Twice Round the Clock

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.

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.

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.

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.

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—

Or,

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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—

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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—

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:—

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!

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.”

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: 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.

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.

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.

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.

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,

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.

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—

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.