates a savage
onslaught on the dressing-room doors, accompanied by a shrill intimation
that the overture is “on.” Let us leave the ladies and gentlemen engaged
in the theatre to complete the bedizenment of their apparel, and, pending
their entrance into the green-room, see what that apartment itself is
made of.

Of course it is on a level with the stage, and within a convenient
distance of that prompt-box which forms the head-quarters of the
call-boy, and where he receives instructions from his adjutant-general,
the prompter. In country theatres, the green-room door is often within
a foot or so from the wing; and there is a facetious story told of
a whilom great tragedian, who, now retired and enjoying lettered
and dignified ease as a country gentleman, was, in his day, somewhat
remarkable for violent ebullitions of temper. He was playing Hamlet; and
in the closet scene with Gertrude, where he kills the old chamberlain,
who lies in ambuscade, and just at the moment he draws his rapier, it
occurred to his heated imagination that an inoffensive light comedian,
ready dressed for the part of Osric, who was standing at the green-room
door within reasonable sword range, was the veritable Polonius himself.
Whereupon the tragedian, shrieking out, “A rat! a rat! dead, for a
ducat—dead!” made a furious lunge at the unhappy Osric, who only escaped
instant death by a timely hop, skip, and jump, and fled with appalling
yells to a sofa, under which he buried himself. Tradition says that the
tragedian’s rapier went right through the wood-work of the half-opened
door; but I know that tradition is not always to be trusted, and I
decline to endorse this particular one now.

Our present green-room is a sufficiently commodious apartment, spacious
and lofty, and fitted up in a style of decoration in which the Louis
Quinze contends with the Arabesque, and that again with the Cockney
Corinthian. The walls are of a pale sea-green, of the famous Almack’s
pattern; and the floor is covered with a carpet of remarkably curious
design and texture, offering some noteworthy specimens of worsted
vegetation run to seed, and rents and fissures of extraordinary polygonal
form. In one corner there is a pianoforte—a grand pianoforte; at least it
may have been at one time deserving of that high-sounding appellation;
but it is now a deplorable old music-box, with a long tail that would
be much better between its legs, and keys that are yellow and worn
down, like the teeth of an old horse. There is a cheval glass, too,
in tolerably good repair, for the _danseuses_ to arrange their skirts
withal; and over the chimney-piece there is another great glass, with a
tarnished frame and longitudinal crack extending over it, in the sides
of which—the interstices of the frame, I mean, not the crack—are stuck
notices having reference to the rehearsals to be held on the morrow.
“All the ladies of the ballet at ten;” “All the company for reading of
new piece at twelve.” So may run the wafered announcements signed in
the fine Roman hand of the prompter or stage-manager. There are varied
pilasters, in imitation of scagliola, supporting the ceiling; the doors
are handsomely panelled with gilt headings. There are four tall windows
in a row, with cornices wofully dingy, and draped with curtains of
shabby moreen. There is good store of settees and ottomans covered with
faded chintz. Everything about the place bears that “stagey,” unreal,
garish, dream-like aspect, that seems inherent to things theatrical, and
makes us, directly we pass the stage-door, look upon everything, from
the delusive banquet on the imitation marble table, to the paint on the
singing chambermaid’s cheeks, as a mockery and a delusion—as the baseless
fabric of a vision, that will soon fade and leave not a wrack behind.
And yet I have said (_vide ante et supra_) that “behind the scenes is
common-place.” And so it is; but it is the common-place of dreamland, the
every-day life of the realms of Prester John, the work-a-day existence
of the kingdom of Cockaigne, or of that shadowy land where dwell the
Anthropophagi, and men “whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders.”

[Illustration: SEVEN O’CLOCK P.M.: A THEATRICAL GREEN-ROOM.]

What shall I assume the first piece that is to be performed this night
to be? Will you have the “Flowers of the Forest,” the “Poor Strollers,”
“Sweethearts and Wives,” “Pizarro,” the “Padlock,” or a “Game at
Romps?” What do you say to a fine old English comedy, such as “John
Bull,” or the “School of Reform,” with a dissipated young squire,
a gouty, ill-tempered, and over-bearing old lord of the manor, an
intensely-virtuous tenant-farmer, a comic ploughman, a milkmaid with a
chintz gown tucked through the placket-holes, and a song, and a spotless
but a persecuted maiden? No; you will have none of these! Suppose, then,
we take our dear old genial friend, the “Green Bushes”—long life and good
luck to Mr. Buckstone, and may he write many more pieces as good for our
imaginary theatre. See; the green-room clock points to ten minutes to
seven—I left that out in my inventory of the furniture. The call-boy has
already warned the ladies and gentlemen who are engaged for the first
scene, that their immediate presence is required, and the erst-deserted
green-room fills rapidly.

See, here they came—the kindly old friends of the “Green Bushes”—Miami
and Jack Gong, and Master Grinnidge; and yet, dear me, what are these
strange, wild costumes mingled with them? Oh! there is a burlesque after
the drama. It is somewhat early in the evening for those who are to play
in the second piece to come down dressed; but then you are to consider
this as a special green-room, a specimen green-room, an amalgam of the
green-room element generally. This model _foyer_ is to have something
of the Haymarket and something of the Adelphi—the old by-gone, defunct
Adelphi, I mean—a spice of the Olympic, a tinge of the Lyceum, and a
dash of the Princess’s, about it. I except the green-room of Drury Lane,
which never resembled anything half so much as a family vault, and
the green-rooms of the two Operas, which, though splendidly furnished
and appointed, are almost deserted during the performances, the great
_tenori_ and _soprani_ preferring to retire to their dressing-rooms when
any long intervals of rest occur.

“Things”—to use a bit of “Green Bushes” _facetiæ_, invented, I am willing
to believe, by that incorrigible humourist, Mr. Wright, and which has
grown proverbial—“things isn’t as they used to was;” and the attractions
of green-rooms have deteriorated, even within my time. When I say “my
time,” I mean a quarter of a century; for as I happened to be almost born
in a prompt-box and weaned in a scene-painter’s size-kettle, and have
been employed in very nearly every capacity in and about a theatre—save
that of an actor, which profession invincible modesty and incurable
incompetency prevented me from assuming—I feel myself qualified to speak
about the green-rooms with some degree of authority. To have read a
three-act melodrama to a (scarcely) admiring audience, and to have called
“everybody for the last scene” in a green-room, gives a man, I take it, a
right to be heard.

But, to tell the truth, green-rooms now-a-days are sadly dull, slow,
humdrum places of resort. In a minor theatre they are somewhat
more lively, as there is there no second green-room, and the young
sylphides of the _corps de ballet_ are allowed to join the company. The
conversation of these young ladies, if not interesting, is amusing, and
if not brilliant, is cheerful. They generally bring their needle-work
with them if they have to wait long between the scenes (frequently to the
extent of an entire act) in which they have to dance, and they discourse
with much _naïveté_ upon the warmth or coldness of the audience with
reference to the applause bestowed, the bad temper of the stage-manager,
and their own temporary indisposition from corns, which, with pickled
salmon, unripe pears, the proper number of lengths for a silk dress, and
the comparative merits of the whiskers and moustaches of the musicians
in the band (with some of whose members they are sure to be in love,
and whom they very frequently marry, leaving off dancing and having
enormous families), form the almost invariable staple of a ballet-girl’s
conversation. Poor simple-minded, good-natured, hard-working little
creatures, theirs is but a rude and stern lot. To cut capers and wear
paint, to find one’s own shoes and stockings, and be strictly virtuous,
on a salary varying from nine to eighteen shillings a week—this is
the pabulum of a ballet-girl. And hark in thine ear, my friend. If
any man talks to you about the syrens of the ballet, the dangerous
enchantresses and cockatrices of the ballet, the pets of the ballet,
whose only thoughts are about broughams and diamond _aigrettes_, dinners
at Richmond, and villas at St. John’s Wood—if anybody tells you that
the majority, or even a large proportion, of our English _danseuses_
are inclined this perilous way, just inform him, with my compliments,
that he is a dolt and a teller of untruths. I can’t say much of ballet
morality abroad; of the poor _rats de l’opera_ in Paris, who are
bred to wickedness from their very cradle upwards; of the Neapolitan
_ballerine_, who are obliged to wear green _calzoni_, and to be civil
to the priests, lest they should be put down altogether; or of the poor
Russian ballet-girls, who live altogether in barracks, are conveyed
to and from the theatre in omnibuses, and are birched if they do not
behave themselves, and yet manage somehow to make a bad end of it; but
as regards our own sylphides, I say that naughtiness among them is the
exception, and cheerful, industrious, self-denying perseverance in a
hard, ungrateful life, the honourable rule.

There are yet a few green-rooms where the genus “swell” still finds a
rare admittance. See here a couple in full evening costume, talking to
the pretty young lady in the low-necked dress on the settee; but the
swell is quite a fish out of water in the green-room of these latter
days. Managers don’t care quite so much for his patronage, preferring
to place their chief reliance and dependence on the public. The actors
don’t care about him, for the swell is not so generous as of yore in
taking tickets for the benefits of popular favourites. Actresses mistrust
him, for the swell has given up raising actresses to the peerage. The
ballet-girls are half afraid of him; and when they don’t fear him,
they laugh at him. So the swell wanders in and out of the green-room,
and stares at people uneasily, and at last escapes to his brougham or
his cabriolet at the stage-door. Now and then a wicked old lord of the
unrighteous evil-living school of British peers, now happily becoming
rarer and rarer every day, will come sniggering and chuckling into a
green-room, hanging on the arm of the manager, with whom he is on the
most intimate terms, and who “My Lords” him most obsequiously. He rolls
his scandalous old eyes in his disreputable, puckered face, seeking some
pretty, timid, blushing little flower, whom he may blight with his Upas
gaze, and then totters away to his stage-box, where he does duty for the
rest of the evening with a huge double-barrelled opera-glass.

Such is the green-room of to-day, quiet, occasionally chatty (for
actresses and actors can be pleasant enough among themselves, in a
cosy, sensible manner, talking about butcher’s meat, and poor’s-rates,
and Brompton omnibuses); but not by any means the glittering Temple
of Radiant Delight that some might feel inclined to imagine it. There
have been days—and I remember them—when green-rooms were very different
places. There were women on the stage then who were Queens as well as
actresses, and had trains of admirers round their flowing robes. There
was a slight nervous man in those days—a famous writer of plays and books
that yet live, and will live while our English language is spoken—a
strange-looking, high-cheek-boned man, with long hair carelessly thrown
away from his forehead, and a piercing eye, that seemed to laugh to scorn
the _lorgnon_ dangling from its ribbon. I have seen him so, his spare
form leaning against the mantel, and he showering—yes, showering is the
word—arrowy _bon mots_ and corruscating repartees around him. He is
dead: they all seem to be dead, those brilliant green-room men—Jerrold,
Talfourd, Kenney, Haynes Bayley, Hook, A’Beckett. They have left no
successors. The modern play-wrights skulk in and out of the manager’s
room, and are mistaken at rehearsal for the property-men. They forsake
green-rooms at night for drawing-rooms, where they can hear themselves
praised, or smoking-rooms of clubs, where they can abuse one another; and
if A. says a good thing, B. books it for his next _petite comédie_, which
does not hurt A. much, seeing that he stole it from C., who translated it
hot-and-hot from Monsieur de D., that great plagiarist from Lope de Vega.

Come, let us leave the green-room to its simple devices, and see what
they are doing “Behind the Scenes.” You and I, we know, are in the
receipt of fern-seed, and can walk invisible without incommoding ourself
or anybody else, be the pressure ever so great; but I should strongly
advise all swells and other intruders, if any such remain, either to
withdraw into the shadiest recesses of the green-room, or to “get out of
that”—to use an Irishism, without the least possible delay. For “Behind
the Scenes” is clearly no place for them. If I were the manager of a
theatre, I would not admit one single person into the _coulisses_ save
those connected with the night’s performance, nay, nor allow even the
_employés_ of the theatre, till the call-boy summoned them to approach
the wing. Madame Vestris established this Spartan rule of discipline, and
found it answer in making her theatre the best-managed in Europe; but it
will be observed that no such _ordre du jour_ has been promulgated in the
theatre behind whose scenes we find ourselves to-night. What a confusion,
what a hubbub, what a throng and bustle! The _dramatis personæ_, you will
perceive, no longer contemplate the performance of the “Green Bushes.”
Hoops, powder, brocade, black-patches, high-heeled shoes, bag-wigs,
flapped waistcoats, and laced-hats prevail. This must be some Pompadour
or Beau Tibbs piece—“Court Favour,” or “Love’s Telegraph,” or some last
century dramatic conceit by Mr. Planché or Mr. Dance. How the carpenters
scuffle and stamp, entreating the bystanders, not always in the politest
terms, to get out of the way! Now and again the prompter rushes from his
box, and in a hoarse _sotto voce_, that would be a shriek if it were not
a whisper, commands silence.

[Illustration: SEVEN O’CLOCK P.M.: BEHIND THE SCENES.]

Upon my word, there is that unlucky old Flathers, the heavy man, who
_never_ knows his part; there he is again, evidently imperfect, and
taking a last desperate gulp of study, sitting in the property arm-chair,
on the very brink of the stage. And see there—don’t blush, don’t stammer,
but make as polite a bow as you can—there is Mrs. Woffington Pegley,
in full Pompadour costume, and such a hoop! She is only twenty-three
years of age; has had two husbands; Count Schrechny-synesky, the
Moldo-Wallachian ambassador, is reported to be madly in love with her;
she rides in the park, she hunts, she drives, she owns a yacht, she
has more diamonds and Mechlin lace than a duchess, and she is the most
charming actress of the day. To be sure, she can’t read very fluently,
and can scarcely write her own name, but _que voulez vous_?

Don’t you know that queer, quaint passage in good old Dr. Johnson’s life,
where, soon after the production of his tragedy of “Irene,” and when the
lexicographer had even gone to the extent of appearing behind the scenes
of the playhouse in a scarlet coat and laced-hat fiercely cocked, he
suddenly told David Garrick that he could visit him behind the scenes no
more, assigning his own honest sufficient reason? The pretty actresses
were too much for Samuel. He was but mortal man—mortal man. Their rosy
cheeks—never mind whether the roses were artificial or not—their white
necks, and dainty hands and feet, their rustling brocades and laced
tuckers, disturbed the equanimity of our great moralist and scholar.
He fled from the temptation wisely. Who can wonder at it? Who, that is
not a misogynist, can sufficiently case himself in brass to withstand
the Parthian glances of those pretty dangerous creatures? Surely they
dress better, look better, walk better, sit better, stand better,
have clearer voices, cheerier laughs, more graceful curtsies, than any
other women in the world. But they are not for the likes of you or me,
Thomas. See, there is fat, handsome Captain Fitzblazer of the “Heavies,”
the Duke of Alma’s aide-de-camp, pretending to flirt with little Fanny
Merrylegs, the _coryphée_, and the rogue has one eye on Mrs. Woffington
Pegley. I wish some robust scene-shifter would tread on his varnished
toes. The Pegley is aware of the Fitzblazerian _œillade_, I wager,
though she makes-believe to be listening to young Martinmas, the walking
gentleman’s, nonsense. Come away, Thomas, come away, my friend. Let us
strive to be as wise in our generation as Sam Johnson was in his, and
write to Davy Garrick that we will come “behind the scenes” no more.




EIGHT O’CLOCK P.M.—HER MAJESTY’S THEATRE, AND A PAWNBROKER’S SHOP.


I think that I have held out something like a guarantee, in the course
of these papers, that my readers shall be introduced to a fair amount
of fashionable life. How far I have performed my promise it is for them
to judge; but I am not, myself, without misgivings. True it is that,
under my guidance, they have perambulated Regent Street; have dined off
the fat of the land at a Public Dinner; have betted at Tattersall’s;
ridden in the Park; heard the band play at St. James’s; strolled through
the Pantheon Bazaar; and lounged in a theatrical green-room: but then,
have not I, discourteous _cicerone_, cajoled them into visiting strange
unlovely places, dismal to look upon; persuaded them to hang up their
harps by the willows of the Custom-house quay, and listen to the slang
of oyster-boatmen and bargees, at Billingsgate; forced them to haunt
the purlieus of police-courts, and witness the departure of prison-vans
and their felonious cargoes; to keep bad hours, and associate with
newspaper boys, market-gardeners, paupers, and common people who travel
by parliamentary train; to become acquainted, in fact, with scenes and
people distressingly low and unfashionable? It is true that I have not
taken them to the lanes of Petticoat and Field; to Duke, his Place; or
St. Mary, her Axe; or Bevis, his Marks; or Rag, its Fair; or Whitechapel,
its Butcher Row; or Ratcliff, its Highway; or Lock, his Fields; or Somers
Town, its Brill; or Rats, their Castle; or Whetstone, its Park; or
Jacob, his Island; or Southwark, its Mint; or Lambeth, its New Cut; or
St. Giles, its Church Lane and Hampshire Hog Lane. If I have not moved
them so to travel with me, it is not, I fear, through any _laches_ of
intention or deficiency of will, but simply because I have at different
seasons travelled over every inch of the road I have named with other
readers, and that I have a decent horror of repeating myself, and respect
for the maxim of _non bis in idem_.

Be my demerits granted or disallowed, I have still some time left to me
wherein to make amends. Though it may be my duty, ere we have finished,
to lead you again into dismal and wretched places, you shall have at
least an instalment of fashionable life now; and—follow honest Sancho’s
advice as to not looking the gift-horse in the mouth; be satisfied with
my assurance that this present one is of the pure Godolphin Arabian
lineage, elegant in form, unquestionable in mettle, electrical in
swiftness. The next may be but a sorry nag, spavined, blown, wind-galled,
and sprung. You must take the bad with the good, in this world, and in
all things.

Ladies and gentlemen, we are going to the Opera—to her Majesty’s Theatre
in the Haymarket; and by eight o’clock it behoves us all to be in our
seats, if we wish to hear the first bars of the overture. It is true that
if we are so fortunate as to possess, or to hire, or to have opera-boxes
given to us, we do not, frequently, make our appearance in the theatre
till past nine o’clock; and that, if we are lessees or renters of stalls,
the ballet has frequently commenced before we condescend to occupy our
seats; but if the pit or the amphitheatre be our destination, we had much
better present ourselves at the entrance immediately the doors open,
and secure seats with what speed we may. It is a peculiarity of her
Majesty’s Theatre that whether the “house” be a good one or a bad one,
there are always, before the termination of the first act of the opera,
some occupants of the pit who are compelled to content themselves with
standing-room.

Opinions are divided as to the place in the _enceinte_ of the magnificent
theatre where the greatest enjoyment of the performance can be obtained.
To some, a box on the grand tier—vast, roomy, with space for six to sit
abreast—is considered the superlative of operatic felicity. Others hold
out stoutly for the artistic fourth tier, where, they declare, they can
hear and see better than their lowly-placed neighbours. There are many
who abide by the stalls, despite of those who declare that in the front
rows thereof the voices of the singers are drowned by the contiguity of
the braying band. The pit has its defenders, who allege that distance
not only “lends enchantment to the view,” but chastens the instrumental
exuberances of the orchestra; but perhaps the most energetic advocates of
the merits of their own particular seats are the dwellers in the high-up
amphitheatre or gallery, who boldly declare that it is in that elevated
position alone, that you can enjoy, in the full extent of their beauty,
the gems of the opera, and that the sole place fit for the presence
of the genuine amateur is the operatic paradise, ascent to which is
permitted for the sum of three-and-sixpence or half-a-crown.

Be our election, however, the stalls. From those comfortable _fauteuils_
let us explore the ample field—see what the open, what the covert yield;
and, as we expatiate over this scene of Man, own that, though “a mighty
maze,” it is “not without a plan.” For there is a plan of her Majesty’s
Theatre in the box-office.

Am I treading on any one’s toes, disturbing any one’s prejudices,
predilections, or pre-formed opinions, in asseverating that the interior
of Mr. Lumley’s establishment offers, with one exception, the most
magnificent _coup-d’-œil_ of any Opera in Europe that I have seen? Mark
the cunning qualification! I say, _that I have seen_; for they tell me
that there is an Opera at Barcelona (which nutty sea-port I have never
visited), a theatre surpassing in grandeur, and richness of decoration,
all the lyric temples of the continent or of these isles; and so far
as mere _size_ is concerned, the palm must, I believe, be yielded to
Parma, in which caseous Italian city there exists—yet unexplored by
me—a huge tumble-down, ruinous, leaky, mildewed _salle_, which is as
the Tower of Babel of Opera-houses the Great Bonassus of theatres. I
speak of the houses which these weak eyes, in the course of many years’
wandering, have surveyed, through powerful-lensed lorgnettes. Give
me her Majesty’s. Above the dreary Scala, with its naked tiers above
tiers, its _sediti chuisi_, and the three reserved front rows of the
pit, where the authorities were compelled to put the white-blanketed
Austrian officers, lest they should come to blows (they often squabbled
in the lobbies even) with the spiteful Milanese; the ghastly, dingy,
ill-lighted Scala—(it is bigger by far than her Majesty’s, though)—with
its rabbit-hutch-like private boxes, whose doors are scrawled over with
the penny plain and twopence coloured-like coats of arms of the effete
and decadent Lombardian nobility. Above the boasted Grand Opera at Paris,
tawdry, inconvenient, and chopped up into unreasonable sections. Above
the Burg Theater, at Vienna; the Theatre de la Monnaie, at Brussels.
Above, even, the superb little Opernhaus, at Berlin, which, though a gem
in its way, is but as a diamond _aigrette_ to the Koh-i-noor. Above the
late Royal Italian Opera House, in Bow Street, Covent Garden, London,
which was simply a big theatre, ill-built, and undecorated. For the
solitary exception I have hinted at you must go north, very far north
into Europe, and in the city of Moscow, in the empire of Holy Russia, you
shall find an Italian Opera House unprecedented, I verily believe, for
size, for splendour, for comfort, for elegance, and for taste. It was
not my fortune to be present in Moscow on the occasion of the coronation
_fêtes_, when the theatre I speak of was opened to the public preparatory
to the regular winter season; but for a description of its glories I must
refer those curious in operatic matters to my friend Mr. Henry Sutherland
Edwards, who was resident many months in the city of the Kremlin, and
whom I sincerely wish I could persuade to do, in better part, for Moscow
the holy that which I have myself endeavoured, according to my lights, to
do for St. Petersburg the mundane.

Look around you, in the vast arena of her Majesty’s. Wonder and admire,
for such a sight it is not permitted to you often to behold. Look around,
and around again, the enormous horseshoe; look from base to summit, at
this magnificent theatre, glorious with beauties and with riches. Here
are gathered the mighty, and noble, and wealthy, the venerable and wise,
the young and beauteous of the realm. The prime minister seeks at the
opera a few hours’ relaxation from the toils of office; the newly-married
peeress there displays the dazzling diamonds custom now, for the first
time, permits her to wear; the blushing maiden of seventeen, “just
out”—that very day, perhaps, presented at Court—smiles and simpers
in a shrine of gauze and artificial flowers. Mark yonder, that roomy
box on the grand tier, which a quiet, plainly-dressed party has just
entered. There is a matronly lady in black, with a few bugle ornaments
in her _coiffure_. She ensconces herself in a corner, her back towards
the audience, screens herself with a curtain, and then calmly proceeds
to take a review of the front rows of the stalls, and the occupants
of the proscenium boxes. It is not considered etiquette to take more
than a cursory glimpse of the matronly lady in black through _your_
opera-glass. Presently there sits down by the matronly lady’s side, a
handsome, portly, middle-aged gentleman, in plain sober evening dress,
and with a very high forehead—so high, indeed, that I don’t think that
the assumption that the middle-aged gentleman’s head inclined to baldness
would be unreasonable. In the opposite angle of the box sits a demure
young lady—sometimes a couple of demure ones—who doesn’t move much or
speak much; and at the back of the _loge_ are two gentlemen in white
waistcoats, who never sit down, and, from the exquisitely uncomfortable
expression of their countenances, would appear to be standing on one
leg. Now, take the hat of your heart off, for your head, according to
operatic sumptuary laws, must be already uncovered, and with your spirit
salaam thrice three times, for the matronly lady is Victoria Queen of
England, and the middle-aged gentleman, inclined to corpulence and
baldness, is his Royal Highness the Prince Consort. The demure ones are
maids of honour or ladies in waiting; and as for the white-waistcoated
uncomfortables (seemingly) on one leg, one may be the tremendous Gold
Stick himself, and the other—who shall say I—the ineffable Phipps, pride
of chivalry and pearl of privy purses.

On the same tier, but nearer the stage, there is a narrow box, holding
only two persons _de face_, at whose occupants you may gaze without any
glaring dereliction of the proprieties. See, a lady who screens herself
behind the amber satin drapery, even more completely than her Majesty,
and by her side an elderly gentleman, with a large mouth, a very stiff
white neckcloth, and a very severe aspect, and about whose tendency to
baldness there cannot exist any doubt, inasmuch as his cranium is as
bare and polished as a billiard-ball. It would be a pardonable guess to
presume this individual to be a member of the College of Preceptors,
or a proctor, fresh from Doctors’ Commons; but if you eye him narrowly
through the many-lensed lorgnette, you will perceive that he wears a
little badge of parti-coloured ribands at his button-holes, and on some
evenings you may even discern a brilliant star tacked on the left breast
of his coat. Who is this distinguished bald one? I must not be personal
with less distinguished people than royalty, and so I will content myself
with calling him his Excellency. His Excellency dwells in an enormous
mansion in Belgravia, where he gives grand parties. His own little
cabinet is, I am told, decorated with charming-coloured lithographs,
representing scenes Oriental and operatic; and, indeed, his Excellency
has been throughout his long and ornamental life a consistent and
liberal patron of Terpsichore. He never misses a new ballet night now.
Occasionally, his Excellency has some business to transact with the Baron
Fitzharris, Earl of Malmesbury; but the old fogies of the clubs, and the
chronic alarmists of the newspapers, are haunted by the notion that his
Excellency is perpetually weaving plots, and entangling British statesmen
in the mazes of his dark diplomacy. For my part, I think that very often,
when his Excellency is supposed to be busily occupied in concocting
his Machiavelian plots, the good man is quietly at home snipping away
the outlines of his favourite coloured lithographs, and pasting them
in albums or on screens. You know what the Chancellor Oxenstiern said
to his son anent the small amount of wisdom with which this world is
governed; and I think as much might be said concerning diplomacy. But
his Excellency has a terrible reputation for undermining, plotting, and
counter-plotting, and is supposed to be, intellectually, a compound of
the dark and crooked astuteness of Talleyrand, Metternich, ex-Inspector
Field, and the late Joseph Ady.

I might tire you out, and exhaust a space already growing limited, by
drawing portraits of the denizens of opera-boxes. Our glances at them
must be, perforce, rapid, for I dare not linger. See, there (he comes
late, does not seem to enjoy the music much, and stays but for an hour)
seventy-three years worth of learning, of genius, of wit, of eloquence,
and patriotism—that glorious edifice of humanity, of which the first
stone was laid by a young north-country advocate, who was a friend of
Jeffrey and Sydney Smith, and wrote stinging articles in the “Edinburgh
Review.” No man so famous as that whilom chancellor has her Majesty’s
Theatre reckoned among its audience, since the days when, in spotless
white waistcoat, and creaseless cravat, with a silver buckle behind, the
great duke was wont to make his bow at the court of Euterpe, not because,
honest man, he cared much for operas, Italian or English, but because he
considered it to be a matter of duty towards that aristocracy of which,
though a premier duke, he was the prince, to show himself in their places
of resort. He went everywhere, the brave old boy, to balls and concerts,
to routs and banquets. In the house of feasting, when the goblets were
wreathed with flowers, and the cymbals clashed, there was Duke Arthur,
long after his gums were toothless, his eyes dim, his joints stiffened,
and the drums of his ears muffled. And, next morning, at eight o’clock,
you would still see him on duty, at early service, in St. James’s Church,
reading out the responses to the Psalms as though they were words of
command.

[Illustration: EIGHT O’CLOCK P.M.: THE OPERA.]

There, in her family box, is the still beautiful marchioness, with that
crop of ringlets unequalled in luxuriance. There, in the stalls, is
Captain Fitzblazer, the Duke of Alma’s aide-de-camp, whom we met “behind
the scenes” an hour since. “Jemmy” Fitzblazer—he is always known as
“Jemmy,” though there are not half-a-dozen men of his acquaintance who
would presume thus familiarly to address him to his face—is getting very
middle-aged and gray-headed now. He is not slim enough in the waist.
Adonis is growing fat. Narcissus has the gout. Lesbia’s sparrow is
moulting. A sad reflection, but so runs the world.

I should be wilfully deceiving you, and unworthy the name I have been
always striving to gain—that of a faithful chronicler—if I were to lead
you to imagine that the brilliant theatre is full only of rank, fashion,
wealth, and happiness. Are any of the terms I have used synonymous,
I wonder. There are many aching hearts, doubtless, beneath all this
jewellery and embroidery; many titled folks who are thinking of pawning
their plate on the morrow, many dashing young scions of aristocracy,
who, between the bars of the overture, are racking their brains as to
how on earth they are to meet Mephibosheth’s bill, and whether a passage
through the Insolvent Court would not be, after all, the best way out
of their difficulties. And in the great equality that dress-coats, bare
shoulders, white neckcloths, and opera-cloaks make among men and women,
how much dross and alloy might we not find among the gold and silver! In
the very next box to the mother of the Gracchi, resplendent among her
offspring, in her severe beauty, is poor pretty lost Mrs. Demmymond,
late Miss Vanderplank, of the Theatres Royal. The chaste Volumnia, who
only comes to the opera once in the season, and always goes away before
the commencement of the ballet, is elbowed in the crush-room by Miss
Golightly, who has one of the best boxes that Mr. Sams can let, and
who comes with a head of flaxen hair one night, and with raven black
tresses the next. Captain Spavin, of the 3rd Jibbers, shudders when he
finds his next-stall neighbour to be his long-suffering tailor; and Sir
Hugh Hempenridge, baronet, is covered with confusion when he feels the
hawk-glance of little Casay, the sheriff’s officer (and none so bravely
attired as he) darted full at him from Fops’ Alley.

Fops’ Alley! The word reminds me of bygone operatic days, and I sigh
when, looking round the house, I remember how Time, the destroyer, has
left a mark, too, upon these _cari luoghi_. It is true that many of
those reminiscences may not be worth sighing for; but is there not always
something melancholy in the fading away of old associations? Where is
the Omnibus Box? The longitudinal den answering to the _Loge Infernale_
at Paris, and the _Fosse aux Lions_ at Madrid, yet has its customary
locality over the orchestra, on the Queen’s side of the proscenium;
but where are its brilliant, witty, worthless occupants? But one, the
gay young prince, who, if report says true, kicked, with his own royal
foot, through the panels of the door of communication leading from the
Omnibus Box to the stage, and for that night—the night of the famous
Tamburini and Coletti disturbance—locked by special order of M. Laporte,
has become a Respectable, holds high office, does his work well, and
occupies himself far more with the subjects of soldiers’ kit and barrack
accommodation, than with squabbles between Tweedledum and Tweedledee. But
where are the rest? Where the dashing spirits and impetuous madcaps of
twenty years since? One is in a lunatic asylum, and another is paralytic,
and a third is prowling about the gambling-places on the Rhine, and the
last I saw of a fourth, was once, in 1852, descending the stairs of the
Hotel des Bains, at Dieppe, when a companion, drawing me on one side as
a broken, bowed, decrepit, sunken-eyed, gray-headed, prematurely-aged
man passed us tottering on a stick, whispered to me, “See! there goes
D’Orsay;” who died a fortnight afterwards.

A Liberal, I hope—a Democrat, if you will—on some not unimportant
public topics, I cannot help a species of meek wailing Conservatism
upon the decadence of some of our social institutions. This is the age
of abolition—of doing away with and putting down. They have robbed our
grenadiers of their worsted epaulettes. The beefeaters in the Tower have
been deprived of those scarlet and embroidered tunics, that contrasted so
quaintly with the pantaloons and highlows of everyday life, and thrust
into buttoned-up coats and brass buttons. The barristers’ wigs will go
next, I suppose, and the cocked-hat of the parish beadle—his red plush
shorts and buckled shoon are already departed. I have fears for the
opera; I tremble for the days when there will be bonnets in the upper
tiers and paletots in the pit. When I mind the opera first, it was a
subaltern’s, and not a sergeant’s, guard that kept watch and ward under
the portico. The officer on duty had a right of entrance _ex officio_
into the pit, and it was splendid to see him swinging his bearskin and
flashing his epaulettes in Fops’ Alley. The very name of Fops’ Alley is
becoming obsolete now. The next generation will forget its locality.
In those days, on drawing-room nights, the men used to come in their
court suits and uniforms, their stars and badges, the ladies in their
ostrich plumes and diamond necklaces, only taking off their trains. There
were opera-hats in those days—half moon cocked-hats; now the men carry
Gibuses like pancakes. The link boys are disappearing—the leather-lunged,
silver-badged fellows, who shouted so sonorously that Lady Sardanapalias’
carriage stopped the way. And the glories of the operatic stage; are
not those inconstant singing birds fled now? Can all the Arditis in
the world compensate for Costa, with his coat thrown back, and those
immortal, tight-fitting white kid gloves? He was the first man who ever
succeeded in parting his hair down the back; and now, he too is growing
bald, and he has cajoled Grisi the mellifluous, and Mario the heroic,
to pipe their nightingale notes among the coach-builders of Long Acre,
and the fried-fish shopmen of Drury Lane. Of the glorious unequalled,
unapproachable Four—Grisi, Rubini, Tamburini, and Lablache—who once
electrified the world in the “Puritani,” three are dead: the first is
in Covent Garden provoking malevolent criticism. Where are the other
Four, the Terpsichorean quartett, the immortals who danced the _pas de
quatre_! Ah! Mademoiselle Piccolomini, you are very arch and pretty; ah!
Mademoiselle Marie Taglioni, you are a _spirituelle_ and graceful dancer;
but you are not the giants and giantesses of the old Dead Days.

    “You little people of the skies,
    What are you when the sun shall rise!”

But the sun is set, and there is darkness, and I am afraid that I am
prosing _in re_ her Majesty’s Theatre, as old playgoers will prose about
Jack Bannister, sir, and Dowton, and Munden, and Fawcett.

There is lately come to town, at least within these latter years, an
Italian gentleman by the name of Verdi, to whose brassy screeds, and
tinkling cymbalics, it is expected that all _habitués_ of the opera
must listen, to the utter exclusion and oblivion of the old musical
worthies who delighted the world with their immortal works before Signor
Verdi was born. I have brought you to her Majesty’s Theatre, and this
is unfortunately a Verdi night. You may listen to him, but I won’t.
Thersites Theorbo, the editor of the “Spinet” (with which is incorporated
that famous musical journal the “Jew’s Harp”), may accuse me of being
“perfunctory,” or of being an ass—no one minds Thersites Theorbo,
knowing him to be a good fellow, much bemused in Cavendish tobacco and
counterpoint; but I will shut my eyes, and muse upon the bygone glories
of the opera. The place is a mass of memories. Things and books, and
scenes and men, and stories, come teeming on my brain as I sit in my
stall, heedless of Signor Verdi and his musical machinations. From
that shelf, well known to me, where nestle my dog’s-eared Rabelais, my
Montaigne, my annotated edition of Captain Grose’s Dictionary of the
Vulgar Tongue, my Shakspeare, and my beloved Jeremy Taylor, I take down
garrulous old Pepys, and read—“Jan. 12, 1667. With my Lord Brouncker
to his house, there to hear some Italian Musique, and here we met Tom
Killigrew, Sir Robert Murray, and the Italian Signor Baptista, who had
prepared a play for the Opera, which Sir T. Killigrew do intend to have
up; and here he did sing one of the acts. He is himself the poet as
well as the musician, and did sing the whole from the words without any
musique prick’d, and played all along on a harpiscon most admirably, and
the composition most excellent.” And then I mind me of an advertisement
in the “London Gazette,” in 1692, setting forth how “the Italian lady
that is lately come over, that is so famous for singing, will sing at the
concerts at York Buildings during the season.” The season! There was a
“season” in William the Deliverer’s time, then. So I call to mind Dick
Steele’s serio-comic announcement in the fourth number of the “Tattler,”
of how “Letters from the Haymarket inform us that on Saturday night last
the opera of ‘Pyrrhus and Demetrius’ was performed with great applause.”
Then from the beginning of Italian opera in England, a grand trunk line
extending to our days, I shunt off on to innumerable little branches and
loop-lines. I see the Faustina and the Cuzzoni coming to blows—Sir Robert
Walpole backing the first, his lady the second. I am, for the nonce, an
ardent partisan of Mrs. Tofts. Then I have a vision of Mrs. Fox Lane,
in a hoop of preternatural size, bidding General Crewe get out of her
house, because he professed his ignorance as to whom Signora Mingotti
was—the Mingotti who told Dr. Burney that she had “been frequently hissed
by the English for having a toothache, a cold, or a fever, to which the
good people of England will readily allow every human being to be liable
except an actress or a singer.” And then I bow down in awe before the
radiant shadow of Farinelli, great and good, unmoved by misfortune,
unspoilt by fame—Farinelli, whose dulcet notes cured a Spanish king of
madness, who was thought worthy to receive the decorations of the orders
of St. Jago and of Calatrava—Farinelli, of whom honest Will Hogarth could
not help falling a little foul in the “Rake’s Progress,” but who was,
nevertheless, as singularly modest and upright as he was unprecedentedly
gifted in his art. Unprecedentedly! recall the word. I bow before a
greater shadow, though of one who wrote, and sang not, save to his pretty
wife.[9] I see a little boy, in a grave court suit, and his young locks
curling like the tendrils of the vine, sitting before the harpsichord in
the orchestra of the great theatre of Milan. It is the first night of a
new opera, and the opera is his—this almost suckling. Upstairs, in a box
near the chandelier, is the little man’s father, sobbing, and smiling,
and vowing candles to the Virgin, if his dear child’s opera succeeds.
And it does succeed, and all Milan is full of that small maestro’s, that
maestrino’s fame, the next day. I see him again, years afterwards, grown
to be a slight, vivacious little personage, in a scarlet pelisse and a
cocked-hat. He is standing behind the scenes at the wing of the Imperial
Theatre at Vienna, and it is again the first night of the performance
of a new opera—his own. There is a singer in a Spanish costume, and who
must be, I take it, a species of barber. When he sings a song, commencing
“_Non più andrai farfallone amoroso_,” the little man in the scarlet
pelisse and cocked-hat begins to beat his palms together in applause,
and murmurs “_Bravo! Bravo!_ Benucci!” But when the singer winds up in
that magnificent exercitation to Cherubino, “_Alla vittoria! Alla gloria
militar!_” the house comes down with applause. The people shout out; the
fat-headed musicians in the orchestra beat their violin bows violently
against their desks, and (quite in defiance of operatic discipline) cry
“_Bravo! Bravo! Viva! viva! grande maestro!_” I see the same little man
lying sick and pining on his bed at Salzburg. The intrigues of Salieri,
the ingratitude of courts, the quick forgetfulness of the public, are
nothing to him now. Little does it matter if he have been indeed poisoned
with _aqua tofana_, or if he be dying of that common, but denied disease,
a broken heart. _He has written the Requiem_ (recreant Sussmayer will
strive to rob him even of _that_ fame after death), and his last hour is
approaching. The poor Swan dies; and then the sluice-gates of my eyes are
opened, and I remember that this was Johann Wolfgang von Mozart.

Upon my word and honour there is Van Poggi, the chorus-singer, on the
stage. I am recalled at once from dreamland to actualities. There is
an old operatic saying that her Majesty’s Theatre, in the Haymarket,
could not be complete without Van Poggi, and now behold that lyrical
Widdicomb. According to the same tradition—not always trustworthy—Van
Poggi was the identical chorus-singer who assisted Velluti to alight
from his barge the night the last of those male _soprani_ made his first
appearance (in the opera of the “Crociato in Egitto”) before an audience
who had almost forgotten the fame of the Pacchierottis, the Rubinellis,
and the Marchesis. Van Poggi wears wonderfully well. Nobody knows his
exact nationality: whether he is a Dutchman, a Dane, or an Italian. His
residence has never been precisely ascertained. The management have no
occasion to rout him up, for he is always punctual at rehearsal. During
the vacation he retires to Paris, where he tells his friends that he is
to be found between ten and four every day in the Long Gallery of the
Louvre. During the London season you may contemplate Van Poggi between
the same hours in Mr. Zerubbabel’s cigar-shop in the Quadrant, at whose
door he generally stands in a Spanish cloak faced with velvet. He never
sang any better or any worse than he sings now; he was never promoted to
play the smallest separate part, such as is from time to time assigned
to the gentleman who appears in the bills as Signor N. N., or _non
nominato_. It is believed that Van Poggi would faint if he had to deliver
a line of recitative. Yet there is a very general opinion in operatic
circles that her Majesty’s Theatre would come to hopeless grief if Van
Poggi were not among the chorus. At the commencement of the season there
are always anxious inquiries at the box-office as to whether Van Poggi is
secured; and a reply being given in the affirmative, the lovers of the
lyrical drama breathe freely, and the subscription progresses. No one
knows what became of Van Poggi in the dark and dismal interregnum during
which Mr. Lumley was compelled to close his doors. Mysterious offers of
better parts, and better salaries, had, it is reported, been made to Van
Poggi, emanating from a quarter not a hundred miles from Bow Street,
Covent Garden; but the patriotic chorister scornfully refused them. He
was still seen to haunt Mr. Zerubbabel’s cigar-shop at the commencement
of the musical season; then he suddenly disappeared; and whether he went
abroad, or wrapped himself in the Spanish cloak and so lay torpid for two
years like a dormouse, must for ever remain a matter for speculation. But
it is certain that when the Haymarket Phœnix arose from its ashes, and
light once more shone on its amber satin curtains, there was Van Poggi,
at the first chorus rehearsal, as fresh as paint, and looking better
than ever. And it is moreover reported, that when his Excellency, whom a
combination of political difficulties (which began about the time some
English grenadiers were sent out to Gallipoli) had forced to leave this
country, and who did not return for upwards of three years, when his
Excellency Baron —— made his first visit to his beloved opera-house,
the piece of the evening being “Lucia di Lammermoor,” he swept the ranks
of those preposterous sham Highlanders, who are discovered singing a sham
hunting chorus, anxiously with his lorgnette, and at last cried out with
a satisfied accent: “_Bon, voilà_ Van Poggi.” He had recognised that
chorus-singer in his kilt, and was thenceforth persuaded that the opera
season was safe.

There is a new ballet to-night, in which the enchanting little Pocchini,
most modest and most graceful of modern _danseuses_, is to appear; and
Signor Verdi’s opera is very long, and I am aweary of his figments, and
cannot sit them out. Besides, I want your presence, trusty friend and
companion, always in the interest of “Twice Round the Clock.” We have a
little business to transact; and as it is getting towards nine o’clock,
we had better transact it at once. Leave we then the dazzling temple,
let us hie to an obscure retreat, to your servant known, where we can
leave our opera-glasses, divest ourselves of our white cravats, and throw
paletots over our evening dress. There, a few touches, and the similitude
of swells is taken away from us. Now let us plunge into a labyrinth of
narrow streets to attain our unfashionable goal, for, upon my word, our
destination is a pawnbroker’s shop.

[Illustration: EIGHT O’CLOCK P.M.: INTERIOR OF A PAWNBROKER’S SHOP.]

Where the long lane from St. Giles’s to the Strand divides the
many-branching slums; where flares the gas over coarse scraps of meat in
cheap butchers’ shops; where brokers pile up motley heaps of second-hand
wares—from fishing-rods and bird-cages to flat-irons and blankets;
from cornet-à-pistons and “Family Encyclopædias” to corkscrews and
fowling-pieces; where linen-drapers are invaded by poorly-clad women
and girls, demanding penn’orths of needles, ha’porths of buttons, and
farthingworths of thread; where jean stays flap against the door jambs,
and “men’s stout hose” gleam gaunt in the shop-windows; where grimy dames
sit in coal and potato-sheds, and Jew clothesmen wrestle for the custom
of passengers who don’t want to buy anything; where little dens, reeking
with the odours of fried fish, sausages, and baked potatoes, or steaming
with reminders of à-la-mode beef and hot eel soup, offer suppers, cheap
and nasty, to the poor in pocket; where, in low coffee-shops, newspapers
a fortnight old, with coffee-cup rings on them, suggest an intellectual
pabulum, combined with bodily refreshment; where gaping public-houses
receive or disgorge their crowds of tattered topers; where “general
shops” are packed to overflowing with heterogeneous odds and ends—soap,
candles, Bath brick, tobacco, Dutch cheese, red herrings, firewood,
black lead, streaky bacon, brown sugar, birch brooms, lucifer matches,
tops, marbles, hoops, brandy balls, packets of cocoa, steel pens,
cheap periodicals, Everton toffy, and penny canes; where on each side,
peeping down each narrow thoroughfare, you see a repetition only of
these scenes of poverty and misery; where you have to elbow and jostle
your way through a teeming, ragged, ill-favoured, shrieking, fighting
population—by oyster-stalls and costermongers’ barrows—by orange-women
and organ-grinders—by flower-girls and match-sellers—by hulking labourers
and brandy-faced viragos, squabbling at tavern doors—by innumerable
children in every phase of weazened, hungry, semi-nakedness, who
pullulate at every corner, and seem cast up on the pavement like pebbles
on the sea-shore. Here, at last, we find the hostelry of the three
golden balls, where the capitalist, whom men familiarly term “my uncle,”
lends money on the security of plate, jewellery, linen, wearing apparel,
furniture, bedding, books—upon everything, in fact, that is not in itself
of so perishable a nature as to warrant the probability of its rotting
upon my uncle’s shelves.

The pawnbroker’s shop window—the _étalage_, as our Parisian neighbours
would term it—presents a medley of merchandise for sale; for I suppose
the host of the three balls buys-in sundry articles at the quarterly
sales of unredeemed pledges, of whose aspect you have already had an
inkling in these pages, which he thinks are likely to sell in his
particular neighbourhood. Of course, the nature and quality of the
articles exhibited vary according to the locality. In fashionable
districts (for even Fashion cannot dispense with its pawnbrokers) you
may see enamels and miniatures, copies of the Italian masters, porcelain
vases, bronze statuettes, buhl clocks, diamond rings, bracelets, watches,
cashmere shawls, elegantly-bound books, and cases of mathematical
instruments; but we are now in an emphatically low neighbourhood,
and such articles as I have alluded to are likely to attract but few
purchasers. Rather would there seem a chance of a ready sale for the
bundles of shirts, and women’s gear, and cheap printed shawls; for the
saws, and planes, adzes, gimlets, and chisels; for the cotton umbrellas;
for the heavy silver watches that working men wear (though they, even,
are not plentiful); for the infinity of small cheap wares, for sale at an
alarming reduction of prices.

Let us enter. Behold the Bezesteen of borrowed money. This, too, might be
compared, with a grim mockery, to the theatre; for hath it not private
boxes and a capacious stage, on which is continually being performed the
drama of the “Rent Day,” and the tragi-comedy of “Lend me Five Shillings?”

See the pawners, so numerous that the boxes can no longer remain private,
and two or three parties, total strangers to one another, are all crowded
into the same aperture. It is Saturday night, and they are deliriously
anxious to redeem their poor little remnants of wearing apparel for
that blessed Sunday that comes to-morrow, to be followed, however, by
a Black Monday, when father’s coat, and Polly’s merino frock, nay the
extra petticoat, nay the Lilliputian boots of the toddling child, will
have to be pawned again. Certain wise men, political economists and
pseudo-philanthropists, point at the plethora of pawnbrokers’ shops as
melancholy proofs of the poor’s improvidence. But the poor are _so_ poor,
they have at the best of times so very little money, that pawning with
them is an absolute necessity; and the pawnbroker’s shop, that equitable
mortgage on a small scale, is to them rather a blessing than a curse.
Without that fourpence on the flat-iron, there would be very frequently
no bread in the cupboard.

It is Saturday night, and my uncle, who on other days of the week shuts
at six o’clock in winter and eight in summer time, does not close his
doors, and drives a roaring trade till midnight. The half-pence rattle,
shillings are tested, huge bundles rumble down the spout, and the little
black calico bags, containing the tickets having reference to the goods
desired to be redeemed, and which the assistant will look out in the
warehouse, fly rapidly upwards. It is time now for us to redeem that
trifling little matter which we pawned last Tuesday, on purpose to have
an excuse for visiting the pawnbroker’s shop to-night; and, casting
glances in which curiosity is not unmixed with compassion, go back to
Signor Verdi and her Majesty’s Theatre. Thou, at least, my friend, may
do this—I will leave thee in the vestibule for awhile; for, between the
hours of nine and ten, I have other clock matters to which I must attend.




NINE O’CLOCK P.M.—HALF-PRICE IN THE NEW CUT, AND A DANCING ACADEMY.


An inedited anecdote of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.,—an anecdote passed over or
ignored by Boswell, Croker, Piozzi, and Hawkins,—an anecdote to allude
to which, perhaps, Lord Macaulay might disdain, while Mr. Carlyle might
stigmatise it as an “unutterable sham of mud-volcano gigability,” but in
which I have, nevertheless, under correction, the most implicit faith,
relates that the Sage’s opinion was once asked by Oliver Goldsmith
(Mr. Boswell of Auchinlech being present, of course) as to whether he
approved, or did not approve, of the theatrical institution known as
“half-price?” The Doctor was against it. “Sir,” he reasoned, or rather
decided, “a man has no right to see half an entertainment. He should
either enjoy all or none.” “But, sir,” objected Goldsmith deferentially,
“supposing the entertainment to be divided into equal halves, both
complete in themselves, has not a man a right to suit his pocket and his
convenience, and see only one half?” “Sir, you are frivolous,” thundered
the Doctor; “the man has but Hobson’s choice: the second moiety of the
entertainment. If he go at first price, he must pay whole price.” “But,
sir,” suggested Bozzy with a simper, “how would it stand, if the man
coming at half-price promised the doorkeeper to go away punctually at
nine o’clock, when the second price commenced?” “Hold _your_ tongue,
sir,” said Doctor Johnson, whereat Mr. Boswell of Auchinlech was abashed,
and spake no more till the kindly old Doctor invited him to tea, with
blind Miss Williams and Mr. Levett the apothecary.

I am sure that it must be a matter of lamentation for any man with a
well-regulated mind to be under the necessity of disagreeing with so
eminent an authority as Doctor Johnson—with the rough, genial, old bear,
who had had so many sorrows of his own when young; had danced upon so
many hot plates, and to the very ungenteelest of tunes; had been so
pitilessly muzzled and baited by mangy curs, that he yet made it his
delight in age and comparative affluence to take the young bears under
his protection, to assuage their ursine sorrows, and lick them with a
lumbering pity into shape. I am equally certain that few would even
_dare_ to differ from the scholar, critic, poet, dramatist, essayist,
moralist, philosopher, and Christian gentleman, whose pure life and
death in an unbelieving age are an answer for all time to the ephemeral
brilliance of the fribble Chesterfield, the icicle Hume, the stalactite
Gibbon, and the flashy Bristol-diamond Voltaire. Still, in the interests
of the British drama (and assuming my anecdote to be otherwise than
apocryphal), I must, perforce, dissent from the Doctor, and pin my
faith to half-price. The absence of a second price is suitable enough
for such exotic exhibitions as the Italian operas and the French plays;
but I deplored the suspension of that dramatic _habeas corpus_ in the
palmy Lyceum days of Madame Vestris’s management. There is something
supercilious, pragmatical, maccaronyish, un-English, in the announcement,
“No half-price.” How immeasurably superior is the fine old British
placard, now, alas! so seldom seen, “Pit full: standing-room only in the
upper boxes!”

There is a transpontine theatre, situated laterally towards the Waterloo
Road, and having a northern front towards an anomalous thoroughfare
that runs from Lambeth to Blackfriars, for which I have had, during a
long period of years, a great esteem and admiration. This is the Royal
Victoria Theatre. To the neophyte in London I frequently point out a
brick erection, above the cornice of the pediment, and say, “My friend,
in the days when the ‘Vic.’ (it is popularly termed the ‘Vic.’) was known
as the ‘Coburg,’ that brick slip was built to contain at its rise—for it
could not be rolled up—the famous ‘Crystal curtain,’ which ruined one
management to construct, and half ruined another to demolish. The grand
melodramas the Coburg used to give us—real horses, real armour, real
blood, almost real water!” Those were the days of “Ginevra the Impaled
One” and “Manfroni the One-handed Monk.” There are famous dramatists,
actors, scene-painters, who would look rather shame-faced (though I
cannot see why they should be ashamed) were they reminded, now, of
their achievements in the service of transpontine melodrama at the
Coburg. How stupidly absurd people are in repudiating their beginnings!
Buffel, the millionaire contractor, denies stoutly that he ever carried
a hod, although hundreds of us remember him on the ladder. Linning,
the fashionable tailor, would poison any one who told him he once kept
a beer-shop in Lambeth Walk, and afterwards failed as a tea-dealer in
Shoreditch. One of the most accomplished comedians of the day makes a
point of cutting me dead, because I can recollect the time, and knew
him, when he used to colour prints for a livelihood; and I daresay that
Baron Rothschild—with all the philosophy his unbounded wealth should
properly give him—would not ask me to dinner, if I reminded him that his
grandfather was a pedlar in the Juden-Grasse, at Frankfort. The next
Tamworth baronet, I suppose, will strike the beehive and “_Industriâ_”
out of the family escutcheon, and assume the three leeches sable on a
field gules _semée_ or, of his ancestors the De la Pills, who came over
with the Conqueror as barber-chirurgeons to the ducal body. And yet a
certain Emperor and King was not ashamed to talk of the period when he
was a “lieutenant in the Regiment of Lafère;” and the present writer, who
is, on one side (the wrong), of the _sangre azul_ of Spain, is not above
confessing the existence of a tradition in his family, hinting that his
maternal grandmother danced on the tight rope.

Although I am a devotee of the opera, and am always glad when Drury
Lane doors are open, and mourn over the decadence of the Lyceum, and
wish that the Strand would succeed,[10] and longed for the day when
the resuscitated Adelphi should open its doors, and rejoice at the
prosperity of the Olympic, and think that one of the most rational and
delightful night’s amusements in Europe, may be attained by the sight
of the “Merchant of Venice” at the now closed (so far as Charles Kean
is concerned) Princess’s, I have yet a tenderness, a predilection, an
almost preference, for the Vic. There is a sturdy honesty of purpose,
unity of action, sledge-hammer morality about the rubbishing melodramas,
which are nightly yelled and ranted through on the Victoria stage, that
are productive, I believe, of an intellectual tone, highly healthful and
beneficial. Burkins, the garotter, who is now in hold in Pentonville for
his sins, and is so promising a pupil of the chaplain, (having nearly
learnt the Gunpowder Plot service and the prohibitions of consanguinity
by heart,) has confidentially informed his reverend instructor that to
the melodramas at the Victoria must be ascribed his ruin. It was the
“Lonely Man of the Ocean” that led him to fall on Mr. Jabez Cheddar,
cheesemonger, in Westminster Broadway, at two o’clock in the morning,
split his skull open with a life-preserver, jump upon him, and rob him of
eight pounds twelve, a silver hunting-watch, and a brass tobacco-box; at
which confession the chaplain orders him more beef and books, and puts
him down in the front rank for his next recommendatory report to the
visiting magistrates. Partaking, in company with some other persons, of
the opinion that Burkins adds to the characteristics of a ruffian and
a blockhead, those of a hypocrite and a Liar, I do not necessarily set
much store by the expression of _his_ opinions on the British drama. But
when I find shrewd police-inspectors and astute stipendiary magistrates
moralising over the dreadful effects of cheap theatres, attended as
they are by the “youth of both sexes,” I deem them foemen worthy of my
steel. Good Mr. Inspector, worthy Master Justice, where are the youth
and the adults of both sexes to go in quest of that amusement, which I
suppose you will concede to them, of some nature, the necessity? Are
the churches open on week nights, and to such as they? and would you
yourselves like to sit under Doctor Cumming, or even Mr. Spurgeon, from
Saturday to Saturday? Are they to go to the Opera, to Almack’s, to the
Carlton Club, or to the conversaziones of the Geological Society? You
object, you say, to the nature of the entertainments provided for them.
Come with me, and sit on the coarse deal benches in the coarsely and
tawdrily-decorated cheap theatre, and listen to the sorrily-dressed
actors and actresses—periwigged-pated fellows and slatternly wenches,
if you like—tearing their passion to tatters, mouthing and ranting,
and splitting the ears of the groundlings. But in what description of
pieces? In dramas, I declare and maintain, in which, for all the jargon,
silliness, and buffoonery, the immutable principles of right and justice
are asserted; in which virtue, in the end, is always triumphant, and
vice is punished; in which cowardice and falsehood are hissed, and
bravery and integrity vehemently applauded; in which, were we to sift
away the bad grammar, and the extravagant action, we should find the
dictates of the purest and highest morality. These poor people can’t help
misplacing their h’s, and fighting combats of six with tin broadswords.
They haven’t been to the university of Cambridge; they can’t compete for
the middle-class examinations; they don’t subscribe to the “Saturday
Review;” they have never taken dancing lessons from Madame Michau; they
have never read Lord Chesterfield’s Letters; they can’t even afford to
purchase a “Shilling Handbook of Etiquette.” Which is best? That they
should gamble in low coffee-shops, break each other’s heads with pewter
pots in public-houses, fight and wrangle at street corners, or lie in
wait in doorways and blind alleys to rob and murder, or that they should
pay their threepence for admission into the gallery of the “Vic.”—witness
the triumph of a single British sailor over twelve armed ruffians, who
are about to carry off the Lady Maud to outrage worse than death; see
the discomfiture of the dissolute young nobleman, and the restitution
of the family estates (through the timely intervention of a ghost in a
table-cloth) to the oppressed orphan? And of this nature are the vast
mass of transpontine melodramas. The very “blood-and-murder” pieces, as
they are termed, always end with the detection of the assassin and his
condign punishment. George Cruikshank’s admirable moral story of “The
Bottle” was dramatised at the “Vic.,” and had an immense run. They are
performing “Never Too Late to Mend,” now, over the water, to crowded
houses. If we want genteel improprieties, sparkling immoral repartees,
decorously scandalous intrigues, and artful cobwebs of _double entendre_,
touching on the seventh commandment, we must cross the bridges and
visit the high-priced, fashionably-attended theatres of the West-end.
At a West-end theatre, was produced the only immoral version of an
immoral (and imbecile) “Jack Sheppard,” which is, even now, vauntingly
announced as being the “authorised version”—the only one licensed by
the Lord Chamberlain; and in that “authorised version” occurs the line,
“Jack Sheppard is a thief, but he never told a lie,” a declaration than
which the worst dictum of howling Tom Paine or rabid Mary Wolstoncraft
was not more subversive of the balance of moral ethics. And, at a
West-end theatre, likewise, his Lordship the Chamberlain authorised the
production of a play, whose story, regarded either as a melodrama or
as the libretto of a trashy Italian opera, has not been equalled for
systematic immorality: no, not by Wilkes; no, not by Aphra Behn: no, not
by Crebillon the younger: no, not by Voltaire in the scandalous “Pucelle.”

And have I brought you all the way over Waterloo Bridge in the evening
only to sermonise you! I deserve to be mulcted in three times the
halfpenny toll; and I must make amends by saying nothing whatsoever
about the shot towers, or the Lion Brewery, the London and South-Western
Terminus, and Hawkstone Hall. Here we are, at the corner of the New Cut.
It is Nine o’Clock precisely (I must have flown rather than walked from
the pawnbroker’s in that lane on the Middlesex side), and while the
half-price is pouring into the Victoria Theatre, the whole-price (there
is no half-price to the gallery, mind, the charge for the evening’s
entertainment being only threepence) is pouring out with equal and
continuous persistence, and are deluging the New Cut. Whither, you may
ask, are they bound? They are in quest of their Beer.

The English have been a beer-loving people for very many ages. It gives
them their masculine, sturdy, truculent character. Beer and beef, it
has been before remarked, make boys. Beer and beef won the battle of
Waterloo. Beer and beef have built railways all over the world. Our
troops in the Crimea languished, even on beef (it was but hard corned
junk, to be sure) till the authorities sent them beer. There is a _lex
non scripta_ among the labouring English, much more potent than many Acts
of Parliament, and called the “Strong Beer Act.” They have songs about
beer with lusty “nipperkin, pipperkin, and the brown beer” choruses; and
in village parlours you may hear stentorian baritones, of agricultural
extraction, shouting out that “Feayther likes his beer, he does;” that
“Sarah’s passionately fond of her beer, she is;” and denouncing awful
vengeance upon those enemies of the people who would “rob a poor man
of his beer.” Our fingers were brought to the very hair-trigger of a
revolution by the attempted interference of an otherwise well-meaning
nobleman, with the people’s beer; and did not William Hogarth strike
the right nail on the head when he drew those two terrible pictures of
Beer Street and Gin Lane? The authorities of the Victoria Theatre have
preserved, I am glad to say, a wholesome reverence for the provisions of
the Strong Beer Act, and it is, I believe, a clause in the Magna Charta
of the management, that the performances on Saturday evenings shall
invariably terminate within a few minutes of midnight, in order to afford
the audience due and sufficient time to pour out their final libations at
the shrine of Beer, before the law compels the licensed victuallers to
close.

There are not many gradations of rank among the frequenters of the
Victoria Theatre. Many of the occupants of the boxes sat last night
in the pit, and will sit to-morrow in the gallery, according to the
fluctuation of their finances; nay, spirited denizens of the New Cut will
not unfrequently, say on a Monday evening, when the week’s wages have
not been irremediably dipped into, pay their half-crown like men, and
occupy seats in the private box next the stage. And the same equality and
fraternity are manifest when the audience pour forth at half-price to
take their beer. There may be a few cheap dandies, indeed—Cornwall Road
exquisites and Elephant-and-Castle bucks—who prefer to do the “grand” in
the saloon attached to the theatre; there may be some dozens of couples
sweethearting, who are content to consume oranges, ginger beer, and
Abernethy biscuits within the walls of the house; but the great pressure
is outwards, and the great gulf stream of this human ocean flows towards
a gigantic “public” opposite the Victoria, and which continually drives a
roaring trade.

I wish that I had a more savoury locality to take you to than the New
Cut. I acknowledge frankly that I don’t like it. We have visited many
queer places in London together, of which, it may be, the fashionables
of the West-end have never heard; but they all had some out-of-the-way
scraps of Bohemianism to recommend them. I can’t say the same for the
New Cut. It isn’t picturesque, it isn’t quaint, it isn’t curious. It
has not even the questionable merit of being old. It is simply Low. It
is sordid, squalid, and, the truth must out, disreputable. The broad
thoroughfare, which, bordered with fitting houses, would make one of the
handsomest streets in London, is gorged with vile, rotten tenements,
occupied by merchants who oft-times pursue the very contrary to innocent
callings. Everything is second-hand, except the leviathan gin-shops,
which are ghastly in their newness and richness of decoration. The broad
pavement presents a mixture of Vanity Fair and Rag Fair. It is the
paradise of the lowest of costermongers, and often the saturnalia of the
most emerited thieves. Women appear there in their most unlovely aspect:
brazen, slovenly, dishevelled, brawling, muddled with beer or fractious
with gin. The howling of beaten children and kicked dogs, the yells of
ballad-singers, “death and fire-hunters,” and reciters of sham murders
and elopements; the bawling recitations of professional denunciators of
the Queen, the Royal family, and the ministry; the monotonous _jödels_
of the itinerant hucksters; the fumes of the vilest tobacco, of stale
corduroy suits, of oilskin caps, of mildewed umbrellas, of decaying
vegetables, of escaping (and frequently surreptitiously tapped) gas, of
deceased cats, of ancient fish, of cagmag meat, of dubious mutton pies,
and of unwashed, soddened, unkempt, reckless humanity: all these make
the night hideous and the heart sick. The New Cut is one of the most
unpleasant samples of London that you could offer to a foreigner. Bethnal
Green is ragged, squalid, woe-begone, but it is quiet and industrious.
Here, there is mingled with the poverty a flaunting, idle, vagabond,
beggarly-fine don’t-care-a-centishness. Burkins in hold in Pentonville
for his sins assures the chaplain that the wickedness of the New Cut is
due solely to the proximity of the “Wictoriar Theayter, that ‘aunt of
disypashion and the wust of karackters.” For my part, I think that if
there were no such safety-valve as a theatre for the inhabitants of
the “Cut,” it would become a mere Devil’s Acre, a Cour des Miracles, a
modern edition of the Whitefriars Alsatia; and that the Cutites would
fall to plundering, quarrelling, and fighting, through sheer _ennui_.
It is horrible, dreadful, we know, to have such a place; but then,
consider—the population of London is fast advancing towards three
millions, and the wicked people must live somewhere—under a strictly
constitutional government. There is a despot, now, over the water, who
would make very short work of the New Cut. He would see, at a glance,
the capacities of the place; in the twinkling of a decree the rotten
tenements would be doomed to destruction; houses and shops like palaces
would line the thoroughfare; trees would be planted along the pavement;
and the Boulevard de Lambeth would be one of the stateliest avenues in
the metropolis. But Britons never will be slaves, and we must submit to
thorns (known as “vested interests”) in the constitutional rose, and pay
somewhat dear for our liberty as well as for our whistle.

In the cartoon accompanying this essay, you will find a delineation of
the hostelry—the tavern—bah! it isn’t a hostelry—it isn’t a tavern; it
is an unadulterated gin and beer palace—whither takes place the rush at
half-price for malt refreshment. I have kept you lingering at the door
a long time; I have digressed, parried, evaded the question; discoursed
upon the transpontine drama, and the moot question of its morality; I
have wandered about the New Cut, and have even gone back to the last
century, and evoked the ghost of Doctor Johnson; I have been discursive,
evasive, tedious very probably, but purposely so. I was bound to show
you the place, but it is better that the pen should leave the fulness of
representation to the pencil in this instance. It is humorous enough,
brilliant enough, full of varied life and bustle enough. I could make you
very merry with accounts of the mock Ethiopian serenaders at the door,
with facetious remarks on the gentleman in the sou’-wester, knee-shorts,
anklejacks, and gaiters, who is instructing the lady in the mob-cap in
the mysteries of the celebrated dance known as the “Roberto Polveroso,”
or “Dusty Bob and Black Sal.” I might be eloquent upon the subject of
the sturdy sailor who is hobnobbing with the negro, the Life Guardsman
treating the ladies, like a gallant fellow as he is, and the stream
of honest, hardworking mechanics, their wives, and families, who have
surged in from the “Vic.” to have their “drop of beer.” But the picture
would still be incomplete. In graver pages—in tedious, solemn journals
only—could be told (and I have told, in my time) the truth about a
gin-shop in the New Cut. I will not descant upon the crime and shame,
the age made hardened, the very babies weaned on gin. Let us take the
better part, and throw a veil over this ugly position of the night side
of London.

[Illustration: NINE O’CLOCK P.M.: HOUSE OF CALL FOR THE VICTORIA
AUDIENCE.]

       *       *       *       *       *

Do you ever read the supplement of the “Times” newspaper? Of course you
do; at least, you must diurnally peruse one column at least of that
succursal to the monster journal, specially interesting to yourself.
Almost every one who can read is anxious to consult the “Times” every
morning for one purpose or other. Either he requires information about a
ship that is going out, or a ship that should be come home; about a purse
he has lost, or a bank-note he has found; about a situation he wants,
or a clerkship he has advertised for competition; about the wife he has
run away from, or the son who has run away from him; about the horse he
wishes to sell, or about the Newfoundland pup he wants to buy; about his
debtor’s bankruptcy, or his own insolvency; about the infallible remedy
for all diseases, for which he has promised to send a recipe on the
receipt of twelve postage-stamps; or the best curative pills advertised
for hypochondriasis and dyspepsia; about the cheapest sherries, and the
best second-hand broughams; about pianofortes for the million, sales by
auction, money to be lent, or money wanted to borrow; and, chiefest of
all, about the “births, deaths, and marriages,” which announcements are
the prime and favourite reading of the female sex. Indeed, I know one
lady—young, comely, accomplished, good-natured, and married—who never
even condescends to glance at a line of the colossal “Times” newspaper,
beyond the “Births, Marriages, and Deaths;” and very good reading she
declares them to be.

There is a portentous column to which my attention is attracted (I know
not why, for it has never concerned me in the slightest degree), having
reference to dancing. I don’t allude to the casinos, or masquerades,
or public full-dress balls, to which a man may go, lounge about, stare
at the votaries of Terpsichore, and go away again without ever shaking
a leg; but to the advertisements of the professors of dancing and
“drawing-room deportment,” who really mean business, and give instruction
in those elegant and graceful arts, and hold their academies daily and
nightly all over London, from the farthest East to the extremest West.
Now I am myself no dancer. I remember as a boy, in the grim Parisian
_pension_, or school boarding-house attached to the College where I
had my scant Humanities hammered into me, a certain obese professor,
to whom my parents and guardians paid a certain quarterly sum for my
instruction in the poetry of motion. I remember him well, for whenever
we took our walks abroad in Paris, we could scarcely pass a dead wall
without seeing it placarded, or a _porte cochère_ without seeing it
hung, with a little yellow black framed bill, screened with a wire
trellis-work, proclaiming “Boizot” and his “_cours de danse_.” This was
in ’39; yet last winter in Paris the same walls and _portes cochères_
still sounded the praises of Boizot. He appears to be immortal, like
Cockle of the pills, Grimstone of the eye-snuff, and Elizabeth Lazenby
of the sauce. The square _toqued_ and black-gowned professors of the
College Bourbon—now Lycée Bonaparte—could by dint of locking me up in
cellars, making me kneel across sharp rulers and rapping my knuckles with
ferulas (for corporal punishment never—oh! never—enters into the scheme
of French education), impel me to construe Cæsar indifferently well; but
Boizot, in all his _cours de danse_, failed in teaching me the difference
between _cavalier seul_ and _en avant deux_—between the _pastorale_ and
the _chaine des dames_. A more incorrigible dunce at dancing than your
humble servant, never, I believe, existed. In the attempt to instruct
me in the enchanting and vertigo-giving waltz, Boizot made a most
lamentable _fiasco_, although he resorted to his famous specific of
stamping on the pupil’s toes with heavy-heeled shoes till he made the
right steps to the right time. But our gyrations always ended in my doing
all my waltzing on _his_ toes; and he flung me away from him at last,
denouncing me as a hopeless _butor_, _ganache_, _cretin_, and _cancre_—a
Vandal, a Goth, an Ostrogoth, and a Visigoth—the three first being
terms perfectly comprehensible to the French schoolboy, but for which
it is difficult to find equivalents in this language. I am sure that
Boizot left me with the utmost dislike and contempt, and with the most
sinister forebodings for my future career. Thenceforth I was released
from the dancing-lessons. In after years, I have heard it reported on
good authority that I once danced a hornpipe at the wedding-breakfast of
a maritime relation of mine; but the exploit, if ever accomplished, was
due more, I opine, to the salmon and cucumber of the nuptial feast than
to the _certaminis gaudia_ of dancing. I essayed seriously once more to
waltz at a Kursaal ball at a German watering-place. How I tore a lady’s
dress, how I tripped myself up, how I was covered with shame, and had the
finger of scorn pointed at me, are yet matters of history at Bubbelbingen
Schlaggasenberg. Thither I will return no more. Again, when I visited
Russia, the first letter of introduction I presented on my arrival at St.
Petersburg brought me an invitation to a grand ball. It was—Oh, horror! a
diplomatic ball; there were not half a dozen persons in plain clothes in
the ball-room; and I stood lonely and forlorn among a crowd of brilliant
guardsmen, be-starred and be-ribboned ministers, plenipotentiaries, and
embroidered _attachés_, who are proverbially the best dancers in Europe.
I had not even the miserable safety-valve of crossing over and talking
to the non-dancing dowagers, for, according to Russian custom—one which
would delight the irreverent Mr. Spurgeon—the ladies remain at one end of
the _salon_, and the gentlemen at the other—a relic of Orientalism—and
in strict isolation, during the intervals between the dances. I was in
despair, and about either to rush out or to recite “My name is Norval,”
with a view towards exciting curiosity and inspiring terror, when the
gracious lady who did the honours for the ball-giving minister, who was a
bachelor, asked me if I didn’t dance? I didn’t say that I had a sprained
ankle, that I was hot, or tired, but I told the truth for once, and
said honestly that I couldn’t. “Don’t you smoke, then?” she continued,
glancing at me with a sort of pitying expression, as though she were
thinking, “I wonder what this gawky Englishman _can_ do?” I replied that
I could smoke a little; whereupon, with her own fair hands, she opened
a door and inducted me to an apartment, where a score of Boyards and
secretaries of legation were smoking Havannahs, playing _préférence_,
and sipping whisky-punch, and where I stopped till two o’clock in the
morning, became very popular, and positively sang a comic song. At
evening parties in England, alas! they seldom have a smoking-room, and so
I don’t go to them. A non-dancing man becomes speedily known in society,
and the women shun him.

I can’t help thinking (of course, on the fox and sour grapes principle),
whenever I see a very accomplished male dancer, as when I look upon a
first-rate amateur billiard-player, on the immense amount of time the man
must have wasted to acquire a useless and frivolous art. Yet I remember
the fox and the grapes, and suppress my rising sneer. Dancing to those
who like it, and can dance gracefully, is an innocent and cheerful
recreation. It does my heart good sometimes to see the little tiny
children in our crowded London courts and alleys waltzing and polkaing to
the Italian organ-grinder’s music; and I shall be sorry for the day when
some new Oliver Cromwell or Puritan government—we may have another in
time—may denounce and put down “public dancing and dancing academies.”

But why should the dancing academy column in the “Times” advertisements
possess more than general attractions for me? Is it that I have a
sneaking inclination to visit one of these establishments as a pupil;
take six private lessons from Miss Leonora Geary, or Mrs. Nicholas
Henderson—I could never dare to face Madame Mélanie Duval, or the
Semiramis of dancing mistresses, Madame Michau Adelaïde—study the
fashionable steps in secret, and then burst upon the world as an adept
in the _Schottische_, the _Cellarius_, and the _Deux Temps_? Alas! I do
not even know the names of the fashionable dances of the day, and very
probably those to which I have alluded are by this time old fashioned,
out of date, rococo, and pigtaily. But I have a theory that every man
must dance before he dies, and that of the choreographic art we may say
as of love—

    “Whoe’er thou art, thy master see,
    Who is, or was, or is to be.”

And I shall dance, I suppose, some of these days, although my nerves be
shrunk, my blood be cold, and hair white, and Death scrape away on the
fiddle, as in Hans Holbein’s shudder-giving panorama.

Mr. William M’Connell, however, the young gentleman who is my artistic
_fides achates_ in this horological undertaking, is, I am given to
understand, a complete master of this desirable accomplishment, and a
finished adept in its various mysteries. In this case, therefore, the
leader has become the led, and I am grateful to him for his service as
cicerone in introducing me to the domains of Terpsichore.

Assume, O reader and spectator—to violate no academical privacy—that we
are in the _salle de danse_ conducted for so many years, and with so much
success, by Mrs. Hercules Fanteague, late of the Royal Operas. Throughout
each day, from morn till dewy eve, does Mrs. Fanteague—a little woman,
who, at no remote period of time, has been pretty—assisted by her
husband, Mr. Hercules Fanteague, a diminutive gentleman, with tight
pantaloons and a “kit,” and a numerous family of sons and daughters,
who all appear to have been born dancing-masters and mistresses, give
private instruction to ladies and gentlemen, who are as yet novices in
the art, or who are too shame-faced to venture upon the ordeal of public
instruction. But, at nine o’clock in the evening, commences the public
academy—the “hop,” as some persons, innocent of the bump of veneration,
call it. There, in the tastefully yet cheaply decorated saloon, with
its boarded floor and flying cupids and sylphides on the panels—there,
where the gas shines, and the enlivening strains of a band, composed
of a harp, piano, and violin, are heard—there, in a remote section
of the apartment—the _pons asinorum_ of the dancing-school—the adult
gentlemen, who are as yet in the accidence or rudiments of dancing, are
instructed in the mysteries of the “positions” and preliminary steps by
Mrs. Hercules Fanteague. The dancing-mistress is obliged to be very firm
and decided, not to say severe, with her awkward pupils; for some are
inclined to blush, and some to laugh and whisper disparaging jokes to one
another, and some to tie their legs into knots and imitate the action
of the old shutter telegraphs with their arms, and some to sink into
a state of stony immobility and semi-unconsciousness, from which they
can only be rescued by sharp words and pushes. When these hopeful ones
are sufficiently advanced in the elements, they are handed over to lady
partners, who, to the sound of the aforesaid harp, piano, and violin,
twirl them about the room till they are pronounced fit to figure in the
_soirées_ of society, and in the Arabian Night-like scenes of Cremorne
and Highbury Barn.

[Illustration: NINE O’CLOCK P.M.: A DANCING ACADEMY.]

I once heard a man of the world tell a lady, in gay reproach, that
there were three things impossible of accomplishment to her sex. “Women
can’t throw,” he said, “they can’t jump, and they can’t slide.” The
lady stoutly denied the third postulate, and adduced in proof her own
sliding performances in winter time in the day-room at boarding school.
The first assertion she settled by throwing the peeling of an apple at
him, which fell deftly over his left shoulder, and formed on the carpet,
I am told, the initials of her Christian name. However this may be with
other ladies—for she was fair, and good, and wise, as “Sydney’s sister,
Pembroke’s mother,” though Time has not thrown a dart at her yet, I
know there is one thing a man cannot do. He cannot dance. He may take
lessons of Mrs. Hercules Fanteague till his hair grows out of his hat,
and his nails grow out of his pumps; he may dance the Crystal Platform
at Cremorne to sawdust, but he will never succeed in making himself more
than a capering elephant, or an ambling hippopotamus, with the facial
expression of an undertaker’s man on duty for the funeral of a very
rich “party,” where extra woe is laid on by Mr. Tressels, regardless of
expense.

Of course I except professional dancers, and I bow reverentially before
the bust of Vestris, “_Diou de la Danse_” and of the late Mr. Baron
Nathan. I do not remember the first. He died years before I was born,
yet I see him in my mind’s eye on the stage of the Grand Opera in
Paris, swelling with peacock-pride and conscious merit—in dancing—in
full court-dress, his sword by his side, his laced and plumed _chapeau
bras_ beneath his arm, his diamond _solitaire_ in his laced shirt-frill,
leading his son to the footlights, on the night of the first appearance
of the youth, and saying, “_Allez_, my son, the Muses will protect you,
and your father beholds you.” Was it this son, or a grandson I—tell
me “Notes and Queries”—that was the Armand Vestris, whom our Eliza
Bartolozzi (the famous Madame Vestris) married, and who was hurried
at that dreadful hole at Naples? I see the _Diou de la Danse_ on a
subsequent occasion at rehearsal, when the same son, being committed
to the prison as Fort l’Evêque by the lieutenant of police (the whole
operatic _troupe_, led by Mademoiselle Guimard, were in a state of
chronic revolt) dismissed him with these magnanimous words: “_Allez_, my
beloved one. This is the proudest day of your life. Demand the apartments
of my friend the King of Poland. Take my carriage. Your father pays for
all!” But the poor baron, with his corkscrew ringlets, turn-down collar,
and limber legs, I can and do remember. I have seen him dance that
undying _pas_, blindfold, among the eggs and tea-things, in the Gothic
Hall at Rosherville. But five Sundays since I was at Gravesend, and over
my shilling tea in the Gothic Hall, I sighed when I thought of Baron
Nathan and of happier days. “Where art thou, my Belinda? There is no one
to pull off my shrimp-heads now.”

Lo, as I pen these reminiscences of nine o’clock in the evening—pen them
in the “quiet street,” where I am again for a season—though my boat is
on the shore, and my bark is on the sea, and ere you hear from me again
there will be a considerable variation of clocks between London and
Jericho—a fife and tabour announce the advent of a little dancing boy
and girl, with a careworn mother, in the street below. I look from my
window, and see the little painted people capering in their spangles and
fleshings and short calico drawers. It is against conviction, and against
my own written words, and against political economy, and ex-Lord Mayor
Carden; but I think on Mr. Carrick’s picture of “Weary Life,” and must
needs take some pence from the clock-case, and throw them out to these
tiny mummers. Life is _so_ hard, my brother!




TEN O’CLOCK P.M.—A DISCUSSION AT THE “BELVIDERE,” AND AN ORATORIO AT
EXETER HALL.


Exists there, in the whole world, civilised or uncivilised, a nation
of such inveterate grumblers as the English? We grumble at everything.
We are five-and-twenty millions of bears afflicted with perpetually
sore heads. Are we charged sixpence extra for a bed? is the tail of
our mutton-chop underdone? does our mockturtle soup disagree with us?
is a railway train late? or the requisite amount of hop deficient in
our pale ale? does an Italian itinerant split our ears while we are
endeavouring to solve the Seventh Problem in the First Book of Euclid?
does the editor or manager refuse to return the manuscript of our poems
or our farces? do we buy a silk dress that turns out to be nine-tenths
cotton? are we surcharged by the commissioners of income-tax, (_they_
say I make a thousand a year, I say I don’t _make_ a hundred and
fifty; but may difference of opinion never, et cetera)? forthwith we
call for pen, ink, and paper, and indite a letter to the “Times,” that
providential safety-valve for the great legion of grumblers. What are our
public meetings but organised arenas of grumbling? what the “leaders”
in our Sunday newspapers but extra facilities for grumbling after we
have been grumbling all the week? I think it was Mr. Horace Mayhew, in
his “Model Men and Women,” who told the story of a waiter at a city
tavern, who took but one holiday in the course of the year, and then
enjoyed himself by paying a visit to another waiter at another tavern,
and assisting him in laying the knives and forks. In like manner the
ordinarily-understood holiday for the gentlemen of the daily press—there
being no diurnals published on Sunday—is Saturday; whereupon, after
lying in bed somewhat longer than usual on the sixth day’s morning, they
indulge in the _dulce desipere in loco_, by writing stinging leading
articles in the journals which publish editions on the Sabbath. This is
due to their inveterate propensity for grumbling. And, mark me, this
licensed and acknowledged grumbling is the surest safeguard of our
liberties, and the safest guarantee for our not drifting from our snug
roadstead of constitutionalism, where we can ride at anchor, and smile
at the timid argosies and caravels of despotism, moored and chained in
the grim granite basins of the inner port, and all without launching
into the troubled oceans, full of breakers and white squalls, of utter
democracy. We seize upon a wrong, and grumble at it, till, after a few
months’, and sometimes a few years’ grumbling, we find that the wrong
exists no more, and that we have gained another Right. But we have had no
barricades _ad interim_, no fusillades, no bombardment of private houses,
no declarations of the “solidarity” of anybody, no confiscations, no
deportations, and no guillotinings. Our rulers, grown wise by experience
of smashed windows, pelted heads, and occasional (when the people were
very hard driven) political annihilation, and hurling into the limbo
of red tapism, have of late years placed few or no restrictions upon
grumbling. The noble lord at the head of the Government daily receives
deputations, who grumble at his measures, or at the measures he won’t
guarantee to propose, fearfully. In the Parliament House, no sooner does
our gracious Queen, in her silver bell-like voice, speak the speech
that others have written down for her (I daresay she could write a
much more sensible discourse herself), than Lords and Commons begin to
grumble about the sense of her words, and move amendments to the address
which is to be presented to her. Downstairs, all through the session,
parliamentary committees are grumbling at witnesses, and witnesses are
grumbling at the committee; and in outlying boroughs vicious electors are
grumbling at the members of the Commons’ House of Parliament. The country
newspapers and the London newspapers grumble. The barristers grumble at
the judge, and the judge at the jury. The public grumbles at the way
soldiers are treated by the officers, and the soldiers (who are about
the only citizens who are not addicted to grumbling) go out and fight
and win battles, at which we at home grumble, because so many lives have
been lost. And I daresay the Prime Minister grumbles because he has the
gout, and the Queen on her throne grumbles because “Punch” caricatures
the Prince Consort, and “Punch” grumbles because the Prince Consort does
not often enough give occasion to be grumbled at. I grumble at being
obliged to write for your amusement, and you grumble because I am not
half amusing enough. We grumble at the cold dinners at school, at the
price of the marriage license, at the doctor’s bill for our first child’s
measles, at the cost of the funeral of Uncle John, who left us all his
money. We grumble because we have to live, and grumble when the physician
tells us that we must die. Does it not all resolve itself into our purer,
better Fielding’s aphorism in “Vanity Fair”—“Ah! _vanitas vanitatum_? Who
of us has not his hobby, or, having it, is satisfied?” Yet there is much
virtue in having at least liberty to grumble.

These thoughts come over me as I wend my way at Ten o’Clock at night
along the New Road—what do they call it now? Euston Road, Pancras
Road, Paddington Road—_que scais-je_—towards the suburban district of
Pentonville. It won’t be suburban much longer; for Clerkenwell and
Islington, Somers Town and Finsbury, are hemming it in so closely that it
will be engulphed some of these days by a brick-and-mortar torrent, like
the first Eddystone Lighthouse. A pleasant spot once was Pentonville,
haunted by cheery memories of Sir Hugh Myddleton, the New River Head,
Sadlers’ Wells Theatre, and the “Angel” at Islington—which isn’t (at
least now-a-days, and I doubt if it ever was) at Islington at all. They
began to spoil Pentonville when they pulled down that outrageously
comic statue of George IV., at Battle Bridge. Then they built the Great
Northern Railway Terminus—clincher number one; then an advertising
tailor built a parody of the Crystal Palace for a shop—clincher number
two (I am using a Swivellerism). The pre-ordinate clincher had been the
erection of the hideously lugubrious penitentiary. However, I suppose it
is all for the best. The next step will be to brick up the reservoir, and
take down that mysterious tuning-fork looking erection, which no doubt
has something to do with the water supply of London, and the New River
Head; then they had better turn the Angel into a select vestry-room or
a meeting-house for the Board of Works; and then, after that, I should
advise them to demolish the “Belvidere.”

Whose connection with grumbling you shall very speedily understand. At
this famous and commodious old tavern, one of the few in London that
yet preserve, not only a local but a metropolitan reputation, there
is held every Saturday evening—ten o’clock being about the time for
the commencement of the mimic Wittenagemotte—one of those meetings for
political discussion, and the “ventilation” of political questions, whose
uninterfered with occurrence, not only here, but in Fleet Street, in
Bride Lane, and in Leicester Square, so much did rouse the ire of the
_sbirri_, and _mouchards_, and unutterable villany of Rue de Jérusalem
spydom, in the employ of his Imperial Majesty, Napoleon III.

I have run the gauntlet of most of these harmless symposia of political
talk; and with all, save the Westminster Forum, I can claim acquaintance.
I have been one of the Alumni of “Cogers” or “Codger’s” Hall, Bride
Lane, where the gentleman who occupied the chair was addressed as “My
Noble Grand” by the speaker. I have attended a meeting at the Forum,
held at the Green Dragon,[11] Fleet Street, where visitors are invited
to join in the discussion; and where, one evening, joining in the
discussion as a stranger, the meeting objected to my political views, and
a vote passed the chair that I was to be thrown out of the window; from
which ignominious exodus I was only rescued by the advent of a friendly
Templar, who had dropped in from chambers to the Forum to oil his rusty
eloquence in time for the coming Western Circuit. I have dropped in, too,
occasionally, at Mr. Wyld’s Reading-Room, in Leicester Square, and have
listened to much drouthy eloquence on subjects home and foreign. But
nowhere have I seen such tableaux as the governmental journals of Paris
have depicted, in the gloomiest of colours, as images of the political
discussion meetings of _perfide Albion_. Nowhere have I seen a bowl of
blood on the table, the chairman sitting on a barrel of gunpowder—to
be subsequently used for the conflagration of the Thames—the orator
addressing his hearers from the summit of a pile of ball-cartridges
erected on a coffin; or dissentient members launching _abuses_, charged
with fulminating mercury, at an unpopular speaker’s head. Dark and
dangerous meetings, of dark and dangerous men, do certainly take place
in London. Oppressed, despairing, starving, outlawed, outraged exiles,
do meet in holes and corners, do plot and conspire, do hurl, in speech,
denunciation and sarcasm, at despots. But you must not go to Fleet
Street, to Bride Lane, to Leicester Square, nor, least of all, to
Pentonville, to find them. The doors of those mysterious meeting-places
are “tiled” as securely as Freemasons’ lodges. Now and then a traitor,
by lies and hypocrisy, gains admittance, but woe to the traitor if he be
discovered in his treason. He dies within the year.

[Illustration: TEN O’CLOCK P.M.: A DISCUSSION AT THE “BELVIDERE.”]

The “Belvidere” is distinguished above its kindred discussion halls,
by its eminently respectable aspect. The subjects broached are bold
enough, and are as boldly treated; but you are puzzled to reconcile
the full-blown democracy of some of the speakers, with their mild,
bank-account-possessing, rate-and-tax-paying, housekeeping appearance.
They bark but do not bite. The usages and prestige of the place, too,
demand a certain amenity in discussion and forbearance in reply, which
throws an extra tinge of respectability over the whole. Looking at
this spacious, handsome room, panelled and pillared, comfortably and
brilliantly lit, with its doubled rows of mahogany tables covered with
bottles and glasses full of steaming compounds that do comfort the
flesh outwardly and rejoice the spirit inwardly—in strict moderation,
mind; looking at this burly, substantial auditory, ensconced in their
cosy chairs, smoking their cigars, and listening with attentive ears
to the orator; looking at the thoughtful waiter slipping from table to
table, administering refreshment and receiving orders with a subtle
swiftness, yet taking, I will be bound, an ardent mental interest
in the discussion; looking at the grave chairman in his comfortable
high-raised _fauteuil_—you might fancy this to be one of the parochial
“representative councils,” as vestries are now queerly christened,
or a freemasons’ lodge, when, “labour” being over, “refreshment”
commences, or an ordinary club of middle-class men accustomed to meet
one another, and talk upon the topics of the day over a social glass.
And, in truth, were you to suppose this, you would not be so very far
out in your calculation. These are, indeed, vestrymen—or representative
councillors—freemasons, benefit-club, middle-class men. But the topic
of the night is invested with authority, and its discussion is subject
to rules; and the highest compliment I can pay to the “Belvidere” is
that, if in that other Discussion Hall, held between the months of March
and August, in a green-leather and oak-carving furnished chamber, nigh
unto the crypt of St. Stephen’s Chapel, Westminster, as much sobriety,
decorum, and persistence in adhering to the matter in hand were shown, as
in this convivial parliament, the business of the nation would progress
much better, and we should have much less cause to grumble at most things.

See a speaker on his legs—a fluent speaker, somewhat of a florid speaker,
occasionally somewhat of a violent speaker, though his violence is
strictly confined to words and gesticulations. What withering sarcasms he
hurls at kings and ministers! How eloquently he tells those tyrannical
puppets that, when they are forgotten, when the force and direction of
personal satire is no longer understood, and measures are felt only in
their remotest consequences, his words shall still be found to contain
principles worthy of being transmitted to posterity! How sneeringly
he assures our rulers that they have but a copyhold interest in the
state, that they cannot waste, that they cannot alienate, and that
the fee-simple is in us! How menacingly he assures the monarchs of the
earth that the crowns which were gained by one revolution may be lost
by another! and how much, listening to his impassioned exordium, to
his whirlwind argument, to his scathing peroration, I become impressed
with a notion that the orator has a capital memory, and has been an
assiduous student of certain letters, which were addressed, in our
great-grandmothers’ time, to Mr. Woodfall, the printer of the “Public
Advertiser,” by a mysterious correspondent—a correspondent whose motto
was, “_Stat nominis umbra_” and who chose to assume the pseudonym of
“JUNIUS.”

In these orations you are sure to hear a good deal about Catholic
Emancipation, the Test and Corporation Acts, the Spa Fields Riots,
the Peterloo Massacre, the “Piccadilly Butchers,” the “Dorsetshire
Labourers,” Queen Caroline’s Trial, Richmond the Spy, and similar topics.
They are not very amusing, perhaps, but they are of infinite service in
keeping juvenile politicians _au fait_ with the political _memorabilia_
of thirty or forty years since. I have even heard an ardent reformer,
with scarcely so much as a tuft on his chin, declaim in burning accents
upon the great case of Horne Tooke _versus_ the House of Commons—“Once
a priest forever a priest”—on Jack Wilkes, Number Forty-five, and the
question of general warrants, on the cruelty of Lord Ellenborough to
William Hone, the trial of Colonel Despard, and the eventualities which
might have followed the successful assassination of Lord Sidmouth by
Arthur Thistlewood.

A staid, middle-aged gentleman follows the reformer, and proceeds,
genteelly, to demolish him. He is a staunch upholder of our ancient
institutions, and sneers at the presumptuous and levelling tendencies of
the age. He has some neat things to say about the “Pig and Whistle” style
of oratory, at which the ardent reformer winces, chews the end of his
cigar, and empties his glass indignantly; and he concludes with a glowing
eulogium on church and state, our glorious constitution, and our noble
aristocracy.

Ere I leave these placid tribunes of Pentonville Hill, discharging their
harmless philippics at men high in place and power, I muse a little
over the tavern itself, and call to mind a certain story I once heard
respecting it, possessing what foundation of truth I know not, but which,
if not true, is assuredly _ben trovato_. Thus runs the dubious legend:
You remember the fair young daughter of England, the good princess, the
virtuous daughter of a wicked father, and in whom, from her cradle to
her marriage, the hope and love of this stolid but strong-feeling nation
were centred. You remember her husband: he is a king at Brussels now. You
remember how, when she died, all England burst into a passionate lament;
how thousands went into voluntary mourning; how clergymen wept in the
pulpit, when they discoursed on her virtues; how an awful darkness and
despair seemed to overshadow the ill-governed land when the news came
that the Princess Charlotte was dead. There is little need to say that
her husband (who, I am glad to believe, loved her very truly and fondly)
was at first inconsolable for her loss, and grieved long and bitterly
for her. But time was good to him, and heaven merciful, and by degrees
his sorrow wore away. Still he was melancholy, pre-occupied, and loved
nothing so much as to be left alone. It was about this time that the
then landlord of the Belvidere began to notice that about eleven o’clock
almost every forenoon during the week a gentleman in deep mourning, and
on horseback, would stop at the door of the tavern, leave his horse in
charge of his groom, enter the large room, call for a pipe and a pint
of ale, and quietly enjoy those refreshments for about the space of one
hour. The room would be at that early hour of the day almost deserted.
The one or two tradesmen who would occasionally drop in for a crust of
bread and cheese, and a peep at the “Times,” would be bidden a civil
“good morning”—in a slightly foreign accent—by the stranger; but he
never entered into conversation; he never read the newspaper; he “kep
hisself to hisself,” the waiter said. But he was so punctual and so
regular in his attendance, that the people of the house came to look out
for his daily visit in his suit of sables, and a special pipe was laid,
a special dish of tobacco prepared, and a special chair and spittoon
arranged, every day for his use. So things went on for many weeks; till
one luckless morning, just after the departure of the black horseman, a
customer of the house—I believe he was a commercial traveller, who had
just returned from a journey in the west of England, and who had been
enjoying his pipe and pint in the society of the taciturn stranger—called
the landlord on one side.

“Do you know who that chap is?” he asked.

“Not a bit,” answered the host. “Comes here every morning regular. Pint
of mild sixpenny; bird’s-eye; gives the waiter twopence, and goes away.
Groom has a glass of ale sitting on his horse. Pays his way like a
gentleman.”

“He’s somebody,” said the commercial traveller, significantly.

“So I should think,” returned the landlord, quietly.

“He’s a high fellow,” added the bagman, mysteriously.

“I shouldn’t wonder,” said the landlord, tranquilly.

“Why, bless your heart, man alive!” broke out, impatiently, his
interlocutor, “can’t you guess who he is? He’s Prince Leopold of
Saxe-Coburg. I have seen his Royal Highness a hundred times, and know him
by sight as well as I do you.”

The next forenoon, when the sable horseman arrived, he found a roll of
crimson baize laid down from the pales before the tavern to the doorway,
which was lined by American aloes in tubs. The staircase was freshly
carpeted; in the stranger’s customary place was a table covered with a
crimson cloth, backed by a crimson chair with gilt legs. The landlady,
her daughter, and the barmaid, were all in holiday attire, and when the
unknown rang the bell, the landlord himself, in a blue coat and brass
buttons, and his hair newly powdered, brought him the beer in a silver
tankard, and a wax candle at which to light his pipe. The black horseman
said nothing, drank his ale, and smoked his tobacco, paid his reckoning,
made his way downstairs amidst a profusion of bows and curtsies, mounted
his horse, and—never came again. So runs the legend. The commercial
traveller may have been wrong in his assertion, or may have been hoaxing
the landlord; but I incline to the belief that this was really Prince
Leopold. Why not? The incident is trifling enough; yet there is something
touching in the picture of the good-natured young German brooding over
his bereavement, yet consoling himself in the simple German fashion, over
his pipe and beer.

       *       *       *       *       *

Friend of mine, if you have the slightest hope or thought that whither
I am now taking thee is one of the gay and merry scenes of London
night-life, prithee dismiss the thought, for thou art in error. Prithee
pull up the collar of thy coat, stiffen thy neckcloth as much as
possible, take that wicked cigar from thy mouth, cast down thine eyes,
and assume a decorum, if thou have it not. We are going to Exeter Hall.

Don’t be alarmed: this is not the month of May or the season for meetings
in aid of missions to the Quashiboos, the Rumbatumbas, or the Oolalooloo
cannibals. We are not going to hear John B. Gough lecture on temperance.
We are going to hear an oratorio, conducted by Mr. Costa—an oratorio in
which Mr. Sims Reeves, Mr. Weiss, Miss Dolby, and Madame Clara Novello,
are to sing—and to listen to a band and chorus brought to a degree of
perfection which only the genius of such a conductor could insure, or the
gigantic resources of the Sacred Harmonic Society command.

There would seem to be in an oratorio something essentially germane to
the English mind and character. The sounding recitative and swelling
hymns, the rolling choruses and triumphant bursts of exultant music,
have a strange affinity with the solemn, earnest, energetic English
people, slow to move to anger or to love, but, when moved, passionately
enthusiastic in their love, bloody and terrible in their great wrath. The
French can no more understand oratorios than they can understand blank
verse. I remember going to see Mendelssohn’s “Elijah” once in Paris. It
was winter time, and the performances took place in Franconi’s great,
windy, for-summer-built horse-riding circus in the Champs Elysées. The
band and chorus shivered as they scraped and sang; the _prima donna’s_
nose and lips were blue, and the music paper quivered in her hand; the
_contralto_ looked exquisitely uncomfortable at not having to wear a
page’s dress and show her legs. As for the audience, the ladies sat
muffled up in shawls and furs—it was a morning performance—and whispered
among themselves; the men sucked the knobs of their canes, twirled their
moustaches, stared up at the chandeliers, and murmured, _Quelle drôle de
musique_! They didn’t repeat that oratorio, and I don’t wonder at it.
To the French it was neither fish nor flesh, neither ecclesiastical nor
secular. If the first, they might argue, give us the chanting priests,
the swinging censers dispensing fragrant clouds, the red-cassocked altar
boys, the twinkling tapers, the embroidered canopies, and the swelling
pæans of the concealed choristers. If the last, let us have a drinking
chorus, a laughing chorus, and a dagger chorus, a _prima donna_ to make
her entrance on horseback, a _contralto_ in tights, a ballet in the
second act, and some red fire at the end. But this is neither mass nor
opera.

They think differently in England. To the seriously-inclined middle
classes the oratorio supplies the place of the opera. And it behoves you
to consider what a vast power in the state those serious middle-class
men and women are. It is all very well for us, men and citizens of the
world, yet living in a comparatively contracted circle of acquaintances
as cosmopolitan as ourselves; it is all very well for us, who see “no
harm” in sitting at home and reading the newspaper, while our wives
go to church; who support Sunday bands, Sunday steamboats, and Sunday
excursion trains, and are agitating now for the opening of museums,
and galleries, and palaces on the Sabbath; who talk lightly on serious
topics, and call clergymen parsons; it is all very well, I say, for
us, travelled, and somewhat cynical as we may be, to pretend that the
“serious” world is an amalgam of bigotry, hypocrisy, and selfishness,
and to ignore the solemn religious journals that denounce hot dinner
on Sundays, or a walk after it, or the perusal of a secular book on
the sacred day, as intolerable sins. Yet how many thousands—how many
millions—of sober, sincere, conscientious citizens are there, who are
honestly persuaded of the sinfulness of many things which we consider
harmless recreations! who would shrink back in horror, if they heard
a tithe of the conversations that go on every night in hundreds of
well-conducted London drawing-rooms! who look upon dancing as an
irreligious and Babylonish pastime! whose only light reading consists
of tracts, missionary chronicles, and memoirs of sainted cheesemongers,
and the beatified daughters of dairymen! I declare that I never see a
theatre in a country town—where, at least, two-thirds of the population
consist of such as I have described—without wondering at the lunacy of
the person who built it, without marvelling at the idiocy of every fresh
speculator who enters on the management. We may pretend to despise the
Puritan world, write books and farces against them, and quiz the “Record”
or the “Wesleyan;” but it is folly to ignore the vast numerical strength
of these same Puritans. They purchase such books as “Memorials of Captain
Headly Vicars” by thousands; they subscribe thousands of pounds yearly
in an almost insane hope of converting heathen barbarians to a better
faith; they give away millions of tracts; they flood the platform and the
auditory of every public meeting. It won’t do to ignore them. Cromwell’s
Ironsides and Sir Harry Vane’s Fifth-Monarchy Men have made too deep a
mark upon the people of England to be lightly passed over.

But the serious world, and that section who are worldly, meet on
neutral ground at an Exeter Hall oratorio. The religionists see no sin
in listening to sacred music; the mundane come to listen with delight
to the immortal strains of Handel, of Haydn, and of Mendelssohn. “When
shall their glory fade” asked Tennyson, singing of the Six Hundred at
Balaclava. When shall the glory of our great oratorio writers decay?
Never—I hope.

A resident at Bethlehem Hospital—he wasn’t either a doctor or a
keeper, but wore, habitually, a strait-waistcoat, took shower-baths
very frequently, and kept his head close shaved—once divided the world
into two classes: people who were mad, and people who would be mad. I,
too—but out of Bedlam, thank heaven!—have made a somewhat analogous
classification. I divide the world into people who have and have not
seen Ghosts. I belong myself to the first class. I am continually seeing
ghosts. I shake hands in the street with friends who have been dead
these ten years. A dear dead sister comes and sits by me at night when
I read, and tells me, with a kiss, that I am a good boy for coming home
so early. I was troubled some years ago with a man with his head off,
who, in that unseemly position, and holding his head on his knees, sat
continually before me. I dismissed him at last as being an unworthy
hallucination, and not a genuine ghost. I meet a good many ghosts
now—friendly ghosts, pleasant ghosts—but chiefly do they favour me with
their company at places of public entertainment. It may be that I am a
bad listener to music or theatrical dialogue, that I am absent in mind,
and _distrait_; but so surely as I go to a theatre or concert, so surely
do I fall a conjuring up mind-pictures, till the theatre or the hall, and
its occupants, quite fade away, and I find myself in entirely different
company, talking to people who are mouldering in their graves, or who are
thousands of miles away.

And so the oratorio goes on, the assemblage paying a grave and
decorous attention to the music, and bearing themselves far more like
a congregation than an audience. They are so devotedly rapt in the
magnificent performance, that I expect every moment to hear the vast
mass of them join in the choruses; and when, at the first bar of the
sublime “Hallelujah Chorus,” the hearers all _stand up_, the singers
in the orchestra seem to me like priests. In truth, I think that to
hear an oratorio, chastens and purifies the mind, and that we go away
from those grand performances wiser and better men. There is a natural
disinclination to return—at least, immediately—to frivolous and trivial
pursuits, after listening to those solemn and ennobling strains. I know
that some exist upon whom music has no effect whatsoever; but I believe
that the vast majority of mankind are influenced for good or evil by
the sound of music. The most heartless woman in the world whom I know,
cries when she hears “Kathleen ma vourneen.” Napoleon could never listen
to “_Lascio ch’io piango la cruda sorte_,” without crossing himself.
How grandly does John Dryden set forth this theory in his immortal St.
Cecilian Ode! with what exquisite art has he shown us Alexander moved to
alternate joy, pride, shame, weeping, frenzy, as old Timotheus sweeps the
lyre in varied strains!

[Illustration: TEN O’CLOCK P.M.: AN ORATORIO AT EXETER HALL.]

Now, in sober broughams and in hack-cabs—driven, I hope, by regenerated
cabmen, who give tickets before they are asked for them, and never charge
more than thirty per cent. above the legal fare—or haply, if the night be
fine, on foot, the serious audience, well cloaked and bonneted, leave the
hall. For half an hour afterwards, the Exeter Hall side of the Strand,
both east and west, is dotted with serious groups in search of the last
omnibus, or, perchance, boldly walking home. I wonder how many of the
serious ones know anything of the thoroughfare. They may traverse it at
noonday, or pass down it every morning for twenty years in omnibuses on
their way to the city; but do they know anything of the night aspect of
that most mysterious of London thoroughfares? It is better, perhaps, that
they should not.

Minute by minute they grow scarcer, and by ten minutes to eleven there
are no serious groups in the Strand. They are all gone home to supper—hot
ones, very probably, for the serious world is not at all unaddicted
to good living—and sober. I, too, have liberty to go and sup, if I so
choose; but not, alas! to bed. Still have I work to do, and for some
hours.




ELEVEN O’CLOCK P.M.—A SCIENTIFIC CONVERSAZIONE, AND AN EVENING PARTY.


It is Eleven o’Clock post meridian, and I am once more thrown, with my
clock on my hands, on the great world of London. The insatiable, restless
metropolis is as busy in the night as in the day season; there is no
respite, no cessation, in its feverish activity. One set or class of
mortals may, quite worn and worried out, cast themselves on beds more or
less hard, and sleep; but, forthwith, another section of the population
arise like giants refreshed—the last hour of the night to some is the
commencement, the opening day, to others; and an innumerable army of
conscripts are ready to relieve one another in mounting the guard of
London Life.

Eleven o’clock, and thousands are yet in the streets, tens of thousands
still in the pursuit of the avocations by which they earn their daily
(or nightly) bread, hundreds of thousands awake, busy, and stirring. The
children of the aristocracy and some sections of the middle classes are
gone to bed—save those who have been so good that their fond parents have
taken them to the play, which entertainment they are now enjoying, with
delightful prospects superadded of “sitting up” to supper, perchance of
oysters, afterwards. But the children of the poor do not dream of bed.
They are toddling in and out of chandlers’ shops in quest of ounces of
ham and fragments of Dutch cheese for father’s supper; they are carrying
the basket of linen—mother takes in washing—to the residences of clients;
they are eliminating the most savoury-looking bits of plaice or flounders
from the oleaginous pile in the fried-fish shop; they are fetching the
beer and the “clean pipe” from the public-house; nay—not unfrequently,
alas! assisted by a lean baby in arms—they are fetching father himself
home from the too-seductive establishment of the licensed victualler.
Eleven o’clock at night is the great supper-time of the working classes;
then, by the steady and industrious mechanic, the final calumet is
smoked, the borrowed newspaper read, the topics of the day, the prospects
of the coming week, discussed with the cheery and hard-working helpmate
who sits by the side of her horny-handed lord, fills his pipe, pours out
his beer, and darns the little children’s hose.

Eleven o’clock: theatrical audiences are at their apogee, and the last
piece is “on.” Convivial clubs are in full action, and the waiters at the
supper-rooms, very tumbled and drowsy during the day, put on their most
highly-starched neckcloths, and begin to rub their eyes, in preparation
for the labours of the night. The linen-drapers’ shopmen, who have
been strolling about Regent Street and Oxford Street since the shops
closed at nine, and who “live on the premises,” begin to turn in; the
proprietors tolerate no gadding about after eleven, and persistence in
keeping bad hours to the extent of hearing the chimes at midnight, out of
doors, would entail reprimand, and perhaps expulsion, on the offender.
At eleven o’clock close the majority of the coffee, chop houses, and
reading-rooms. There are some that will remain open all night; but they
are not of the most reputable description. At eleven the cheap grocer,
the cheesemonger, and the linen-draper, in low-priced neighbourhoods,
begin to think of putting up the shutters; and, by half-past eleven, the
only symposia of merchandise open will be the taverns and cigar-shops,
the supper-rooms and shell-fish warehouses, the night coffee-houses, and
the chemists—which last shops, indeed, never seem to be quite open, or
quite closed, at all, and may be said to sleep with one eye open.

Eleven o’clock at the West-end is, morally speaking, broad day-light.
Midnight will be high noon. Fashionable life’s current riots through the
veins of West-end streets; mirth, and gaiety, and intrigue, are heard on
staircases and at street corners. And pre-eminently wide awake, busy,
active, and restless just now is the great and mysterious country of
Bohemia, both Upper and Lower. You are beginning to hear of Bohemia, oh,
reflective reader! and of its shady denizens. Recondite, half-reluctant
allusions are made to it in solemn reviews and portentous magazines. An
arch-Bohemian proposed the other day to write a novel concerning the
present condition of his country. The book actually appeared, but its
author stumbled on the threshold of his own subject. Either he dared not
say that which he knew, or he had over-estimated his knowledge of things
Bohemian: and he drew, not the real country, but an impalpable region
full of monsters. But his was no easy task. After all, who shall say, who
can tell, where Bohemia really is, and who really are Bohemians? They
are secretly affiliated, and to each other known, like freemasons, like
the Illuminati and Brethren of the Rosy Cross of the last century, like
Balzac’s “Treize;” but the outside world knows them not, and oft-times
mistakes for a Bohemian a vile Illyrian, a contemptible Styrian, a
worthless Croat, or a base Bezonian. Is there a king of Bohemia? or is
it an oligarchy, a theocracy, or a red republic? How does a man become
a Bohemian, and can he ever renounce his allegiance to the “friends of
Bohemia,” and become an ordinary citizen of the world? Yet Bohemianism is
ubiquitous. The initiated ones are everywhere. In the House of Commons,
at this very moment, a free and accepted Bohemian is pounding away at
the ministry, and a past grand-master of Bohemianism is descending the
steps of the Carlton. A Bohemian is dancing the Schottische in Westbourne
Terrace, and his brother is passing underneath Temple Bar, in a cab and
in custody, on his way to Mr. Slowman’s caravanserai in Cursitor Street.
There is a Bohemian, in white kid gloves and a white cravat, sitting
in his opera-stall, and he whispers to his companion to order a Welsh
rabbit and a pint of half-and-half for him at the Club. Some Bohemians
are drinking claret at the Wellington, and others are sleeping among
the vegetable baskets under the tarpaulins in Covent Garden Market.
Bohemian No. one has just won a hundred pounds at _écarté_. Bohemian
No. two has just pawned his great-coat. A Bohemian has just gone home
to read Plato, and take a basin of arrow-root for supper. Another has
let himself out with his latch-key, and is on his way to the Haymarket.
Oh, marvellous land! Oh, people yet more marvellous! Despised, derided,
abused by men, ye are yet a power in the state. Bootmakers combine
against ye; but you can turn out governments. Clerks of county courts
issue judgment summonses against ye; but you dine at princes’ tables.
Lands you have not, nor jewels, nor raiment, nor fine linen, nor pieces
of gold, nor pieces of silver; still do ye travel first-class express;
still do you clamour for green fat at mighty banquets, and turn up your
Bohemian noses if the venison be not hung to your liking; still do you
pride yourselves upon being good judges of Rhine wine and Habana cigars.
A peculiar race! And the most astonishing thing about the Bohemian is
this: that he does not—as the non-Bohemian charitably supposes and
reports—die in an hospital, to be saved from dissection, and humbly
buried, only by a subscription among his Bohemian associates. If he be an
ass and a profligate, he goes to the bad, and serve him right; but the
Bohemian, dying, frequently leaves a great deal more money behind him
than yonder starched man of business, who professed to regard him, during
his lifetime, with a shuddering, pitying horror. The Bohemian, brought,
as it would seem, to the lowest and forlornest state of impecuniosity
and discredit, suddenly starts up as Attorney-General of Yellow-Jack
Island with twelve hundred a year, as Judge-Advocate of the Meridional
Quashiboos, or Consul-General to the Tontine Republic.

While thus discoursing to you on things in general, I have been keeping a
sharp look-out for the most notable things that are to be seen in London
at eleven p.m. But as we shall have to sit up very late to-night—or
rather early to-morrow morning—I think it right that we should pass
the time till midnight in a quiet and decorous manner. Not but that we
have been exceedingly well-behaved ever since the commencement of our
peripatetics; but life is life, and one can scarcely go twice round the
clock in London without some moral and physical wear and tear. Suppose we
drop in at a Conversazione.

This (more or less) social _réunion_ is an institution of purely modern
invention. It is the latest device of the fantastically despotic
organisation we call “society,” with the exception of _the dansante_,
or dancing tea. It might be alleged, but the allegation would be open
to the imputation of hypercriticism, that the first conversazione on
English record was the meeting of the Royal Society at which King Charles
II. propounded the famous problem of the live fish in the pail of water:
and another semblance of a conversazione might be found in the assemblage
of antiquaries at the christening of Martinus Scriblerus. But the real
conversazione is quite another affair, and wholly modern. It is not much
more than twenty years old, its establishment following close on the
heels of the fashionable “rout,” which again succeeded the “assemblies”
of our grandmothers and the “drums” of our great-grandmothers. The
modern conversazione means a room or a suite of rooms thrown open for
the reception of a miscellaneous mob of fashionables or of celebrities,
foreign and native, political, literary, scientific, or artistic. It
is a vast menagerie, a “happy family” on a monster scale, a Noah’s ark
upon dry ground, and the birds, beasts, and fishes crowd and elbow
each other, and roar, or yell, or howl, or bark, or low, or grunt,
or squeak, or crow, or whistle, or scream, or pipe, to the infinite
delectation of the host and hostess. The only sounds proper to the
animal or ornithological kingdom are those which might be supposed to
be produced by billing and cooing; for the guests are not—or do not in
general look—very good-tempered, and a favourite manner of passing the
time at a conversazione is to scowl at your neighbour, and wonder who
the deuce he is. But one of the chief advantages connected with these
bringings-together of celebrities, lies in the moderate sum for which the
thing can be done. The conversazione is eminently cheap. They don’t give
these lions any shinbones of beef; tea, coffee, macaroons, and, at very
hospitable houses, sandwiches and wishy-washy negus, are all that you can
reckon upon in the way of refreshment at a conversazione.

Of late days, conversaziones, which were ordinarily given by private
persons—the Mrs. Leo Hunters of the _beau monde_—have been held by
societies literary and learned, nay, even by commercial and financial
companies. I remember myself receiving on one occasion an invite
to a “conversazione” at which the novel principles of a new life
assurance company, and the immense advantages offered to shareholders,
assurers, and annuitants, were to be fully developed and explained. The
conversazione was held at the bran-new offices of the company, smelling
very strongly of recent varnish, putty, and French polish, and of calf
ledgers and day-books yet innocent of entries. There were plenty of
ladies in evening dress, and plenty of gentlemen in white waistcoats,
and flirtation and gallantry were oddly mixed up with the Northampton
Tables and the Institute of Actuaries. We had a neat lecture by a stout
gentleman, in a blue coat buttoned up to the chin, upon the inestimable
blessings of life assurance. Tea and coffee were handed round in the
intervals of his discourse upon bonuses, paid-up capital, and the
purchase of reversions; and an immense sensation was created at the
termination of the lecture by the recitation, on the part of the orator,
of a neat little copy of verses, of which the commencing stanzas, so far
as my recollection will serve me, ran somewhat thus:—

    “When dear papa went up to heaven,
      What grief mamma endured!
    And yet that grief was softened, for
      Papa he was assured.

    “He never lodged his policy,
      He left it to mamma;
    The office paid most cheerfully,
      How happy now we are!”

This touching effusion was received with great waving of handkerchiefs,
and some sobs, indeed, on the part of the ladies, and I have no doubt
that many of those fair ones on returning home did that night incite,
command, and compel their liege lords and masters forthwith to assure
their lives in the “Amiable and General Fire and Life Assurance Company”
(with which are incorporated the “Good-natured and Law Life,” the
“Equitable and Jocular Fire,” and the “Compassionate and Confidential
Deposit and Loan Association”). The friendly meeting of the “Amiable
and General” was distinguished above other conversaziones by the fact,
that when the ladies had taken their departure, a capital cold supper,
and abundant libations of champagne, were provided for the directors
and their friends, at which repast, which lasted to a very advanced
hour, everybody drank everybody else’s health with all the honours, and
everybody was made a preferential shareholder. I know that I was; though
I am not quite aware at the present moment of the exact locality of the
“Amiable and General’s” offices, or, indeed, whether that most promising
company is still in existence.

The strange conversaziones a man may from time to time visit! I have
been to one at the Hanover Square Rooms given by the confraternity of
dentists. Slim gentlemen of Carker-like dental developement held forth
on the transcendant merit of the art of pulling out people’s teeth, and
fiercely denounced the quacks and impostors who ignorantly tampered with
the jaws of her Majesty’s subjects; the room itself was hung round with
the most hideous coloured cartoons, representative of diverse phases of
dental surgery, and I came away haunted by visions of pink beeswax, thin
gold plates, morocco easy chairs, springs, _dents osanores_, artificial
gums, and those dreadfully clean hands, the wrists garnished by
wristbands as clean, which seem to be the exclusive property of dentists.
I congratulated myself, too, on my departure, on the fact that no visitor
to the conversazione had, for the pure love of art, pulled out one of
my few remaining teeth, just as, after dining with a schoolmaster, I
felicitate myself for having escaped a caning. There is something in the
whiteness of a dentist’s hand, and in the twinkling of a schoolmaster’s
gray eye, that would make me tremble were I Lord Chancellor of Great
Britain.

But the oddest conversazione I ever attended was not in this country,
but in a foreign land. It was in Paris—and I am speaking seriously—a
conversazione of _coiffeurs_, of barbers, hair-dressers, and wig-makers.
I declare that I have seldom passed a more agreeable evening in my
life. Everything was conducted on the most intensely genteel footing,
and everybody was ceremoniously polite; although I must be candid
in admitting that a decided odour of pomatum and freshly-frizzled
curls pervaded the _salon_, which was, indeed, the upstairs room of a
_restaurant_ at Montmartre. There were ladies present, too; and after
some pleasant little discourse, all tending to the glorification of
hair-dressing, an eminent professor of the philocomal art there present
proceeded to a series of practical and illustrative experiments on
the heads of some of the young ladies, in order to show the different
styles of dressing and arranging the head which had prevailed from
the time of François, _premier jusqu’ à nos jours_, to our own days.
The ladies submitted with charming equanimity to the operation, and
the experimentalist was enabled to submit to public inspection and
admiration a full-blown Ninon d’Enclos, a Mademoiselle de Montpensier,
a Duchesse de Longueville, a Madame de Maintenon, together with several
Du Barris, De la Vallières, Pompadours, Madame Talliens, Mademoiselle
Mars, Charlotte Cordays, and Théroigne de Méricourts. At the conclusion
of the experiments, there was a grand procession of the ladies variously
_coiffées_ round the room, followed by the triumphant hair-dressers,
waving their tongs and combs, and redolent of puff-powder; then we had
_orgeat_ and _anisette_; and then I went and supped in the _restaurant_
downstairs with one of the hair-dressers, who went me halves in a bottle
of Beaune, and swore eternal friendship to me over a _Mayonnaise de
homard_.

But to return to the conversazione world of London. Suppose we take
a literary one to begin with: say one of Mrs. Van Umbug’s Thursdays.
Mrs. Van Umbug lives at that classically severe mansion, the “Arena.
Gladiator’s Crescent, Nero Square.” Mr. Van Umbug is a member of
Parliament, and sits on the Liberal side of the House, but nobody takes
much notice of him, and he is usually alluded to as Mrs. Van Umbug’s
husband. If you ask the coachman in the adjacent mews whose horses are
those the helper is harnessing to the brougham, he will probably answer,
“Mrs. Van Umbug’s.” The servants in the house in Gladiator Street, talk
continually of “Missus” (who makes her presence not only seen but felt),
but scarcely ever mention “Master.” The tradespeople usually send in
their bills to Mrs. Van Umbug; and it is certain that it is that lady
who issues the invitations and receives the company at her Thursday
conversaziones. Mr. Van Umbug, M.P., is scarcely ever seen at those
gatherings, and when he is, rarely, manifest, it is in a very meek and
subdued manner. He sneaks in and out as if the house didn’t belong to
him (which, indeed, it does not), and appears desperately afraid of the
portly man in black with the white Berlin gloves who hands round the tea
and coffee.

Mrs. Van Umbug’s mansion is supposed to be furnished in the highest style
of taste and virtu. Hers is quoted as an abode of all that is elegant,
_recherché_, and _distingué_. What are taste and virtu, I wonder?
what makes things elegant, _distingué_, and _recherché_? Do chairs
that you can’t sit down upon, and spindled-shanked tables, tottering
beneath the weight of gaudily-bound books, containing specimens of
chromo-lithography? do a sham pre-Raphaelite picture or two, in which a
long-legged swain is courting a lady with yellow hair and a striped dress
falling in unnatural folds, under the lee of a marvellously-executed
waterbutt—a curiously-manipulated mangold-wurzel, and a minutely
finished frying-pan occupying the foreground? do scraps of armour and
oak-carvings, supposed to be ancient, but in reality manufactured the
week before last in Wardour Street? do odds and ends, and Chinese
monsters in porcelain, and a Louis Quinze clock, and the model of a Swiss
châlet in box-wood, and an imitation grotto and aquarium in an ante-room?
I suppose these things do.

This present Thursday at Mrs. Van Umbug’s is a great literary one.

The lions of literature are present in the flesh. Here is the
distinguished Snortup, author of “The Common Objects of the Back-yard,”
“Geology in Joke,” “Trigonometry Judged by Taxation,” “The Extinct
Animals of Eel-pie Island,” and other erudite and ponderous scientific
works. Snortup, who is a Doctor of Philosophy of the University of
Schinckelbrauen, is a heavy man, with a black wig and a huge black satin
stock, in which gleams a cameo bearing a curious resemblance to an
oyster. He snuffs a great deal, and when he speaks he does not belie his
name, but literally snorts. Near him is young Twiddles, with his auburn
hair, his turn-down collar, and Byron tie, his speckled silk stockings
and low shoes, his baby face and falsetto voice. Twiddles, who writes
under the pseudonym of Swedenborg Scanderberg, has just published a
volume of poems of the ultra-spasmodic order. In passages replete with
burning eloquence, he has spoken of the “moonbeam’s frosty rime, that
hoars the head of nature, and makes last summer’s sapling patriarchal
white.” His grand passage in “Ladye Babbynetta,” in which he alludes to
“the hot and rabid ice, that burns and sears by force of congelation,”
has been enthusiastically spoken of by Sidney Muffins, editor of the
“Tomfool” (with which is incorporated the “Pinchbeck News”) weekly
journal. Muffins is not a poet yet, but he hopes to be one when his
whiskers grow and he has read “Cassel’s Popular Educator.” Meanwhile, he
swears by Twiddles, and fiercely abuses, in print and in person, those
who can’t avoid the conviction that Twiddles is a donkey.

Do you see that man with the enormous red beard, the black velvet cuffs,
collars, and facings to his coat, and the fez cap? That is O’Roarer.
O’Roarer is a special correspondent to the “Howl” daily newspaper.
O’Roarer went to the Crimea for the “Howl,” during the war; he quarrelled
with a major in a marching regiment, and challenged him to mortal
combat. The general commanding the division was compelled to request
O’Roarer to select some other locality for his hut, and terrific were
the criticisms upon that divisional general’s military conduct, which
subsequently appeared in the “Howl.” Little Eggles, who was a clerk in
the Commissariat Department, who hates O’Roarer, declares that he was
found in Balaclava once returning from a carouse on board ship, and
_Bacchi plenus_, that he was taken to the main-guard, and in the morning,
notwithstanding his protestations that it was “all a mistake,” and his
assertions of his “responsible position,” he received the customary
hospitality of the main-guard, namely, two dozen lashes. Eggles adds,
with a knowing wink, that the provost-marshal was not General ——’s nephew
for nothing.

Besides Mr. O’Roarer and his fellows already described, there is the
Honourable Simperkin Blushington, that pleasing novelist and Oriental
traveller. A little to the left, and scowling at the Honourable Simperkin
fearfully, is Leathers, the author of “A Jaunt to Jericho” and “Seven
Years in a Penal Settlement.” Leathers wears a huge cut-velvet waistcoat,
that looks like a fragment from some tapestried window-curtain. He is
not at all clever, is Leathers—has no humour, observation, or power of
description; but he has got a name among the book-selling trade, somehow,
as a “good travelling hand”—a safe man for two volumes royal octavo
with plates and a map—and so soon does any foreign country, from Canton
to British Columbia, begin, from political or other causes, to attract
public attention, so soon is Leathers commissioned to write his two
bulky volumes of travels therein. Ill-natured people say that he keeps
particulars relative to geography pigeon-holed in his library, and that
he never went further than Boulogne, in the days of the five-shilling
fares; but Leathers gets his price, and can afford to laugh at the
evil-speaking. Bonassus, the publisher, of Bumpus Street, will have
Leathers’s portrait in the next edition of “Rambles in the Island of
Perim.”

I am sure it is very ungallant in me to have been so long silent
regarding the ladies who grace the literary conversazione with
their presence. A man must be, indeed, a brute who could pass over
the charms of Miss Withers, aged forty, authoress of “Crackings of
the Heartstrings,” “Shudderings of the Soul,” “Crinklings of the
Spirit-skin,” “Eyeball Darts,” and other pathetic lyrics. Miss Withers
once kept a boarding-school, but gradually languished into poetry. She
attained considerable celebrity in the time of the Annuals, but on the
downfall of those amusing ephemerides, she betook herself to history, and
is the writer of “Lives of the Wet Nurses of the Princesses of England,”
“Memorials of celebrated Bedchamber Women,” and “The Silversticks in
Waiting before the Conquest”—all works replete with critical acumen,
and brimful of historical lore, though following a little too closely
in the footsteps of a lady who has written an admirable and genuine
History concerning some Queens of England. Miss Withers, however, has
done very well for her publishers and for herself. She is one of those
authoresses who, dying, would never wish to blot out a line they had
written, simply because Heaven has gifted them with a happy mental
cecity that prevents them from discerning that nine-tenths of their
works should never have been written at all. You may see Miss Withers
any day in the British Museum Reading-room, vigorously compiling away
at the desk marked “for ladies only.” She has piles of books around
her; she makes the attendants’ lives a torment to them with the flying
squadrons of book-tickets she deposits at the bar; she walks about
the india-rubber flooring with one pen behind her ear and another in
her mouth. She, being tall, bony, severe of aspect, and much given to
snuff-taking, is generally feared by the Museum frequenters. She wrenches
volumes of the catalogue from mild young clergymen in spectacles and
M. B. waistcoats. She follows line after line of the printed page with
her heavy inkstained forefinger. Once Dedman the pedigree-hunter, who
was filling up his ticket opposite Miss Withers, was venturous enough
to ask her the day of the month. She called him, in a hollow voice,
“fellow,” on the spot, snuffed indignantly, and afterwards spoke of him
to the attendant with the red moustache as an “impertinent jackanapes.”
The only person with whom she condescends to be conversational in the
reading-room, is Eglintoun Beaverup, the famous novelist, satirist, poet,
traveller, Quarterly Reviewer, essayist, epigrammatist and politician,
who stood for the Macbeth district of burghs last general election, and
proved in an article in the “Rampant Magazine,” that the present Duke of
Sennacherib’s grandfather was a pork butcher in Liquorpond Street, and
that Sir Ranulph De Brie’s papa (who was a pawnbroker) owed his baronetcy
to a loan of ten thousand pounds, advanced by him to the Prince Regent
on the security of a pinchbeck watch, which that improvident scion of
royalty, having no other available pawnable property, had borrowed for
the nonce from one of the helpers in his stable. Beaverup is himself
descended from Brian de Bois Guilbert on the father’s side, and from the
original Thane of Cawdor, who slew Duncan, on that of the mother. Miss
Withers will sometimes exchange deadly whispers with him relative to the
mushroom characteristics of our modern peerage, and the departed glories
of soccage and villeinage, infang theof and outfang theof.

Ah! and you are there, too, at Mrs. Van Umbug’s conversazione, little
Fanny Gillytin. Even so! behold Fanny in a black satin dress and a laced
_berthe_, and her yellow wavy hair parted on one side like a man, seated
on an ottoman in deep conversation with Professor Sventurato, that
red-hot republican, formerly one of the tribunes of the Ultramontane
Republic; next, under the name of Kibaub Bey, a colonel in the Turkish
service, warring against the Moscovs in Anatolia; then deputy-assistant
quartermaster-general under the immortal Walker, liberator of Nicaragua;
next, an actor at the Variétés Theatre, New Orleans; next, keeper of an
oyster and lager bier saloon, in One-Hundred-and-Twenty-seventh Street,
Ginslingopolis, in the United States of America; next, of Paris, Milan,
Turin, Vienna, and Pesth, travelling as a broom-girl, an old woman, a
Jesuit priest, a waiter at a _café_, a Franciscan friar, and a clown to
a circus; now of the Whetstone Park College for Ladies (by whom he is
adored), professor of modern languages; during the foregoing time, and
occasionally, a prisoner in divers cells, wards, casemates, underground
dungeons, _oubliettes_, _piombi_, _ergastoli_, and penal colonies, from
all of which he has escaped by means little short of miraculous. Fanny,
they say, is madly in love with Sventurato, and would marry him, were not
the professor already allied to a Moldo-Wallachian lady, the daughter of
a Kaïmakan, whose heroism effected his escape from the citadel of Comorn,
and who afterwards essayed to poison him in his coffee. Fanny is no less
mad after liberty, by which she means universal democracy, universal
spoliation, and universal smash. She has some private fortune, which she
dispenses liberally among necessitous refugees; and in furtherance of the
sacred cause of liberty—as she understands it—she has written piles of
books. She is the authoress of that flaming epic, “The Tyrant’s Entrails,
or a Maiden’s Wish;” “Crowns and Coffins, or Oligarchs and Ogres,” an
historical retrospect; “Mazzini the Shiloh,” and “Victory and Vitriol,”
those soul-stirring pamphlets. She signs revolutionary bank-notes; she
applauds regicide; she is in correspondence (in a complicated cipher
which every police official from Paris to Petersburg understands and
laughs at) with foreign revolutionary committees. She visits the
Continent sometimes to distribute funds and ammunition. She would be
ready to assume man’s clothes for the benefit of her adored liberty—as
she understands it. Ah! Fanny, Fanny, pause; ah! rash and foolish girl,
for whom to be whipped and sent to bed would be the better portion,
forbear to play with these edged tools! No second-sight is necessary
for the result of these miserable machinations to be manifest. I see
the portico of a theatre brilliantly lighted up; for a Tyrant and his
young innocent wife come hither to-night. He is hemmed in by guards and
police-agents; yet, for all his escort, desperate men rush forward and
throw hand-grenades beneath his carriage-wheels. A horrible explosion,
and then scores of peaceful men, women, and children, are borne, dead
or frightfully mutilated, to the hospitals; and the Tyrant, safe and
sound, bows to a cheering audience from his box. I see four downcast
men sitting between gensd’arme on the criminals’ bench of a crowded
court-house, before stern judges who have doomed them to death before
the very reading of the indictment. I see a straight-waistcoated wretch
sitting in his chair in a gloomy cell, his head bent down, the governor
and the priest standing by, while the executioner cuts off his hair and
shaves the back of his neck. I see a grim, gray winter’s morning in the
fatal Place of the Roquette. A space is kept clear by thousands of horse,
foot, artillery, and police; and, thrust to the furthermost limits of the
place, is a pale-faced crowd surging like a sea. Then the drums beat, and
the dismal procession issues from a prison to a scaffold. Then, tottering
between priests and turn-keys, come two bare-footed men, with long white
shirts over their garments, and their faces concealed by hideous black
veils. But the veils are removed when they mount the scaffold, when
one by one a distorted, livid face, with white lips, appears, when the
executioner seizes the pinioned criminal, and flings him—yes, flings him,
is the word—on the plank. Then I see the horrible gash in the face as the
moribund strives to shape his mouth to utter his last words on earth;
the last up-turning of the starting eye-balls; but the plank reverses,
the rollers revolve, the slide closes, the spring is touched, the KNIFE
falls, the blood spouts, and the heads drop into the sawdust of the red
basket. Liberty, equality, and fraternity, flaming epics, soul-stirring
pamphlets, and complicated ciphers, have come to this miserable end. The
Tyrant is borne through the streets, the people shouting, and the maidens
strewing flowers at his feet. The telegram has been despatched from the
revolutionary committee to the Roquette, and the answer is a corpse that
quivers, the parricide’s shroud, and the headsman’s bloody axe.

Of course there are some titled folks at Mrs. Van Umbug’s conversazione:
it would not be complete without a literary lord—a harmless nobleman,
generally, who has translated Horace, invented a new metre, or discovered
a new butterfly; and a literary lady—if separated from her husband all
the better, who paints him in the darkest of colours, as the hero of
every one of her novels. And, equally of course, Ethelred Guffoon is
here. Ethelred Guffoon is everywhere. He is one of Mrs. Van Umbug’s
special favourites. She calls him by his Christian name. He hunts up new
lions for her; occasionally he officiates as peacemaker, and prevents
the lions from growling and fighting among themselves. He rushes from
Mrs. Van Umbug’s conversazione to the Pontoppidan Theatre, to see a new
face, which he must criticise; after that he will sit up half the night
to review Mr. Gladstone’s Homer, for the “Daily Scratcher,” and will be
at Somerset House by punctual office hours the next morning. A man of the
age, Ethelred Guffoon—a man of the time, a good fellow, but frivolous.

I wonder whether the celebrities one sees at this shadowy conversazione
really represent the literary world—the real people who write the books
and think the thoughts. I am afraid they do not. I fear that to find
the princes of the pen, the giants of the land of letters, I must go
further afield. Lo, here is Great Tom of Chelsea, sitting cosily, in
his back parlour, smoking a pipe of bird’s-eye with Eglintoun Beaverup,
and telling him he is about having his ceilings whitewashed. Here is
Lord Livy poring over Restoration and Revolution broadsides by his
reading-lamp in his lonely chambers in the Albany;—no, not lonely, the
spirits of the old historic men come from their dusty shelves and clap
him on the shoulder, and cry, “Go on and prosper, Thomas Babington,
Lord Livy.” The great Mr. Polyphemus, the novelist, is bidden to the
Duke of Sennacherib’s, and as he rolls to Sennacherib House in his
brougham, meditates satiric onslaughts on “Tom Garbage” and “Young
Grubstreet”—those Tom Thumb foes of his[12]—in the next number of the
“Pennsylvanians.” Mr. Goodman Twoshoes is reading one of his own books
to the members of the Chawbacon Athenæum, and making, I am delighted
to hear, a mint of money by the simple process. Goldpen, the poet, has
taken his wife and children to Miss P. Horton’s entertainment; Bays, the
great dramatist, is sitting in the stalls of the Pontoppidan Theatre
listening with rapt ears to the jokes in his own farce; and Selwyn Cope,
the essayist, is snoring snugly between the sheets, having to rise very
early to-morrow morning in order to see a man hanged. And where are the
working-men of literature, the conscripts of the pen, doomed to carry
Brown Bess, for sixpence a day, all their lives? Where are Garbage and
Grubstreet? In the worst inn’s worst room, with racing prints half hung,
the walls of plaster and the floors of sand, at once a deal table but
stained with beer, sits Garbage playing four-handed cribbage with an
impenitent hostler, a sporting man who has sold the fight, and a potboy
who is a returned convict? Sits he there, I ask, or is he peacefully
pursuing his vocation in country lodgings? And Grubstreet, is he in some
murky den, with a vulture’s quill dipped in vitriol inditing libels upon
the great, good, and wise of the day? Wonder upon wonders, Grubstreet
sits in a handsome study—listening to his wife laughing, over her crochet
work, at Mr. Polyphemus’s last attack on him, and dandling a little child
upon his knee! Oh! the strange world in which we live, and the post that
people will knock their heads against!

[Illustration: ELEVEN O’CLOCK P.M.: A SCIENTIFIC CONVERSAZIONE.]

From a literary to a learned or scientific conversazione, at one of which
we are about to take a transient peep, there is but one step; indeed,
literature is always welcome among the good-natured old Dryasdusts, who
are continually raking and rummaging, and rocking the “placers” and
“prospects” of knowledge, and turning up huge masses of quartz, from
which the nimble-fingered chymists of the pen extract flakes of shining
gold. Presto! we leave the Republic of Letters, and are in the handsome
rooms of the Royal Inquiring Society. This meritorious association
(incorporated by Royal charter) is perpetually asking questions, and,
though it often receives insufficient, if not ridiculous responses, yet
manages, at the close of every year, to accumulate a highly-respectable
stock of information on almost every imaginable topic. The members, I
will assume (would that such a society in strict reality existed), are
draughts from all the learned, scientific, philosophical, antiquarian,
and artistic societies in London; and on the first Thursday in every
month during the season, they meet to gloze over curiosities exhibited
for their inspection, to shake hands and crack jokes with one another—I
have even seen the friendly dig in the ribs, accompanied by the sly
chuckle, occasionally administered—and to ask questions and receive
answers. They are “Notes and Queries” (chattiest, most quaintly-erudite
of periodicals) incarnated. But they abjure not the presence of the
gentler, unscientific sex. These rare old boys of learning and science
thread their way through the rooms (sometimes almost inconveniently
crowded, for the Royal Inquiring Society is very popular) with blooming
wives and daughters on their arms. The young ladies delight in these
conversaziones—for a change. They are so strange, so peculiar, they
say. You don’t meet anybody to dance with or to talk about the weather,
or the Crystal Palace, or crinoline, or the Botanical Gardens; but you
see such nice old gentlemen, with dear, shiny, bald heads, and such
wonderful intellectual-looking beings, with long hair, turn-down collars,
and large feet, who smell musty bones with unpronounceable names, and
make extraordinary instruments to whiz round, and point out places upon
maps, and talk _so_ cleverly (but so incomprehensibly to you, my dears)
about rusty coins and the backbones of fishes, and battered saucepans,
which _they_ say are helmets. And then there are the nice stereoscopes
to peep through, and the beautiful water-colour drawings and photographs
to look at, and the old gentlemen are so quiet and so polite, and so
different from the young men one meets in society, who either stammer and
blush or are superciliously rude and put their hands in their trousers’
pockets. Yes, young ladies, the bald-headed old gentlemen, the careworn,
long-haired, slovenly-looking men, are quiet and polite. They were, many
of them, poor and humble once; but they have hewn out steps from the rock
of knowledge, whereby they have mounted to that better fortune—European,
Worldwide fame. That quiet man with gray hair, smiles when ministers
press upon him a knighthood or a baronetcy: “_Cui bono?_” he says; “I
would rather be a corresponding member of the Academy of Honolulu. When
I am old and broke, and past work, you may give me enough for a little
bread in my old days: I take it as a Right, not as a favour,” just as
Turner the painter left in his will the simple direction that he was to
be buried in the Cathedral Church of St. Paul.—“St. Paul’s is for the
painters and the warriors, as Westminster Abbey is for the poets and
statesmen; but I want not your honours and titles. Such as you have, you
bestow on your lawyers and your lacqueys; but your captains are almost
ashamed to take the decorations that are shared by footmen and backstairs
cringers.”

You have readily divined, I hope, why I have instructed the dexterous
limner who illustrates these pages to select for his subject the
scientific, rather than the literary, conversazione. The men of science
do not obtrude their personalities upon the public. Their fame is known,
their influence felt from London to Louisiana, but their portraits seldom
meet the public eye. Those of General Tom Thumb or the Christy Minstrels
would attract more crowds to the print-shop windows, and sell better.
But, good lack! what a commotion there would be if the portraits of a
series of _littérateurs_, in their habits as they live, appeared in
“Twice Round the Clock!” I should be denounced, repudiated, vilified,
abused, for the artist’s misdeeds. The great Mr. Polyphemus would crush
me mercilessly beneath his iron heel; Grubstreet would (threaten to)
kick me; Garbage would have me on the hip; O’Roarer smite me beneath
the fifth rib; Leathers devise devices against me to make my existence
intolerable; and Ethelred Guffoon castigate me terribly in his popular
paper, “The Half-penny Cane.” No; let me deal only with the shadows; and
those that the cobweb cap fits, e’en let them wear it.

       *       *       *       *       *

At Eleven o’Clock in the evening, the social institutions known as
Evening Parties assume their gayest and most radiant aspect. I think
that I have already hinted in these pages that I am not a very frequent
visitor at these entertainments. The truth must out: the people don’t
like me. At the last _soirée_ I attended, a fashionable physician, coming
in very late, and throwing out for general hearing the fact that he had
been dining with an earl, I meekly suggested that he should allow me to
rub myself up against him, in order to catch some of his aristocracy. All
the women laughed, but the men looked as though they would have very much
liked to throw me out of the window. There was one exception—a gentleman
with one eye, and a face like a glass case full of curiosities, so many
different phases of expression were there in it, who came across to me
and made friends at once. But I shall never be asked to that house again;
and if I am ill, I won’t send for the fashionable physician. _Timeo
Danäos_, and the pills they give you.

Thus circumstanced, I feel it becoming my degree to stay on the outside
of great houses, and, herding among the crowd and the link-men, to
witness the setting down and the taking up of the carriages coming to
or going from evening parties. It has always been my lot so to stand on
the kerb, to be a continual dweller on the threshold. I have stood there
to see people married, to see people buried, and have murmured: “My
turn must come next, surely;” but my time has not come yet. A king has
patted me on the head, and I have sate, as a child, on the knee of the
handsomest woman in Europe. I have been on the brink of many a precipice;
I have attained the edge of many a cloud. But I have stopped there. I
have always been like the recalcitrant costermonger’s donkey, “going for
to go,” but never accomplishing the journey in its entirety.

I spoke of link-men. I might tell you a not uninteresting story regarding
those industrials, in these gas-lit days growing day by day rarer and
rarer. The tarred-rope made links are indeed, save on extraneous foggy
nights, grown quite extinct, and are replaced by neat lanterns; and
the time will come when the old red jackets, famous as a class from
Grosvenor Square to the Horticultural Gardens at Chiswick, from the
club-house fronts, on _levée_ days, to the doorways of evening parties,
shall become quite obsolete. But there is a grand old admiral living
now—titled, high in office, before whom even his equals in rank bow, and
who can make post-captains wait in his ante-chambers—who owes at least
half his advancement and social position to the services of the link-men.
Thirty years ago this officer was a young stripling, cast upon the ocean
of London society. He was of good family, but his acquaintances in the
fashionable world were few and far between, his influence was _nil_, and
his promotion was therefore more than dubious. But at the Opera, then the
King’s Theatre, he happened to form a shilling-giving on the one side,
cap-touching on the other, acquaintance with a link-man—Silver Tom, I
think he was called, from a silver badge he always wore, presented to him
by a noble marquis whom he had saved from being prematurely scrunched on
a certain dark night between his own carriage wheels and those of the
equipage of a duchess, his grandmamma. “Silver Tom,” moved by gratitude,
and experienced by his (outside) knowledge of the fashionable world,
put the then young and poor lieutenant up to what is vernacularly
known as “a thing or two.” Not a grand entertainment could be given in
Fashionabledom, but on the lieutenant’s arrival in full evening costume,
“Silver Tom” bawled up his name to the footman in attendance on the
door-step (the _régime_ of cards was not so strictly attended to as it is
now); he on the door-step halloaed it out to the powdered attendant on
the first landing; he, in his turn, gave it to the black-vestmented groom
of the chambers, who proclaimed it to the world in general in sonorous
tones, and the bold lieutenant was inducted to the saloons of reception.
Who was to know whether he had been invited to the feast or not? Not,
certainly, the hostess, who, perhaps, did not know two hundred and fifty
of her five hundred guests by sight. Some had been asked by her husband,
some by herself. Not certainly the guests, who would not have been
much surprised if they had met the Hottentot Venus or the King of the
Cannibal Islands. The lieutenant made his bow and himself comfortable;
was sure to meet some lady or gentleman in society whom he knew, and
probably departed with a list of half-a-dozen newly-formed and valuable
acquaintances. He went on and prospered. Gradually, from being met and
liked at great houses, he received genuine invitations, and, as I have
premised, he made a good end of it at the Admiralty. I hope he pensioned
“Silver Tom.”

[Illustration: ELEVEN O’CLOCK P.M.: AN EVENING PARTY.]

Who is dead by this time, most probably; but I can still stand by the
side of his successor, at the door of the great house, by the lamp
and lantern’s glare, and see the gay company pass in and out. How the
horses champ! how the dresses rustle! how the jewels shine! and what
fair women and brave men are here congregated! Messrs. Weippert’s or
Collinet’s band are upstairs; Messrs. Gunter’s men have brought the
ices; there are flirtations in the conservatories, and squeezings of
hands interchanged on the stairs. Vows of love are spoken, flowers from
bouquets are given; and is it not, after all, the same old, old story,
that boys and girls will love one another, and that the old people will
look on with pretended severity, but with real contentment in their
hearts, and that there will be present a few jealous and cankered ones,
who will look on to envy the others because they are so happy? Drive envy
from your hearts, ye who ride not in gilded chariots, and move not in
the “fashionable circles.” There is as much truth, love, and gaiety at a
“sixpenny hop,” between maid-servants and journeymen bakers, as at the
most refined evening parties.




MIDNIGHT.—THE HAYMARKET, AND THE SUB-EDITOR’S ROOM.


Midnight: an awful sound. Supposing you were to be hanged at three
o’clock in the morning, as I am doomed to be, in a literary sense, how
would you like to hear twelve o’clock sound? But three hours more to
live! In three hours “the sheriff he will come,” and the chaplain, and
the hangman, as they came to Mr. Samuel Hall _en route_ for Tyburn. In
three hours the clock will run down; the pendulum shall oscillate no
more; Time shall rest on his scythe; the last grain of sand shall run
out, and of these ephemeral papers you shall say _fuit_. We have clomb
the hill together, and we will rest together at the foot.

Glancing over my map of London, and retracing the course of our
peregrinations, I find, with some complacency, that we have not, after
all, left many parts of the metropolis unexplored. We have been to
Camberwell and to Hyde Park Corner; to Pentonville and to London Bridge;
to Billingsgate and to Euston Square. It is true, that we have not yet
penetrated to the interior of Buckingham Palace, or the condemned cell at
Newgate, nor do I think that I shall assume the part of the Boy Jones or
a visiting magistrate for your amusement; but we have been “behind the
scenes” of more places than theatres since this clock was first wound up.
It is not without regret now, that I linger over and dally with my few
remaining hours. They have been very pleasant ones for me. I shall miss
the printer’s boy (for, be it known, I am about to abandon literature and
go into trade, though I have not yet settled the precise business—corn,
or coals, or commission agency). I shall miss, beyond aught else, the
daily deluge of letters from anonymous correspondents—praising, blaming,
complaining, or inquiring, but all, I am glad to say, very appreciative
readers of my shiftless writings.

But we have come to the complexion of midnight, and the hour must be
described. It is fraught with meaning for London. You know that in
poetical parlance midnight is the time when church-yards yawn (they
had need to be weary now, for the Board of Health won’t allow them to
receive any occupants _intra muros_), and graves give up their dead. And
there be other grave-yards in London town—yards where no tombstones or
brick vaults are—that at midnight yawn and send forth ghosts to haunt
the city. A new life begins for London at midnight. Strange shapes
appear of men and women who have lain a-bed all the day and evening,
or have remained torpid in holes and corners. They come out arrayed in
strange and fantastic garments, and in glaringly gaslit rooms screech and
gabble in wild revelry. The street corners are beset by night prowlers.
Phantoms arrayed in satin and lace flit upon the sight. The devil puts a
diamond ring on his taloned finger, sticks a pin in his shirt, and takes
his walks abroad. It is a stranger sight than even the painter Raffet
imagined in his picture of Napoleon’s midnight review, and it is, I
think, a much better thing to be at home and in bed, than wandering about
and peeping into the mysteries of this unholy London night life.

I know this book (to my sorrow) well; have conned its grim pages, and
studied its unwholesome lore, attentively. But I am not about to make
you a too-recondite participant in my knowledge. Were it not that
the appointed hours were meted out to me, and that from one of the
hours—midnight—the Haymarket is inseparable, the wicked street should
find no place here; but I must be faithful to my trust, and the bad
thoroughfare must be in part described.

Foreigners have frequently pointed out to me a peculiar aspect of London,
and one which appeals strongly to the observant faculties, and which,
nevertheless, may escape us Cockneys who are to the metropolitan manner
born. It is the duality of the huge city, not so much as regards its
night and day side, as in its Sunday and week-day appearance. And this
is not wholly to be ascribed to the shop shutters being closed. The
Strand on Ash Wednesdays and Good Fridays is still the Strand; but on the
Sabbath it would seem as though every house in the West and East ends had
put on its special Sunday suit, and had decorated itself with a certain
smug spruceness quite marked and distinct. You have a difficulty in
recognising your most familiar streets. Regent Street is quite altered.
The aspect of Piccadilly is entirely changed; and Cheapside is no more
like the Cheapside of yesterday than Hamlet is like Hecuba. The people,
too, are not by any means the same people you meet on week-days. Not only
their clothes are different, but their faces, their manners, their very
gait and bearing, seem changed. You meet people out walking on Sundays,
who during the week are confined to places where they are hidden from
the public gaze, or are at most but half visible. You see the bar-maids’
skirts and the pawnbrokers’ legs on Sundays. From Monday to Saturday you
can see but their busts. You may nod to a sheriff’s officer on Sunday
without entertaining any apprehensions as to the piece of paper he may
have against you in that dismal black leather pocket-book of his. The
omnibus roofs are covered, the steamboats’ decks are crowded, the cabs
full, the pavement thronged, the very saddle-horses bestridden by men who
seem of a different race to the outside world of the previous four and
twenty hours. Dirty streets look clean; disreputable streets decorous;
and thoroughfares that were as still as mice during the week, become
quite noisy on Sundays with carriage and cab wheels, as sinners of wealth
and distinction rattle up to the doors of the fashionable chapel.

It is the privilege of the unique Haymarket to be like its week-night
self on Sunday; but in the six mundane days to be a totally different
Haymarket from the street which it becomes immediately after midnight.
True, by daylight, and during the early part of the evening, it is that
which it will remain all night: a broad thoroughfare inclining slightly
downhill northward; a theatre on its eastern, a colonnaded opera-house
on its western side; a thoroughfare containing a sufficiency of shops
for the sale of general merchandise, but, predominating above these,
a crowd of hotels, _restaurants_, cigar-divans, coffee-houses, and
establishments for the sale of lobsters, oysters, and pickled salmon,
according to the seasons in which those dainties are considered most fit
to be enjoyed. But it is not the same—no, not at all the same—Haymarket
to which it will suddenly turn, when the clock of St. Martin’s church
shall proclaim the hour of midnight. The change, at first imperceptible,
is yet in a moment more immense. As though Harlequin had smitten the
houses—and the people also—with his wand, the whole Haymarket wakes,
lights, rises up with a roar, a rattle, and a shriek quite pantomimic,
if not supernatural. The latter image would, I think, be the most _vrai
semblant_. “Hey for fun!” “How are you to-morrow?” and “How are you?” are
the cries and the pass-words. The painted Clown (in mosaic jewellery,
and all-round collar, an astonishing cravat, and a variegated shirt)
grins his grin and tumbles on the pavement. He is not above stealing an
occasional sausage, bonneting a policeman, overturning an image-boy’s
stock in trade, or throwing the contents of a fishwoman’s basket about.
Harlequin in a mask and patchwork-suit is here, there, and everywhere,
conjuring money out of people’s pockets, and perpetually pursued by a
vindictive Sprite, habited in the garb of a police constable. The lean
and slippered Pantaloon hobbles over the flags, and grimaces, with his
wicked old countenance, beneath the gas-lamps. And Columbine, _Wallah
billah!_ Columbine in muslins, spangles, and artificial flowers, is here,
there, and everywhere, too, and dances her miserable jigs to the sorry
music of the fife, viol, and tabor, squeaking, scraping, and thumping at
the gin-shop by the corner of the court.

Midnight: the play is over, and the audience pour from the Haymarket
Theatre. The aristocratic opera season is concluded by this time of the
year, and the lovers of the drama have it all their own way. Crowds of
jovial young clerks and spruce law students cluster beneath the portico,
yet convulsed by the humours of Mr. Buckstone. Happy families of rosy
children, radiant in lay-down collars, white skirts and pink sashes, trot
from the entrance to the dress-circle under the wing of benevolent papa
and stout good-humoured mamma, with a white burnous, and a tremendous
fan; their healthy countenances all beaming and mantling with smiles,
and joyously recalling the jokes of that funny old man in the farce, or
expatiating on the glories of the concluding _tableau_, with its tinsel
and gold leaf, its caryatides of ballet girls, and its red and blue
fire, in Mr. Talfourd’s last sparkling burlesque. Happy, happy days
and frame of mind, when the theatre can give such delights as these.
Isn’t it better to sit amazed and delighted in the front row of the
dress-circle, or on the third row of the pit, roaring at the stalest Joe
Millerisms, and clapping the hands at the tomfool feats of tumbling, than
to lie _perdu_ in a private-box, now scowling, and now sneering, like
Stricknine, the great theatrical critic, who will go and sup afterwards
at the Albion, on an underdone mutton-chop, and, calling for pen, ink,
and paper, slaughter the inoffensive burlesque mercilessly. Stricknine
can’t write burlesques himself. He can’t write books; he can only
slaughter, and must have been apprenticed in his youth to Bannister or
Slater. And, slaughterer as he is, he is not equal to the manly business
of knocking down a bullock with a pole-axe. Give him a long keen knife,
and he will puncture the neck of a lamb, and that is all.

Ethelred Guffoon (who has been to three theatres to-night) bustles out
from his stall with his lorgnette in its shagreen case. Mr. Kickeroe,
Q.C., comes from the pit, shouldering his umbrella. Kickeroe has been a
constant visitor to the pit of the Haymarket any time these twenty years,
though he could easily afford a private box once if not twice a week.
His greatest extravagance is to purchase four upper-box tickets when Mr.
Buckstone takes his benefit. He is an ardent admirer of the Haymarket
five-act comedies; and people say that many of his most effective and
jury-touching perorations have been drawn from the sentimental “tags”
of the Haymarket dramatists. Trotting down the box-stairs, too, comes
vivacious, learned, chatty, kindly, abusive Mr. Boblink, with his head
prematurely white, but his heart as green as it was thirty years since.
Mr. Boblink is generally beloved, though regarded with a humorous
terror for his vituperative qualities. He expatiates on the necessity
of breaking butterflies on the wheel, although, good man, he would not
harm a particle of pollen on their wings. His fierce language is but the
bellow of the blunderbuss: here is no bullet, not so much as a bit of old
hat for wadding in his gun. He strikes with a wooden sword, and scourges
malefactors with a knout whose lash is made of floss-silk. He wears the
mask of a Gorgon horrible to see; but the mask is transparent as glass,
and you may descry the honest genial face of the man wreathed with sly
smiles behind it. So he goes through life—a _bourru bienfaisant_—hitting
men sounding thwacks with a bladder full of peas, and recording sentence
of literary death against culprits, knowing full well that the sentence
will never be carried out. To hear Boblink talk, you would think him
the most malevolent creature breathing. He is so different from smooth,
quiet, smiling Mr. Stricknine, (_he_ only scowls when he is alone) who
presses your hand warmly, and immediately betakes himself to the Albion,
there to make a neat _fricassée_ of your reputation, and, in the most
polished and classical language, insinuate that you are a hopeless fool
with dishonest propensities. And yet Mr. Boblink has a deadly armoury of
his own at home, and knows the _tierce_ and the _carte_ and the “_raison
démonstrative_,” and has, when exasperated, proved himself so cunning
of fence, that I would see him hanged before I would fight with him in
earnest.

Supper is now the great cry, and the abundant eating and drinking
resources of the Haymarket are forthwith called into requisition.
Bless us all! there must be something very dusty and exhaustive in the
British drama to make this Haymarket audience so clamorous for supper.
By the ravenous hunger and thirst displayed by the late patrons of the
theatre, you would imagine that they had gone without dinner for a week.
You may sup in the Haymarket as your taste would lead, or as the state
of your finances would counsel—if people followed such counsel—you to
sup. You may cut your coat according to your cloth. Are you rich—there
is Dubourg’s, the Hôtel de Paris, and the upstairs department of the
Café de l’Europe. There is no lack of cunning cooks there, I warrant,
to send you up pheasants and partridges _en papillotte_; _filets_, with
mushrooms or truffles, culinary gewgaws that shall cost five shillings
the dish. Yea, and cellarers will not be wanting to convey to you the
Roederer’s Champagne, the fragrant Clos Vougeot, the refreshing Lafitte,
and the enlivening Chambertin with yellow seal; smooth waiters to attend
to your minutest wishes, and bring you the handsome reckoning on an
electro-silver plateau, and, with many bows, return you what odd change
there may be out of a five-pound note. I do not say that the Haymarket
contains such gorgeous supper-houses as the Maison Dorée, the Café de
Paris, the Café Anglais, or Vachette’s; but I have seen some notable
_parties fines_ within its precincts. The Haymarket never was virtuous;
so there is never any question about the cakes and ale, and the ginger
that is hot in the mouth, to be found therein.

If still your taste leads you towards French cookery—though you wince
somewhat at the idea of claret, Burgundy, and Champagne to follow—there
exists a second-class French _restaurant_ or two where succulent suppers
may be obtained at moderate prices. If unpretending chops, steaks,
kidneys, sausages, or Welsh rabbit, washed down by the homely British
brown stout, and followed perchance by the soothing cigar, and the jorum
of hot anything-and-water: if such be your ambition, I should advise you
not to sup in the Haymarket at all; but to wait till one o’clock and sup
with me. I will show you the whereabouts. Such chops and steaks and _et
ceteras_, you may indeed obtain in the neighbourhood, but I like them
not. If your funds and your credit be very low, why, you can enter one
of the taverns—if you can reach the bar for the crowd of Bacchanalians
that are gathered before it, and sup on the quarter of a pork pie, a
sausage roll, and a Banbury cake, washed down by a glass of pale ale;
nay, if you be yet lower in pocket, and your available wealth be limited
to the possession of the modest and retiring penny, you may, at the
doors of most of the taverns, meet with an ancient dame, of unpretending
appearance, bearing a flat basket lined with a fair white cloth. She
for your penny will administer to you a brace of bones, covered with a
soft white integument, which she will inform you are “trotters.” There
is not much meat on them; but they are very toothsome and succulent. It
is no business of yours to inquire whether these be sheep’s trotters or
pigs’ trotters, or the trotters of corpulent rats or overgrown mice. They
are trotters. Look not the gift-horse in the mouth; for the penny was
perhaps a gift, however strictly you may have purchased the trotters.
Eat them, and thank heaven, and go thy ways, and take a cooling drink
at the nearest pump with an iron ladle chained to it, which is, if I am
not mistaken, over-against St. James’s Church in Piccadilly. Or, perhaps
you are fond of ham-sandwiches. The unpretending dame with the basket
will straightway vend you two slices of a pale substance, resembling in
taste and texture sawdust pressed into a concrete form, between which is
spread a veneer of inorganic matter, having apparently a strong affinity
to salted logwood. This is ham! The concrete sawdust is bread! The whole
is a sandwich! These luxuries are reckoned very nice by some persons, and
quite strengthening.

Or, “another way,” as old Mrs. Glasse says in her cookery book. At the
Coventry Street extremity of the Haymarket stands that celebrated and
long-established institution known as the Royal Albert Potato Can. At
that three-legged emporium of smoking vegetables, gleaming with block tin
painted red, and brazen ornaments, the humble pilgrim of the Haymarket
may halt and sup for a penny. For a penny? What say I? for a halfpenny
even, may the belated and impoverished traveller obtain a refreshment at
once warm, farinaceous, and nourishing. Garnish your potato, when the
Khan of the Haymarket has taken him from his hot blanket-bed, and cut
him in two—garnish him with salt and pepper, eschew not those condiments,
they are harmless, nay, stimulating; but ho! my son, beware of the
butter! it is confusion. Better a dry potato and a contented mind, than
dreadful Irish salt grease—for butter I dare not call it, which may give
you a bilious attack that will last for a month.

I should like to know what has been the use of my recommending these
various grades of supper to you, from the lordly Café de l’Europe to the
humble Potato Can, when I should have known all along, and as it were
intuitively, that your mind was bent upon oysters, and that oysters after
the play you were determined to have. Come along, then, a’ goodness’
name, and if oysters are to be the order of the night, e’en let us have
them.

The London oyster, or rather shell and cured fish shop, for the sale
of lobsters, crabs, pickled and kippered salmon, bloaters, and dried
sprats, is combined with that of the delicious molluscs of which so
many thousands are nightly consumed; the London oyster-shop, and
particularly the Haymarket one, stands, and is a thing apart, among
the notabilia of this metropolis. You know how the French eat oysters.
There is the _belle écaillère_, generally a hideous old woman of about
sixty, with a snuffy-looking pocket-handkerchief twisted round her
head, who sits at the _restaurant_ door amid a grove of oyster-shells
and hanks of straw, and, in the intervals of oyster-opening, darns
worsted stockings. The nimble _garçons_ come skipping from the gilded
saloons of the _restaurant_ within, and demand their required dozens and
half-dozens from the _écaillère_ without. The bearded frequenters of
the _restaurant_ evidently think it an epicurean and fashionable thing
to commence, or rather precede dinner, by swallowing so many oysters.
There are enterprising _bon vivants_ who will even go so far as their
two dozen: but I dissent from them, for three reasons: The first, that,
in my opinion, oysters should be eaten either alone—of themselves, by
themselves, or for themselves—or that they should be consumed full twenty
minutes before the repast; for the second, that all French oysters,
whether of Ostend, Maremnes, or Canale, are to me utterly abominable,
having—even when they are fresh, which is seldom—a certain coppery
flavour, superlatively nauseous; for the third, that in the best French
_restaurants_, it is difficult, if not impossible, to procure Cayenne
pepper; and, without that rubicund condiment, I would give no more for
the best “natives” than for a plate of cold boiled veal without salt. The
_écaillère_ element is the only one prevalent in France relative to the
sale of oysters, and the consumers pick them off the shells with little
silver pitchforks, squeeze lemon over them, and eat them daintily in many
mouthfuls. Fie upon such miminy-piminy ways! Oyster-shops the French
don’t seem to understand at all. At Chevet’s, that vast comestible shop
in the Palais Royal, they keep oysters, and lobsters, and prawns, and
shrimps—keep them as a show in the windows for a week or two, when, their
novelty beginning to wear off, they are disposed of, I presume, to the
nobility and gentry. They tell a story of a Frenchman, who hoarded up his
money, in order to purchase _un homard magnifique_, which he had seen at
Chevet’s, and to which he had taken a fancy.

[Illustration: MIDNIGHT: SUPPER-ROOMS IN THE HAYMARKET.]

Americans tell me that though the oyster attains high perfection,
and is held in culinary reverence as high, in the States, anything
resembling our Haymarket oyster-shop is not to be found in New York. But
on Broadway Pavement, during the gay night, brilliant lamps, sometimes
coloured in fantastic devices, invite you to enter underground temples
of oyster-eating. These are called oyster-cellars. Some are low and
disreputable enough, and not impassible to imputations of gouging,
bowie-kniving, and knuckle-dusting; but others are really magnificent
suites of apartments, decorated with mirrors and chandeliers, and glowing
with gilding, mahogany, and crimson velvet; and here you may consume
oysters as small as periwinkles or as large as cheese-plates—oysters
of strange and wondrous flavours—oysters with _bizarre_ and well-nigh
unpronounceable names—oysters cooked in ways the most marvellous and
multifarious: stewed, broiled, fried, scolloped, barbacued, toasted,
grilled, and made hot in silver chafing dishes like the delicious
preparation known as “despatch lobster.” You wash down suppers in
oyster-cellars such as these with Hock and Champagne; yet for all the
splendour and the rarity of the cooking, and the variety of oysters,
I will abide by the Haymarket oyster-shop, rude, simple, primitive as
it is, with its peaceful concourse of customers taking perpendicular
refreshment at the counter, plying the unpretending pepper-castor, and
the vinegar-cruet with the perforated cork, calling cheerfully for crusty
bread and pats of butter; and, tossing off foaming pints of brownest
stout, (pale ale—save in bottles, and of the friskiest description—is,
with oysters, a mistake) contentedly wipe their hands on the jack-towel
on its roller afterwards.

       *       *       *       *       *

As in this real life of ours, Old Age and Infancy often meet on neutral
ground, and the prattle of the child goes forth with hand out-stretched
to meet the graybeard’s maundering: so, oh reader, do I find the
beginning and the end of these papers drawing closer and closer together.
Ere many hours they will meet; and their conjunction shall be the signal
for their decay. You will remember how, when the day was very young,
the morning scarce swaddled, and kicking in his cradle with encrimsoned
heels (Aurora, the nurse, had chafed them), we visited a great newspaper
office, and saw the publication of the monster journal. Now, when
midnight itself is fallen into the sere and yellow, we stand once more
within the precincts of journalism. This is not, however, the monster
journal that has all Printing House Square to roar and rattle in. No:
our office is in the Strand. We are free of the charmed domains. We pass
up a narrow court running by the side of the office, push aside a heavy
door, ascend the creaking staircase, and discreetly tapping at a door,
this time covered with green baize, find ourselves in the presence of Mr.
Limberly, the sub-editor of the “Daily Wagon.”

Let us cast a glance round the room. What a litter it is in, to be
sure! what piles of newspapers, home and country ones, mangled and
disembowelled by the relentless scissors, cumber the floor! More
newspapers on shelves—old files, these—more on the table; letters
opened and unopened, wet proof-sheets, files of “copy,” books for
review, just sent by the publishers, or returned by the reviewers,
after they have duly demolished the contents and the authors. And all
about the room are great splashes and dried-up pools of ink, and the
ceiling is darkened with the smoke of innumerable candles—gas was, until
very lately, considered anything but orthodox in a newspaper office,
and many sub-editors still find its sharp, harsh, flickering, though
brilliant light, far inferior to the honest, though evil-smelling, old
tallow-candles, in their tin sconces and japanned shades. The “Daily
Wagon,” be it understood, is a newspaper of the good old Conservative
way of thinking—no Liberal notions, or humbug of that sort: Church
and State, strict constitutional and social discipline (including
game-laws, religious disabilities, church-rates, unequal taxation, rural
justices’ justice, and flogging in the army and schools)—the True Blue
British line of politics, in fact. Thus situated, the “Wagon,” one of
whose proprietors is said to be a peer, another a bishop, and a third
a brewer—nothing could be more respectable—sticks to its old office,
its old rooms, and its old staff. The two former have not been painted
within the memory of man; though it must be admitted that the latter
wash quite as frequently as the _employés_ of the “Morning Cracker,”
with its bran-new offices, its bran-new furniture, its bran-new type,
paper, machines, writers—bran-new everything but ideas. The “Daily
Wagoners” affect to sneer at the “Morning Cracker,” which, in its turn,
laughs the “Wagon” to scorn; but both combine in abusing the monster
journal of Printing House Square. “Wagoner” and “Cracker” are both
high-priced journals. So, of course, they both feel bound to ignore
even the existence of a journal called the “Daily Bombshell,” which
somehow manages to keep up a better staff of writers, and a larger
establishment, to give fresher news, more accurate intelligence, more
interesting correspondence, and reflections on public events incomparably
more powerful, than its high-priced contemporaries, all for the small
sum of one penny. The “Wagon” and the “Cracker” are in a chronic state
of rage at the “Bombshell,” though they pretend to ignore its existence;
but one day the bishop who is interested in the “Wagon,” hearing that
the circulation of the abhorred “Bombshell” exceeded fifty thousand,
while that of his own beloved journal fluctuated between five and seven
hundred, drove down in almost delirious excitement to the offices of the
“Wagon”—drove down in his own carriage, with his mitre on the panels—and
suggested to Mr. Fitzfluke, the editor, that the price of the paper
should forthwith come down to one penny. But Mr. Fitzfluke shook his
head in respectful deprecation of the proposition, and summoned to his
aid Mr. Limberly, who likewise shook his head, and whispered the magic
word “advertisements.” A grand consultation between the proprietors took
place next day, whereat the brewer came out in a rabidly conservative
point of view, and declared, striking a leathern-covered table, that he
would sooner see his own “Entire” retailed at a penny a pint, than submit
to an imitation in price of the “rubbishing prints” of a set of “dam
radicals.” So the “Daily Wagon” keeps up its price, and manages to crawl
on in a tortoise-like manner, supported by its advertisements. It sleeps
a good deal, and doesn’t want much to eat; and will bear being trodden
on, stumbled over, nay, occasionally jumped upon, without seeming in the
least to mind it.

[Illustration: MIDNIGHT: THE SUB-EDITOR’S ROOM.]

Mr. Limberly sits, then, in his sub-editorial throne—an unpretending
cane-bottomed arm-chair—surrounded by his _attachés_ and myrmidons, his
good men and true. The electric telegraph messenger—a spruce lad in the
not unbecoming uniform of that recently-formed corps—has just arrived,
bearing a message which may announce either war in the East or Peace in
China, either a fluctuation in the funds at St. Petersburg, or a murder
at Haverfordwest; either the wreck of a steamer, with all hands lost,
on the north-west coast of Ireland, or the arrival in the Mersey of a
clipper ship from Australia, with a few score thousand ounces of gold in
her treasure-room, to say nothing of the nuggets, the gold dust, and the
bankers’ receipts in the pockets of her wide-awake-hatted passengers.
But all is fish that comes to Mr. Limberly’s net. Leading article
and literary criticism, theatrical notices and prices of railway and
mining shares, advertisements and letters from eulogistic or indignant
correspondents, telegrams and foreign tittle-tattle, fires, murders,
fatal accidents, coroners’ inquests, enormous gooseberries, showers of
frogs, the acceptances of the St. Leger, and the prices of hops in the
Borough Market: he looks upon all these items but as so much “copy,”
for which the master printer is waiting, and which are required to fill
the ever-yawning columns of the “Daily Wagon.” Snipping and pasting,
extracting, excising, revising, and correcting, Mr. Limberly will work
late into the night and early into the morning; but he will not dream
of retiring to rest till the paper itself be “put to bed,”—_i.e._, laid
on the printing machine for the requisite number of copies to be struck
off; and even then he will probably go and smoke a cigar at the “Crimson
Hippopotamus,” in the Strand, hard by—the great house of call for morning
journalists—before he hails his matutinal cab, the driver of which waits
for him on the stand, and looks out for him quite as a regular customer,
and rattles over Waterloo Bridge to his well-deserved bed.




ONE O’CLOCK A.M.—EVANS’S SUPPER-ROOMS, AND A FIRE.


In the bleak, timbery city of Copenhagen, so terribly maltreated at the
commencement of the century by Admiral Lord Nelson, K.C.B.; in that
anything-but-agreeable capital of Denmark, where raw turnips sliced
in brandy form a favourite whet before dinner,—where they blacklead
(apparently) the stairs in the houses, and three-fourths of every
apartment are sacrificed to the preposterous exigencies of the Stove;
where the churches are mostly of wood, and the streets are paved with a
substance nearly resembling petrified kidney potatoes; in Copenhagen,
then, I formed, some thirty months since, a transient acquaintance with
an old gentleman in green spectacles. He was a Dane, formerly commercial,
now retired from business. He came every day, and with unvarying
regularity, to take his post-prandial coffee and _petit verre_ in the
_speise saal_ of the hotel then afflicted with my custom: he generally
indulged in the refreshment by dipping a large lump of sugar in the hot
liquid, sucking it, replenishing it, occasionally replacing the lump,
till the cup was emptied; and he snuffed eternally. These are not such
peculiar characteristics of a foreign gentleman that I have any special
cause to dwell upon them here; but as the hotel was very empty, and I
was very dull, I made this old gentleman—as my incorrigible habit is—a
study and a theme. I converted him into a mental clothes-prop, and hung
an infinity of fantastic notions, theories, and speculations upon him.
We soon became, thanks to the French language and constant proximity,
tolerably good friends. Of course the old gentleman did not delay long
in asking me why I had come to Copenhagen. _That_ question is invariably
asked you—_ad nauseam_, too—throughout the North of Europe. They begin
at Hamburg, continue at Berlin, return to it in Denmark and Sweden, and
end at St. Petersburg. If a man be not a commercial traveller, or a
diplomatist, a spy, or a negotiator of forged bank-notes, these Northern
people seem utterly bewildered as to his object in coming to such
latitudes. The Rhine, the Mediterranean, the Bosphorus, the Holy Land,
Switzerland, the Tyrol, good; but the North: _que diable!_ what does he
want in that galley? I confess that I was somewhat at a loss to give a
straightforward answer to the old gentleman in green spectacles. I might
have told him that I had come to see the birthplace of Hans Christian
Anderson; but then I was not quite certain as to whether that delightful
Danish writer first drew breath in Copenhagen. It would have been equally
disingenuous to have adduced a wish to see the famous Thorwaldsen’s
Museum as the reason for my visit; for with shame I acknowledge that,
having no guide-book with me, I had entirely forgotten that the Danish
metropolis contained that triumph of plastic art. It is true that, by
attentive study of the glorious museum, I subsequently atoned for my
mnemonic shortcomings. So, being on the horns of a dilemma, I elected to
tell the truth—not a bad plan under any circumstances—and said that I had
come to Copenhagen for the simple reason that I did not know what to do
with myself, and would have gone with equal alacrity to Nova Zembla or to
Katamandu; which candid avowal placed me on a most confidential footing
with the old gentleman in green spectacles, and materially assisted the
progress of our intercourse.

Now, whatever can this Danish old gentleman and his verdant spectacles
have to do with One o’Clock in the morning, and Evans’s Supper-rooms?
You must have patience, and you shall hear. In subsequent chatty
interviews, it came out that the old gentleman had once upon a time—a
very long while ago, more than a quarter of a century—been in England.
His reminiscences of our country were very dim and indistinct by this
time. His knowledge of the English language, I take it, had not at any
time been very extensive, and it was reduced now to a few phrases and
interjections; some trifling oaths, a few facetious party-cries, current,
I presume, at the time of his visit, and having, mainly, reference to
Catholic Emancipation and the Reform Bill; these, with some odds and
ends of tattered conversation, formed his philological stock in trade.
But, even as “single-speech Hamilton” had his solitary oration, Mrs.
Dubsy’s hen her one chick, and Major Panton his unique run of luck at the
card-table, so my old gentleman had his one story which he persisted in
delivering in English. It was a mysterious and almost incomprehensible
legend; and began thus: “’Ackney Rod! Aha!” Then he would snuff and suck
his lump of sugar, and I would look on wonderingly. Then he would explain
matters a little. “’Ackney Rod. I live there so long time ago. Aha!” This
would lead to a renewed series of snuffings and suckings, and he would
proceed—“Vontleroy he not ’ang. He rich man, banquier in America. He ’ang
in a sospender basket. Aha!” For the life of me, I could not for a long
time understand the drift about “Vontleroy” and the “sospender basket;”
but at length a light broke in upon me, and I began to comprehend that
this wondrous legend related to Henry Fauntleroy, the banker, who was
hanged at Newgate for forgery, and concerning whose apocryphal rescue
from strangulation—by the means, according to some, of a silver tube in
his windpipe, and, according to others, of an apparatus of wicker-work,
which, suspending him from the waist, so took the strain off his
neck—rumours were current at the time of his death and for a considerable
period afterwards. This cock-and-bull story was well-nigh all the poor
man could recollect about England, and he decidedly made the most of it.

And, after all, I have only introduced him as a species of
gentleman-usher to another foreign acquaintance—with whom my intercourse
was even more transient, for I met him but once in my life, and then
had only about seven minutes’ conversation with him on the deck of a
steamer—whose knowledge of English and recollection of England were even
more limited. “Ver fine place,” he remarked, referring to my native land.
“Moch night plaisir, London. Sing-song ver good. Ev’ns magnifique.”
There, the secret of my digression is out now, and I land you—somewhat
wearied with the journey, it may be—under the Piazza of Covent Garden
Market.

Mr. Charles Dickens once declared in print that were he to start a horse
for the Derby, he would call that horse Fortnum and Mason: the delightful
hampers of edibles and drinkables vended by that eminent firm about the
period of Epsom Races being connected with the most pleasurable of his
impressions concerning that exciting sporting event. I have no doubt
that my steamboat acquaintance was not by any means solitary in his
enthusiastic estimate of the “magnifique” nature of Ev’ns, or EVANS’S,
and its “sing-song;” and his opinion is, I have reason to believe,
shared by many hundreds of English country gentlemen who patronise the
Bedford, the Tavistock, the Hummums, and other kindred Covent Garden
hotels, and who at Evans’s find their heartiest welcome and their most
inexhaustible fund of amusement. Nor can I see myself, exactly, how this
great town of ours could manage to get on without the time-honoured Cave
of Harmony; for be it known to all men—at least to so many as do not know
it already—Evans’s, though Captain Costigan is no longer permitted to
sing his songs there, and even Colonel Newcome, were he to volunteer to
oblige the company with a song, would be politely requested to desist by
a waiter—is the “Cave,” and the “Cave” is Evans’s. It is not without a
certain sly chuckle of gratulation that I record this fact. Those friends
of mine who have adopted the highly honourable pursuit of hiding round
corners in order to throw, with the greater security, jagged stones at
me as I pass, those precious purists and immaculate precisians who cry
hard upon a writer on London life in the nineteenth century, because he
describes things and places which every man knows to exist, and whose
existence he for one has not the hypocrisy to deny—these good gentlemen
will scarcely be angry with their poor servant, Scriblerus, for giving a
word-picture of a place of amusement which is immortalised in the first
chapter of “The Newcomes.” And please to observe, gentlemen, that I am
not about to venture on the very delicate ground with respect to the
quality of the songs once sung at Evans’s, and so boldly trodden by Mr.
Thackeray. I have the less need to do so, as that delicate or indelicate
ground has long since—and to the honour of the present proprietor, Mr.
Green—been ploughed up and sown with salt, and the musical programme
rendered as innocuous as the bill of fare of a festival in a cathedral
town.

And now for the place itself. About a century since, when the shadowy
hero of the “Virginians” was beating the town with my Lords Castlewood
and March, and Parson Sampson, and his black man Gumbo was flirting with
Colonel Lambert’s servant-maids; about a century since, when in reality
Johnson—not so long since emancipated from sleeping on bulks with that
other homeless wretch, and man of genius, Savage—was painfully finishing
his gigantic work, the “Dictionary;” when Goldsmith was “living in Axe
Lane among the beggars,” or starving in Green Arbour Court; when honest
Hogarth dwelt at the sign of the Golden Head, in Leicester Fields (he
had set up his coach by this time, worthy man, was Serjeant-painter to
the King, and had his country-house at Chiswick); when the wicked, witty
Wilkes was carousing with other “choice spirits” as wicked and as witty
as he, at Medmenham Abbey; when the furious Churchill was astonishing
the town with his talent and his excesses; when Lawrence Sterne was yet
fiddling, and painting, and preaching, while his friend Hall indited the
“Crazy Tales;” when George II., hitherto considered as a heavy, morose
German king, who did not like “boetry and bainting,” and could not see
the fun of the “March to Finchley,” but now for the first time revealed
to us by Mr. Carlyle as a dapper, consequential little coxcomb—the “_mein
bruder der comödiant_,” “my brother the playactor” of Friedrich-Wilhelm,
was Sovereign of Great Britain, by the grace of the Act of Settlement
and the madness of the Stuarts—this town of London was full of choice
holes and corners, known under the generic name of “night cellars.” You
may see in Liverpool to this day—and I am told, also, in New York—some
flourishing specimens of these inviting localities, but they have
almost died out in London. The White Horse Cellar in Piccadilly is now
a booking-office; the Shades in Leicester Square (underneath Saville
House), once Pennant’s “pouting house for princes,” is a _restaurant_;
the cellar of the Ship at Charing Cross is yet a tavern, but is used
more as a waiting-room for passengers by the Kent Road and Deptford
omnibuses; and a whole nest of cellars were swept away by the Adamses
when the Adelphi Terrace, with a worse range of cellars beneath, as
it afterwards turned out, was constructed. But the night cellars of a
hundred years ago! What dens, what sinks, what roaring saturnalia of
very town scoundrelism they must have been! We have but two reliable
authorities extant as to their manners and appearance: Hogarth’s prints,
and the pages of the Old Bailey Sessions Papers. The former are the
engraven testimony of a man to whose honest nature it was utterly
abhorrent and intolerable to bear false witness; the latter is a record
that _cannot lie_. I don’t mean by these Sessions Papers the collection
of trials known as the “Newgate Calendar.” In these, crimes are dressed
up with all manner of romantic and adventitious details, and occasionally
spiced with moral reflections by the ordinary of Newgate. I mean the
real Sessions Papers, the _verbatim_ reports of the trials—from murder
to pot-stealing—taken officially in short-hand by the Gurneys and their
predecessors, and which, in their matchless _extenso_, remain, to the
inestimable advantage of our historians and our painters of manners. They
date from the time of Judge Jeffreys, to the last session of the Central
Criminal Court—it may have been the day before yesterday.

The cellars come out with a perfectly livid radiance in the reports of
these trials. You see the “brimstone” woman, whom Hogarth pointed out
to his friend and sketched upon his thumbnail, spurting brandy from her
mouth at the enraged virago her companion. You see Kate Hackabout passing
the stolen watch to Tom Idle, who is under the unseen surveillance of
one of Justice de Veil or Harry Fielding’s runners, and the luckless
Thomas will be laid by the heels by daybreak to-morrow. Kate will go to
Bridewell, there to be whipped and to pick oakum. Foote’s Mother Cole
is here, you may be sure; and Tom Rakewell, spending his last guineas
among the gamblers and ruffians. Who else are there? Ferdinand Count
Fathom, you may sure; poets and hack-writers—for Grub Street existed then
in spirit and in truth—making my lord’s gold pieces, which he gave for
that last foolishly-fulsome dedication, fly. Yes; Mr. Peregrine Pickle,
and you are spending your night in the cellar. And Mr. Thomas Jones,
fresh from the western counties,—you, too, are here, with a laced coat
bought out of my Lady Bellaston’s last bank-note. Ah! Thomas! Thomas!
if pure-minded Sophy Western could but see you in this bad place, among
these ruffianly companions!—among horse-jockeys, highwaymen-captains,
unfrocked parsons; deboshed adventurers, redolent of twopenny ordinaries
and Mount Scoundrel in the Fleet; disbanded lieutenants of phantom
regiments; scriveners struck off the rolls, ruined spendthrifts,
Irish desperadoes enthusiastic for the Pretender and other men’s
pence, bankrupt traders, French and Italian rascals flagrant from the
galleys of foreign seaports, and all, according to their own showing,
distressed patriots; German swindlers and card-sharpers, who declare
themselves to be Counts of the Holy Roman Empire, Jew coin-clippers and
diamond-slicers, riverside vagabonds in the pay of the commanders of
press-gangs on the look-out for benighted journeymen, or dissolute lads
who have run away from their apprenticeship or quarrelled with their
parents, recruiting crimps for both sexes, usurers looking for prodigals
who have yet money to lose, bailiffs’ followers looking for prodigals
who have lost all and owe more; and, scattered among all this scum of
frantic knavery and ragabosh, some gay young sprigs of aristocracy, some
officers in the regiment of Guards, some noisy young country squires of
the Western type. This, all garnished with dirt and spilt liquors, with
the fumes of mum, Geneva, punch, wine, and tobacco smoke, with oaths
and shrieks and horrid songs, with the clatter of glasses and tankards,
the clash of rapiers and verberations of bludgeons—is the London night
cellar of a hundred years ago. Round Covent Garden such places positively
swarmed. The Strand, the neighbourhood of Exeter ’Change, Long Acre, and
Drury Lane, reeked with dens of this description. For hereabouts were
the playhouses, and in their purlieus, as in those of cathedrals, you
must expect to find, and do find, in every age, the haunts of vice and
dissipation. It may be profane to say _ubi apis ibi mel_: but such is the
sorry fact.

I am to give you notice that this article was originally intended
to be intensely topographical—nay, _sant soit peu_, antiquarian and
archæological. It was my desire to give you a minute description of the
hostelry called Evans’s Hotel, and whose basement contains the saloon
known as Evans’s supper-room, from the earliest period of authentic
research to the present time. How it emerged from a state of brawling
night-cellarhood, to the dignity of a harmonic meeting; who first ordered
“chops to follow,” and what ingenious spirit originally suggested the
curious principle now in practice, of paying for your refreshment at
the door on quitting the establishment; who instituted the glee-choir,
introduced books of the words, and discovered that baked potatoes are
necessarily associated with bumpers of stout, poached eggs, and liberally
cayenned kidneys; who formed the gallery of portraits which now graces
the walls of the ante-saloon, and who first dreamed of such an Arabian
Night’s succedaneum as a ladies’ gallery. All these things it was my
firm intention to record, in Roman type, for your amusement, if not
your edification. “Who knows,” I asked myself enthusiastically, “if I
take sweet counsel (hot and strong as well as sweet, sometimes) of Mr.
Paddy Green, most urbane of nocturnal Bonifaces, and sit reverentially
at the feet of Mr. Peter Cunningham, who, it is rumoured, in the matter
of London localities, could, an he chose, rival the marvellous feat
of memory ascribed to old Fuller of the ‘Worthies,’ who could repeat
backwards, and without book, the names of all the tavern signs on both
sides of the way from Temple Bar to Ludgate: who knows,” I repeated,
“but that I shall be able to submit to the readers of ‘Twice Round the
Clock,’ a copy of an unpaid score left by Oliver Goldsmith at some
Evans’s of the past; or put it upon record that Sir Thomas Lawrence and
Major Hanger had claret-cup together here, on the night that Thurtell was
hanged, or that on the fatal evening when the Catholic Bill passed the
Lords, a live bishop—a hackney coachman’s many-caped coat over his apron
and shorts—descended Evans’s well-worn stairs, ordered a Welsh rabbit,
partook of two ‘stouts,’ and, the tears coursing down his right reverend
cheeks, murmured—‘Britain! oh my country! _Delenda est Carthago!_’ by
way of chorus to Captain Costigan’s favourite ditty of ‘The Night before
Larry was stretched?’”

In the famous gardens of the Villa Pallavicini, near Genoa, there is an
artificial piece of water winding between rocks, at the extremity of
which the mimic river seems to lose itself in the blue waters of the
Mediterranean. Nothing of the sort is the case: the sea is, in reality,
more than three hundred yards distant; but the intervening ground has
been so dexterously sloped and masked with groups of plants, that the
optical delusion is marvellous. Of such are the aspirations of mankind.
In such disappointment ended my castles in the air with respect to
Evans’s. It was from across the ocean that I had to respond to the
printers’ wail for “copy:” this article was commenced in view of the
Castle of Rolandseck, on board a Rhine steamer, whose worn-out engines
throbbed as irregularly as though they had palpitation of the heart. It
is being continued now at the sea-side, in bed, gruel on the one side,
sweet spirits of nitre on the other: and where it will be finished,
who can tell? Old Æsop told the soldiers, when they asked him whither
he was going, that he did not know, whereupon they arrested him for an
impertinent. “Was I not right?” he cried; “did I know that I was going
to jail?” “_Sait on où l’on va?_” echoes Diderot. How do I, how do you,
how does your lordship, how does your grace, how does your majesty,
know what will happen the moment after this? Therefore, take heed of the
present time, and make your wills: the best will, in my humble thinking,
that a man can make, being that strong will and determination to act as
justly as he can in each moment in the which he is permitted to live.

So you understand, now, why I was compelled to dispense with the
assistance of Mr. Paddy Green and Mr. Peter Cunningham, and why I am
reduced to a dependence on my own personal reminiscences with respect
to Evans’s, without the adventitious aid of recondite anecdote and
historical data. Here is the place as I remember it.

One o’clock in the morning. Of course we are supposed to be spending
just a fortnight in town, and putting up at the Bedford, or it would
never do to be so early-late abroad. We have been to the play, and have
consumed a few oysters in the Haymarket; but the principal effect of
that refreshment seems to have been to make us ten times hungrier. The
delicate bivalves of Colchester have failed in appeasing our bucolic
stomachs. We require meat. So, says the friend most learned in the ways
of the town to his companion—“Meat at our hotel we eschew, for we shall
find the entertainment of the dearest and dullest. We will go sup at
Evans’s, for there we can have good meat and good liquor at fair rates,
and hear a good song besides.” Whereupon we walk, till the piazza, about
which I have kept you so long lingering, looms in sight. A low doorway,
brilliantly lit with gas, greets our view. We descend a flight of some
steps, pass through a vestibule, and enter the “Cave of Harmony.”

Push further on, if you please. You are not to linger in this
ante-chamber, thickly hung with pictures, and otherwise, with its
circular marble tables, much resembling a Parisian _café_, minus the
mirrors and the rattle of the dominoes. This ante-chamber will be treated
of anon; but your present business is with chops and harmony.

Passing, then, through this _atrium_, the visitor finds himself in a
vast music-hall, of really noble proportions, and decorated not only
with admirable taste, but with something nearly akin to splendour. You
see I am at a loss for authorities again, and I cannot tell you how much
of the hall is Corinthian, and how much composite; whether the columns
are fluted, the cornices gilt or the soffits carved, and whether the
Renaissance or the Arabesque style most prevails in the decorations
employed. All I know is, that it is a lofty, handsome, comfortable room,
whose acoustic properties, by the way, are far superior to those enjoyed
by some establishments with loftier philharmonic pretensions. At the
northern extremity of the hall is a spacious proscenium and stage, with
the grand pianoforte _de rigueur_, the whole veiled by a curtain in
the intervals of performance. As for the huge area stretching from the
proscenium to a row of columns which separate it from the ante-chamber
_café_, it is occupied by parallel lines of tables, which, if they do not
groan beneath the weight of good eatables and drinkables piled upon them,
might certainly be excused for groaning—to say nothing of shrieking,
yelling, and uttering other lamentable noises, evoked by the unmerciful
thumping and hammering they undergo at the conclusion of every fresh
exercitation of harmony.

Still, the eatables and drinkables do merit a paragraph, and shall have
one. To the contemplative mind they are full of suggestions, and evidence
of the vast digestive powers of the English people. To any but a race of
hardy Norsemen, sons of Thor and Odin, hammerers of steel, welders of
iron, and compellers of adverse elements, men who are sometimes brought
to live when on shipboard upon weevily biscuit that breaks the teeth, and
salted leather, humorously nicknamed beef; or in trenches, upon rancid
pork, toasted on bayonet or ramrod tips; to any but that unconquerable,
hard-headed, and strong-stomached people, of whom it is sometimes said
that they would eat a donkey if they were allowed to begin at the hind
legs, this post-midnight repast at Evans’s would be full of menace of
perturbed slumbers, distraught dreams, nay, even ghastly nightmares. Your
Frenchman, when he sups, takes his cold salad, his appetising fruit,
his succulent partridge, his light omelette, or, at most, his thin weak
_bouillon_, with a lean cutlet to follow. He drinks sugar-and-water,
wine-and-water, or, on high holiday nights, a glass or two of champagne;
puffs his mild cigars, and goes to bed, simpering that he has _bien
soupé_. And even then, sometimes, your Frenchman has dreams, and rising
in bed, with the hair of his flesh standing up, vows that he will sup no
more. Your Italian sups on his three-halfpennyworth of maccaroni. Your
Spaniard rubs a piece of bread with garlic, and eats it, blesses heaven,
and goes to sleep with a cigarette in his mouth. Your gross German
affects the lighter kind of cold meats and salads at supper, and washes
down his spare repast—to be sure, it is the fourth within the twelve
hours—with some frothy beer. The Americans can’t be said to sup, any
more than they breakfast, lunch, or dine. They are always over-eating,
over-drinking, and over-smoking themselves; and were it not for their
indomitable pluck and perseverance, their tendency to dyspepsia would be
an insurmountable obstacle to their ever becoming a great people. _For
the great peoples have always had strong stomachs._ Homer’s heroes ate
beef undone. When the Romans took to made-dishes and kick-shaws, then
came their decadence, and the strong-stomached barbarians of the North
overran them. To make an end of foreign wanderings, Russian suppers,
among the people, are just no suppers at all. One—or at most two—meals
a day, is the rule with the moujik. In elegant society, the cook might
as well provide for supper painted chickens and lobster salads made
of sealing-wax and cut paper, as any genuine viands. A supper at St.
Petersburg, means champagne and gambling till the next morning.

But see the suppers set forth for the strong-stomached supporters of
Evans’s. See the pyramids of dishes arrive; the steaming succession of
red-hot chops, with their brown, frizzling caudal appendages sobbing
hot tears of passionate fat. See the serene kidneys unsubdued, though
grilled, smiling though cooked, weltering proudly in their noble gravy,
like warriors who have fallen upon the field of honour. See the hot
yellow lava of the Welsh rabbit stream over and engulf the timid toast.
Sniff the fragrant vapour of the corpulent sausage. Mark how the russet
leathern-coated baked potato at first defies the knife, then gracefully
cedes, and through a lengthened gash yields its farinaceous effervescence
to the influence of butter and catsup. The only refreshments present open
to even a suspicion of effeminacy are the poached eggs, glistening like
suns in a firmament of willow-pattern plate; and those too, I am willing
to believe, are only taken by country-gentlemen hard pressed by hunger,
just to “stay their stomachs,” while the more important chops and kidneys
are being prepared. The clouds of pepper shaken out on these viands are
enough to make Slawkenbergius sneeze for a fortnight; the catsup and
strong sauces poured over them are sufficient to convince Sir Toby Belch
that there are other things besides ginger, which are apt to be “hot
i’ the mouth,” and, as humble servitors in attendance on these haughty
meats, are unnumbered discs of butter, and manchets of crustiest bread
galore.

[Illustration: ONE O’CLOCK A.M.: EVANS’S SUPPER-ROOMS.]

Pints of stout, if you please, no puny half-measures, pints of sparkling
pale ale, or creaming Scotch, or brownest Burton, moisten these sturdy
rations. And when the strong men have supped, or rather before they
have supped, and while they have supped, and indeed generally during
the evening, there bursts out a strong smell of something good to
drink; and presently you perceive that the strong men have ordered
potent libations of spirituous liquors, hot whiskey-and-water being the
favourite one; and are hastily brewing mighty jorums of punch and grog,
which they undoubtedly quaff; puffing, meanwhile, cigars of potency and
fragrance—pipes are tabooed—taken either from their own cigar-cases, or
else recently laid in from the inexhaustible stores of the complaisant
Herr von Joel.

“Who will always be retained on this establishment,” the proprietor
good-naturedly promises, and more good-naturedly performs. “Why,” asks
the neophyte, “is it necessary for my well-being, or the prosperity of
this establishment, that the services of Herr von Joel should always be
retained thereon? Why this perpetual hypothecation of Joel? Can no one
else sell me cigars? What am I to Joel, or what is Joel to me? Confound
Joel!” To which I answer: “Rash neophyte, forbear, and listen. In the
days when thou wert very young and foolish, wore lay-down collars,
and had no moustaches, save the stickiness produced by much-sucked
sweetstuff on the upper lips—in the days when thou wert familiar, indeed,
with Doctor Wackerbarth’s seminary for young gentlemen, but not with
Evans’s—Herr von Joel, young and sprightly then, was a famous Mimic.
In imitating the cries of birds, Herr von Joel was unrivalled, and has
never been approached. In the old days, when he was famous, and did
the lark and the linnet so well, he brought crowds of visitors to the
old supper-rooms, who laughed and wondered at his mimicry, supped and
drank, and smoked, and paid fat scores. So Joel, in his generation, was
a benefactor to Evans’s. And now, when the thorax is rusty, and the
larynx no longer supple, the faithful servant rests upon “his well-earned
laurels”—of tobacco-leaves—among the old faces of old friends. “His
helmet is a hive for bees”—and Havannah cigars, and “his services will
always be retained in this establishment.” One would shudder to think
of Wellington’s old charger, Copenhagen, being sent to Cow Cross, to
the knackers, instead of ending his days peacefully in a paddock at
Strathfieldsaye. No one likes to hear of Sophie Arnould or Mademoiselle
Camargo (the ballet-dancer who introduced short petticoats) being brought
to indigence in their declining years. Guilbert in the hospital, Camöens
starving, blind Belisarius begging for an obolus, these are pitiable; and
to this day I think the country might have done something for the widow
of Ramo Samee. We give pensions to the families of those who use their
swords well, but I should like to know how many can swallow them as Ramo
did?

All the while the company have been supping and I have been prosing,
the “Cave of Harmony” has not belied its name. A bevy of fresh-coloured
youths, of meagre stature, of curly hair, in broad collars and round
jackets, such as distinguished you and me, neophyte, when we were pupils
at Dr. Wackerbarth’s, have made themselves manifest on the stage, and
in admirable time and tune have chanted with their silver-bell voices
those rare old glees which were written by the honest old masters before
the Father of Evil had invented Signor Guiseppe Verdi. Thersites Theorbo
(who is an assiduous frequenter of the Cave at hours when men of not
so transcendent a genius are in bed) Thersites Theorbo, down yonder in
the _café_ ante-saloon, glowering over his grog, cannot forbear beating
time and wagging his august head approvingly when he hears the little
boys sing. May their pure harmony do the battered old cynic good! Honest
old glees! though your composers wore pigtails and laced ruffles. And
none the worse, either, because we owe some of the most beautiful of
them to an Irish nobleman. Do you know who that nobleman was? Go ask Mr.
Thackeray, who, in an absurd copy of verses, written in barbarous Cockney
slang, has brought the “unaccustomed brine” to these eyes many and many a
time. He describes a stately lady sitting by an open window, beside the
“flowing Boyne,” with a baby on her lap. It is a man child, and not far
off is the father,

    “... Most musical of Lords,
    A playing madrigals and glees
    Upon the harpsichords.”

And this child’s father was old Lord Mornington, whose son was Arthur,
Duke of Wellington.

If you scrutinise the faces of these juvenile choristers somewhat
narrowly, and happen yourself to be a tolerably regular attendant at the
abbey church of St. Peter’s, Westminster, it is not at all improbable
that you may recognise one or two young gentlemen whom, arrayed in snowy
surplices, you may have heard trilling forth in shrill notes their parts
of the service among the gentlemen choristers and minor canons of the
Abbey. I wonder if it is very wicked for them to be found at Evans’s
thus late. I don’t mean at one o’clock in the morning, for they mostly
disappear about midnight. Perhaps not so wicked, for I know there are
some people so very religious that they only think of religion on
Sundays; and fancy that week-day transactions can’t have the slightest
connection with the Sabbath. However this may be, I must mention it as
a curious fact in relation with the moral economy of Evans’s, that in
the old days, when Captain Costigan or one of his peers, was about to
sing anything approaching to a _chanson grivoise_, the juveniles were
invariably marched out of the room by a discreet waiter, in order that
their young ears might not be contaminated.

With respect to the remaining harmonic attractions of Evans’s, I shall
be very brief. I believe that on some evenings individuals of the
Ethiopian way of thinking, and accoutred in the ordinary amount of
lamp-black, Welsh wig, and shirt-collars, and provided with the usual
banjo, accordion, tambourine, and bones, are in the habit of informing
the audience that things in general are assuming an appearance of “Hoop
de dooden do;” also of lamenting the untimely demise of one Ned, an
aged blackamoor, who stood towards them in an avuncular relation, and
of passionately demanding the cause of their master effecting the sale
of their persons, by auction or otherwise, on the day on which they
entered into the state of matrimony. I am given to understand that a
gentleman with an astonishing falsetto voice is a great favourite among
the _habitués_, and that some screaming comic songs by popular vocalists
are nightly given with immense applause; but I candidly confess that I am
not qualified to speak with any great degree of certitude with respect to
these performances. I go to Evans’s generally very late, and as seldom
venture close to the proscenium. I am content to bide in the ante-saloon,
and to muse upon Thersites Theorbo, glowering over his grog.

This iracund journalist—to borrow an epithet from Mr. Carlyle—is not by
any means solitary in his patronage of the marble-tabled, portrait-hung
_café_. To tell the honest truth, as, in Paris, if you wish to see the
actors in vogue, you must go to the Café du Vaudeville—if the authors,
to the Café Cardinal or the Café du Helder—if the artists, to the Café
des Italians—if the students, to the Café Belge—and if the dandies,
to the Café de Paris; so in London, if you wish to see the wits and
the journalist men about town of the day, you must go to Evans’s about
one o’clock in the morning. Then those ineffables turn out of the
smoking-rooms of their clubs—clique-clubs mostly—and meet on this neutral
ground to gird at one another. _Autres temps, autres mœurs._ A century
since it used to be Wills’s or Button’s, or the Rose; now it is Evans’s.
I should dearly like to draw some pen-and-ink portraits for you of the
wits as they sit, and drink, and smoke, at one o’clock in the morning;
but I dare not. As for Thersites Theorbo, he is a shadow. You know what
I told you about clubs; and this place also is a prison-house to me. It
is true, Heaven help me, that I am not affiliated to witcraft myself,
that I am neither priest nor deacon. Still I have been one of the little
boys in red cassocks, who swing the censers, and I dare not reveal the
secrets of the sacristy. But I may just whisper furtively in your ear,
that Ethelred Guffoon is never seen at Evans’s. It makes his head ache.
Mr. Goodman Twoshoes, also, is but a seldom visitor to the Cave of
Harmony. He prefers his snug corner-box at the Albion, where he can brew
his beloved ginger-punch. It is not that the wits despise the “Cave.” Mr.
Polyphemus, the novelist, not unfrequently condescends to wither mankind
through his spectacles from one of the marble tables; and I have seen the
whole “Times” newspaper—proprietors, editors, special correspondents, and
literary critics—hob-nobbing together at—— _Will_ you hold your tongue,
sir?

One trifling indiscretion more, and I have done with Evans’s. “It is not
generally known,” as accurate, erudite, and amusing Mr. John Timbs would
say, that the sly gallantry of Mr. Green, the proprietor of the Cave of
Harmony, caused him, when his new and sumptuous music-hall was in course
of construction, to move the architect to build some cunning loop-holes
and points of espial connected with commodious apartments—in other words,
with private boxes, somewhat resembling the _baignoires_ in the Parisian
theatres, whence ladies could see and hear all that was going on without
being seen or heard. A somewhat similar contrivance exists, it will be
remembered, in our House of Commons; I only wish that the fair ones who
there lie _perdues_ during a late debate, were doomed to hear as little
trash as meets their ears from the secluded bowers overhanging Evans’s.
What passport is required to ensure admission into these blissful regions
I know not; but I have it on good authority that ladies of the “very
highest rank and distinction”—to use a “Morning Postism”—have on several
occasions graced Evans’s with their presence, and with condescending
smiles looked down upon the revelries of their lords.

       *       *       *       *       *

Tell me, you who are so quick of hearing, what is that noise above
our heads—it must be in the street beyond—and which dominates the
revelry as the sound of the cannon did the music of the Duchess of
Richmond’s ball before Quatre Bras. It grows louder and louder, it
comes nearer and nearer, it swells into a hoarse continually-jarring
roar, as I sit smoking at Evans’s. The sham blackamoor on the stage
pauses in his buffoonery, forbears to smite his woolly pate with the
tambourine; his colleague’s accordion is suspended in the midst of a
phthisic wheeze, and the abhorred bones quiver, yet unreverberate in
the nicoto-alcholoicho-charged air. The rattle of knives and forks, the
buzzing conversation, cease; a hundred queries as to the cause of the
noise rise on as many lips; the waiters forget to rattle the change,
the toper forgets to sip his grog: there is intromission even in the
inspiration of tobacco fumes: then comes the mighty answer—comes at once
from all quarters—caught up, echoed and re-echoed, and fraught with
dread, the momentous word—FIRE!

Man, it has been somewhere pertinently observed, is a hunting animal. The
delight in having something to run after: whether it be a pickpocket,
who has just eloped with a watch or a silk handkerchief; a dog with a
kettle tied to his tail, a hare, a deer, a woman, a fugitive hat, a
slaver, a _prima donna_, a lord’s tuft, an oriental traveller, a deformed
dwarf—something to chase, something to scour and scud after, something
to run down, and ultimately devour and destroy: such a pursuit enlivens
and comforts the heart of man, and makes him remember that he has the
blood of Nimrod in his veins. The schoolboys at Eton have their “paper
chases,” and course miles through the pleasant playing-fields, crossing
brooks, and tearing through hedges, after a quire of foolscap torn up
into shreds. The child chases a butterfly; the adult exhausts himself and
his horse in racing after a much-stinking fox; and the octogenarian frets
his palsied old limbs, and bursts into a feverish snail’s gallop, after
a seat on the Treasury Bench, or a strip of blue velvet embroidered with
“_honi soit qui mal y pense_” in gold, and called a garter. There is a
wild, engrossing excitement and pleasure in hunting; the fox-hound, the
otter, the “harmless necessary cat,” would tell you so, were their speech
articulate; but of all things huntable, chasable, rundownable, I doubt if
there be one that can equal a Fire.

“Fire! fire!” It matters not how late the hour be, how important the
avocations of the moment, that magic cry sets all legs, save those of
the halt and the bed-ridden, in motion—strikes on every tympanum. “Fire!
fire!” as the sound rolls earwards, the gambler starts up from the
dicing-table, the bibber leaves the wine-pots, the lover rises from his
mistress’s feet, the blushing maiden forgets half of that last glowing
declaration, the captive runs to his grated window, the sluggard sits
up on his couch, the sick man turns his head on his pillow to whence
issues the portentous cry. Hundreds of impulses are bound up in the
uncontrollable desire that prompts us to run at once after the “Fire!”
Fear: it may be our own premises that are blazing, our own dear ones that
are in peril. Hope and cupidity: we may be rogues, and there may be rich
plunder from a fire. Duty: we may be policemen, firemen, or newspaper
reporters. Generous emulation, brave self-devotion: there may be lives
at stake and lives to save. Curiosity: it is as good to see a house
burned (when it doesn’t happen to be your own) as a bear baited or a man
hanged. All these may prompt us to follow the howl of the fire-dogs; but,
chiefest of all, is the vague, indefinite, yet omnipotent desire to swell
a pursuing crowd, to join in a hue and cry, to press to the van of the
chasers: to hunt something, in fact.

I never could understand where a London crowd comes from. Be the hour
ever so late, were the street ever so deserted a moment before, a man
quarrelling with his wife, or cry of Fire, will be sufficient to evoke
the presence of a compact and curious crowd, growing instantaneously
thicker and noisier. Whether they start from the sewers or the
cellar-gratings, or drop from the chimney-pots or the roof-copings,
is indeterminate; yet they gather somehow, and jostle, squeeze, yell,
stamp, and tear furiously. No conscription, no mustering of the _posse
comitatis_, no summoning of ban and _arrière_ ban, no “call of the
House,” no sending forth of the “fiery cross,” no beacon signalling, no
Vehmgericht convening under penalty of the cord and dagger, could be
half so successful in calling multitudes together as the one word—FIRE!
A minute past, I was at Evans’s, tranquilly conversing with the veteran
Herr von Joel, and now I find myself racing like mad up St. Martin’s
Lane, towards St. Giles’s. How I found my hat and donned it I haven’t
the slightest idea, and I sincerely hope that I didn’t forget to pay the
waiter for my chop, kidney, stout, and etceteras. All I know is, that
I am running after that hoarse cry, and towards that awful Redness in
the sky; that I tread upon unnumbered corns; that I hold cheap as air,
innumerable punches and thrusts which I receive from my neighbours; and
that I will not by any means undertake to make oath that I am not myself
also vociferating, “Fire! Fire!” with the full strength of my lungs.

I thought so. There goes the “Country Fire Office.” There it goes,
dashing, rattling, blazing along—only the very strongest adjective,
used participle-wise, can give a notion of its bewildering speed—there
it goes, with its strong, handsome horses, champing, fuming, setting
the pavement on fire with their space-devouring hoofs, and seeming to
participate in the fire-hunting mania. They need no whip; only the
voices of the firemen, clustering on the engine like bees, the loose
rattle of the reins on their backs, and the cheers of the accompanying
crowd. The very engine, burnished and glistening, flashing and blushing
in its scarlet and gold in the gaslight, seems imbued with feeling,
and scintillating with excitement—(Oh! critics of fishy blood, oyster
temperament, and tortoise impulses, pardon my heedless exuberance of
epithet)—so gleaming and glittering, and its catherine-like wheels
revolving, and the moon just tipping the burnished helmets and hatchets
of the fire-men, who will have a ruddy glare on those accoutrements
shortly, goes screaming through the night, the County Fire-engine. The
Northern Express blazing over Chatmoss at speed is a terrible sight
to see: that fiery messenger has subdued the wilderness, and made the
waste places, whilom the haunts of bats and dragons, tremble; but the
fast-tearing fire-engine is nobler and more Human. It cleaves its
way through the sleeping city; it bears the tidings of succour and
deliverance. Yon express-train may convey but a company of chapmen and
pedlars, thirsting to higgle in the cheapest so that they may haggle in
the dearest market; but the five-engine is freighted with brave manly
hearts, braced—with little lust of lucre, God knows! for their pay is but
a pittance—to the noble task of saving human life. That they do so save
it, almost every night throughout the year, save it in the midst of peril
to their own, in the ever-imminent peril of a sudden, hideous, unrewarded
death, Mr. Braidwood and the fire companies know full well. That the best
of the young British painting men, John Everett Millais, should have
chosen the every-day, but none the less glorious, heroism of a fireman
for the theme of a magnificent picture, is good to know; and the very
thought of the picture goes far towards making us forgive the painter
for his asinine “Sir Isumbrasse,” or whatever the abortion was called;
but it would be better if the knowledge of our firemen’s good deservings
were extended beyond Mr. Braidwood and the fire companies. The deeds of
those plain men with the leathern helmets and the trusty hatchets, have
received neither their full meed of praise, nor a tithe of their meed of
reward. I have yet to hear of the Fireman’s Order of Valour; I have yet
to learn that our bounteous Government, so prompt to recognise diplomatic
demerit, to reward political worthlessness, and to ennoble military
failure, have thought it worth their while to bestow even the minutest
modicum of a pension on a fireman. To be sure, these worldly, unwise men,
are, for their own interests’ sake, disastrously and inexcusably modest,
unobtrusive, and retiring. There is no trumpeter attached _ex-officio_
to the fire brigade. Would you believe it, that these unambitious men,
their glorious labours over, are content to retire to the sheds where
their engines stand at livery, where they eat bread-and-cheese with clasp
knives, read cheap newspapers, and teach tricks to their dogs? Their
principal recreation is to scrub, polish, tickle, and frictionise the
brass and wood work of the fire-engines to a Dutch pitch of cleanliness,
and they are much given, I am sorry to say, to the smoking of long clay
pipes. This is, in itself, sufficient to ruin them in the estimation of
such sages and public benefactors as ex-Lord Mayor Garden. Let us hope
that it is not his ex-Lordship’s house that is being burned down this
November morning.

[Illustration: ONE O’CLOCK A.M.: A FIRE.]

No—the fire is in the very thickest part of St. Giles’s. Unfaithful
topographers may have told you that the “Holy Land” being swept away and
Buckeridge Street being pulled down, St. Giles’s exists no more. _Ne’n
croyez rien._ The place yet lives—hideous, squalid, decrepit—yet full
of an unwholesome vitality. Splendid streets have been pierced through
the heart of this region—streets full of mansions four and six storeys
high—affluent tradesmen display their splendid wares through glistening
plate-glass windows. But St. Giles’s is behind, round about, environing
the new erections, sitting like Mordecai in the gate on the threshold of
the brick and mortar and stucco palaces with which cunning contractors
and speculative builders have sought to disguise the most infamous
district in London. The proof of what I have asserted is very easy. You
have but to be invited to dinner in Gower Street, or to have a morning
call to make in Bedford Square. Take a walk from young Mr. Barry’s
bran-new opera-house in Bow Street, and walk straight a-head—nearly a
measured mile to the Square of Bedford. You pass the gigantic carriage
factory, which I will call by its ancestral name of Houlditch’s—for it
always seems to be changing proprietors—at the corner of Long Acre. You
ascend Endell Street, and greet with satisfaction such signs of advancing
civilisation as baths and wash-houses, and a bran-new dispensary. I
had forgotten to mention that you might have had a back view of St.
Martin’s Hall. Then you cross the area of High Street, St. Giles’s, or
High Street, Holborn, whichsoever you may elect to call it. Then, still
straight a-head, you mount Charlotte Street, Bloomsbury, a thoroughfare
dignified by any number of churches, belonging to any number of
persuasions. And then you are at your journey’s end, and are free to call
in Bedford Square, to dine in Gower Street, or to go see the Nineveh
Marbles in the British Museum, _comme bon vous semble_.

But throughout this pilgrimage, passing by edifices erected in the newest
Byzantine, or early English, or Elizabethan, or sham Gothic style, you
have had St. Giles’s always before, behind, and about you. From a hundred
foul lanes and alleys have debouched, on to the spick-and-span-new
promenade, unheard-of human horrors. Gibbering forms of men and women
in filthy rags, with fiery heads of shock hair, the roots beginning an
inch from the eyebrows, with the eyes themselves bleared and gummy, with
gashes filled with yellow fangs for teeth, with rough holes punched in
the nasal cartilage for nostrils, with sprawling hands and splay feet,
tessellated with dirt—awful deformities, with horrifying malformations of
the limbs and running sores ostentatiously displayed; Ghoules and Afrits
in a travestie of human form, rattling uncouth forms of speech in their
vitrified throttles. These hang about your feet like reptiles, or crawl
round you like loathsome vermin, and in a demoniac whine beg charity from
you. One can bear the men; ferocious and repulsive as they are, a penny
and a threat will send them cowering and cursing to their noisome holes
again. One cannot bear the women without a shudder, and a feeling of
infinite sorrow and humiliation. They are so horrible to look upon, so
thoroughly unsexed, shameless. Heaven-abandoned and forlorn, with their
bare liver-coloured feet beating the devil’s tattoo on the pavement,
their lean shoulders shrugged up to their sallow cheeks, over which falls
hair either wildly dishevelled or filthily matted, and their gaunt hands
clutching at the tattered remnant of a shawl, which but sorrily veils
the lamentable fact that they have no gown—that a ragged petticoat and a
more ragged undergarment are all they have to cover themselves withal.
With sternness and determination one can bear these sights; but, heavens
and earth! the little children! who swarm, pullulate—who seem to be
evoked from the gutter, and called up from the kennel, who clamber about
your knees, who lie so thickly in your path that you are near stumbling
over one of them every moment, who, ten times raggeder, dirtier, and
more wretched-looking than their elders, with their baby faces rendered
wolfish by privation, and looking a hundred years old, rather than not
ten times that number of days, fight and scream, whimper and fondle,
crawl and leap like the phantoms a man sees during the access of
_delirium tremens_. I declare that there are babies among these miserable
ones—babies with the preternaturally wise faces of grown up men; babies
who, I doubt little, can lie, and steal, and beg, and who, in a year or
so, will be able to fight and swear, and be sent to jail for six months’
hard labour. Plenty of the children are big enough to be “whipped and
discharged.” Yes; that is the pleasant tee-totum: “six months’ hard
labour,” “whipped and discharged,” the merry prologue to Portland and
the hulks, the humorous apprenticeship to the penal settlements and the
gallows. And yet people will tell me that St. Giles’s is “done away
with”—“put down,” as the worshipful Sir Peter Laurie would say. Glance
down any one of the narrow lanes you like after passing Broker’s Row. See
the children coming out of the gin-shops and the pawnbrokers’. Ask the
policeman whether every court in the vicinity be not full of thieves,
and worse. Look at the lanes themselves, with the filthy rags flaunting
from poles in the windows in bitter mockery of being hung out to dry
after washing; with their belching doorways, the thresholds littered
with wallowing infants, and revealing beyond a Dantean perspective of
infected backyard and cloacan staircase. Peep, as well as you may for the
dirt-obscured window panes, and see the dens of wretchedness where the
people whose existence you ignore dwell—the sick and infirm, often the
dying, sometimes the dead, lying on the bare floor, or, at best, covered
with some tattered scraps of blanketing or matting; the shivering age
crouching over fireless grates, and drunken husbands bursting through the
rotten doors to seize their gaunt wives by the hair, and bruise their
already swollen faces, because they have pawned what few rags remain to
purchase gin. But then St. Giles’s doesn’t exist! It has been done away
with! It is put down! “Stunning Joe Banks” and Bamfylde Moore Carew have
been subdued by civilisation and the march of intellect! Of course.

Notwithstanding all which there is a terrific fire in the very midst
of St. Giles’s to-night; and that conflagration may do more in its
generation towards the abolition of the district, than all the astute
contractors and speculative builders. The fire is at an oilman’s shop,
who likewise manufactures and deals in pickles, and from the nature of
the combustible commodities in which he trades, you may anticipate a rare
blaze. Blaze! say an eruption of Mount Vesuvius rather; far high into the
air shoot columns of flame, and hanging thickly over all are billows upon
billows of crimson smoke, the whole encircled by myriads of fiery sparks
that fall upon the gaping crowd and make them dance and yell with terror
and excitement.

The police have very speedily made a sanitary _cordon_ round about the
blazing premises, and let none pass save those who have special business
near the place. The firemen are “welcome guests” within the magic
_cordon_, as also the fussy, self-important sergeants and inspectors
of police, who often do more harm than good with their orders and
counter-orders. There are some other gentlemen, too, who slip in and out
unquestioned and unchallenged. They don’t pump at the fire-engines, and
they don’t volunteer to man the fire-escape. But they seem to have an
undisputed though unrecognised right to be here, there, and everywhere,
and are received on a footing of humorous equality by the police, the
fire-escape men, the firemen, and the very firemen’s dogs. They are
not official-looking persons by any means. They wear no uniforms, they
carry no signs of authority, such as truncheons, armlets, or the like.
They are rather given, on the contrary, to a plain and unpretending,
not to say “seedy,” style of attire. Napless hats, surtouts tightly
buttoned up to the throat and white at the seams, pantaloons of undecided
length, unblackened bluchers, and umbrellas, seem to be the favourite
wear among these gentlemen. They are, not to mince the matter, what
are termed “occasional reporters” to the daily newspapers, and, in
less courteous parlance, are denominated “penny-a-liners.” It is the
vocation of these gentlemen (worthy souls for the most part—working very
hard for very little money) to prowl continually about London town,
in search of fires, fallings in and down of houses, runnings away of
vicious horses, breakings down of cabs, carriages, and omnibuses; and,
in fact, accidents and casualties of every description. But especially
fires. Fatal accidents are not unnaturally preferred by the occasional
reporters, because they lead to coroners’ inquests, which have of
course also to be reported; and, in the case of a fire, a slight loss
of life is not objected to. It entails “additional particulars,” and
perhaps an inquiry before the coroner, with an examination of witnesses
relative to the cause of the fire; nay, who knows but it may end in a
trial for arson? There was—and may be now—a gentleman attached to the
combustible department of the press, who was so well known and practised
a hand at reporting conflagrations, that he was christened, and to
some extent popularly known as, the “Fire King.” It was facetiously
suggested that he was unconsumable, made of asbestos, not to be affected
by heat, like Signor Buono Cuore at Cremorne Gardens. According to
the legend current in London newspaper circles, the “Fire King” had
his abode next door to a fire-engine station in the Waterloo Road,
and further to guard against the possibility of missing one of these
interesting, and, to him, remunerative events, he caused to be inscribed
on the door-jamb, in lieu of the ordinary injunction to “ring the top
bell,” this solitary announcement on a neat brass plate, “Fire Bell.”
So, when a fire was signalled within the beat of that portion of the
brigade stationed in the Waterloo Road—or, indeed, anywhere else if of
sufficient magnitude, for the brigade are not by any means particular
as to distances, and would as lief go down the river to Gravesend or up
it to Henley if occasion required—a stalwart brigadier, his helmet and
hatchet all donned, would pull lustily at the fire-bell, accompanying the
tintinnabulation by stentorian shouts of “Wake up, Charley!” Charley,
the “Fire King,” perhaps at that moment serenely dreaming of new Great
Fires of London, Temples of Diana at Ephesus, and Minsters at York,
ignited by Erostatratuses and Jonathan Martins yet unborn, would sing
out of the window a sonorous “All right!” hastily dress, descend, jump
on the ready-harnessed engine, and be conveyed jubilantly, as fast as
ever the horses could carry him, to the scene of the fire. But two stains
existed on the “Fire King’s” otherwise fair escutcheon. It was darkly
rumoured that on one occasion—it was a very fat fire at a patent candle
manufactory—he had offered to bribe the turncock, so tampering with the
supply of water; and that on another, it being a remarkably cold winter’s
night, he expressed a hope that the main might be frozen. And yet a more
tender-hearted man—“additional particulars,” and the claim of a wife and
large family being put out of the question—than the Fire King, does not
exist.

Meanwhile the oil and pickle man’s house blazes tremendously. The
houses on either side must go too; so think the firemen. Fears are
entertained for the safety of the houses over the way, already scorched
and blistering, and the adjoining tenements within a circle of a hundred
yards are sure to be more or less injured by water, for the street is
wretchedly narrow, and the houses lean-to frightfully. One extremity of
the thoroughfare has been shored up for years by beams, now rotting. The
oil and pickle man is heavily insured, so is the contractor for army
clothing over the way, so is the wholesale boot and shoe manufacturer
next door. It would be a mercy if the whole decayed stack of buildings
were swept away by the devouring, yet purifying element. Yes, a mercy,
surely a mercy. But the miserable inhabitants of the crumbling tenements
that cling like barnacles to the skirts of the great shops and factories,
are they insured? See them swarming from their hovels half naked,
frenzied with terror and amazement, bearing their trembling children in
their arms, or lugging their lamentable shreds and scraps of household
goods and chattels into the open. Are _they_ insured? The fire will
send them to the workhouse, or, maybe, to the workhouse dead-wall—for
they have no legal settlement there, or they are not casual paupers, or
they haven’t seen the relieving-officer, or they are too early, or too
late—there to crouch and die. To be sure, they ought never to have been
born. _They_ are not necessary for the prosperity of the wholesale trade
in boots and shoes, oil, pickles, and army clothing. Why cumber they the
earth?

And still the fire leaps up into the cold morning air. The house will be
gutted out and out, the police now say authoritatively. Happily there is
no danger to be apprehended now for human life within the blazing pile.
The oil and pickle chandler does not dwell in his warehouse. He has a
snug villa at Highgate, and is very probably now contemplating the motley
sky from his parlour-window, and wondering wherever the fire can be. The
only living person who had to be rescued was an old housekeeper, who
persisted in saying that she had lived in the house “seven and thirty
year,” and wouldn’t leave it while one stone remained on another; which
was not so very difficult a task, seeing that the premises were built
throughout of brick. She had to be hustled at last, and after much to
do, into the fire-escape; but for hours afterwards she led the firemen a
terrible life respecting the fate of a certain tom-cat, of extraordinary
sagacity, called Ginger, which she averred to have left sitting on
the lid of the water-butt, but which very soon afterwards appeared in
the flesh, so scorched that it smelt like burnt feathers, and clawing
convulsively at the collar of a police-constable of the F. division. It
is, perhaps, scarcely worth while to state that in the course of the
fire a poor woman is carried from one of the adjoining hovels dead. She
was close upon her confinement, and the child and she are gone to a more
peaceable and merciful city, where lives, at least, are assured for ever.

Towards two o’clock, the columns of flame begin to grow slenderer, less
continuous, more fitful. The clanking of the fire-engines does not
decrease, however, in the least, though the firemen joyfully declare
that the fire is “got under.” The surrounding publicans—who, though they
closed at midnight, have all taken down their shutters with marvellous
alacrity—are doing a roaring trade in beer, which is distributed to the
volunteers at the pumps in sufficiently liberal quantities, a check being
kept upon the amount consumed by means of tickets. Where the tickets
come from I have no means of judging, but this wonderful fire-brigade
seem prepared for everything.

So, feeling very hot and dry, and dazed about the eyes with constant
contemplation of the flames, I leave St. Giles’s and the oil and pickle
vender’s warehouse, which, when daylight comes, will be but a heap of
charred, steaming ruins, and wander westward, musing over the fires I
have seen and the fires I have read of. I think of the great fire of
London in Charles’s time—the fire that began at Pudding Lane and ended
at Pye Corner, and in commemoration of which they built that strange
monument, with the gilt shaving-brush at the top—

        “... London’s column, pointing to the skies,
    Like a tall bully, lifts its head and lies.”

I think of the great fire at the Tower of London in 1841, of which I was
an eye-witness, and which consumed the hideous armouries built by William
III. and their priceless contents. I think upon the great scuffle and
scramble to rescue the crown and regalia from the threatened Jewel House,
such a scuffle and scramble as had not taken place since Colonel Blood’s
impudent attempt to steal those precious things. Then my mind reverts to
the monster conflagration by which the winter palace at St. Petersburg
was destroyed in 1839; of the strange discovery then made, that dozens of
families lived on the roof of the palace—lived, and roosted, and died,
and kept fowls and goats there, of whose existence the court and the
imperial household had not the remotest idea; of the sentinel who died at
his post, notwithstanding the imperial command to leave it, because he
had not been relieved by his corporal; and of the Czar himself watching
with compressed lips the destruction of his magnificent palace, and
vainly entreating his officers not to risk their lives in endeavouring
to save the furniture. One zealous aide-de-camp could not be dissuaded
from the attempt to reach a magnificent pier-glass, framed in gold and
malachite, from a wall, whereupon his Imperial Majesty, seeing that
injunction, entreaty, menace were all in vain, hurled, with the full
force of his gigantic arm, his opera-glass at the sheet of crystal, which
was shivered to atoms by the blow. Not an uncharacteristic trait of
Nicholas Romanoff.




TWO O’CLOCK A.M.—A LATE DEBATE IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS, AND THE TURNSTILE
OF WATERLOO BRIDGE.


I never could understand politics (which difficulty of comprehension of a
repulsive topic I share, I am delighted to know, with the whole charming
female sex, for a woman who is a politician is to me no woman at all).
I never could be consistent in public matters. If my remembrance serve
me correctly, I think I began life as a flaming Conservative. I am now
as flaming a Radical; but I admit that I am most deplorably deficient
in consistency. I find myself, while straining every nerve to defend
the cause, to advocate the rights, to denounce the oppressors of that
English people of whom I am one, frequently halting on ground where
Eglintoun Beaverup, the Conservative _par excellence_, and I can shake
hands; I find myself acknowledging that “blood is thicker than water,”
and that gentle birth will hold its own in the midst of sarcasms against
the tenth transmitters of foolish faces. I find myself actuated now (as
ever in that I have been consistent) by the same dislike and contempt
for the cruel, capricious, ruffian, unteachable Mob—the base _decamisado
canaille_, who are not the working classes, or the lower classes, or any
other class, but the Father of confusion and anarchy’s—the scurvy mob who
pelt a Castlereagh to-day and tear a John de Witt in pieces to-morrow;
who slaughtered Rienzi, and yelped for joy when Madame Roland went to the
guillotine; who cried for “justice” upon Charles Stuart, and danced round
the Tyburn tree from which dangled the rotting corpse of Cromwell; who
would trample on Henry Brougham or John Russell at the present writing,
and rend their vitals, if _their_ mobbish majesty were crossed in one of
its wild-baboon whims.

With this candid confession of my political shortcomings (I mean to
stand some day for the borough of Weathercock), and having thus, I hope,
disarmed criticism, I shall now venture into the (to me) perilous region
of politics. It is Two o’Clock in the morning; we will even be present in
the spirit at a late debate in the “House.”

Which august assembly has already been designated by some irreverent wag
as a “large house which keeps bad hours.” In truth, one needs to be
very intimately acquainted, not only with the framework, but with the
minuter organisation of English society and institutions—(how sick I am,
and you must be, of those eternally-recurring words “institutions” and
“society!”)—to understand the causes of the immoderately late hours kept
sometimes by the Lords, but with much greater frequency by the Commons’
House of Parliament. At the first blush, there seems no earthly reason
why the legislative business of the nation should not be got over during
the day, or, at the outside, before the night were spent. The French
Deputies, Conventionalists, or Representatives in the National Assembly,
in their stormiest and most prolonged debates, seldom heard the chimes at
midnight; and, ardent parliamentarians as are the Americans, it is only
towards the immediate close of the session that Congress keeps for two
or three days and nights a sort of Saturnalia of untimely sittings. If
report speaks true, the members of the United States Legislature are only
enabled to bear these unwonted vigils by incessant recurrence to powerful
stimulants. “Quislings,” “Fiscal Agents,” “Stone Fences,” “Bullocks’
Milk,” and the innumerable tribe of “Cocktails,” are at a premium during
these abnormally protracted debates; the benches of the House and the
desks of the members stand in imminent danger of being whittled away
during the excitement of discussion; the amount of tobacco masticated
is sufficient to ruin the digestive powers of the nation; the spittoons
overflow, and the fretfulness and irritation not unnaturally engendered
by nervous excitement, occasionally finds relief in cowhiding in the
committee-rooms, gouging in the lobbies, and “stand up and drag out”
fights on the august floor itself, occupied by the conscript fathers of
the republic. Thus I have been informed; but it may be that report tells
a fib, after all.

When we arrive, however, at a just understanding and appreciation of the
mechanism of this wondrous British constitutional watch, jewelled in ever
so many holes as it is, with its levers, and escapements, and unnumbered
compensation balances, the lateness of our legislative hours will not be
by far so much of a mystery to us. We are altogether a sitting-up late
people. The continental theatres are all closed by eleven. We dismiss
our audiences sometimes at midnight, oftener at half-past, or a quarter
to one in the morning. Our fashionable balls commence when those of
other nations are terminating. We may not dine so late, but then we sup
heavily, hours afterwards. Night life in London does not condescend to
commence till the “small hours;” yet, in dissipated Paris, you may
count the _cafés_ and supper-rooms on your fingers whose portals are
open at one o’clock in the morning. The “Journal des Debats” goes to
press at four in the afternoon; eight hours later, there is yet often
a leader to be written for the forthcoming number of the “Times.” The
only capital that can equal London in the faculty of “keeping it up” to
any number of hours, is St. Petersburg. There the antipathy which the
Russians entertain for going to bed is solely surpassed by their aversion
to getting up. They turn night into day; but the sturdy, strong-willed,
perverse English work or dissipate nearly “twice round the clock.” They
make the little children go to bed; yet the ambition even of those
younglings is to “sit up late” like the grown people.

A French senator gets a thousand pounds a year for wearing a blue livery
coat with a stand-up collar, the whole handsomely embroidered in gold;
kerseymere small clothes, and silk stockings. He drives down to the
Luxembourg in his brougham, about three in the afternoon, dozes for
a couple of hours on a well-stuffed bench, goes home to dine, drink
coffee, play tric-trac, read the “Gazette de France,” or receive a
select circle of pensioned fogies like himself. He wakes up some fine
morning to find himself complimented in the “Moniteur,” and the gratified
recipient of the grand cross of the Legion of Honour. A member of the
French _Corps Législatif_ receives his wages in a comparative ratio, and
pursues an analogous cycle of “duties.” But look at an English member
of Parliament. He receives nothing a year, and in many cases has little
more than that problematical income, sometimes humorously characterised
as “midshipman’s half-pay,” to live upon. If he be rich, so much the
better; but wealth will not take away a tittle from his hard work. In the
early morning, over his tea and toast, he has an ocean of correspondence,
often frivolous, always wearisome, to wade through. Then he has his
blue-books to dive into, his authorities to consult, his statistics to
cram, his speeches to “coach,” his grievances to hunt up, his exordia to
study, his perorations to practise. Comes the hour of morning calls when
he must be at home, and give audience to the great army of Askers and
the legionary tribe of bores, men who will take no denial, importunate
clients, who want berths in the Post-office for themselves, or reversions
of tide-waiterships for their cousins’ cousins. Happily for the member
of Parliament, Mr. Rowland Hill’s penny-postage system has abolished the
frank-hunting torture, which brought many M.P.’s to death’s door, and
made more bitterly regret that they had ever been taught to write their
own names. And woe be to the legislator if he receive not his visitors
with courtesy! They probably are constituents, and a curt answer will
frequently send them away charged with the deadliest schemes against
that member’s vote and interest at the ensuing general election. As a
diversion during the morning calls, the M.P. has to receive some dozens
of applications for orders of admission to the Strangers’ Gallery of
the House, he having always a couple at his disposal. After this, he
has, perhaps, to wait upon the Prime Minister, in Downing Street, at
the head of a deputation respecting the disputed right in a cess-pool;
or he may be the chairman of some parliamentary committee, sitting, _de
die in diem_, to inquire into the hideous turpitude of a contractor
who has sewn so many pairs of soldiers’ boots without cobblers’ wax.
Then, he has to take a cab to attend the great public meeting for the
Evangelisation of Chinese beggars, held at the Mansion House. He is due
about this time in the board-room of the public company of which he is
a director; and at the special committee of the Benevolent Institution
in which he takes so much interest. A pretty hard day’s work this, you
will acknowledge. Add that the English member of Parliament has to be,
over and above all this, a man of business or pleasure: with a wife
and family very often, with a turn for literature, or art, or science,
or natural history. He is a merchant or banker, and must drudge in his
counting-house, like the meanest of his clerks, or gabble on ’Change
with the nimblest-tongued bill-broker. He is a great counsel: he cannot
plead the cause of “Stradlings _versus_ Styles,” by deputy, or allow
his junior to sum up in the great will case. He is a celebrity of the
fashionable world: he must pay his morning visits, ride in the Park, show
himself at the “Corner,” lounge through his clubs, drop in at the opera
at night; and, after all this, or rather in the midst of all this, and
pervading it like a nightmare, there is the real business of his life—the
“House.” He possesses some six hundred other colleagues, who are to the
full as busily occupied as he is during the day, yet manage, somehow, to
find themselves behind the Speaker’s chair, or at the gangway, at five
o’clock in the afternoon. He had better not be unpunctual or remiss in
his attendance. Those constituents of his, at Shrimpington-super-Mare,
will call him to a strict account of his stewardship at the end of the
session, and it may go hard with him at the Mechanics’ Institution or the
Farmers’ Ordinary. Under all these circumstances, do you think it so
very extraordinary that there should be occasionally a late debate in the
House of Commons?

You will remark that I have preserved, throughout, a decorous reticence
with regard to the House of Lords. Goodness forfend that I should have
to judge their Lordships by the same business-like work-a-day standard
which I have presumed to apply to the Lower House. Their Lordships meet
early and separate early, as becometh their degree; yet even the Lords
have their field-days, and their occasions when they sit up late o’
nights. Then the right reverend bishops come down, booted and spurred,
to vote against the heathen; and paralytic old peers are borne to the
House in litters, there to wheeze forth, in tremulous accents, their
unalterable attachment to Church and State, so dangerously menaced in
“another place,” and from their most noble pockets they pull forth
“proxies,” signed by other peers more paralytic than themselves. But
these field-days of the Lords are few and far between, and the _otium
cum dignitate_ is the easy, comfortable rule with their Lordships. It
is but doing them justice to say, however, that many peers have been
members of the Lower House in their time, and have sat up as late,
and battled in debate as fiercely, as any middle-aged member of her
Majesty’s Opposition. Nor are they all idle, parliamentarily, in the
day time. There are some noblemen—legal peers mostly—who disdain to
rest upon their laurels, and are content to spend the long forenoons in
listening to dreary disquisitions about the wrongs of Parsee traders,
and the visionary pedigrees of claimants to dormant peerages. The
Lords’ committee hear appeals, and it is a wondrous sight to see those
old boys snoozing and twiddling their thumbs on the crimson benches
of their golden chamber. They seem not to listen to the elaborate
word-entanglements of the bewigged pleaders; yet they make remarks full
of sense and pregnant with acumen. You are a young man or woman, dear
reader of this, I hope. You have not much time to lose. Go straight down
to Palace Yard, pass through Westminster Hall, and up the stone stairs,
by the giant brazen candelabra and the great stained-glass window. So on
through the Gothic vestibules and corridors—never mind the frescoes of
Messrs. Dyce and Company, they are not worth looking at just now. Hie
you quickly to a door-way half-screened by crimson drapery, and edge
your way into the House of Lords. An you take off your hat and hold your
tongue, you may stare about you as much as ever you please, and hear
your fill of the edifying, if not amusing, appeals. You may wonder at
the Lord Chancellor’s wrinkles and at his ruffles; you may listen to
Floorem, Attorney-General, and Botherem, Q.C., till your eyes begin to
wink, and your head to nod, and your whole mental framework to grow
desperately weary; but you must not go entirely to sleep. Somnolence
may entail a fall on the floor of the House, which would cause a noise,
and would never do; so, unless you are gifted, like a horse, with the
power of going to sleep standing, I would counsel you to take a cup
of strong green tea before you enter the House, and so string your
nerves up to wakefulness. For diversion, turn away your eyes from the
verbose barristers in their horse-hair, silk, and bombazine, and look
at their Lordships. There are not often more than half-a-dozen of them
present—seldom so many as that. You shall scarcely fail, however, to miss
that noble senator—a capital working man of business he is too—who is
possessed by the curious idiosyncrasy of dressing in the exact similitude
of his own butler: blue coat and brass buttons, yellow waistcoat,
pepper-and-salt pantaloons—not trousers, mind—and low shoes. I think,
even, that his Lordship’s head is powdered. You may object that there is
no reason why a gentleman of the old school, wedded to traditions and
reminiscences of _le bon vieux temps_, should not wear such a costume
as this, and yet look every inch a nobleman. Nor is there, indeed;
but glance for a moment at Lord Aspendale, and you will confess that,
from hair-powder to shoe-string, there is a permeating flavour of the
side-board and the still-room. Whether his Lordship likes it, or whether
his Lordship can’t help it, it matters little; but the fact is there,
plain and obvious.

Standing in the narrow Gothic railed-off space reserved for the
public—the throne at the opposite extremity of the House—you may see
on one of the benches to the right, almost every forenoon—Saturday and
Sunday excepted—during the session, a very old man with a white head,
and attired in a simple frock and trousers of shepherd’s plaid. It is
a leonine head, and the white locks are bushy and profuse. So, too,
the eyebrows, penthouses to eyes somewhat weak now, but that can flash
fire yet upon occasions. The face is ploughed with wrinkles, as well it
may be, for the old man will never see fourscore years again, and of
these, threescore, at the very least, have been spent in study and the
hardest labour, mental and physical. The nose is a marvel—protuberant,
rugose, aggressive, inquiring, and defiant: unlovely, but intellectual.
There is a trumpet mouth, a belligerent mouth, projecting and
self-asserting; largish ears, and on chin or cheeks no vestige of
hair. Not a beautiful man this on any theory of beauty, Hogarthesque,
Ruskinesque, Winckelmanesque, or otherwise. Rather a shaggy, gnarled,
battered, weatherbeaten, ugly, faithful, Scotch-colley type. Not a soft,
imploring, yielding face. Rather a tearing, mocking, pugnacious, cast
of countenance. The mouth is fashioned to the saying of harsh, hard,
impertinent things: not cruel, but downright; but never to whisper
compliments, or simper out platitudes. A nose, too, that can snuff the
battle afar off, and with dilated nostrils breathe forth a glory that
is sometimes terrible; but not a nose for a pouncet-box, or a Covent
Garden bouquet, or a _flacon_ of Frangipani. Would not care much for
truffles either I think, or the delicate aroma of sparkling Moselle.
Would prefer onions or strongly-infused malt and hops: something honest
and unsophisticated. Watch this old man narrowly, young visitor to the
Lords. Scan his furrowed visage. Mark his odd angular ways and gestures
passing uncouth. Now he crouches, very doglike, on his crimson bench:
clasps one shepherd’s plaid leg in both his hands. Botherem, Q.C., is
talking nonsense, I think. Now the legs are crossed, and the hands
thrown behind the head; now he digs his elbows into the little Gothic
writing-table before him, and buries the hands in that puissant white
hair of his. The quiddities of Floorem, Q.C., are beyond human patience.
Then with a wrench, a wriggle, a shake, a half turn and half start
up—still very doglike, but of the Newfoundland rather, now, he asks a
lawyer or a witness a question. Question very sharp and to the point,
not often complimentary by-times, and couched in that which is neither
broad Scotch nor Northumbrian burr, but a rebellious mixture of the two.
Mark him well, eye him closely: you have not much time to lose. Alas!
the giant is very old; though with frame yet unenfeebled, with intellect
yet gloriously unclouded. But the sands are running, ever running. Watch
him, mark him, eye him, score him on your mind tablets: then home; and in
after years it may be your lot to tell your children, that once at least
you have seen with your own eyes the famous Lord of Vaux; once listened
to the voice that has shaken thrones and made tyrants tremble, that has
been a herald of deliverance to millions pining in slavery and captivity;
a voice that has given utterance, in man’s most eloquent words, to the
noblest, wisest thoughts lent to this Man of Men by Heaven; a voice that
has been trumpet-sounding these sixty years past in defence of Truth, and
Right, and Justice—in advocacy of the claims of learning and industry,
and of the liberties of the great English people, from whose ranks he
rose; a voice that should be entitled to a hearing in a Walhalla of wise
heroes, after Francis of Verulam and Isaac of Grantham; the voice of one
who is worthily a lord, but who will be yet better remembered, and to all
time—remembered enthusiastically and affectionately—as the champion of
all good and wise and beautiful Human Things—HARRY BROUGHAM.

But I must not forget, as I am sorely tempted to do in Westminster
Hall, that it is two o’clock in the morning. This is the last night—the
honourable House are positively determined to divide to-night, even if
the Ministry go out—of the adjourned debate on the Gulliver Indemnity
Bill. The honourable House have been speechifying at a tremendous rate
for the last fortnight on the vexed question as to whether Samuel
Gulliver, master mariner, is or is not to have an indemnity. Lord
Viscount Palmerston, head of the government, says he shall. The Right
Hon. Benjamin Disraeli, ex-Chancellor of the Exchequer, and head of the
Opposition, says he sha’n’t. Honourable members in formidable numbers
range themselves on either side. Night after night the House has been
ringing with eulogies and denunciations of Gulliver and his indemnity.
The country is in a ferment, the press in arms, on the Titanic topic. A
monster meeting at Manchester has pledged itself, amid deafening cheers
in the Lancashire dialect and rounds of “Kentish fire,” to support the
indemnification of Gulliver by every legal and constitutional means.
The “Times” newspaper, on its part, declares the indemnity an impudent
swindle, and plainly announces that if Gulliver be indemnified, Great
Britain must be content to remain henceforth and for ever a second-rate
Power. The funds are going up and down like a see-saw, all with reference
to Gulliver. More bets are made in the clubs and sporting localities
_in re_ Gulliver than on the coming Derby, or that other vexed question
whether Bludgin Yahoo, who murdered the old lady with the crowbar (they
say he is beautifully penitent in Newgate, and that the sheriffs cry
to see him eat his daily beefsteak) will be hanged or not. The Emperor
of Brobdignag is vitally interested in Gulliver, and there were two
_attachés_ from the Lilliputian embassy in the Speaker’s gallery the
night before last. Never mind who Gulliver was, or what was the nature
of the losses for which he sought to be indemnified. It matters as
little now as whether Bolgrad was a hamlet or a town; and even while the
conflict was raging, I very much question whether a hundred members of
the House of Commons knew anything about Gulliver personally, or cared
two pins about him or his indemnity. In some respects politics are like
fox-hunting. You want a fast-running, doubling, artful question—the more
powerful in odour the better—to start with; but once run down the fox,
and the question goes for nothing. Sometimes Reynard is scarce; but even
then a red herring will serve at a pinch to bark at and run after.

We are in a spacious chamber, not very vast, not very lofty—for there
is a false roof of ground glass, for acoustic reasons—and not very
handsome. A sufficiency of oaken panelling, and windows veiled with
velvet curtains, brilliant but cunningly tempered light—the absolute
lamps invisible. Altogether a comfortable, well-to-do-place—say something
like an enlarged edition of the coffee-room of a terminus hotel, as they
are building terminus hotels now-a-days, or the newspaper-room of a club
fitted up for a general meeting of the members. A tinge of Gothicism
pervades the decorations, here and there tending to the Elizabethan, but
altogether leaning more to the “convenient” style of ornament. Everything
that skill and ingenuity (duly patented) can devise for the promotion
of light, warmth, general comfort, &c., are here. Enthroned on high,
slender galleries above him, is the Speaker. “Jove in his chair, of the
skies lord mayor,” is a sufficiently tremendous Pagan image. He must
find it a somewhat hard task to keep order on Olympus’ top occasionally.
Vulcan will be wrangling with Apollo and eyeing Mars askant: Venus
will be having high words with Juno, and Minerva boring the celestial
company generally with her strongmindedness; to say nothing of Bacchus,
in the plenitude of fermented grape-juice, volunteering a stave when
nobody wants one; Mercury, labouring under his eternal disability to
keep his hands out of the other gods’ and goddesses’ pockets; and the
arch mischief maker, Cupid, wantoning about on his flyflapper wings, and
setting everybody by the ears. But Jupiter-Speaker has a thrice more
difficult task! Fancy having to preserve discipline among six hundred
and a half gentlemen—young, old, and middle-aged gentles, all fond of
the sound of their own voices; many of whom have dined copiously, to the
making of them noisy; some who have not dined at all, to the making of
them fretful and peevish, not to say quarrelsome. Poor Mr. Speaker! how
weary he must be of the honourable House and of its honourable members
in general, and of the Gulliver’s Indemnity Bill in particular! Yet
there he sits, the image of urbanity and equanimity, graceful, composed,
dignified, though taciturn; his wig unmoved, his bands and ruffles
uncrumpled. How devoutly he must wish that the bill were “in committee,”
when the mace might lie under the table, and he himself “leave the
chair!” But, alas! the atrocious measure has not yet been read a second
time. The country need be liberal and the House courteous to the Speaker.
Surely, if any man deserves a handsome salary, free quarters, and a
peerage on retirement, it is that Right Honourable Gentleman. To have to
listen, night after night, to drowthy verbosities, phantasm statements,
nightmare gibberings of incoherent statistics, inextricable word-chaoses
of statements and counter-statements, sham declarations of sham
patriotism bellowed forth with sham energy; to have to hear these tales,
full of sound and fury, told by honourable idiots full of unutterable
“bunkum” (an Americanism I feel constrained to use, as signifying
nothingness, ineffably inept and irremediably pin-perforated windbaggery,
and sublimated cucumber sunbeams hopelessly eclipsed into Dis)—these
must be trials so sore that they need the highest of wages, the best of
living, to be endured even. To induce a man to keep a turn-pike or a
lighthouse, to work in a gunpowder mill, or to accept the governorship
of Cape Coast Castle, you must offer heavy reward. Of old, in France,
glass-blowing was considered to be a trade so dangerous, and requiring
so much abnegation of self, that its professors were not ranked with the
meaner sort of mechanics. Your glass-blower was entitled to wear a sword,
a privilege extended since, I believe, to printers: (it is lucky they
do not exercise it now, or I should be run through and through a dozen
times a day by compositors infuriate at illegible spider manuscript.)
He could blow glass without tarnishing his ’scutcheon, and was called
“_Gentilhomme Verrier_.” Touching the Speakership, I think that the mere
obligation of hearing men who hate each other, bandying the epithet of
“honourable friend” so many hundred times in a night, is in itself worth
two thousand a year.

The House has commenced. The peers’ gallery, ambassadors’ seats,
strangers’, Speaker’s gallery, all full of attentive listeners.
“Distinguished foreigners” are present. The Emperor of Brobdignag’s
ex-Minister for Foreign Affairs has come down from the Travellers’,
where he has been playing whist with the Hospodar of Wallachia’s _Chargé
d’Affaires_, and lurks in ambush behind the Speaker. The sparkling
eyes of ladies, seeing but unseen, look down, as at Evans’s, upon the
hall. The members’ benches—oaken covered with green leather, carved
ends—are full. The members’ gallery (stretching along both sides of
the House) is, to tell the truth, not full, but it is possibly occupied
by honourable members who have retired thither to—listen to the debate,
of course. Oddly enough, they find that the assumption of a horizontal
position is the very best for hearing that which is going on below; or,
perhaps, they only imitate in this Fortunio’s gifted servant. To turn
the face to the wall, also, seems a favourite method of stimulating the
auditory nerve; and some honourable gentlemen are so engrossed in the
exciting debate proceeding in the House, that, at two o’clock in the
morning, they sometimes give vent to their overworked-up feelings in a
deep stertorous nasal sound resembling a snore.

Up in the reporters’ gallery there, the gentlemen who submit to “work on
an intellectual treadmill for three hundred pounds a year,” are having
hard times of it. The “turns” of stenography are getting shorter and
shorter; but, alas! they have been terribly frequent during the debate.
How unmerciful have been the maledictions bestowed on Gulliver and his
indemnity since five p.m. when the Speaker was at prayers! Gulliver
would be a bold man to venture into the cushion-benched chamber behind
the gallery where the gentlemen of the Press retire to transcribe their
notes. O’Dobbin of the “Flail” has been dying to hear Tamberlik in
“Otello” these six weeks past. His chief gave him a stall this morning.
Gulliver sits in it like a ghoule on a grave. Dollfus, of Garden Court,
Temple, was invited to Jack Tritail, the newly-made barrister’s, “call”
carouse in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Gulliver is sitting at the hospitable
board, gulping down the claret like Garagantua. Little Spitters, who was
always a ladies’ man, was to have been a “welcome guest” at a neat villa
not far from Hammersmith Broadway. The fiend Gulliver is at this moment
being called a “droll creature,” and is flirting with the eldest Miss
Cockletop.

[Illustration: TWO O’CLOCK A.M.: A LATE DEBATE IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS.]

The great chief of the Opposition has spoken. Gloomy, saturnine,
isolated, yet triumphant, sits the eloquent and sarcastic Caucasian.
Those once brilliant black corkscrew ringlets are growing slightly gray
and wiry now, the chin tuft has disappeared, and time and thought have
drawn deep lines in the sallow visage of Benjamin Disraeli, ruler of the
Opposition. His attire, too, is sober compared with the myriad-hued garb,
the flashing jewellery, and vests of many colours, with which Benjamin
was wont to dazzle our eyes in the days before he slew Robert Peel, and
hired himself to the Protectionists—all in a parliamentary sense. People
say, when he wrote “Venetia” and the “Revolutionary Epic,” he used to
wear laced ruffles at his wrists and black velvet inexpressibles. He is
wiser now. He has turned the half century, and only wears a vest of many
colours when he dons his gold robe as Chancellor of the Exchequer. He has
worn it once, and would very much like to wear it again. He has made a
very long, telling, brilliant speech, in which he has said a multitude of
damaging things against Gulliver, his indemnity, and especially against
the noble Viscount at the head of the Government. He has never been
abusive, insulting, coarse, virulent—oh, never! he has not once lost
his temper. He has treated the noble Viscount with marked courtesy, and
has called him his right honourable and noble friend scores of times;
yet, hearing him, it has been impossible to avoid the impression that if
any man was ever actuated by the conviction that his right honourable
and noble friend was an impostor and a humbug, with a considerable dash
of the traitor; and that—without hinting anything in the slightest
degree libellous—his right honourable and noble friend had been once
or twice convicted of larceny, and had failed in clearing himself from
the suspicion of having murdered his grandmother, that man was Benjamin
Disraeli, M.P. for the county of Bucks. He did not begin brilliantly.
He was not in the slightest degree like Cicero or Demosthenes, Burke
or Grattan, or like thee, my Eglintoun Beaverup, when thou descantest
upon the “glorious old cocks,” the “real tap, sir,” of antiquity. He
was, on the contrary, slow, laboured, downcast, and somewhat ponderous;
nor even at the conclusion of his magnificent harangue, did he throw
his arms about, smite his breast, stamp his foot, or cast his eyes
up to heaven—and the ceiling. The days of weeping and gesticulation,
of crumpling up sheets of paper, cracking slave-whips, flinging down
daggers, and smashing the works of watches, seem to have departed from
the House of Commons. Yet the eminent Caucasian contrived to create a
very appreciable sensation, and certainly shot those barbed arrows of
his—arrows tipped with judicious sarcasm and polite malevolence—with
amazing dexterity and with murderous success. He has made his noble
friend wince more than once, I will be bound. But you cannot see the
workings of that stateman’s face, for (save while addressing the House)
he wears his hat; and the light coming from above causes the friendly
brim to cast the vice-comital countenance into shadow.

A noticeable man this Hebrew Caucasian, Benjamin Disraeli, with his
byegone literary nonsenses, and black-velvet-trousered frivolities. Not
at all an English Man, trustworthy, loveable, nor indeed admirable,
according to our sturdy English prejudices. Such statesmen as
Shaftesbury, Ximenes, De Retz, any minister with a penchant for “dark
and crooked ways,” would have delighted in him; but to upright, albeit
bigoted, William Pitt, he would have had anything but a sweet savour.
Even Tory Castlereagh and Tory Sidmouth would but ill have relished
this slippery, spangled, spotted, insincere Will-o’-the-wisp patriot. I
should like very much to have known what manner of opinion the late Duke
of Wellington entertained of Benjamin Disraeli. It is, of course, but
matter of speculation; but I can’t help thinking, too, that if Arthur
Wellesley had had Benjamin in the Peninsula, he would have hanged him to
a certainty.

Hush! pray hush! Silence, ye cackling juniors on the back benches; wake
up, ye sluggards—only they don’t wake up—the noble Viscount at the head
of the Government is speaking. He begins confidently enough, but somewhat
wearily, as though he were thoroughly tired of the whole business. But
he warms gradually, and he, in his turn, too, can say damaging things
about _his_ right honourable friend, head of the Opposition. But he never
says anything spiteful—is at most petulant (loses his temper altogether
sometimes, they say), and flings about some _bon mots_ that, were they
published in this week’s “Punch,” would cause a well-grounded complaint
of the growing dulness of that periodical. He speaks long, and to the
purpose, and you can see at once in what stead have stood to him his
long official career, his immense parliamentary experience. Recollect
that John Henry Temple, Viscount Palmerston, has sat in Parliament for
half a century, was Secretary-at-War while Wellington was yet wrestling
with Napoleon’s marshals in Spain, was one of the authors of the “New
Whig Guide,” has formed part of scores of administrations; and—one
of the hardest-worked men of his time—has yet found leasure to be a
beau and lion of fashion in Grosvenorian circles, and to be called
“Cupid”—Grosvenorian circles rather chap-fallen, crow’s-footed, rheumy
about the eyes by this time, rather fallen into the sere and yellow leaf,
now hessians and short waists have gone out, hoops and pegtops come in.
Drollest of all, to think that this smug elderly gentleman, voluble in
spite of tongue-clogging seventy, and jaunty in spite of evident gout,
but quite a decorous, father-of-family, select vestryman-looking ancient,
should be the “_terrible Palmerston_” the firebrand of the Continent, the
bugbear of foreign oligarchs, the grim “_Caballero Balmerson_” naming
whom Spanish contrabandistas cross themselves, the abhorred “Palmerstoni”
whom papal gensd’arme imagine to be an emerited brigand who has long
defied the pontifical authority from an inaccessible fastness in the
Apennines. I need not tell you anything more about his speech. You will
find it all in Hansard; and the newspapers of the day gave an accurate
summary of the cheers, the counter-cheers, the ironical cheers, the
“Hear, hears,” and the “Oh, oh’s” which accompanied the harangue,
together with the “loud and continuous cheering” (from his own side of
the House) which greeted its conclusion.

The longest lane, however, must have a turning; and this desperately long
drawn-out parliamentary avenue has its turning at last. There have been
frenzied shrieks of “Divide—divide!’ numerous bores who have essayed
to speak have been summarily shut up and coughed down; and at length
strangers are ordered to withdraw, and the division bell rings.

“On our re-admission,” we quote from the “Times” newspaper of 185—, the
results of the division were announced as follows:—

    For the second reading of the bill 284
    Against it                         307
                                       ---
    Majority against the Government     23

The bill was consequently lost.

Next day the Government presided over by the noble Viscount who wears
his hat, goes out of office—the “Times” giving it a graceful kick at
parting, and hinting that it was never anything more than a disreputable,
shameless, abandoned clique, whose nepotism had grown intolerable in the
nostrils of the nation. The Right Honourable Caucasian, who doesn’t wear
his hat, is sent for by a certain friend of his—a noble Earl, who is
generally considered a first-rate hand at making up a book for the Derby.
He in his turn is sent for by his Most Gracious Sovereign; and, for the
next three or four days, there is nothing but running about and getting
upstairs between Buckingham Palace, St. James’s Square, and Grosvenor
Gate; and at the end of that time, the right honourable Caucasian finds
himself snugly ensconced in Downing Street, with full liberty to wear his
gold robe again.

[Illustration: TWO O’CLOCK A.M.: THE TURNSTILE OF WATERLOO BRIDGE.]

Past, long past two in the morning. The much-suffering House of Commons
at last shut up, and deserted save by the police and the night watchmen.
The last cabs in Palace Yard driven away: the charioteers grumbling
horribly on their boxes, for they have members of Parliament inside, who
never pay more than the legal fare. Irish members walked round the corner
to Manchester Buildings or Victoria Street, there dwelling. Some members
do all but sleep in the House. As for the noble and defeated Viscount,
he trots cheerily home—scorning either cab or carriage—shouldering his
umbrella, as though nothing in the world had happened to ruffle his
equanimity.

       *       *       *       *       *

And now, for the first time since this clock was set in motion, something
like a deep sleep falleth over London. Not that the city is all hushed;
it never is. There are night revellers abroad, night prowlers a-foot.
There is houseless wretchedness knowing not where to hide its head;
there is furtive crime stalking about, and seeking whom it may devour.
Yet all has a solemn, ghastly, unearthly aspect; the gas-lamps flicker
like corpse candles; and the distant scream of a profligate, in conflict
with the police, courses up and down the streets in weird and shuddering
echoes.

The Strand is so still that you may count the footsteps as they
sound; and the pale moon looks down pityingly on the vast, feverish,
semi-slumbering mass. Here we stand at length by Upper Wellington Street;
a minute’s walk to the right will bring us to the “Bridge of Sighs.”

Which never sleeps! Morning, and noon, and night, the sharp, clicking
turnstile revolves; the ever-wakeful tollman is there, with his
preternaturally keen apron. I call this man Charon, and the river which
his standing ferry bridges over might well be the Styx. Impossible,
immobile, indifferent, the gate-keeper’s creed is summed up in one
word—“A halfpenny!” Love, hope, happiness, misery, despair, and
death—what are they to him? “A halfpenny for the bridge” is all he asks!
but “a halfpenny for the bridge” he must have.

“Please, sir, will you give me a halfpenny for the bridge?” A phantom in
crinoline lays her hand on my arm. I start, and she hastens through the
turnstile—

    “Anywhere, anywhere,
    Out of the world,”

perhaps. But I may not linger on the mysteries of the Bridge of Sighs.
They are among the “Secrets of Gas,” and the pictured semblance of the
place here must content you.




HOUR THE TWENTY-FOURTH AND LAST—THREE A.M.—A BAL MASQUE, AND THE NIGHT
CHARGES AT BOW STREET.


When the bad Lord Lyttelton lay on his last bed—thorn-strewn by
conscience—and haunted by the awful prediction of the phantom which
appeared to him in the semblance of a white dove, telling him that at a
certain hour on a certain night he should die, some friends who had a
modicum of human feeling, and wished that wicked lord well, thinking that
his agony was caused by mere terror of an impending event—half nervous,
half superstitious—advanced the hands of the clock One Hour, and when
the fatal one, as it seemed, struck, his Lordship started up in bed,
apparently much relieved, and cried out joyfully that he had “jockeyed
the ghost.” But when the _real time_ arrived, and the _real hour_ was
stricken on the bell, the prediction of the white dove was verified, and
the bad Lord Lyttelton, shrieking, gave up the ghost.

Moral: there is not the slightest use in playing tricks with the clock.
Were it otherwise, and were I not deterred by this awful warning in the
case of Lord Lyttelton, I would entreat some kindly friend to stand on
tiptoe, and just push the hour-hand of this clock of mine back, were it
but for one poor _stunde_ of sixty minutes. But in vain. As well ask Mr.
Calcraft to postpone his quarter-to-eight visit with a new rope, when the
law has consigned you to the tender mercies of that eminent functionary.
As well may Crown Prince Frederick entreat the Governor of Cüstrin to
defer the execution of wretched Lieutenant Katte, “till he can write to
the king.” As well may the unfortunate little Pants, hopelessly embroiled
for the fifth time this morning with his Greek Delectus, implore the
terrible Doctor Budd to spare him the rod this once. As well might I
write to the Postmaster-General to say that it will not be convenient for
me to deposit the last batch of newspapers in the window till half-past
six p.m.; or beg the London and North-Western Railway Company to delay
the departure of the Manchester night express till I have finished my
wine and walnuts at the Victoria Hotel, Euston Square. The fiat has gone
forth. _Missa est._ Judgment is over, and execution is come; and I may
say, with Lord Grizzle in “Tom Thumb:”

    “My bodye is a bankrupt’s shop,
    My grim creditor is death,”

who, like a stern sergeant, lays his hand on my collar, and bids me
follow him to jail in the king’s name. I wish I were Punch, for he not
only “jockeyed” the ghost, but the hangman, and the beadle, and Mr.
Shallabalah, and his wife, and the very deuce himself. I wish I were in a
land where time is indeed made for slaves, or where there are no clocks
to cast honest men off their hobbies.

    “I wish I were a geese,
    For they lives and dies in peace,
    And accumulates much grease,
                Over there.”

But I am not a Punch nor a “geese,” to endorse the touching transatlantic
locution, however much I may merit the singular application of the name.
I am only your humble servant to command, and this is the last hour of
“Twice Round the Clock,” so I must e’en essay to make a good end of it.

We have not been so badly off for public amusements during
our journeyings. We have been to the opera, to the theatre, a
dancing-academy, and to hear an oratorio. We have supped at Evans’s, and
“assisted” at a late debate in the House of Commons; yet I acknowledge,
mournfully, that scores of places of recreation exist in London to which
I could have taken you, and where we might have enjoyed ourselves very
rationally and harmlessly. I should have liked to induct you to the
mysteries of Canterbury Hall, the Polytechnic, Christy’s Minstrels,
and Madame Tussaud’s waxwork show. For I hold to this creed, sternly
and strongly, that public amusements—indoor and outdoor amusements—are
eminently conducive to public _morals_, and to the liberty and happiness
of the people. Music, dancing, and dramatic representations, free from
grossness and turbulence, are as healthful and innocent recreations as
Temperance Halls, lectures on the comet’s tail, or monster meetings
dedicated to the deification of the _odium theologicum_. From my little
parlour window at Brighton, I can see a huge yellow placard disfiguring
a dead wall with this inscription:—“Protestants! attend the Great
Meeting to-night!” Bother the Protestants, (on platforms) I say, and the
Pope of Rome too. What have we done that we are to be perpetually set
together by the ears by belligerent Protestants and rampant Romanists?
Is the whole framework of society to be shaken by controversies about
the cardinal’s red stockings or the rector’s shovel hat? They had best
both be swept into the dust-hole, I think, as having no more to do with
religion than my poodle, Buffo, has with the Gunpowder Plot. Will all
these roaring meetings—Protestants and Romanist, or Mumbo-Jumboical—where
blatant stump-orators, paid for their theology by the night, rant, and
stamp, and cook up those eternal Smithfield fires, help the sacred cause
of Christianity one iota? It is long since Sheridan expressed a hope that
there might be no more “scandal about Queen Elizabeth,” and now, I see,
they can’t let that poor old woman rest in her grave. Some zealous people
want to get up a sort of rider to “Guy Fawkes’s Day,” to commemorate the
tri-centenary of her accession. You stupid firebrands! Of course “the
Reformation was a blessing;” but do you know what will be the result of
this raking up of the Elizabethan scandal? Do you know that there are
such books as “Cobbett’s Legacy to Parsons,” and “Lingard’s History,”
besides “Foxe’s Martyrs,” and a “Thunderbolt for Rome”? Do you know that
it may be proved just six of one and half-a-dozen of the other about
Queen Bess? that while to some she is the Great Protestant Sovereign, the
Egeria of the Reformation, the Heroine of Tilbury Fort, to others she
is a vain, cruel, arrogant old beldame, no better than she should be?
who butchered Mary Stuart, and had Leicester poisoned; and who for every
Protestant her gloomy sister burned, had at least two Papists hanged,
drawn, and quartered, with the pleasant addition of their entrails
being torn out and consumed before their eyes! _Eh! laissons la_ these
horrible reminiscences, and thank Heaven that we live under the sway of
good Victoria, not that of ruthless Elizabeth or bloody Mary. Did the
wise, and merciful, and bounteous Creator, who made this smiling earth,
who has gladdened us with an infinity of good things for our solace and
enjoyment, and for all quit-rent has laid this law upon us that we should
love one another, in testimony of our greatest love for Him, who is
all love and tenderness; did He send us here to squabble and fight and
predict eternal perdition to one another, because there fall into our
hearts a differently-coloured ray of the divine Effulgence? There is a
flaming Protestant here with a broad-brimmed hat, and who is a vessel of
much consequence among his fellow-bigots, who told an honest butcher some
days since that if the Maynooth grant were renewed we should have “the
thumbscrews in three months;” whereupon the affrighted butcher plastered
all his joints over with handbills of the great Protestant Meeting, thus,
of course, losing all his customers of the other persuasion. I wish those
bells which are eternally jangling invitations for us to come and thank
Heaven that we are not “as that publican,” would ring a little tolerance
and charity into men’s hearts; would ring out a little more oblivion
of phylacteries and pew-rents in high places, and of the sepulchral
whitewash brushes. If the people who make all this noise and clamour,
and who howl out against rational amusements, led pure and virtuous
lives, and set good examples to their neighbours, this voice should not
be raised; but, alas! here is brother Dolorous at the bar of the court
of Queen’s Bench for peculation; here is Sister Saintly scourging her
apprentice; here are Messrs. Over-righteous in trouble for adulteration
of their wares.

It is by no means incompatible, I hope, with the broad line of argument
I have striven to adopt in these papers, if I honestly declare that the
tableau I am about to describe has not in any way my approval, nay is, in
many respects, much to be reprobated and deplored. I describe it—in its
least repulsive details—simply because it is a very noticeable feature
in modern London life. To have passed it over would have been dishonest
and hypocritical, and I set it down in my catalogue of subjects at the
outset of my task, actuated then, as I am now, by a determination to
allow no squeamishness to interfere with the delineation of the truth—so
long as that truth could be told without offence to good manners and
in household language. A modern masquerade in London is, to tell the
honest truth, anything but an edifying spectacle. There is certainly no
perceptible harm in some hundreds of persons, of both sexes, accoutred
in more or less fantastic dresses, meeting together in a handsome
theatre, and, to the music of a magnificent band, dancing till three
or four o’clock in the morning. But the place is not harmless: people
go there to dissipate, and _do_ dissipate. The _salle de danse_ of a
grand masquerade is a re-union of epicurean passions—an epitome of vice
painted and spangled. And I take a masquerade triumphantly as an argument
against the precisians and sour-faces, who would curtail the amusements
of the people, and viciously thwart them in their every effort to amuse
themselves. Look you here, gentlemen of the vestry—arch moralists of the
parish! look you here, good Mr. Chaplain of Pentonville, who have got
your pet garotter safe in hold for his sins! This is no penny-gaff, no
twopenny theatre, no cheap concert or dancing academy—not so much as a
“free-and-easy” or a “sixpenny hop.” Shopboys don’t rob the till to come
to a _bal masqué_ at her Majesty’s Theatre. Your pet garotter didn’t
throttle the gentleman in the Old Kent Road in order to procure funds to
dance with Mademoiselle Euphrosine de la Galette, of the Rue Nôtre Dame
de Lorette, Paris, and attired in a ravishing _débardeur_ costume. There
is, to be sure, a floating population of Bohemians—citizens of the world
of London, belonging to the theatres, _enfants perdus_ of the newspaper
press, and so on, who are admitted gratis to a masquerade: these last
Zouaves of social life, have free admission to coroners’ inquests, public
dinners, ship launches, private views of picture exhibitions, night
rehearsals of pantomimes, and royal marriages. The modern newspaper man
is, in print, the embodiment of Mr. Everybody; in private he is Mr.
Nobody, and doesn’t count at all. Lord Derby is afraid of the journalist
in print, but in the flesh his Lordship’s footman would look down upon
him. “Honly a littery man, let him knock agin,” Jeames would say. So we
go everywhere, even as though we were in the “receipt of fern seed.” Even
the House of Commons has invented a pleasant fiction for the benefit of
the gentlemen of the press, and humorously ignores their presence during
the debates. The Empress Julia bathed before her male slave. “Call _that_
a man,” she cried, contemptuously. In the like manner, no account is
taken of the journalist’s extra card of admission or extra knife and
fork. He goes under the head of “sundries,” though he makes sometimes a
rather formidable figure in the aggregate.

But to the general public—the social Zouaves are but a drop of water in
the sea—a _bal masqué_ is a very expensive affair, and a luxury not to be
indulged in without a liberal disbursement of cash. First, ticket, half
a guinea. Mademoiselle de la Galette’s ticket, if you be _galant homme_,
five shillings more, if she be in costume; half a guinea if in domino.
Next, costume for yourself, variable according to its extravagance—a
guinea at least. At any rate, if you are content to appear in plain
evening dress, there are clean white kid gloves and patent leather
boots to be purchased. And the supper; and the wine, for champagne
is _de rigueur_, at twelve and fifteen shillings a bottle! (You will
observe that whenever I grow fashionably dissipated, I begin to chatter
French.) And Mademoiselle de la Galette’s _bouquet_, and the intermediate
refreshments, ices, coffee, lemonade, and what-not; and the cabs and the
wild revelry in the wicked Haymarket purlieus afterwards. You see I
have led you to the very end of the chapter, and that a night at a _bal
masqué_ will make an irremediable hole in a ten-pound note.

For this reason the persons (of the male sex) who visit such a gathering
must be divided into three classes: theatrical and literary nobodies,
coming there for nothing and not caring much about the place now they
are come; young bucks about the town with more money than wit, who will
exist, I am afraid, in every civilised age; and lastly and chiefly,
the “Swells.” I use the term advisedly, for none other can so minutely
characterise them. Long, stern, solemn, languid, with drooping tawny
moustaches, with faultlessly made habiliments, with irreproachable white
neckcloths, with eyes half-closed, with pendant arms, with feet enclosed
in mirror-like patent boots, the “swells” saunter listlessly through the
ball-room with a quiet consciousness that all these dazzling frivolities
are provided for their special gratification—which indeed they are. As
it is _l’œil du maître qui engraisse le cheval_, so it is the “swell”
who makes the _bal masqué_ pay. Never so many orders may Mr. Nugent give
away; but if the “swell” be not in town or muster not in force on the
eventful night, there will be wailing in her Majesty’s Theatre, and woe
in M. Jullien’s cash-box. It must be somewhat of a strong till that can
stand this _tiraillement_. As regards the ladies who are the partners
in the mazy dance of these splendid cavaliers, I may say, once for all,
that they are Daughters of Folly; Mademoiselle de la Galette and her
condisciples, English and French, are there, multiplied five-hundred
fold. I don’t think your pet garotter, good Mr. Chaplain, would be very
successful as a Hercules at the feet of these Omphales.

[Illustration: THREE O’CLOCK A.M.: A BAL MASQUE.]

I wonder how many sons and scions, or cousins or nephews, or
multitudinous misty offshoots of the titled men who govern us, who own
our lands, our waters, and the birds of the air, the beasts of the
field, and the fish of the sea, are here. I wonder how many threads of
connection there are in this ball-room theatre between these butterflies
and the ermine and the lawn of the House of Peers. How many, how much?
Bah! There is young Reginald Fitzmitre, the Bishop of Bosfursus’s son,
talking to that charming _titi_ in the striped silk skirt and crimson
satin trousers. Reginald is in the Guards. Bishops’ sons are fond of
going into the Guards. Yonder is little Pulex, whose brother, Tapely
Pulex, is Under-Secretary for the Egregious Department. There Lord Claude
Miffin has just stalked in with Sir Charles Shakeypegs (who is old enough
to know better); and upon my word, here comes that venerable sinner
Lord Holloway, with little Fanny Claypainter on his arm. It won’t do,
my Lord; you may disguise yourself as closely as you will in a domino
and a mask with a long lace beard, but I know you by that side-wise
waggle of your Lordship’s head. The Earl of Holloway has been a very
gay nobleman in his time. He married Miss Redpoll, the famous English
_contraltro_, drew her theatrical salary with very great punctuality
every Saturday afternoon at three o’clock, and beat her, people said. He
was the honourable Jack Pilluler then. Years elapsed before he came into
the title and Unguenton Park. _She_ died. Advance, then—advance then, my
noble swells—to adopt the style of the gentlemen with the thimble and
pea. Advance, this is all for your delectation. Meanwhile, let your most
noble and right reverend fathers, brothers, uncles, and cousins meet
in either House of Parliament, meet at Quarter Sessions, or on borough
bench, and make or expound laws against the wicked, thriftless, hardened,
incorrigibly dissipated Poor. No beer for them, the rogues! No fairs,
no wakes, no village feasts, no harvest-homes, no theatres, concerts,
dances, no tobacco, no rabbits, no bowls, no cricket—but plenty of law,
and plenty of nice hard labour, and wholesome gruel, and strengthening
stone-breaking, and plenty of your sweet aristocratic wives and daughters
to force their way into poor men’s cottages, ask them questions for
which I wonder they don’t get their ears boxed, pry into their domestic
concerns, peep into their cupboards, and wonder at their improvidence in
not having more to eat and drink therein.

Stand we in the orchestral hemicycle, and watch the garish, motley scene.
Questions of morality apart, one must have jaundiced eyes to deny that,
as a mere spectacle, it is brilliant and picturesque enough. All that
M. Jullien’s _bizarre_ taste and fancy could suggest, or the cunning
skill of experienced scenic decorators carry out, has been done here
to make the place gay, dazzling, and effective. Wreaths of artificial
flowers, reflecting the highest credit upon the paper-stainer and the
paper-cutter’s art, mask the somewhat _fanées_ ornaments of the tiers of
boxes; homely corridors and staircases are pleasantly disguised under a
plentitude of scarlet baize and drugget; the chandelier is of abnormous
size, for any number of glittering festoons have been added to its
crystal abacot; devices in glass and devices in gas twinkle and radiate
on every side: nor is music’s voluptuous swell wanting to incite us to
“chase the glowing hours with flying feet,” and make all things go “merry
as a marriage bell.”

Truly, that well-packed orchestra deserves a more dignified arena for
its exertions than this vulgar dancing-place. A jangling harp, a wheezy
flute, and a cracked-voice violin, with perhaps a dingy old drum, with
two perpetual black eyes in its parchment cheeks where the stick hits
them, like the wife of an incorrigibly drunken cobbler—instruments
such as you may hear tortured any night outside the Moguls in Drury
Dane: these would be quite good enough for the _ruffiani_ (by which
I do not at all mean “ruffians”) and _bona robas_ of a masquerade to
dance to. But this orchestra, numerous as it is, is composed of picked
men: it is an imperial guard of veterans in fiddling, bassooning, and
cornet-à-pistoning. Even the gentleman who officiates at the triangle,
is a solo player; and the fierce-looking foreigner who attends to the
side-drums, is the most famous _tambour_ in Europe. At beating the
_chamade_ he stands alone, and his roll is unrivalled. With shame I
speak it: you shall find among these artists in wind and artists in
string instruments, horns, and clarionettes, tenors and second violins,
who, during the operatic season, are deemed not unworthy to be ruled
by the Prospero wand of the kid-gloved Costa or swayed by the magic
fiddlestick of the accomplished Alfred Mellon. A pretty vocation for
them to have to fiddle and blow for the amusement of ne’er-do-weels in
tom-fools’ costumes, and bold-faced jigs in velvet trousers! Why, they
could take their parts in the symphonies of Beethoven and the masses of
Mozart. And thou, too, Jullien the Superb, _maestro_ of the ambrosial
ringlets, the softly-luxuriant whiskers and moustaches, _gracilis puer_
of the embroidered body-linen, the frogged pantaloons, the coat with
_moire antique_ facings, the diamond studs and sleeve buttons! couldst
thou not find a worthier tilt-yard for thy chivalrous gambadoes? Alas!
to some men, howsoever talented, charlatanism seems to adhere like a
burr, and will not depart. Jullien must have caught this stain at the
battle of Navarino or at the Jardin Turc, and it has abided by him ever
since. There is not the slightest necessity for this clever, kindly, and
really accomplished musician—to whom the cause of good and even classical
music in England owes much—to be a quack; but I suppose he can’t help
it. He was born under a revolving firework star, and would introduce
blue fire in the Dead March in “Saul.” So it is with many. They could be
Abernethies, but they prefer being Dulcamaras; they could be Galileos or
Copernici, they prefer the fame of Cagliostro or Katterfelto. There was
poor dear Alexis Soyer, as kind a hearted Christian as you might find, an
admirable cook, an inventive genius, a brave, devoted, self-denying man,
who served his adopted country better in the Crimea than many a starred
and titled C.B. He had no call to be a quack; there was no earthly reason
why he should inundate the newspapers with puffs, and wear impossible
trousers, or cloth-of-gold waistcoats, cut diagonally. The man had a vast
natural capacity, could think, ay, and _do_ things; yet he quacked so
continually, that many people set him down as a mere shallow pretender,
and some even doubted whether he could cook at all. He was, nevertheless,
a master of his difficult art, though in his latter days he did not
exercise it much. Grisier grew tired of fencing. Wordsworth did not write
much after he was laureate. Sir Edwin’s brush is passing idle now. But
I have partaken of succulent dainties cooked in their daintiest manner
by the cunning hands of the illustrious _chef_: and I tell you that he
could cook, when he chose, like St. Zita, the patroness of the Genoese
_cuisinières_. And I think I know, and that I can tell, a _compôte_ from
a cow-heel, having dined as well and as ill, in my time, as any man of my
age and standing.

What shall I say of the moving, living, kaleidoscope, twinkling and
coruscating in the vast _enceinte_? Indeed, it is very difficult to say
anything a bout the outward similitude of a _bal masqué_ that has not
been said a hundred times before. You have taken for granted the very
considerable admixture of plain evening costume, worn by the swells _et
autres_, which speckles the galaxy of gay costumes with multitudinous
black dots. After this, we all know what to expect, and whom to find.
Paint, patches, spangles, and pearl-powder, tawdry gold and silver
(more brassy and pewtery, rather, I opine), and sham point lace. Sham
fox-hunters, mostly of a Hebrew cast of countenance, in tarnished scarlet
coats, creased buckskins, and boots with tops guiltless of oxalic acid,
brandishing whips that have oftener been laid across their own shoulders
than on the flanks of the “screws” they have bestridden; and screening
their mouths with palms covered by dubious white kid gloves, or with bare
dirt-inlaid knuckles protuberant with big rings of mosaic jewellery,
shouting “Yoicks,” and “Hark-away,” in nasal accents. Undergraduates,
in trencher caps and trailing gowns, worn by jobbernols, who know far
more about Oxford Street than the University of Oxford. Barristers, more
likely to be pleaded for than to plead. Bartlemy-Fair Field Marshals,
in costumes equally akin to his who rides on the lamentable white horse
before the Lord Mayor’s gingerbread coach, and Bombastes Furioso in
the farce. Charles the Seconds, with all the dissolute effrontery of
that monarch, but of his wit or merriment none. Red Rovers and Conrad
Corsairs, whose nautical adventures have been confined to a _fracas_ on
board a penny steamboat; Albanian, and Sciote, and Suliote Chiefs, with
due fez, kilt, yataghan, and lambrochines, in orthodox “snowy camise
and shaggy capote,” and who act their characters in a likelier manner
than their comrades, for they are, the majority, arrant “Greeks.” A few
Bedouin Arabs—a costume picturesque yet inexpensive: a pen’north of
Spanish liquorice to dye the face withal; a couple of calico sheets,
for caftan and burnous, with the tassel of a red worsted bell-pull
or so to finish off with, and you have your Abd-el-Kader complete.
Half-a-dozen Marquises, of Louis the Fifteenth’s time. Plenty of Monks:
robes and _cagoules_ of gray linen, a rope for a girdle, a pennyworth
of wooden beads for a rosary, and slippers cut down into sandals—these
are as cheap as effective. A Knight, in complete armour (pasteboard
with tin-foil glued thereupon); a Robinson Crusoe, always getting into
piteous dilemmas, with his goatskin (worsted) umbrella; a Bear, a Demon,
and a Chinese Mandarin. When I have enumerated these, I find that I
have noticed the _travestisements_ most prevalent among the English
male portion of the costumed mob. But there is another very appreciable
element in these exhibitions: the foreign one. A century has passed
since Johnson told us, in his mordant satire of “London,” that England’s
metropolis was—

        “The needy villain’s general home,
    The common sew’r of Paris and of Rome.”

It is astonishing to find how much foreign riff-raff and alien
scoundrelry will turn up at a masquerade. Leicester Square and Panton
Street, the _cloaques_ of the Haymarket and Soho, disgorge the bearded
and pomatumed scum of their stale _pot-au-feu_-smelling purlieus on
this dancing floor. They come with orders, and don’t sup; rather hover
about the Daughters of Folly and Sons of Silliness, to wheedle and
extort odd silver sums, with which to gamble at atrocious “nicks,” and
tobacco-enveloped gambling dens in Leicesterian slums, yet unrooted out
by lynx-eyed policemen. Homer not unfrequently nods in Scotland Yard.
“None are so blind as those that won’t see,” whisper the wicked. These
foreigners—shameless, abandoned rogues, mostly throwing undeserved
discredit upon honest, harmless _forestieri_; fellows who are “known
to the police” in Paris, and have a second home at the _Depôt de la
Prefecture_—affect the cheap, but thoroughly masquerade costume of
the _Pierrot_. Very easy of accomplishment, this disguise. About one
and ninepence outlay would suffice, it seemeth to me. Jerkin of white
calico, with immoderately long sleeves, like those of a _camisole de
force_ unfastened; galligaskins of the same snowy cheapness, and scarlet
slippers; any number of tawdry calico bows of any colour down the sides,
a frill round the neck, where the “jougs” of the pillory or the collar
of the garotte should be; the face, that should be seared with the
hangman’s brand, thickly plastered with flour, so that there would be
no room for the knave to blush, even if the light hand of a transient
conscience smote him on the cheek and bade him remember that he once
had a mother, and was not always aide-de-camp in waiting to Beelzebub;
a conical cap of pasteboard, like an extinguisher snowed upon; here you
have the _Pierrot_. The Englishman sometimes attempts him, but generally
fails in the assumption. In order to “keep-up” the character well, it
is necessary to play an infinity of monkey-tricks, to bear kicking with
cheerful equanimity, to dance furiously, and to utter a succession of
shrill screams at the end of every dance. Else you are no true _Pierrot_;
and these elegancies are foreign to our phlegmatic manners.

Another favourite costume with the _bal masqué_ is that of the “Postillon
de Longjumeau.” He is as well-nigh extinct in France, by this chiming,
as our own old English post-boys. Railways shunted him off on to
oblivion’s sidings with terrible rapidity. Only, his Imperial Highness
Prince Jerome Napoleon—whom the Parisians persist in calling “l’Oncle
Tom,” because, say they, Napoleon I., his brother, was “_le grand
homme_” Napoleon III., his nephew, “_le petit homme_” so this must be
necessarily “_l’oncle-t-homme_”—or Tom—this mediocre old gentleman, who
throughout his long life has always been fortunate enough to be lodged,
and boarded, and pensioned at other peoples’ expense (they positively
carved out a kingdom for him once), still keeps up a staff of _postillons
de Longjumeau_, who, with much bell-ringing, whip-cracking, and “ha!
heu hooping!” guide his fat, white, hollow-backed Norman post-horses,
when his Imperial Highness goes down to St. Cloud or Chantilly in his
travelling carriage. It is a quaint, not unbecoming costume: glazed
hat, the brim built at an angle, broad gold band, cockade as big as a
pancake, and multicoloured streamers of attenuated ribbon; short wig,
with club well powdered; jacket with red facings and turn-up two-inch
tails; saucepan-lid buttons, and metal badge on the left arm; scarlet
vest, double breasted; buckskins, saffron-dyed; high boots with bucket
tops, and greased, mind, not blacked; long spurs, and whip insignificant
as to stock and tremendous as to lash. This is his Imperial Highness’s
postilion, and this, minus the spurs, is the postilion of the _bal
masqué_.

And the ladies? I am reticent. I am nervous. I draw back. “I don’t
like,” as the children say. Hie you to the National Gallery, and look at
Turner’s picture of “Phryne going to the bath as Venus.” Among the wild
crew of _bacchantes_ and _psoropaphæ_ who surround that young person, you
will find costumes as extravagant of hues, as variegated, as strike the
senses here. Only, among the masqueraders you must not look for harmony
of colour or symmetry of line. All is jarring, discordant, tawdry, and
harlequinadish. You are in error if you suppose I am about to descant at
length on the glittering semi-nudities gyrating here. Go to, you naughty
queans! you must find some other inventory-maker. Go and mend your ways,
buy horsehair corsets, “disciplines” and skulls if you will, and repair
to the desert, there to mortify yourselves. Alas! the hussies laugh at
me, and tell me that the only manner in which they choose to tolerate
horsehair is _en crinoline_. Go to, and remember the fate of a certain
Janet Somebody—I forget her surname—condemned by some Scotch elders,
in the early days of the Reformation, to stripes and the stocks, for
assuming a “pair of breeks.” Alack! the _débardeurs_ only mock me, and
tell me that I am a fogey.

Three quasi-feminine costumes there are, however, that shall be
pilloried here. There is the young lady in a riding-habit, who is so
palpably unaccustomed to wearing such a garment, who is so piteously
ill-at-ease in it, not knowing how to raise its folds with Amazonian
grace, and tripping herself up at every fourth step or so, that she is
more ridiculous than offensive. There is the “Middy:” a pair of white
trousers, a turn-down collar, a round jacket, and a cap with a gold-lace
band, being understood to fulfil all the requirements of that costume.
The “middy” sneaks about in a most woeful state of sheep-leggedness,
or, at most, essays to burst into delirious gymnastics, which end in
confusion and contumely. And last, and most abhorrent to me, there is
the “Romp.” Romps in their natural state—in a parlour, on a lawn, in
a swing, at a game of blind-man’s-buff, or hunt-the-slipper—no honest
man need cavil at. I like romps myself, when they don’t pull your hair
too hard, have some mercy on your toes, and refrain from calling you a
“cross, grumpy, old thing,” when you mildly suggest that it is very near
bed-time. But a romp of some twenty-five years of age, with a cadaverous
face, rouged, with a coral necklace, flaxen tails, a pinafore, a blue
sash, Vandyked trousers, bare arms, and a skipping-rope: take away that
romp, I say, quickly, somebody, and bring me a Gorgon or a Fury, the
Hottentot Venus or the Pig-faced Lady! Anything for a change. Away with
that romp, and cart her speedily to the nearest boarding-school where a
lineal descendant of Mother Brownrigge yet wields her birchen sceptre.

It is on record that Thomas Carlyle, chiefest among British prose writing
men, once in his life was present, in this very theatre, at a performance
of the Italian Opera. He stayed the ballet, even, and went away full of
strange cogitations. I would give one of my two ears (for be it known
to you I am stone-deaf on the left side, like most men who have led
evil lives in their youth, and could, wearing my hair long, well spare
the superfluous flap of flesh and gristle) if I could persuade Thomas
to visit a masquerade. There would be a new chapter in the next edition
of “Sartor Resartus” to a certainty. For all these varied fopperies
and fineries, dominoes, battered masks with ragged lace, sham orris,
draggle-tailed feathers, tin-bladed rapiers, rabbit-skin and rat’s-tail
ermine, cotton velvet, “pinked” stockings, frayed epaulettes, mended
skirts—all suggest pregnant thoughts of the Bag. _Tout cela sent son
marchand d’habits._ Not to be driven away is the pervading notion of
Old Clothes of Vinegar Yard and the ladies’ wardrobe shop, of the
ultimate relegation of these sallow fripperies to Petticoat Lane and
Rag Fair. Nor without histories—some grave, some gay, some absurd, some
terrible—must be these mended shreds of gaudy finery. They have been
worn by aristocratic striplings at Eton Montem—defunct saturnalia of
patrician “cadging.” Those dim brocades and Swiss shepherdess _corsages_,
have graced the forms of the fair-haired daughters of nobles at fancy
balls. Great actresses, or _cantatrici_, have declaimed or sung in those
satins, before they were disdainfully cast by, abandoned to the dresser,
sold to the Jew costumier, cut down into tunics or pages’ shoulder
cloaks, furbished up with new tags and trimmings. Real barristers and
gay young college lads have worn those wigs and gowns and trencher caps;
real captains have flaunted at reviews in those embroidered tunics and
epaulettes; swift horses have borne those scarlet coats and buckskins
across country, but with real fox-hunters inside. Where are the original
possessors? Drowned, or shot to death, or peacefully mouldering,
insolvent, or abroad, gone up to the Lords, or hanged. Who knows?
Perhaps they are lounging here as Swells, not recognising their old
uniforms and academics, now worn by sham Abraham men and _franc-mitous_.
Who can tell? Where is the pinafore of our youth, and the first shooting
jacket of adolescence? “_Où sont les neiges d’antan?_” Where are the last
winter’s snows?

But Thomas Carlyle wouldn’t come to this place, at his age and at this
time in the morning; and, between you and me, I think it high time
that we too should depart. In truth, the place is growing anything
but orderly. Champagne and incessant exercise on the “light fantastic
toe” have done their work. Dances of a wild and incoherent character,
reminding one of the “_Chaloupe_” the “_Tulipe Orageuse_,” and the
much-by-municipal-authorities-abhorred “_Cancan_” are attempted. The
masters of the ceremonies seem laudably desirous of clearing the _salle_.
Let us procure our great-coats, and flee from Babylon before the masquers
grew unroarious.

A stream of masquerading humanity, male and female, begins to pour
through the corridors and so out beneath the portico. It is time. Cabs
and broughams—the “swells” came in the broughams—sly, wicked little
inventions; policemen hoarsely shout and linkmen dart about.

       *       *       *       *       *

I thought so. I knew how it would end. A row, of course. That big
_Postillon de Longjumeau_ has borne it with admirable temper for hours;
but the conduct of the Charles the Second Cavalier has been beyond human
forbearance. She—the cavalier is a she—has incited the _Pierrot_ (an
Englishman, for a wonder, and hopelessly gone in champagne) to knock the
postilion down. He wept piteously at first, but, gathering courage, and
not liking, perhaps, to be humiliated in the eyes of a _débardeur_ in
claret-coloured velvet, he kicked up wildly at the aggressor with his
boots. Then the cavalier scratched his face; then the claret-coloured
_débardeur_ fainted; then Mr. Edward Clyfaker, of Charles Street, Drury
Lane, thief, cut in cleverly from between the wheels of a carriage, and
picked Lord Holloway’s pocket of Miss Claypainter’s cambric handkerchief;
then A 22 drew his truncheon and hit an inoffensive fox-hunter a violent
blow on the head; then four medical students called out “Fire!” and an
inebriated costermonger, who had not been to the masquerade at all, but
was quietly reeling home, challenged Lord Claude Miffin to single combat;
then Ned Raggabones and Robin Barelegs, street Arabs, threw “cart-wheels”
into the midst of the throng; then the police came down in great force,
and, after knocking a great many people about who were not in the
slightest degree implicated in the disturbance, at last pitched upon
the right parties, and bore the pugnacious _Pierrot_ and the disorderly
Cavalier off to the station-house. It is but due to the managers of the
masquerade to state, that no such scandalous _melées_ take place within
the precincts of the theatre itself. The masters of the ceremonies and
the police on duty take care of that: but such little accidents will
happen, outside, after the best-regulated masquerades.

[Illustration: THREE O’CLOCK A.M.: THE NIGHT CHARGES AT BOW STREET.]

To the station-house, then, to the abode of captivity and the hall of
justice. The complaining postilion and his friends, accompanied by a
motley procession of tag-rag and bob-tail, press triumphantly forward.
Shall we follow also?

In a commodious gas-lit box, surrounded by books and papers, and with
a mighty folio of loose leaves open before him—a book of Fate, in
truth—sits a Rhadamanthine man, buttoned up in a great-coat often;
for be it blazing July or frigid December, it is always cold at three
o’clock in the morning. Not a very pleasant duty his: sitting through
the long night before that folio, smoking prohibited, warm alcoholic
liquids only, I should suppose, to be surreptitiously indulged in:
sitting only diversified by an occasional sally into the night air, to
visit the policemen on their various beats, and learn what wicked deeds
are doing this night and morning—a deputy taking charge of the folio
meanwhile. Duty perhaps as onerous as that of the Speaker of the House of
Commons: but, ah! not half so wearisome. For the Rhadamanthine man in the
great-coat has betimes to listen to tales of awful murder, of desperate
burglaries, of harrowing suicides, of poverty and misery that make your
soul to shudder and your heart to grow sick; and sometimes to more jocund
narratives—harum-scarum escapades, drunken freaks, impudent tricks,
ingenious swindles, absurd jealousy, quarrels, and the like. But they
all—be the case murder, or be it mouse-trap stealing—are entered on that
vast loose folio, which is the charge-sheet, in fact; Rhadamanthine man
in great-coat being but the inspector of police on night duty, sitting
here at his grim task for some fifty or sixty shillings a week. Harder
task than sub-editing a newspaper even, I am of opinion.

He has had a busy time since nine last evening. One by one the “charges”
were brought in, and hour after hour, and set before him in that little
iron-railed dock. Some were felonious charges: scowling, beetle-browed,
under-hung charges, who had been there many times before, and were likely
to come there many times again. A multiplicity of Irish charges, too:
beggars, brawlers, pavement-obstructors—all terribly voluble and abusive
of tongue; many with squalid babies in their arms. One or two such
charges are lying now, contentedly drunken heaps of rags, in the women’s
cells. Plenty of juvenile charges, mere children, God help them! swept
in and swept out; sometimes shot into cells—their boxes of fusees, or
jagged broom-stumps, taken from them. A wife-beating charge; ruffianly
carver, who has been beating his wife with the leg of a pianoforte. The
wretched woman, all blood and tears, is very reluctant, even now, to give
evidence, and entreats the inspector to “let Bill go; he didn’t mean no
harm.” But he is locked up, departing to durance with the comforting
assurance to his wife that he will, “do for her,” at the first convenient
opportunity. I daresay he will, when his six months’ hard labour are
over. There was a swell-mob charge, too, a dandy _de première force_,
who swaggered, and twisted his eye-glass, and sucked his diamond ring
while in the dock, and declared he knew nothing of the gentleman’s watch,
he was “shaw.” He broke down, however, while being searched, and on the
discovery of the watch—for he had missed the confederate who usually
“covered” him—subsided into bad language, and the expression of a hope
that he might not be tried by “old Bramwell,” meaning the learned judge
of that name. Short work has been made with some of these charges, while
the disposal of others has occupied a considerable time. As the night
grew older, the drunk and disorderly and drunk and incapable charges
began to drop in; but one by one they have been disposed of in a calm,
business-like manner, and the “charges” are either released, or, if
sufficient cause were apparent for their detention, are sleeping off
their liquor, or chewing the cud of sweet and bitter fancies, in the
adjacent cells.

“I thought the _ball masky_ would bring us some work,” the inspector
remarks to the sergeant, as the _Pierrot_ is carried, and the cavalier
is dragged, and the postilion and his friend stalk indignantly—the whole
accompanied by a posse of police, into the station: “Now, then, F 29,
what is it?”

F, or X, or Z, or whatever may be his distinguishing letter or numeral,
gives a succinct narrative of the row, so far as he is acquainted with
its phases, very much in the style of the _Act d’Accusation_ of a French
_procureur imperial_, which is always as damaging as it conveniently
can be made against the person in custody. The postilion follows with
_his_ statement, the cavalier breaks in with an indignant denial of
all he has said, violently insists upon charging the postilion with
murder and assault, and ultimately expresses a desire to know what he,
the inspector, thinks of himself, a wish to tear F 29’s eyes out, and
ardent ambition to “polish off the whole lot.” “Don’t all speak at
once,” remonstrates the inspector, but they _will_ all speak at once,
and the _Pierrot_, waking up from an intoxicated trance, asseverates, in
broken accents, that he is a “p-p-p-p-pro-f-f-fessional man, and highly
res-pe-pe-p-pectable,” and then sinks quiescent over the front of the
dock, in an attitude very much resembling that sometimes assumed by the
celebrated Mr. Punch.

“There, take him away,” says the municipal functionary, pointing with
sternly contemptuous finger to the _Pierrot_. “And take _her_ away,” he
adds, designating the cavalier. “And you, sir,” he continues, to the
postilion, “sign your name and address there, and take care to be at the
court at ten in the morning. And I should advise you to go straight home,
or you’ll be here again shortly, with somebody to take care of you. I
wonder whether we shall have any more,” he says wearily, to his sergeant,
as the captives are removed, and the room is cleared.

       *       *       *       *       *

It does not so much matter, for the third hour is gone and past, and
as we emerge into the street, the clock of St. Paul’s strikes FOUR.
There! the twenty-four hours are accomplished, and we have progressed,
however lamely and imperfectly, “Twice Round the Clock.” Good-bye, dear
readers—pleasant companions of my labours. Goodbye, troops of shadowy
friends and shadowy enemies, whose handwriting—in praise, in reproach,
in condolence, in sympathy, in jest, and in earnest—is visible enough
to me on many pages laying open before me at this moment, but whose
faces I shall never see on this side the grave. Your smiles and frowns
henceforward belong to the past, for my humble task is achieved, and the
Clock is Stopped.


THE END.




FOOTNOTES


[1] A post-prandial paper, called the “Evening Mail,” rarely seen in the
metropolis, but extensively circulated in the provinces, and especially
in the colonies, and in the United States, is published as a species of
vesper thunderer at the “Times” office.

[2] “The Chimes.”

[3] This old man’s name was “Corney,” at least I never knew him by any
other appellation. He had been a collegian for years; and being a Briton
who “stood upon his rights,” and was for “freedom of opinion,” gave
the governor an immense amount of trouble. I think one of the happiest
days of Captain Hudson’s life must have been the one on which “Corney”
(who, it turned out, ought never to have been imprisoned at all) got his
discharge. He took lodgings immediately, I have heard, at a neighbouring
coal shed, and brought an action (_in formâ pauperis_) against the
governor for false imprisonment, and wrongful detention of property,
about once a fortnight.

[4] Free-grown sugar in the first two: slave-grown sugar in boxes.

[5] See page 30.

[6] I am afraid that this legend must be regarded as what the “Times”
newspaper called, in reference to old Peter Thellusson’s delicate sense
of honour, in providing for a possible restitution of property left
in his charge by the ancient noblesse of France—a “modern myth.” An
analogous story, relative to the appearance of a _real_ demon on the
stage, in addition to those forming part of the _dramatis personæ_, is
related in connection with Edward Alleyn, the actor; and the supernatural
visitation, it is said, caused him to quit the stage as a profession, and
found Dulwich College.

[7] The ladies appear in the gallery before dinner, quit it after grace
has been said, and are regaled in ante-chambers with ices, coffee,
and champagne. They return when the speech-making, wine-bibbing, and
song-singing commence.

[8] This absurd remnant of a candle-snuffing age, and which is about as
consistent with dramatic proprieties as the performance of the character
of Macbeth by Garrick in the costume of a Captain in the Guards, was
abolished—so far as his admirable Shakspearian revivals were concerned—by
Mr. Charles Kean.

[9] Who married again, and extinguished herself. So did Maria Louisa, so
did Mrs. Shelley. They _will_ marry again, those unconscionable feminines.

[10] This pretty little theatre has succeeded, thanks to the genius and
perseverance of Miss Swanborough, aided by an admirable company.

[11] There is a curious story anent this “Green Dragon” tavern, a dim
record, embosomed in the musty records of the “State Trials.” In a note
to one of those chronicles of crimes and suffering, it is hinted at that
the daughter of the executioner of Charles the First was a barmaid at the
Green Dragon in the reign of Queen Anne.

[12] “He made the giants first, and then he killed them.”—_Fielding’s
“Tom Thumb.”_