Palace and Hovel; Or, Phases of London Life

The Project Gutenberg eBook, Palace and Hovel, by Daniel Joseph Kirwan

ONE MORE UNFORTUNATE. (Page [459].)

GRAND STAIRCASE, BUCKINGHAM PALACE.

PALACE AND HOVEL:

OR,

PHASES OF LONDON LIFE.

BEING

PERSONAL OBSERVATIONS OF AN AMERICAN IN LONDON, BY DAY AND NIGHT; WITH
GRAPHIC DESCRIPTIONS OF ROYAL AND NOBLE PERSONAGES, THEIR RESIDENCES
AND RELAXATIONS; TOGETHER WITH VIVID ILLUSTRATIONS
OF THE MANNERS, SOCIAL CUSTOMS, AND MODES OF
LIVING OF THE RICH AND THE RECKLESS, THE
DESTITUTE AND THE DEPRAVED, IN THE
METROPOLIS OF GREAT BRITAIN.

WITH

VALUABLE STATISTICAL INFORMATION,

COLLECTED FROM THE MOST RELIABLE SOURCES.

BY

DANIEL JOSEPH KIRWAN.

Beautifully Illustrated with Two Hundred Engravings, and a finely executed Map of London.

PUBLISHED BY SUBSCRIPTION ONLY.

Hartford, Conn.:
BELKNAP & BLISS.
W. E. BLISS, TOLEDO, OHIO.—NETTLETON & CO., CINCINNATI,
OHIO.—DUFFIELD ASHMEAD, PHILADELPHIA, PA.
UNION PUBLISHING CO., CHICAGO, ILL.
A. L. BANCROFT & CO., SAN FRANCISCO, CAL.
1870

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1870, by
BELKNAP & BLISS,
In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of Connecticut.
WILLIAM H. LOCKWOOD,
Electrotyper
Hartford, Conn.

TO

Samuel L.M. Barlow, Esq.,

OF

NEW YORK CITY,

A

True Gentleman in Every Quality and Duty of Life,

THESE PAGES ARE DEDICATED,

AS A

SLIGHT TESTIMONY

TO THE

Unvarying Friendship borne by him for the author

PREFACE.

In offering this volume to the Public, the result of a year's experience and labor, I must indeed feel gratified, and more than rewarded, if any of those who may peruse its pages shall find in them a tithe of the pleasure which I enjoyed in journeying in and about the nooks, crannies, and curious places, of what may be justly called the greatest and most populous City of the Modern World.

Believing that a Metropolis of Three and a Half Millions of people should be observed and described, if observed and described at all, in a large and comprehensive sense, in order that a thorough knowledge of it may be obtained by those who will do me the honor of turning the leaves of this book, I have not hesitated to take my readers into places which they might shrink from visiting alone, and which are rarely or ever seen by the stranger, in London. Therefore have I sketched its Haunts of Vice, Misery, and Crime, as well as its fairer and brighter aspects, with no faltering in my purpose, so that the American people might see London as I saw it, and as it exists To-Day.

The material employed in making the book was gathered from personal observation, while acting as a Special Correspondent of the New York World, in London, and I cannot do less than make an acknowledgment of the kindness of its Editor, Mr. Manton Marble, by whose permission I have used some portions of the matter embodied in this work.

DANIEL JOSEPH KIRWAN.

Hartford, August 1st, 1870.

1. [One More Unfortunate] Frontispiece
2. [Grand Staircase, Buckingham Palace]—Illuminated Title-Page.
3. [Bird's-Eye View of London,]
4. [Initial Letter],
5. [The London Stone],
6. [Thank you, Sir],
7. [The Rock and Chain, Tail Piece],
8. [Initial Letter],
9. [Sword, &c., Tail Piece,]
10. [Entrance to Docks],
11. [I Don't Think it Will Hurt me],
12. [Forest, Initial Letter],
13. [Buckingham Palace] (Full Page,)
14. [Portrait of Queen Victoria],
15. [John Brown Exercising the Queen],
16. [Fancy Sketch, Tail Piece,]
17. [Lion on Guard, Initial Letter],
18. [Purty Bill Showing us in],
19. [Wont you Take Something?]
20. [Snake Swallowing],
21. [ "Bilking Bet takes the Chair],"
22. [ "Teddy the Kinchin's Song],"
23. [Explosive Materials, Tail Piece,]
24. [Initial Letter],
25. [ Cogers' Hall, Debating Club],
26. [Snake in the Grass, Tail Piece],
27. [Initial Letter],
28. [ Conservative Club House],
29. [ Carlton Club House],
30. [ Oxford and Cambridge Club House],
31. [ United Service Club House],
32. [Architectural Sketch, Tail Piece],
33. [Initial Letter],
34. [ Westminster Abbey],
35. [ Shakespeare's Tomb],
36. [ Tomb of Milton],
37. [ Tomb of Mary Queen of Scots],
38. [ Coronation Chair],
39. [Gauntleted Hand and Sword, Tail Piece],
40. [Initial Letter],
41. [ Victoria Theatre in the New Cut], (Full Page,)
42. [ Rag Fair],
43. [A Cell Window, Initial Letter],
44. [The Last Execution at Newgate],
45. [Fetters and Chain, Tail Piece],
46. [Broken Wheel, Initial Letter,]
47. [Doctors' Commons],
48. [Eagle and Snake, Tail Piece],
49. [Initial Letter],
50. [A Bohemian Carouse],
51. [A Water Scene, Tail Piece],
52. [Tower of London] (Full Page,)
53. [Initial Letter],
54. [Traitors' Gate],
55. [The Crown Jewels],
56. [Imperial Orb, Ampulla and other Jewels],
57. [The State Salt-Cellars],
58. [Cannon, Tail Piece],
59. [Initial Letter],
60. [The Cadgers' Meal],
61. [Raft Timber, Tail Piece],
62. [The Old Oak, Initial Letter],
63. [Bathing in Hyde Park],
64. [The Labyrinth],
65. [The Crystal Palace],
66. [The Promenade, Tail Piece],
67. [Fort and Water Scene, Initial Letter,]
68. [Portrait of the Prince of Wales],
69. [Prince and Cabman],
70. [Broken Wagon and Dead Horse, Tail Piece],
71. [Blood-Hounds in the Leash, Initial Letter,]
72. [Portrait of Lady Mordaunt],
73. [Portrait of the Duke of Hamilton],
74. [Portrait of the Marquis of Waterford],
75. [Portrait of the Marquis of Hastings],
76. [Mounted Cannon, Initial Letter],
77. [Houses of Parliament] (Full Page,)
78. [Portrait of William Ewart Gladstone]
79. [The Legislative Bar-Maid],
80. [Portrait of John Bright],
81. [The Student, Tail Piece],
82. [Initial Letter],
83. "[Could you Make it a Tanner?]"
84. [The Speaker of the House],
85. [First Lord of the Admiralty],
86. [Portrait of Robert E. Lowe],
87. [Gladstone Speaking in the House of Commons] (Full Page,)
88. [Landscape, Tail Piece],
89. [Initial Letter],
90. [The Pocket-Book Game],
91. [Steam Frigate, Tail Piece],
92. [A Broadside, Initial Letter],
93. [The Sewer Hunter],
94. [Blood-Hound, Tail Piece,]
95. [Island, Initial Letter],
96. [Cats Receiving Rations],
97. [The Great Porter Tun],
98. [Initial Letter],
99. [The Harvard Crew] (Full Page,)
100. [Bridge, Tail Piece],
101. [Initial Letter],
102. [The Oxford Crew], (Full Page,)
103. [The University Race], (Full Page,)
104. [Beautiful Craft, Tail Piece],
105. [Initial Letter],
106. [Hospital Ship "Dreadnought,"]
107. [Jonathan Wild's Skeleton],
108. [Initial Letter],
109. [Coke Peddler],
110. [Bum Boatman],
111. "[I Gets it for Cigar Stumps],"
112. [Street Acrobats],
113. [Punch and Judy],
114. [Initial Letter],
115. [Nelson's Monument],
116. [Damaged Tree, Tail Piece],
117. [Initial Letter],
118. [Nursery in the Foundling Hospital],
119. [Washing the Waifs],
120. [Landscape, Tail Piece],
121. [Initial Letter],
122. [Breakfast Stall, Covent Garden Market] (Full Page,)
123. [The Orange Market],
124. [Going to Market, Tail Piece],
125. [Fancy Piece, Initial Letter],
126. [Wild and Desolate, Tail Piece],
127. [Initial Letter],
128. [Foreign Cafe in Coventry Street]
129. [Canteen of the Alhambra],
130. [The Old Sinner],
131. [Rough and Ready, Tail Piece],
132. [In the Haymarket],
133. [Initial Letter],
134. [St. Paul's Cathedral],
135. [Sharp-Shooter, Initial Letter],
136. "[Beautiful Miss Neilson],"
137. [A Gin Public in the New Cut],
138. [A Gallery of the "Vic,"]
139. [Putting on Airs, Tail Piece],
140. [Initial Letter],
141. [An Auction at Billingsgate Fish Market], (Full Page,)
142. [Initial Letter],
143. [Lincoln's Inn],
144. [Fancy Sketch, Tail Piece],
145. [An English Oak, Initial Letter],
146. [Bankers' Eating-House],
147. [The Bank of England],
148. "[I Began to Perspire],"
149. [Carpet-Bag, Tail Piece],
150. [London Bridge], (Full Page,)
151. [Forest Scene, Initial Letter],
152. [Temple Bar, Fleet Street],
153. [The New Blackfriars Bridge],
154. [Bridge and Water Scene, Tail Piece],
155. [Initial Letter],
156. [Windsor Castle],
157. [Tail Piece],
158. [Initial Letter],
159. [Loading the Prison Van],
160. [Detective Irving],
161. [Before the Lord Mayor],
162. [Bible and Hand, Initial Letter],
163. [Portrait of Spurgeon],
164. [Portrait of Father Ignatius],
165. ["Lothair" (Marquis of Bute,)]
166. [Ruins, Tail Piece],
167. [Initial Letter],
168. ["Scott's" in the Haymarket],
169. [The Midnight Mission], (Full Page,)
170. ["Skittles" and the Princess Mary],
171. [A Row in Cremorne],
172. [Sword and Purse, Initial Letter],
173. [Portrait of "Mabel Grey,"]
174. [Portrait of "Anonyma,"]
175. [Portrait of "Baby Hamilton,"]
176. [Mabel Grey at Home],
177. [Portrait of "Alice Gordon,"]
178. [Snake and Dove, Initial Letter],
179. [A Meal at a Cheap Lodging House], (Full Page,)
180. "[Damnable Jack],"
181. [Statue of George Peabody],
182. [Tail Piece],
183. [Initial Letter],
184. [Old "Smudge," the Cabby],
185. "[A Hansom Cab],"
186. "[One Hundred Rats in Nine Minutes],"
187. [The Rat-Catcher],
188. "[Paddy's Goose],"
189. [Waiting for the Tide],
190. [Ruins, Tail Piece],
191. ["The Times" Office],
192. [The Sub-Editors' Room, "Daily Telegraph" Office],
193. [Portrait of James Anthony Froude],
194. [Portrait of Algernon Charles Swinburne],
195. [Portrait of John Stewart Mill],
196. [Portrait of Benjamin Disraeli],
197. [Portrait of John Ruskin],
198. [Portrait of Charles Kingsley],
199. [Portrait of Anthony Trollope],
200. [Tail Piece],
201. [Initial Letter],
202. [Half-Penny Soup House], (Full Page,)
203. [A Pawn-Broker's Shop],
204. [A Third Class Railway Carriage],
205. [Tail Piece],
206. [Map of London],

[CHAPTER I.]

THE MISTRESS OF THE WORLD.

N the civilized world perhaps such another sight cannot be witnessed, as that which greets the eye from the great Cupola of St. Paul's, when the view is taken on a bright summer morning, after daybreak has settled on the leads and huge gilded cross of this, the most mighty of English Cathedrals.

I saw this vast expanse of brick, stone, and mortar, one delicious, but hazy September morning, from the outer circle of the dome, and I shall never forget that peopled metropolis which lay swarming below me like a vast human hive.

For a radius of ten miles, the roofs and spires of countless religious edifices, dwelling-houses, banks, the tall cones of storied monuments, the delicate tracery of a forest of slender masts, and the smoky chimneys of innumerable breweries, manufactories, and gas-houses, met my vision, which had already begun to weary long before any of the individual characteristics of the British metropolis had segregated themselves from the aggregate mass.

Directly before me, and almost at my feet, lay the turbid Thames, winding in and out sinuously under bridges, and heaving from the labor which the paddles of numerous steam craft impressed in its dirty yellow bosom. These small steamers were of a black and red, mixed, color, and it was only through a glass that I could discern where the two colors met and divided. Passing under the huge stone bridges, their smoke stacks seemed to break in two parts for an instant as they shot under an arch of the huge spans of London or Waterloo Bridges; gracefully as a gentleman bows to his partner in a quadrille, and then the black funnels went back to their original erect but raking position with great deliberation.

I had secured an eyrie in the top of St. Paul's at an early hour with the aid of a greasy half crown, which I had slipped to an old toothless verger with his silver-tipped wand, and he readily gratified my wish to allow me egress from the Whispering gallery which encircles the interior dome of the Cathedral, to a point where, giddily, I might lean out and look all over the great city.

"It's as good as my place is worth, sir," said he, "to let you look out here. A man who was a little light headed from drinking tumbled from this window some years ago, and was broken to pieces on the cobble stones below."

The danger did not prevent me from looking long and greedily at the splendid coup d'[oe]il.

THE LONDON STONE.

Far up the river to the left the queerly shaped toy turrets and massive ramparts and quadrangles of the Tower broke through the morning haze in shapely and artistic masses, and at the back of the green spot of grass which surmounts Tower Hill, the square, solid, and substantial looking Mint showed where Her Majesty's sworn servants were already at work employed in making counterfeit presentments of her features for circulation in trade and commerce. The Norman tower and flanking buttresses of St. Saviour's, Southwark, next came in range, followed by the long oval glass roof of the Eastern Railway Terminus, facing Cannon street, where is erected London Stone, upon which Jack Cade sat in triumph before the dirty, noisy, rabble, which had followed his fortunes; and now I can see Guy's Hospital with its hundred windows, the Corinthian Royal Exchange in Cornhill, the massive Guildhall where many a bloated Britisher has fed on the fat of the land; the Mansion House in which the Lord Mayor occasionally does petty offenders the honor of sentencing them to the Bridewell; and now the view enlarges to the southward, and the eye takes in the fine Holborn Viaduct, lately honored by the Queen's presence; Barclay and Perkin's massive caravanserai for the brewing of beer, and the gray stones of St. Sepulchre's where the passing bell is always tolled for the condemned Newgate prisoner just before execution. The square, gray blocks of this fortress of crime gloom in an unpitying way below me, and there now is the court yard of Christ's Hospital with the gowned and bare headed school lads at their morning game of foot ball, and their shouts peal upward, even up as high as the dome of St. Paul's, like the chimes of merry music. The great piles of Somerset house and the Custom House frown down on the busy river, and the sound of the bell of St. Clement Dane's in the Strand, striking six o'clock, mingles with the mighty thunder whirr of the incoming train from Dover, which dashes like a demon over the Charing Cross bridge and into its station. Structure after structure rises on the retina, the Treasury Buildings and Horse Guards in Parliament street, Marlborough House, the British Museum, Buckingham Palace, the University College, the Nelson and York Monuments, the splendid club houses in Pall Mall and St. James; Apsley House and Hyde Park with its lakes of silvery water, Westminster Abbey, the Clock and Victoria Towers surmounting the Parliament Houses which overhang the Thames, Lambeth Palace, the residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Chief Dignitary of the English State Church and Milbank Penitentiary down in dusty Westminster, and by the way this prison with its eight towers looks like a cruet stand and its towers certainly represent the caster bottles. With its parterre of trees in the central square, the quadrangles of Chelsea Hospital, and the dome of the Palm House in Kensington Garden next come under inspection, and finally I became weary in endeavoring to pierce the haze which the sun had broken into annoying fragments, and failing to penetrate farther than Vauxhall bridge, I give up the task and draw in my head after a last look at the Catherine and West India docks, bewildered and confused by the very immensity of wealth and population which is centered and aggregated below, under and in the shadow of St. Paul's, the Mother Church of Great Britain.

"THANK YOU, SIR."

The verger says with a weak and wheezy voice:

"This is a werry great city, sir. They do say as how there's more nor three millions of hooman beings in this 'ere metropolis, and how they all gets a living is a blessed puzzle to me. I gets an occasional sixpence, and Americans seem to be more generous than any other visitors. Thank you, sir."

London is a wonderful city in many ways. The year 1866 brought the number of the inhabitants to the total of 3,186,000. This is a population larger than that of Pekin, and as large and a half as that of London's great rival, Paris. It has a greater number of edifices devoted to religious worship than the Eternal City, Rome. Its commerce exceeds that of New York, Glasgow, Cork, Havre, and Bremen in gross. It sends abroad missionaries of all known sects, to convert the heathen and blackamoor, and for them and their wives there is a larger amount of money collected in London than could by any possibility be subscribed in all the other great cities of the world combined for a like purpose. It numbers among its population more prostitutes and unfortunate females than Paris, there being according to a calculation made by a former bishop of Oxford, 30,000 of this wretched class, alone, who are strictly professionals.

London has work houses to accommodate 150,000 paupers under the parochial system, for which the residents or freeholders of every parish in the metropolitan district are taxed at an annual rate of fourteen pounds ten shillings per pauper, and yet men, women, and children die of starvation, weekly, in the slums of St. Giles, Saffron Hill, Bethnal Green, and Shoreditch.

For a penny the young thief or abandoned street girl can listen to hoarse fiddling, obscene jests, and the lowest of low slang songs at some penny "gaff" in Whitechapel, and on a benefit night at Covent Garden, or the Haymarket, the man who is known in society will have to pay twenty-five or thirty shillings or from six to ten dollars to hear the musical warblings of a Patti or a Nillson.

There are one hundred and three hospitals in London in which all the complaints, frailties, and mishaps of poor human nature are supposed to be provided for, and yet it will be much easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, or a rich man to get a free pass into paradise, than that a poor wretch without friends or influence should be able to find a bed in an hospital, unless he can succeed by a miracle in dodging the sentinels which red tape has placed at every entrance to these vaunted institutions.

Down in the quiet and aristocratic dwellings of Pimlico, you shall find such ladies as "Nelly Holmes," or "Skittles," and in St. John's Wood a "Mabel Gray," and in a delicious villa at Fulham, a "Formosa," spending in one night's Corinthian revelry the yearly salary of a bank clerk, or hazarding at a game of cards the life-time pittance of a sewing woman. And with these painted women shall be found night after night the curled darlings of the Pall Mall clubs, some of them mere youths who bear names as old as Magna Charta, and once as spotless perhaps as those of Sidney or Hampden.

At Blanchard's, in Regent street, you may dine for a pound upon the choicest variety of dishes, cooked by a French Chef, who would scorn a gift of the Order of the Garter were it given to him without the proper culinary brevet to accompany it; and at a ham and beef shop in Oxford street you may fill yourself to repletion, taking as a basis a pork saveloy for a penny, a "penn'orth" of bread as a second layer, a mutton-pie for "tuppence," a tart for a penny, and a pint of porter for "tuppence," and then as a relish of a literary kind, you can look at the great evening paper of London, the Echo, written in the most scholarly English, without any fee. Or you can go down Camden Town way, or up into Tottenham Court Road and get a kidney pie for two pence, or an eel stew for two-pence half penny, with a dry bun for a penny, and a good glass of Bass's ale for three half pence. And then you can go to Morley's or the Langham Hotel and pick your teeth and no one will be the wiser.

For other amusements there is the Zoological Gardens in the Regent's Park, with the amusing elephant, the comic kangaroo, the graceful hippopotamus, the sleepy alligator, a band of music, lots of very pretty English girls, a score of impudent waiters in the restaurant to give you cold dishes when you call for hot ones, and all these delights may be enjoyed on six-penny days, and when you come out from the wild beasts, if you be thirsty it will only cost you a half-penny for a chair in the Regent's Park with its noble avenues of stately trees, and the little old woman at the little old house which juts off the gate will hand you a bottle of cooling ginger beer, a popular Cockney drink, for one penny.

In the National Gallery, a magnificent structure which faces the Nelson Monument in Trafalgar Square, one of the finest collections of paintings in the world is hung. Here is the noble Turner Gallery, bought for the nation and free to all for copying or inspection. Here are Corregio's, Angelos', Titians, the masterpieces of Velasquez, Murillo, Paul Veronese, the best things done by Etty, Landseer, Stanfield, Wilkie, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and nearly all of that glorious galaxy whose names have been painted too deeply in their grand canvasses ever to efface. All this is free to the public, poor and rich alike, but on Sunday, British piety bolts the lofty doors in their hapless faces.

The Londoners have the finest public parks in the world. The flower beds in Hyde Park, Battersea Park, Victoria Park, Regent's Park, Kensington Gardens, and the Crystal Palace at Sydenham, are wonderful for their beauty and constant freshness, and in the Serpentine, a clear stream in Hyde Park, there is no hindrance from bathing, though the stream laves the margin of Piccadilly, one of the principal thoroughfares of the city, where many of the richest and most powerful of the nation have their mansions.

This is London in brief. But a rapid and imperfect glance can be given of the wonderful city in the opening chapter of this book, but it is my purpose to give such details as I hope may instruct and amuse my readers, in the chapters that shall follow.

[CHAPTER II.]

THE SILENT HIGHWAY.

HE Thames, the great river of England, which enriches London with the cargoes of its thousand ships, weekly, rises in the southeastern slopes of the Cotswold Hills. For about twenty miles it belongs wholly to Gloucestershire, when for a short distance it divides that county from Wiltshire. It then separates Berkshire first from Oxfordshire, and then from Buckinghamshire. It afterward divides the counties of Surrey and Middlesex, and to its mouth those of Kent and Essex.

It falls into the sea at the Nore, which is about one hundred and ten miles nearly due east from the source, and about twice that distance measured along the windings of the river.

From having no sandbar at its mouth like the Mersey outside of Liverpool, it is navigable for sea vessels to London bridge, a distance of forty-five miles from the Nore, or nearly a fourth of its entire length. The area of the basin drained by the Thames is estimated at about six thousand five hundred miles.

The progress of half a century has made wonderful changes in the river.

Wharves have taken the place of trim gardens, and the dirty coal scow is now found where the nobleman's state barge formerly anchored.

No man, it is said, can count the national debt of England, but who can give an adequate idea of the number of millions of tons that annually pass through this highway?

The flow of land water through Teddington Weir is annually 800,000,000 gallons. This is the main body of the river within the metropolitan area, not counting the additions it receives from rain-falls and other sources.

Since the removal of the old London Bridge, the tide has been lower upon an average. Shoals have been brought to light, before unknown, and the result has been that nothing but a most constant and unremitting dredging has enabled the Thames Conservancy Board to keep the river navigable.

It requires but a glance at Blackfriar's Bridge to determine how much longer it will take to remove all the gravel from the bed of the river, and leave the solid London clay as its bed.

Every old bridge when removed leaves so many tons of gravel which eventually finds its way to the mouth of the Thames, and there forms shoals.

The channel of the river thus deepened, becomes more and more brackish every year, and it can be but a question of time, as to how and from what source the inhabitants are to derive their water supply for drinking purposes.

At the East India Docks the tide falls fourteen inches lower than formerly, and it is a fact that the low water at London Docks is lower than the low water at Sheerness, sixty miles below.

At present the tide at London Bridge has a rise of 18 feet. This river at almost any tide can float the largest ships, being 33 feet in depth at London Bridge.

The river water when found at low tide near the city is much prized for its power of self-purification, and is much in requisition for sea voyages, for the reason that it contains so large a percentage of organic matter.

There are few or no fish to be found in the Thames in the neighborhood of the city or below, owing to the impurities prevailing from drainage and sewage. This fact is particularly to be noticed in the vicinity of the town of Barking on the Thames, where is located the outfall for all the sewage of dirty London. Formerly salmon were very plentiful at the Nore, and the last one there caught sold at fifteen shillings per pound.

The Thames embankment, which was first proposed by Sir Christopher Wren, the architect of St. Paul's Cathedral, is now almost completed. This magnificent roadway, one of the finest in Europe, and which gives the modern observer some conception of what the Appian Way or Via Sacra were in the palmy day of ancient Rome, is fifty feet broad, and three and a half feet above the highest high-water mark. The embankment, which is constructed of Portland stone, and extends on the Surrey side from Westminster to Vauxhall bridge, a distance of nearly a mile, and on the Middlesex shore from Westminster to Blackfriar's bridge, a distance of fully a mile. The embankment is lined on both sides with trees which throw a pleasant shade under the summer sun, and serve to protect the thousands of people of both sexes, who seek in the evening a breath of fresh air always grateful to the tired and sweltering citizen.

At different points, on both sides of the river, the embankment has magnificent stone terraces with stone stairs to enable wayfarers, who seek transportation up and down the river, to get on and off the numerous ferry boats that swarm and ply all over the Thames from Richmond to Rotherhithe.

A description of the Thames tunnel, now closed to the public, may appropriately be included in this chapter. It was commenced by a joint stock company in 1824, after designs by Sir Isambard Brunel. Early in December, 1825, the first horizontal shaft was sunk. The difficulties encountered in the construction of the great engineering work can scarcely be overestimated. For a distance of five hundred and forty-four feet all went well, but at this point the river burst into the shaft, while the workmen were at labor, filling the excavation entirely in fifteen minutes, but fortunately no lives were lost. With great difficulty the water was pumped out and work resumed.

After adding fifty-two feet to the original length of the shaft, the turbid Thames again broke through.

Six men by this accident were smothered in the rush of angry waters, the remaining laborers escaping. Thrice again the river broke into the succeeding excavations, and at length the tunnel was completed to the Wapping side of the river.

Here a shaft was sunk from the surface to meet it. In sinking this shaft, three distinct lines of piles, showing the existence of wharves below the present level of the Thames, were discovered.

March 25, 1843, nineteen years after its commencement, this monument of British stupidity and dogged obstinacy, the Tunnel, was opened to the London public. As an investment it has never paid a dollar; as a convenience it was a swindle on the general public, but for the wild Arabs of London, and the lowest order of shameful women, it rivaled the infamous Adelphi Arches as a rendezvous; calling into existence a distinct class known as "Tunnel Thieves," who, conscious of the fact that strangers would naturally visit this much lauded work, were always waiting in secret hiding places to plunder the unsuspecting visitor of his watch or valuables.

To take the place of this absurd tunnel, a Thames Subway has been devised, starting at Tower Hill, and continuing under the bed of the river to a point near Blackfriar's Bridge. The Thames subway is in a manner similar to the Pneumatic Railway. Shafts are sunk on either side of the river, and vehicles constructed like a horse railway car, are used to convey passengers to and fro under the river, for a fare of two pence per head. These vehicles are lighted by lamps, and a conductor is attached to each car. Powerful engines at either end furnish the force which propels these underground vehicles.

[CHAPTER III.]

THE DOCKS, SHIPPING, AND COMMERCE OF THE PORT OF LONDON.

F you leave King William Street just at the foot of London Bridge, and turn to the left, you will find your way into a grouping of streets, narrow and steep, a few only of which admit of carriage and horse traffic.

This is the region of the world-renowned London Docks, the basins which hold the greatest commerce known to any city on the globe; a commerce before which the ancient traffic of Tyre, Sidon, Carthage, and Sicily, the granary of the ancient world, was as nothing.

The lower stories of the houses in this district, which smell of tar, resin, and other merchantable commodities, are let out as offices, and the upper as warehouse floors; the pavement is narrow and the roads are as bad as broken staves and long neglect can make them; dirty boys in sailor's jackets play at leap frog over the street posts; legions of wheelbarrows encumber the broader part of these thoroughfares; packing cases stand at the doors of houses, and iron cranes and levers peep out from the upper stories.

No man, it has been said, could ever tell how much money lies hidden away in the vaults of the Bank of England, and it is about as difficult to count up the tons of produce which London exports and imports annually.

For instance, during one year, (1865), the number of cargoes entered and cleared coastwise, (which besides British ports includes the shores from the Elbe to Brest,) was 30,820, and their tonnage, 5,263,565.

As many as fifty thousand ships of all classes enter and leave the Thames in twelve months, or about seventy vessels per day, exclusive of all the innumerable kinds of miscellaneous small craft.

The entire French commercial navy consists of twelve thousand vessels, an aggregate of perhaps one million seven hundred thousand tons, a little more than a quarter of the number of ships and the same percentage of tonnage that enters and leaves this world metropolis of London.

If the ships that move to and fro on the bosom of the Thames be supposed to average one hundred and fifty feet in length one with another, they would reach, placed stem and stern together, upward of thirteen hundred miles, or nearly half way across the Atlantic.

CUSTOM HOUSE DUTIES OF LONDON.

The Custom House duties, with a very low tariff for the port of London, during one year amounts to sixty-eight millions of dollars in gold, and the declared real value of exports from London for the same time amounted to one hundred and seventy millions of dollars in gold. The declared real value of the imports registered at the huge granite custom house on the Thames, for the port of London, for 1869, from foreign and colonial ports, was four hundred millions of dollars in gold, or as much as the total value of the real estate on New York island in 1870.

Englishmen are very fond of coffee it seems, for they imported thirty million pounds of the fragrant berry in 1869. The choleric temper of the people may find an explanation in the six million pounds of pepper received in London. London also imported seven million gallons of rum, although it is supposed to be the great beer drinking city of the world. Eighty thousand gallons of gin, sixty million pounds of tea, thirty-eight million pounds of tobacco, nine million six hundred and fifty-seven thousand and thirty-four gallons of foreign wines, two million cwts. of raw sugar, and two million seven hundred sixty-two thousand two hundred and forty-eight gallons of brandy were imported in 1869. These articles of merchandise were all held in bond at the London Custom House, and from these figures my readers may form some idea of the magnitude of the commerce of this great city.

Russia sent one thousand three hundred vessels and received three hundred and ninety-one vessels, Sweden one thousand one hundred and twenty-one vessels and received five hundred and twenty vessels, France sent one thousand four hundred and sixteen vessels and received one thousand three hundred and eighty-two vessels, Holland sent nine hundred and twenty-four vessels and received seven hundred and fourteen vessels, Cuba sent three hundred and twelve vessels and received sixty-two vessels, United States sent four hundred and twelve vessels and received three hundred and seventeen vessels, China sent two hundred and eight vessels and received one hundred and thirty vessels in 1869.

I have not space here to enumerate all the petty nationalities, whose merchants trade with London, but the above table, obtained from the custom house authorities and therefore authentic, may serve to indicate what the trade of London is, and the vast interests which gather there. The United States does not figure so conspicuously as might be expected here, the Alabamas and Floridas perhaps have something to do with the paucity of American commerce with the commercial metropolis of England.

THE COMMERCIAL AND LONDON DOCKS.

The most wonderful of all the London sights are the huge artificial basins, bound in masses of masonry and known as the London Docks. No other city in the world can boast of such magnificent artificial basins, where millions of tons of shipping can be accommodated. It is enough to make an American feel humiliated to pay a visit to these wonderful docks, and to be forced to compare them with the rotten wooden wharves which environ the great city of New York, and which are honored with the title of docks.

The principal docks of London are those which I give below with their water areas, cost, and the number of vessels which they accommodate:

The Commercial Dock is chiefly used by vessels in the oil, corn, timber, and tobacco trade; and there is floating space for fifty thousand loads of lumber, and the warehouses afford storage for one hundred and fifty thousand quarters of corn, while the yards of the company will hold four million pieces of deals, and staves without number. The lock in the South Commercial Dock is two hundred and twenty feet long by forty-eight feet wide, with a depth of twenty-two feet, and will admit vessels of twenty-six feet draught. Five hundred thousand tons of shipping have been received here in a year, representing about one thousand five hundred vessels of various tonnage.

The London Docks extend from East Smithfield to Shadwell and have twelve thousand four hundred and forty feet of wharf frontage, and are intended principally for the reception of vessels laden with wines, brandy, tobacco, and rice.

There are forty warehouses for the storage of merchandise of every description, convenient in arrangement, and magnificent in design and execution. The cubical capacity of the warehouses is two hundred and forty-nine thousand four hundred and thirty tons; two hundred and thirty-one thousand one hundred and forty-seven for dry goods, and eighteen thousand two hundred and eighty-three for wet goods.

The tobacco house in these docks sends its very strong odor all over the Thames, and it is as good as the flavor of a Havana cigar almost to smell this huge warehouse as you pass by on the river in a steamboat. This warehouse is the largest of its kind in the world, covering five acres of ground, and is rented by the government at fourteen thousand pounds a year of the company, for all the London Docks are owned by stock companies, and this perhaps explains the economy displayed in their construction, and their useful adaptability to the commerce of London.

ENTRANCE TO DOCKS.

The tobacco warehouse will contain twenty-four thousand hogsheads of tobacco, each hogshead holding one thousand two hundred pounds, the total capacity being equal to thirty thousand tons of general merchandise.

THE WINE VAULTS, AND "TASTING PERMITS."

Under the London Docks are the finest vaults in the world, vast catacombs of the precious vintages garnered from every famous vineyard in the globe. The vaults in the London docks cover an area of eighteen acres, and afford accommodation for eighty thousand pipes of wine. One of the vaults alone is seven acres in extent, and the tea warehouses will hold one hundred and twenty thousand chests of that fragrant herb.

To go into these vast wine vaults is indeed a treat. It is like entering a City of the dead, only that instead of the skeletons of human beings piled on top of each other, you find an Aceldama of casks, pipes, barrels, hogsheads, and butts, bonded and stored tier upon tier, until the eye becomes wearied, and a man wonders how all those costly vintages can ever be consumed.

There is no difference between night and day in these dim deep recesses under the London streets. The vaults are only separated from the bed of the Thames by a thick wall, and at noonday, gas has to be turned on to light the way to the enormous storehouses of wine and brandy. Passes are granted by the companies and the owners of liquors on bond, called "tasting permits," which gives the privilege to the visitor to ask an attendant for a sample of any wine, or wines and liquors that he may choose to taste.

Armed with one of these permits I visited the London docks one day with a friend, and we penetrated the gloomy cavern's entrance, and finally found our way to a part of the vaults where were stored thousands of pipes of the delicious golden brown vintage of Xeres de la Frontera.

My friend was one of those wandering Americans you are always sure to light upon abroad, who makes your acquaintance whether you like it or not, and who cries out frantically whenever he sees a foreign flag.

"By Gad—Sir, that flag is all good enough in its way—but I tell you it does not come up to our flag of beauty and glory—now I'll put it to you—does it?"

A grimy looking cellar man who smelled like an old claret bottle that had long remained uncorked, wearing an apron and carrying a wooden hammer for tapping, came to us and said, politely, on presentation of our orders:

"The horders are werry correct, sir. Would you like to try a little old Sherry, sir, fine as a sovrin and sparkling as the sun?"

"Well, I don't care if I do take a little sherry—I don't think it will hurt me—do you think it will?" said my friend.

He then took about half a pint of fine golden sherry, and after taking it he seemed all at once to discover a new beauty in the architecture of the vaults, although he had condemned the place when he entered it, as a "chilly, stinking hole, not fit for a dog, by Gad, sir."

While he was delivering himself most eloquently on the merits of the sherry, I had an opportunity to look about me and examine the place.

"I DON'T THINK IT WILL HURT ME."

Different parties were going from cask to cask, from hogshead to hogshead, like my friend, trying each vintage, and tasting brandies, and gins, and wines to their heart's content.

I thought to myself, what a splendid boon these vaults would be to a New York corner loafer, without restriction and with full liberty to drink till he died like a soldier, contending to the last against the enemy which deprives a man of his brains. The attendants here never object to the amount called for, and a tasting permit admits to all the privileges.

We were now standing in an arched alcove devoted exclusively to the wines of Madeira, Teneriffe, and the Canary Islands. Some of these huge casks held as many as seven hundred gallons, and the rich, old, musty and fruity odors that came from them were truly revivifying to my friend, who was loquacious under the influence of the sherry.

"This ere sexshin is for the Madeery," said the bung starter. "Will you try a little Madeery, sir?" said he.

"Well I don't care if I do take a little Madeira—I don't think it will hurt me. Now I put it to you this way—I don't think it will hurt me if I am moderate?"

He seemed to relish this heavy and fruity wine very much, and before he left the alcove he had "tasted" a good deal of the Canary also smacking his lips lusciously.

There is considerable skill displayed in the building of the arches of the range of vaults, and with the dim lights of the sperm lamps, burning—as it is not deemed safe to have gas in the vaults where spirits are stored—the vaults very much resemble the crypts under the cloisters in Westminster Abbey, or the vaults under St. Paul's.

The method for hoisting cargoes from the holds of ships to the grading, which is level with the opening in the vaults is very perfect. The opening in the wall of the basin or docks is eighteen feet high, and large hogsheads can be hoisted and lowered at once into the vaults instead of being temporarily deposited on the quay.

HOISTING AND DISCHARGING CARGOES.

In the old times before steam had been discovered and these magnificent docks had been built, an East Indiaman of eight hundred tons took a month to discharge her cargo, or if of one thousand two hundred tons, six weeks were required for the labor, and their goods had to be taken from Blackwall to London Bridge in lighters, when they were placed on the quay exposed to dock rats and river thieves as goods are in New York, where the private watchmen on the rotten wooden docks are generally to be found in league with the thieves.

At St. Katharine's Docks the time occupied on an average in discharging a vessel of three hundred tons is eight hours, and for one of six hundred tons two days and a half. In one instance one thousand one hundred casks of tallow were discharged in six hours, but of course this was unusually rapid work. One of the cranes in the St. Katharine's Docks cost about twenty-five thousand dollars, and will raise from forty to sixty tons at a time.

There is a wharf attached to the St. Katharine Docks, which Parliament compelled the company to construct at a cost of nearly a million of dollars, and the warehouses will contain one hundred and ten thousand tons of goods and merchandise. The depth of water in the St. Katharine's Docks is twenty-eight feet at spring tide, at dead tide twenty-four feet, and at low water ten feet, so that vessels of eight hundred tons register are docked and undocked without the slightest difficulty. There is a water frontage and quays of one thousand five hundred feet in the St. Katharine Docks. The wharfage of the London Docks is one thousand two hundred and sixty feet in length and nine hundred and sixty feet in breadth. The capital of the London Docks company is about twenty-five million dollars in gold, and as many as three thousand laborers are employed in the London Docks in a day.

The walls surrounding the London Docks cost sixty-five thousand pounds in construction, and all these walls are so high (nearly thirty feet,) that they present an impregnable barrier to thieves and depredators.

The receipts for one year in the London Docks were over three million dollars, currency; the salaries and wages amounted to about one million dollars, and the revenue customs paid about eleven hundred thousand dollars. These figures show that the company is in a prosperous state, and gives the municipal governments of our American Atlantic cities the best reasons, when others which I have already enumerated are combined, why New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Portland, Savannah and Charleston, should have stone docks to equal those of London and Liverpool in magnitude and solidity.

Having made a lengthened inspection of the London Docks I turned to leave and could not find my friend who had accompanied me. After some difficulty I discovered him afar off at the other end of the vaults discussing with the cellarman what liquor he was next to taste.

"Yer honor might just taste a little of the Hennesey Brandy of 1832—it is very fine and runs down like hile."

"By Gad, sir, the very thing—now that you mention it I will try a little, just a leetle Hennesey brandy. I'll put it to you in this way—I don't think it can hurt me—and the cellarman says it's just like oil. Now I recollect that oil never intoxicates. I will take just the faintest tint."

He did take the "faintest tint," perhaps a good sized glass-full, and he became so jolly, and affectionate, and good natured, embracing me and also the cellarman, that the latter personage had at last to call a cab into which my friend was carried, and after being propped up he was driven to his hotel. The cellarman said to me:

"We've two agents as comes 'ere sober, bless 'em, and goes away drunk; but they hurts nobody but themselves, bless them."

THE WEST INDIA DOCKS.

I went from the London Docks to the West India Docks, about a mile and a half distant, at the Isle of Dogs, a small islet in the Thames near Blackwall. These numerous basins and warehouses occupy three times the space of the London Docks, or about two hundred and ninety-five acres, with a canal three quarters of a mile in length as a feeder. The Import Dock is five hundred and ten feet in length, and about the same measurement in width. The Export Dock is about the same length and is about four hundred feet wide. The docks and warehouse are enclosed by a wall of masonry five feet thick, that seems as if it would endure as long as the port of London is open to commerce and merchandise, and the value of twenty millions of pounds is here stored by its owners.

I gave an employee of the company a shilling to take me through, and he was not at all backward in showing me the treasures under the care of the company.

"These are the biggest docks in Lunnun, sir," said he: "say what they will on the other docks. We will hold two hundred million tons of merchandise here, sir, and we will not be crowded at all. Why, sir, I've seen as much as two hundred thousand casks of sugar, five hundred thousand bags of coffee, fifty thousand pipes of Jimaky rum, ten thousand pipes of Madeery, twenty-five thousand tons of logwood, and lots of other things here and we were not full.

"I've seen an acre of 'ogsheads of tibaccy, eight feet high, and piles of cinnamon, spices, pepper, indigo, salt pork, hides and leather, Hindian corn, mahogany, and sich like, and no one of us, sir, ever knows the walley of them, and I suppose Mr. Bright hiself would be more nor puzzled to tell the walley, and I've heard as how he has got a preshis head for figgers."

Formerly when steamers employed paddle wheels as a means of locomotion, the docks were very much crowded, but the use of the universal screw has given much more space for berthways. There is, however, great risks in these docks, of fire, from steam vessels, and I believe the rates are much higher for steam craft than for sailing vessels. Small offices and compact frame houses for the company's officers, revenue officers, warehousemen, clerks, engineers, coopers and other petty attachees, have been provided within the ground area of all these stone basins, and everything connected with the docks is done in a systematic and business like way that is truly wonderful. When I recollected that less than fifty years ago London had no inclosed docks at all, and no accommodation for shipping but a long and straggling line of private quays, under the management of firms who had no public interests to serve, (and in fact when the present system of docks was at first proposed it met with almost universal opposition, particularly from the interested parties,) I was amazed at the progress made in a half century.

There is not such a city in the world, perhaps, for the number of corporations, guilds, societies, and titled people, who derive and did derive emolument and income, of one kind or another, from these private quay and wharfage receipts.

OPPOSITION TO THE NEW DOCK SYSTEM.

Therefore when the citizens of London became thoroughly awakened to the possibility of substituting for these rotten old timber wharves and tumble down old stone piers, a thorough, efficient, and lasting system of dockage, the interested people began to clamor most hideously about their "vested rights." These two words have always stood in England as a safeguard to protect some oppressive or corporate interest.

The "Tackle House" and City Porter Companies complained that if the import and export business were removed beyond the city limits, their right to the exclusive privilege of unloading and delivering all merchandise imported into the city would be worthless. The carmen who enjoyed a similar privilege and monopoly made the same complaint, and they stated that Christ's Hospital, an institution much revered by all Londoners, derived an income of four thousand pounds a year from the licenses under which they held their monopoly; the watermen, who were then numbered by thousands, foretold that the establishment of docks would deprive one half of their number of bread; the lightermen stated that they had a capital of one hundred and twenty thousand pounds invested in tackle and craft, employed to transport merchandise, which capital would be annihilated if ships were allowed to discharge their cargoes on quays within docks; the proprietors of the "legal quays" as they were called, and the "sufferance wharves," or wharves which held no legal title, all prophesied that the trade of London would be ruined at once if the new system of docks was established.

However these people differed in some details of their grievances, they all concurred in stating that unloading ships in closed docks would be more expensive than discharging them into lighters in the river.

On the other hand the advocates of the new system estimated on paper that the unloading of five hundred hogsheads of sugar from a vessel could be done in the new docks for about three hundred and fifty dollars of American money less than under the old lighterage and open quay system, to say nothing of the greater safety of the property thus enclosed in dock walls.

Finally, Parliament passed an act creating the new docks and granting a compensation of four hundred and eighty-six thousand and eighty-seven pounds to the proprietors of the legal quays in addition to the sum of one hundred and thirty-eight thousand seven hundred and ninety-one pounds which was paid to persons having "vested rights" in the mooring claims on the river. Altogether the cost of the different London Docks, including ground purchases, etc., was about thirty millions of dollars. The West India Docks were the first opened in 1802, and the citizens of London have, I am sure, no cause to regret the decision which gave them the finest and safest system of wharfage in the world.

The passenger traffic, by water, which transpires daily between London and Continental cities and towns is incalculable. This of course does not include the traffic almost as great between London and American and Colonial ports.

You can go from London to New York in a splendid stateroom with every comfort and luxury at sea, for about one hundred and thirty dollars, or you can take passage in a steerage, herding like a beast as best you may for about forty dollars, by steam.

I can safely recommend the Inman Line of Steamships which ply between New York and Liverpool, as the best afloat, the most punctual and the most comfortable. This line has nineteen fine steamers constantly plying between Europe and America.

RATES OF FARES AND DOCK LABORERS.

From London to Cork the fare, first class, is about twenty-three English shillings, and to Dublin twelve shillings. From London to Edinburgh, first class, by sea, fifteen shillings. London to Calais, by rail and sea, twenty-five shillings, to Havre, eleven shillings. London to Ostend, Belgium, fifteen shillings; to Antwerp, twenty shillings; to Hamburg, two pounds; to Rotterdam one pound; to Belfast, forty-five shillings; to Dundee, twenty shillings. London to Malta twelve pounds; to Maderia sixteen pounds sixteen shillings; to Oporto, eight pounds eight shillings; to Marseilles, twelve pounds ten shillings; to Rio Janeiro, thirty pounds; to St. Petersburg, six pounds six shillings; to Glasgow, twelve shillings; to Liverpool, twenty shillings; to Stockholm, eighty-four shillings; to Brussels, forty-eight shillings; to Genoa, twelve pounds; Leghorn, fifteen pounds; Naples, eighteen pounds; Christiana, Norway, eighty shillings, and Copenhagen, sixty-three shillings.

I give these fares as I believe it may be of some use to Americans, who design to travel, to know the correct rates of Continental travel. It is much pleasanter to travel to the continent by sea from London than by rail, the accommodations are better, the views of the best. There is no hurry, you may get your meals regularly, it is more healthful and certainly much cheaper, as the above fares are all for first class passages, and it is easy to obtain second or third class accommodations for a very great deal less money.

In concluding this chapter on the Port of London, I may say that it is almost impossible to name a place for which passage cannot be obtained, by sea from London, and vessels are leaving daily and hourly for their various destinations, from the many wharves and docks that line the Thames between London and Westminster bridges, a distance of two miles, on the river.

Thirty thousand men find employment, daily, as laborers, in the London Docks. Men who have been reduced by want, misfortune, or by drunkeness, find in these vast commercial reservoirs, a precarious means of subsistence, earning from eighteen pence to two shillings a day, half of which generally goes for beer, or potations of a heavier and more spirituous kind. This kind of labor is unskilled, and has for its propulsion mere manual strength, so that, when a man fails in everything else, he may possibly succeed as a dock laborer. The public houses frequented by the laborers are situated in the dark alleys and crowded courts near the river, and all of them partake of the brutal, low appearance which distinguishes the London coal heaver and dock lifter.

[CHAPTER IV.]

PALACES OF LONDON.

ONDON is studded with palaces some of which were constructed by Royalty itself—some of which were confiscated by royalty, and others again were bought by royalty from the nobles of England, or from those persons who had amassed great wealth.

The Court of St. James is a household word among diplomats, and is used as a threat by ambassadors at Vienna, or perhaps as a phrase of mediation at Washington, St. Petersburg, or Paris, but generally this name is used by belligerent envoys with threat and menace at Constantinople, Athens, Honduras, or Lisbon. English statecraft and diplomacy always tempers the wind to the shorn lamb, and an English Cabinet never fails to measure the strength of a nation before trying conclusions with it.

Even the Sultan himself, and he is by common consent supposed to be a very sick man, could pass the dirty looking pile of St. James palace at the lower end of Pall Mall, near St. James street, without a tremor, and the only signs of royalty or power are the bear skin caps and red coats of a couple of guardsmen, who walk up and down with their muskets at a support, in a most melancholy and bored manner before the gates.

ST. JAMES AND WHITEHALL.

This is one of the chief residences of royalty in the metropolis. In 1532, his majesty by the Grace of God, King Henry the Eighth, cast his eyes upon St. James Hospital, a place set apart for lepers, fourteen of whom were residing there at the time, and being convinced of the healthfulness of the situation, the inmates were driven forth, a small pension given to each, and on the site of the hospital for physical lepers, this moral leper erected what is now known as the palace of St. James, for the reception of the unfortunate but giddy Anne Boleyn.

During the reigns of Mary and Elizabeth the palace was deserted, but with the advent of the Stuarts, St. James became a royal nursery.

The ill-fated Charles the First had a passionate fondness for this palace, and on the morning of his execution attended divine service in the chapel which he had fitted up.

After the restoration, James II furnished St. James at great expense; and from this period St. James became with hardly an intermission the abode of royalty. George the Second died here mumbling. George IV was born, and passed much of his time here. As a royal residence it has fallen away from its ancient splendor and is now only used on occasions of state solemnity; yet it is one of the best planned palaces in Europe for comfort, and possesses a fine gallery of paintings.

Whitehall, or the palace that is known by that name, was formerly called York House, and for three centuries before the time of Cardinal Wolsey, was the residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

After the death of Wolsey its name was changed to Whitehall, from a large hall in the building painted entirely white. Wolsey fitted up the palace in a style of grandeur never equaled, much less excelled by any other subject of the English crown, and being occupied by the king on the demise of Wolsey, it was called the King's Palace of Westminster.

When Queen Elizabeth died it was refitted by King James, and enlarged—but was destroyed by fire in 1619. Immediately after its destruction James determined to rebuild it, and a portion of the palace was completed at a cost of fifteen thousand pounds, but such extravagance could not be allowed in those days, parliament refusing to grant money to continue the building, and the fanatical monarch, whose memory has survived because of his hatred of tobacco, was forced to suspend operations for want of funds.

The ceiling of the banqueting-room, a work of Rubens and for which he was paid three thousand pounds, is said to be one of the finest efforts of that most gifted artist's pencil.

In the time of the Protector Cromwell, one of the rarest collections of paintings ever made in the world, and of immense value—which had been accumulated here by successive kings, was ordered to be sold by Cromwell in accordance with the Puritan belief that to possess paintings or statuary was conducive of image worship in the owner. Charles the First was really a great admirer of works of art, and had he lived he would no doubt have made Whitehall the finest palace of Europe.

Cromwell occupied Whitehall as a residence for his family after the execution of King Charles I, for butcher as he was, and strict republican as he pretended to be, he was not above enjoying the good things of this life, and despite his cadaverous countenance he could appreciate a soft bed and a tender piece of roast beef with the jolliest of cavaliers.

On the 10th of April, 1691, a fire broke out in the apartments of the bad Duchess of Portsmouth who occupied a portion of Whitehall, (this woman was a mistress of Charles II,) and in 1698 the entire structure was consumed with the exception of the banqueting-hall, and nothing but the walls were left standing.

This hall was altered to a chapel by King George II, and since that time has been used for that purpose, the clergyman always being a royal chaplain. Over the door is a bust of the founder, and the brilliant frescos of the ceiling pieces of Rubens are all that is left of the once magnificent palace of Whitehall.

BUCKINGHAM PALACE.

The residence of the Queen, when in London, is generally supposed to be Buckingham Palace, a long gloomy looking building in St. James Park, not a stones' throw from the Marble Arch in Hyde Park or Westminster Abbey. The same big flashy looking soldiers in red coats, and hideous grenadier bearskins are to be seen marching up and down opposite this palace gate just as they do about St. James Palace, or at the Horse Guards in Parliament street.

BUCKINGHAM PALACE.

St. James Park is a pretty place with fine shady trees, and here in the mall or wide walk of the park was played a century ago, and still farther back in the days of paint, powder, and patches, and garden masquerades, the game of "pell mell."

Buckingham Palace, though much frequented by the Queen, and situated pleasantly as far as appearances go, is not a healthy place of residence at all. The Queen frequently has complained of its dampness, she having often contracted bad colds there. This I have on the authority of her former chaplain.

George the IV had a Dutch predeliction for low ceilings, and as he never lived on good terms with his wife, whom he used to call a Fat Dutch Hog, no accommodations were made for Queen Caroline his spouse, in Buckingham Palace.

The palace was occupied by this monarch, for whom it was built, in 1825. This king was one of the most profligate of men and a roue—and yet had the reputation of being the finest gentleman in Europe, but he never spared man in his rage nor woman in his lust.

John, Duke of Buckingham, lived in a house on the site of the palace, in 1703, from which circumstance it has derived its name.

I had special permission to visit this palace while the Queen was absent on her summer tour in Scotland; it being a great favor to be admitted, and it was only by great perseverance and difficulty that I obtained entrance to the royal abode.

One bright morning I called about ten o'clock, and after presenting my order of admittance was allowed to enter.

I was bewildered by its sumptuous magnificence. Fancy a noble hall surrounded with a double row of marble columns, every one composed of a single piece of veined Carrara marble, with gilded bases and capitals; the tout ensemble being a splendid perspective of over one hundred and fifty feet. The steps of the grand staircase are also of the purest marble. The Library, Council room, and Sculpture gallery are all most beautifully decorated.

QUEEN'S LIBRARY.

The Library is used for a waiting room for deputations, which as soon as the Queen is ready to receive them pass across the Sculpture Gallery into the hall, and thence ascend by the Grand Stairway, through the Ante-Room and the Green Drawing-room to the Throne room. The Library and adjoining rooms are fitted up in a most gaudy fashion, there being a sad want of taste displayed, either by her Majesty or her upholsterer, but by which I am not able to say.

The Sculpture Gallery contains the busts of leading statesmen of all countries, and chief among them I noticed one of Prince Albert, the late husband of the Queen, mounted on a fine pedestal. Busts of all the members of the royal family, male and female, are also here. That of the Princess Louisa is a charming, innocent looking English face; she is said to be deeply in love with a rich Catholic nobleman of the Duke of Norfolk's family.

The Picture Gallery has fine skylights so as to throw a shaded light on the works of art below, and here are to be found the master pieces of the Dutch and Flemish schools, gems of Reynolds, Watteau, Titian, Albert Durer, Rembrandt, Teniers, Ostade, Cuyps, Wouvermans, and others, formerly the collection in great part of George IV.

The Yellow Drawing room, a superb apartment, has a series of paintings in panels of the royal family, there being full length pictures of Queen Victoria, looking very fat, with the crown upon her head, and Prince Albert in his costume of Knight of the Garter, a dress which is supremely ridiculous in these days when none but priests and academicians wear such drapery.

The Throne Room is a gaudy looking apartment, very large and spacious, and like all the rooms in Buckingham palace having a very low ceiling, the prevailing decoration being curtains of striped satin, and the alcoves are hung in rich crimson velvet relieved or rather bedizened with an nearly obscured gilding. William IV, the sailor king, hated this palace for its ugliness and discomfort, and this all the more that he was used to sleeping in a hammock aboard his own frigate.

The Marble Arch, an immense pile of stone now at the corner of Piccadilly and Hyde Park, formerly occupied the central position in this building, and was erected in its present position at a cost of thirty-one thousand pounds.

When the present Queen had her first child the palace was found so uncomfortable that she had to have the nursery removed to the attic, and there, while the royal child was getting its teeth cut, the Lord Chamberlain of England, who had charge of the improvements, was boiling glue and making French polish in the basement, so that altogether the queen of the greatest nation of the earth, subsequent to her honeymoon, was no better housed than a poor family in New York, dwelling in a respectable tenement house.

Parliament, however, was kind enough to grant the sum of one hundred and fifty thousand pounds to alter and repair the building, and accordingly the palace was made habitable for her Majesty.

The Ball Room is one hundred and thirty-nine feet in length. The Supper Room is seventy-six by sixty feet—with a promenade gallery one hundred and nine feet in length, and twenty-one feet wide. There is a riding school attached, with a mews or stable for horses; here the state carriages and coaches are kept at an expense, for flunkies, grooms, masters of the horse, stable boys, feed for horses and labor, of thirty-six thousand pounds, or over two hundred thousand dollars annually.

I was allowed as a great favor to inspect the Queen's library, which is very handsomely fitted up, and wherever the eye rested for a moment it was sure to find a picture or bust of Prince Albert. There were a number of small tables of inlaid ivory, mother of pearl, and gold, covered with handsomely bound volumes of Shakespeare and other English poets. I also saw a finely bound copy of the Memoirs of the Queen, which it is supposed was written by her Majesty. This is a mistake, however, as the entire book was written by a secretary of hers from some scanty notes provided by her, and from personal recollections. The Queen was nine months dictating the work before its publication. The Queen was in the habit of sitting four hours a day giving these reminiscences of her husband, and during this time she always had a glass of sherry and a biscuit by her side.

Very little is known of her Majesty outside of the British Isles. Almost every other female sovereign has publicity given to all her secret actions, and her private life is discussed with great personal freedom, in the cafes and clubs. A thousand stories have been set afloat and circulated in regard to Madam Isabella, lately Queen of Spain, and but a few of them are true. Rochefort in his papers, "The Lantern" and the "Marsellaise," has not hesitated to pour columns of abuse upon the head of the Empress Eugenie, a lady whose principal fault is a fondness for low necked dresses.

PORTRAIT OF THE QUEEN.

Two women have hitherto escaped this kind of slander, and these two are the Empress of Austria and Queen Victoria. The reason is palpable in the case of the Empress of Austria; she is an imperial lady to discuss whose private life it would be dangerous if done on Austrian territory.

In regard to the Queen of England, the reason why silence is kept in relation to her private life is because of a sneaking regard for the manners, customs, and good opinions of titled individuals among most American travelers.

The Queen has been a good wife and mother, but in these two qualities she is more than equaled by thousands of American women. She is no better and no worse than the average married woman; has her faults, her weaknesses, and her good qualities, and it is among her own people that her failings find their loudest trumpeters.

In honestly dealing with these stories I shall not stop to give the gross yarns which are spun by the Jenkinses of the press, who make what they call an honest penny by chronicling all the loose street scandal that is poured into their ears.

The London Times, the leading paper of England, has on several occasions soundly berated the Queen for her continued seclusion from the public, her exalted position being, it is said, her only excuse, and subsequent to the death of Prince Albert this seclusion was continued so long that the shopkeepers and tradesmen who profit by the receptions, festivals, and gaieties of the court, were loud in their complaints of what they deemed to be an overstrained and extravagant grief.

Several leading modistes or dress makers were obliged to give up business, owing to the Queen having closed her drawing rooms; murmuring loudly that they had been ruined by her Majesty, as their principal business was to make dresses for the ladies of rank who have nothing else to do but go to balls, parties, and drawing-room receptions when invited. Indeed for the past three years there has been a growing dissatisfaction with her Majesty, and sad stories are told of that royal lady in the English capital—chiefly the shopkeepers were enraged—although this class of people are usually the most loyal—then the Fenian affair came and was added as fuel to the general discontent.

But the worst remains to be told, and it is with no feeling of pleasure that I am compelled to lift the veil.

QUEEN'S SECLUSION.

The story is everywhere prevalent that the seclusion of the Queen is owing to her fondness for liquor; this statement has never been openly promulgated in the papers, but is continually hinted at obscurely in the more liberal organs. It is boldly spoken of by private individuals that the temper of her Majesty has of late years become very irascible and is sometimes ungovernable, and the cause is attributed to drink and its consequent delirium which has seized upon this unfortunate lady.

I was told by a clergyman who had it direct from the wife of a former chaplain of her Majesty, that the Queen was in the habit of drinking half a pint of raw liquor per day. The effects of these liberal potations are making visible havoc in her once comely face. I saw her thrice, and her inflamed face and swollen eyes gave her all the appearance of an inebriate. Perhaps the trouble caused by her scapegrace of a son, the Prince of Wales, who, without doubt, is as reckless a scamp as ever existed, has had much to do with his mother's present condition, and has driven her to drinking.

It is also notorious that the Queen has chosen for her body servant one John Brown, a raw boned, robust, and coarse Highlander, and clings to him with more warmth and tenacity than becomes a lady who carried her sorrow for a deceased husband previously to such an extravagant pitch.

This John Brown whom I saw is over six feet in height, a powerful looking fellow; but he has a face that would find favor in the eyes of very few women. He was formerly a body servant of Prince Albert, and was always an attendant on him in his hunting and fishing excursions. The Queen took notice of him at Balmoral, her summer residence in Scotland, and here she made a great pet of him.

After the death of Prince Albert the Queen attached Brown to her person, and ever since he has constantly attended her.

It is the custom of the Queen to have herself pushed around the grounds of her lodge at Balmoral in a perambulator or hand carriage when she visits that charming spot.

The person selected for this duty was the lucky John Brown. Day after day he might be seen pushing around the spacious lawn, the Majesty of England.

LUCKY JOHN BROWN.

During her hours of idleness Brown is always allowed to converse with the Queen in a familiar manner, and it is said presumes on her gracious condescension more than her noblest subject would dare to do.

JOHN BROWN EXERCISING THE QUEEN.

When the Queen takes her seat in her perambulator it might often occur that a servant would spring forward with a lowly reverence to assist the royal lady, but in every instance the unfortunate flunkey would receive a rebuking frown, and in a moment after might have to undergo the mortification of a sneering laugh from Brown, who at this crisis would make his appearance—strolling in a leisurely fashion toward the perambulator, and stretching his long Celtic legs, his arms full of warm wraps in which he proceeds to enfold the person of the Queen, with as much seeming fondness as if he were the husband instead of the low lackey of royalty, without polish and breeding; then in addition to the silent rebuke of the Queen the offending servant would hear from Brown some such remark as "I say my douce laddie, dinna ya offer yer sarvices till her Majesty asks ya fur them. Dinna ye be sticking yer finger in till anoother mun's haggis or ye moon be scalded."

"That will do Brown," the Queen would say to prevent a scene which would be sure to take place were Brown's violent temper not curbed in time to prevent an explosion, for the tall Highland gillie is no respecter of persons, and cares very little for royalty except in the person of its chief representative.

It is a current anecdote in the Pall Mall clubs, that the Queen's cousin, the Duke of Cambridge, who is also the commander-in-chief of the British Army, having one day desired an audience with the Queen of a private nature, waited upon her at Buckingham Palace and presented his card like any other private citizen. He was desired to wait, and did so until he became tired, and finally he was admitted to the presence, and was somewhat astonished to find the servant, John Brown, in the room.

The Duke being a member of the royal family did not hesitate to say to her majesty in a respectful way:

"Will your Majesty be so kind as to ask your footman to leave the saloon, I desire to speak to you on a matter of importance, privately."

"Very well, you may speak without intrusion," said the Queen, turning her head slightly to the window where her servant stood with his back turned coolly upon the Queen's cousin, "there is no one here but Brown, he is very discreet."

A GOOD STORY.

Finding that the Highlander could not be prevailed upon to leave the room, the Duke made a virtue of necessity and proceeded to state the purport of his visit. The Queen engaged in conversation with her cousin, and some minutes having elapsed the conversation turned upon different subjects. The Duke was relating a joke about the Clubs for the edification of the Queen, in which a noble person was made to assume a ridiculous position, when all at once he was interrupted with a peal of coarse and irreverent laughter, which rang through the apartments, and the Duke turning around with a thrill of horror and astonishment, heard Brown scream out while he held his sides to contain his mad mirth:

"Oh! oh! What a d—d fule that fellow must have been."

The Duke for a moment stood petrified with horror, an unpleasant tremor ran down the small of his back, and then being seized with a sudden idea, he took his hat and making a low reverence left the apartment as the Queen said in an irritable tone:

"Oh! never mind, it's only Brown."

The story was too good to keep, and in a few days it was known all over London.

On the day that the Queen opened Blackfriars bridge she rode in a state carriage with Brown behind her, and the act was so flagrant that when the procession passed through the Strand, the Queen was openly hissed by the people who stood on the sidewalks and saw the burly form of the Scotsman in the carriage, so close to her Majesty.

I leave facts to speak for themselves, there is no need of comment. The great rival of Punch is a paper called the Tomahawk, published in Fleet street, and which is edited with fearless ability. The chief artist is a Matthew Morgan who excels all others of his craft in London for the beauty and spirit of his cartoons. Well, one day the Tomahawk appeared with a large two paged cartoon, in which the queen was pictured in her perambulator, and the tall form of Brown behind pushing the vehicle, while he leaned over the back and looked with an affectionate leer into the face of the sovereign of England. There was no inscription at the bottom of the picture, but it was so truthful and telling, that every person who looked, saw the whole scandalous story at a glance. Three editions of this number of the Tomahawk were sold in a few days, and in the corner of the picture the daring artist did not hesitate to sign his initials, "M.M." It is sufficient to state that no proceedings were taken, nor was a suit of libel brought against the editors who publish the paper.

I have here only recounted facts well known in England, and I set them down without malice or extenuation.

The salary or income of Queen Victoria is, I believe, about five thousand two hundred dollars a day, including Sundays, for which she also receives her regular stipend. Like other sovereigns, she does not toil or spin, yet the people must pay the bills all the same. Being of a very economical and thrifty disposition, it is supposed that her Majesty will leave a fortune of many millions of pounds to her scapegrace son when she dies, that is to say, if he has common decency enough too wait for her decease, and ceases to outrage her feelings to much.

Queen Victoria was born May 24th, 1819, and is consequently in her fifty-second year.

[CHAPTER V.]

HIDDEN DEPTHS.

INDING it necessary to have a companion with me who had a perfect knowledge of the English Metropolis, I paid a visit to the headquarters of the police in the Old Jewry, and procured from Inspector Bailey, the Chief of Police, the aid of a detective to accompany me in my nightly adventures. Shortly after midnight Sergeant Moss and myself passed through Gracechurch into Fenchurch street, by towering warehouses, and along Aldgate into High street, Whitechapel. Until we got well up into Whitechapel we had not met more than three or four persons, and they were principally individuals who had taken more ale or strong liquor than was good for their equilibrium. One person, who was evidently out of his latitude, accosted the detective and demanded of him, in a menacing but rather ludicrous way:

"I s'ay ole fel', whish ish Goodman's Feelsh? I wansh to go to Somshseet sthreeths. Goodman's Feelsh, ole boy. Show we waysh and give shixpensh, ole fel?"

"Go along and turn off to your left, and when you get home eat an onion, and it will do you good p'raps," said he, as he tried to dodge the drunken fellow, who seemed well dressed, and had some jewelry on his person.

"Eesh an onionsh. Sir, yer a gentlesmansh—ole boy. Blesh you. Blesh you," and he staggered away into the darkness, rolling like a yawl-boat in the breakers.

We turned off the Whitechapel road into Baker street, up Charles into Wellington street. The neighborhood was a poor desolate one, and every building, and every stone in the street, with the offal in the gutters, spoke of poverty and wretchedness.

Now and then a policeman spoke to us and looked sharply at me, but always they seemed civil and obliging.

The district we were now traversing was a kind of debatable land between Whitechapel and Bethnal Green. The streets, or rather lanes, ran across and along at angles and in circles of a perfect maze tending to confound ways that were well calculated to puzzle a stranger.

The lanes were, with few exceptions, not more than two or three hundred feet long, and the odor from the cellars and lodging houses was miasmatic. Shouts and yells and curses came from drunken male brutes who passed us, and now and then a wretched looking outcast of a woman, hideous with filth and bloated with gin, stole like a shadow from some of the low public houses that were, in accordance with the beer-house act, putting up their shutters.

A woman passed us with a stone bottle in one hand and a herring in the other, while we stood looking up and down the narrow street. Her eyes were bloodshot and her face seamed with dissipation and wretchedness, while she grasped the stone bottle hard, and seemed ready to defend her precious property with her life.

"Wot have you got there," said my companion seizing the stone jug and holding it to his nose. The woman was almost frenzied at this attempt, as she believed it was, to deprive her of what was far dearer to her than her life. "Give me back my gin!" she screamed, and dashed forward like a tigress to claw his eyes out. The sergeant seemed satisfied, and handed her back the stone vessel with a motion of disgust.

"That'll do, ole lady," said he, "I'd rather you'd drink that White Satan nor me. I pitys yer precious witles, that's hall, when you drinks it. Where do you live?"

AN EXPLORATION.

"I live's in 'Purty Bill's lodgin.' I'll show it to you for a brown. Come along." We followed her for a short distance, and now and then, as we passed the doorways and courts, some low blackguard would vent a little of his vile or rough humor upon our devoted heads, merely to keep his intellect in play.

"I say, ye pair of duffers, give us tuppence to get a pot o' beer, wont ye; come here, and I'll cash yer check hif you 'ave no small change," said a cut-throat looking rascal of large build who was lying across a door that seemed to open into the earth somewhere. He half rose; fell back on the broken cavern door stupefied with liquor, and began to snore like a wild beast gorged with blood.

"This is an awful district, sir," said the detective. "They doesn't stand on ceremony with you here."

We passed further down the dark street, and a very dark street it was. The atmosphere was very different from that which hung over London Bridge. The air was noisome, and the collected offal in the gutters sent up a frightful stench to the heavens. At the end of the street was a cul de sac, and before we came to it my conductor stopped at a passage, dim under the midnight sky, which ran back for some distance; I could not tell how far, owing to the darkness.

We passed into the court, which seemed to yawn wider as one progressed, between three-storied, tumble-down, dirty brick buildings, and finally we found ourselves in a yard about a hundred feet square, from the opposite side of whose buildings clothes lines depended covered with canvass jackets, ragged highlows, aprons, and two or three sou'westers, beside a lot of female articles of under-linen. There were barrows, hand carts, small jackass carts and baskets, with a few empty barrels piled up in a confused mass in the corner of the yard. Cabbage leaves, bones of fish and animals, potato skins—the remains of carniverous appetites—were strewed all round.

The detective had by this time lit a lantern which he had concealed in his breast, and thus I was enabled to look around me. He said, "This is a rum spot; but never mind, it's safe enough. Now dy'e see that cellar—that's where we are a goin' to spend an hour or two. Come along."

He pointed in the direction of the cellar, or rather an opening in the ground, at the further corner of the yard, from whose bowels issued slanting streaks of light, shouts of laughter, and yells indicative of mad revelry. Groping our way carefully over the heaps of rubbish, and around the vehicles and barrels, we arrived at the cellar, which had for an opening an aperture about six feet wide by five feet in length. The broken wooden stairs leading to the bottom had some fifteen steps.

We descended and found the door at the lowest step barring the entrance. It was fastened, and had a dirty, impenetrable pane of glass as a watchhole for the use of those inside, so that nothing could be seen from the outside of the door. We gave the door a kick, and then the shouting and laughing seemed to stop very suddenly, and there was a hustling and running about inside which betokened preparation.

A face appeared at the pane of glass, and, after a scrutiny of a minute or two, the door went back on its hinges with a grating sound. A big bullet-head protruded itself, and a voice said:

"Who is that ere? Wot does you want, and who the d—l send you at this time o' night a disturbin' of honest people in their comfortable beds?"

"Bill, it's 'Faking Johnny' as wants to hold a few moments conversation with you. The queen has just sent me with a patent of nobility for you, from Buckingham Palace. You are to be made a barronnight right hoff when you reforms," said the detective, in a jocular way, as he descended into the cellar and faced the proprietor of the den, who held a half-penny candle above his head to get a look at us both.

The master of the mansion finally recognized my companion, but did not seem at all well pleased with his visit.

"Well," he said, in a very gruff voice, "is hit bizness or pleasure? Vich? Kase, hif hits bizness you must 'elp yourself."

"PURTY BILL."

"Oh, pleasure by all means, Purty Bill," said the sergeant, "myself and friend here, who is a son of Henry Clay, as was President of the United States of America, just wants to see how the fun is goin' on to-night, and as I knew you kept a fust-class place, Bill, I thought I would bring him around to see you. He has called on the Queen, Mr. Bright, Mr. Gladstone, the Hemperor of the French, and he expressed a great desire to see 'Purty Bill;' so here we are."

PURTY BILL SHOWING US IN.

The hideous vagabond seemed touched by this piece of insidious flattery, and said in a modified tone:

"Oh, well, that's fair enough. I don't hask hanything better. But ye see I thought you might ha' wanted some of my lodgers, and so many of them have been done for lately that they are getting suspicious of my honesty, and I have to be careful. Come this way," and he held the half-penny candle over his head, which gave me a chance to observe him. The man was about six feet two inches in height, and much in form of shoulders like an ox, with loins like a prize-fighter. The face was pitted terribly with small-pox, his entire face was seared, and even the corners of his eyebrows seemed eaten away by the awful disease. Hence his name of "Purty Bill." His eyes were of a greenish blue, and his attire was that of a costermonger; a smock of canvass, and knee breeches and huge shoes, whose heavy nails made rapid incisions in the clay floor of the long, dark passage through which we had to pass until we came to still another door. This door was not a door; in fact it was only a few planks strongly nailed together, and was not more than four feet high, so that we were all compelled, as "Purty Bill" lifted the latch, to put our feet in first, and making half circles of our bodies, we entered, and after descending three or four flagged steps we were at last in the cellar and establishment proper over which "Purty Bill" claimed a proprietary interest.

It was one of the strangest sights I ever saw—the interior of this Wild Beast's Den. It was a huge cellar formerly used as a brewery, of perhaps a hundred by seventy-five feet in dimension.

The ceiling, or, rather, the rough, unplaned beams which supported the roof above us, gave an appearance of great strength to the place. There was a large fireplace in the center of the cellar, around which fifty or sixty persons sat, of all ages and of both sexes. The floor was of damp clay, smooth and trodden by the feet of countless thieves, vagabonds, and prostitutes. The corners of the cellar were buried in darkness, while the center of the cavern, near the fireplace, was bright with the flames of a fire of logs, which threw a flickering light on the wooden beams, the broken chairs and stools, the pewter pots in the hands of the lodgers, and on many faces stained with dirt and ploughed up with crime and misery. There were thirty or forty berths roughly constructed as they are in the emigrant steerage of a Liverpool packet, and a heap of dirty straw in each indicated that they were used as beds by the occupants of the apartments. There was a large black pot hanging from a big hook, which depended from the brick chimney, and from this pot came a steaming odor of soup, or stew of some kind. The majority of the lodgers were sitting on the bare ground, which was dry and hardened near the fire, while at a distance from its flame the ground was rather damp and the lodgers sat on broken stools or on ragged pieces of matting, broken pieces of willow ware, logs of wood, bundles of rags, or any other article, or articles, that were convertible into seats for the time being.

"WONT YOU TAKE SOMETHING?"

The room was lighted by four or five candles, which were stuck in glass bottles, the bottles being fastened to the joists which supported the berths in which the lodgers slept. The people nearest the fire had fragments of food in their hands and were evidently preparing for a grand midnight feast. Some of them were peeling potatoes, and one old fellow with rheumy eyes had a piece of bacon of five or six pounds weight between his crossed knees on a board, which he was cutting into small square lumps, and as he hacked a piece off he threw it at random into the large pot. A young girl was engaged in carving a huge cabbage-head, and her assistant was scraping carrots and parsnips. Every one seemed interested about the pot, and every one seemed to have some contribution for the feast, which I found was a co-operative one.

"WONT YOU TAKE SOMETHING?"

"Purty Bill" bustled about and found two broken stools for myself and conductor, and placed them near the fire, saying in a hospitable way:

"Gent's, this ere night is werry wet, and you might as well dry yourselves. Sit up nearer the fire. Won't ye take somethink?" and he put his huge paws on the detectives knee in a friendly way. "This is agoin to be a topper of a meal to-night, and all of us will welcome ye gents to our 'umble board. So make yerselves at 'ome, and peck a bit when it's biled."

"Wot's the idea of getting up this cram at this time of the morning, Bill? It's near two o'clock. Won't it interfere with yer lodgers' precious digestion?"

"Hinterfere with it? Wot, vith one of my lodgers? Rayther! No. Vy there's Kicking Billy as heats six blessed meals a day, and then he's all the time a lookin' for sangwiches and pigs trotters a-tween meals. Urt their digestion hindeed? Vy they 'av got stomax like them ere hanimals wot performs at Hastleys. You knows Slap-Up Peter. You used to be a stone swallower in the purfession," and the proprietor touched a man who was squatted on his haunches, smoking a dirty stump of clay pipe, with his foot. Slap-Up Peter drew the pipe out of his mouth, shook the ashes from it, dusted the venerable relic with a greasy red handkerchief, carefully placed it in his breeches pocket, and said:

"Vy don't ye keep yer big feet to yerself? Wot hanimals do you mean? Do you mean cammomiles?"

"Yes, them hanimals vith the 'umps on their hugly backs. You see, sir, Slap-Up Peter has had a good eddycation in his time, and he knows the names of the hanimals, 'cos he used to travel with the circus afore he went on the tramp to swallow stones and snakes."

"Peter," said the detective, "you must 'ave quite an 'istry. Could you tell us somethink about your past life, my boy?"

Slap-Up Peter had a melancholy face. The skin was tanned, the eyes large, black, and bulging, and the nose like a hawk's. His clothes were worn and greasy; his face was gaunt, and when he moved his body the bones seemed to creak and grate as if they had been joined together by metallic hinges. There was something mournful about the man—some queer story attached to him, I felt.

PETER AND JUDY.

"Tell ye me 'istry, is it? Vell, I don't mind if I do; but them as hears my story mout give me somethink to drink first, for I ham werry dry. I lost my woice speaking on the Histablished Church bill tother night in Parlymint, and I've been 'oarse hever since."

"Well, take a drop, Peter," said Kicking Billy, a one-eyed and one-legged, and rascally looking fellow, who sat with his crutches between his knees, toasting his shin at the fire, and he handed a bottle to Slap-Up Peter, who took it without saying a word, and lifting it to his mouth, took a deep, deep draught without winking.

"Look at that fellow that they call Kicking Billy—the one-legged fellow, I mean," said the detective to me. "He's a returned burglar, that fellow, and has served fourteen years. This place is full of thieves. They are nearly all thieves, and this is a thieves feast," he whispered in my ear.

"My name is Peter Wilson, and I've been in the show business for sixteen years, come Christmas, man and boy. I'm thirty-eight years of age now, and they called me Slap-Up Peter when I fust began jumpin', as a hacrobat in the penny gaffs. Cos wy, I had a way of turnin' myself over a chair and coming back-handed on a somerset that used to take well, but now so many does it that the haudience don't mind it a bit. I jumped for four years, and wos counted pretty good in my line until I dislocated my wrist a doin' of the Pyramids of Hegypt, and then I vos laid hup and couldn't jump for six months and hover; so I thought I'd leave the bus'ness and happear in another character. I got married to—"

"More fool you," said Kicking Billy, sententiously, taking a drink.

"Well, hit didn't cost you nothing, no more than it did for the government to support you in Botany Bay for fourteen years. So you needn't hinterrupt me again."

"Go hon, Peter, and never mind him, its only 'is chaff."

"Well, as I wos saying," continued Slap-Up Peter, "I got married, and maybe it was rayther foolish, for when we were spliced, Judy and I—she wos an Irish gal and a good worker—we went into our cash account and found that we had only one pun six shillings and height pence, not a blessed brown more. I said to Judy—she wor a good gal—

"Judy, we can't keep 'ause on twenty-six shillings capital, that's shure. That's all our fortune in silver and gold, and it won't last long. So wot will we do?"

"'Well, Peter,' said she, 'I didn't marry you for the dirty money; I married you cos' you were sich a good jumper and hacrobat, and I'll stick to you now when you can't jump any more;' for you see, Billy, my wrist was two years afore it got well."

"'Let us pad the hoof together,' said Judy, 'and we'll do the best we can. Let us two work the southern counties and we'll get long French or Hitalyan names, and we'll pick up a shillin here and there.' Cos you see," said Peter, "Judy had been born and bred in Shoreditch, and she knew all the wandering play-actors and showmen, and she wor hup to all their affs. So I next came out as 'Signor Hokenfokos, the fiery salamander of Naples, and my wife, the Baroness Padila, who had to leave her country on account of the wiolent love vich the king's son would persist in making hup to her, and she had to leave all her property, to the amount of six millions, behind her.' This was a good lay and we made from three to eight shillings a day down in Devonshire and Cornwall, wherever we could get a crowd together. I used to swaller hot iron bars, pokers, and red hot coals, and my wife used to play the hurdy-gurdy while I was swallerin' the hot coals. I improved at this werry much in two years, and then, after I had vorked the hot coals out, Judy said to me one day:

"'Peter, why don't you try and swaller snakes and swords? They are better than coals, and not so dangerous.'"

SNAKE SWALLOWING.

"'Yes, but I don't know how,' I said, 'and I don't like snakes at all, they are so precious slimy.' You see sir, even then I didn' know what it was to get used to a thing. Well, I commenced to swallow knives at first, and I had to oil them—that's the trick you see—with sweet oil as good as I could find at eighteen pence a pint, and I had to rub this on with a piece of shammy cloth. This oil lets the knife down easily, and when I wos well drilled there wos no danger at all—only I had to be sober. My swallow was hawful bad with the hirritation for two months, but I got over that; for when I felt my throat sore I took sugar and lemon juice, and gorgled my throat and that took the soreness away."

"Tell us about the snakes, Peter," said Purty Bill. "That's a good story, sir," to the author.

SNAKE SWALLOWING STORY.

"Ah! that was the most unlikely thing I hever took to. It went aginst my stomach hawful to swaller the snakes at first, and I don't believe I'd ever have done it if it hadn't been for Judy, who said to me, when I kicked agin it,—

"'Wot difference does it make, Peter, whether you swallow red hot coals or snakes? The snakes has their stings all taken out, and its nothing more than swallowin' a sausage or pork saveloy.'"

"Well, I went at it with a very bad 'art, and my old woman used to play 'Boney's March Across the Halps,' and the 'Death of Nelson,' whenever I swallowed a snake. You see I generally took a snake about fourteen or fifteen inches, or maybe a foot and a half long. The sting is out, you know, and I takes the head and puts the snake in, and if he doesn't go down why I pinches his tail, and then he rolls down the throat. It made me sea-sick at first, and the people in Sussex thought I was the devil out and out, and a good many hexamined my feet, which were in tights, to see if I had cloven feet. A goodish lot of people thinks that the snake goes entirely down the throat, but it stands to reason that the snake is more frightened than the man, and he does not go down, and hif he did he would be glad to come up, I can tell you."

"Don't you put somethink in your throat," said a boy of fourteen, who was known among the confraternity as 'Teddy the Kinchin;' "I mean, to make the snake sick if he'd go too far."

SLAP-UP-PETER'S SONG.

"No, that's no use at all; you see he doesn't go hall the way down. He is afraid, is the snake, and if you cough he'll come up and draw himself up and coil in a bunch in your mouth. But the duffers who pay their money think that the snake is in your stomach. It stands to reason that he'd get sick. It makes a man retch, and the first snake I swallowed I threw up and had awful vomits, but the next one I rather relished it, and it did me a sight o' good, like an oyster does after ye 'ave been drinkin at night and take's tuppence worth of natives in the morning. Well, when I began snake-swallowing it was rather new, and I had it all my own way for a long time, but finally, lots of men began to swallow snakes, and coal swallowing was not as good as it used to be; so I took to ballad singing, Judy and I. By this time we had sixty pounds saved, and we were doing well, but I made the acquaintance of a lot of Doncaster men, who knew I had the money, and before I could say 'Jack Robinson,' the money was all gone. Judy was in her confinement then, and she took on so bad about it that she died in child-bed, and the kid as well, and I've been on the tramp ever since, and now I do an odd turn at anything that turns up, but mostly I sing ballads, and make sometimes a shilling a day, and sometimes eightpence and ninepence a day. Times have changed for me. Worse luck."

Here the snake-swallower's story ended.

"Slap-Up Peter, will you give us a song? and I'll give you a drink, me oul wiper," said the crippled Kicking Billy to the snake-swallower.

"Well, Billy, I don't mind if I do," said Slap-Up Peter, draining the tin skillet to the last greasy drop.

The thieves, loafers, and women gathered around the fire in a half circle, and Purty Bill heaped logs very liberally, while Slap-Up Peter chanted in a hoarse voice the song, an extract of which I give below, as near as I remember it with my recollections of the scene, the choking smoke, the blazing fire, and the band of outcasts and outlaws in the den in Whitechapel:

'Twas down in Whitechapel that once I used to dwell,
And of all the coves that knocked about, I was the greatest swell,
My highlows were the cheese, with breeches to the knees,
Oh, my toggery was quite correct—my coat was Irish frieze,
My togs from Bond street came, it's a nobby slap-up street,
In a fashionable locality—the swells the girls there meet;
Nicol's my man for shirts, with his I cut a shine,
His shop's in far famed Regent street, he's a pal-o'-mine.
Rum too-rul-um, Happy-go-Bill,
Inyuns and greens who'll buy,
Rum too-rul-um, Happy-go-Bill,
Inyuns and greens who'll buy.

"That's a fine melojous voice of yours," said Purty Bill to the singer.

"He's used to it," said one of the women.

Here's Spuds at Thrums a pound, they're prime 'uns as I've found,
Oh, I've Reds and Dukes and Flukes and Blues, I sells in going my round.
My greens are superfine, full blown and hearty are mine,
Oh, come make a deal with me, my dear; don't wait, you'll find 'em prime.
My inyuns now are new, you'll find what I says is true,
In fact, the Queen, since these she's seen has cartloads just a few;
My carrots are long and red, you'll find they're well bred,
My vegetables are the cheese, bunch for you—penny-a-head.
Rum too-rul-um, &c.

"Now give us the last werse with all the 'armony," said Teddy the Kinchin, in a piping voice.

"I vill, vith moosh plesh-yar, as the Frenchman said," returned Slap-Up Peter.

Jerry, my moke's a bird, of him perhaps you've heard,
He knows his way about, he does, to match him's quite absurd;
Just see him cock his eye when grub time's getting nigh,
He likes his feed, he does indeed, he lives on cabbage-pie.
Now any girl that's kind, and a husband wants to find,
I'm ready made and so's my trade, that's if I'm to her mind;
So down to Whitechapel we'll trudge again to dwell,
And of all the coves that knock about I'll be the greatest swell.
Rum too-rul-um, &c.

"That's wot I call a topper of a song. It's so werry sentimental that it makes a gal peep. The lines are werry touchin'," said a young gal of sixteen or seventeen years of age, who was not badly dressed nor bad-looking, and who went by the name of "Bilking Bet." She was a favorite, and several of them called upon her to sing. She had just the same mock modesty, this young woman with the brassy face, as if she had been a fashionable lady at the West End, with a jointure and a coach and six.

"Wot's that young gal's name, Bill," said the detective to the boss of the thieves.

He did not seem inclined to tell at first, but said sullenly, "you don't want her do you? No? Well then that's 'Bilking Bet,' she used to be a 'coster gal but now she's on the cross."

"Oho!" said Serjeant Moss, "that's the gal as was hup before Mr. Knox at Marlboro street the other morning for snatching a lady's purse in a push."

"Yes," said Purty Bill, "but there was no proof aginst the gal. She was brought out has hinnocent as the new-born baby. She wor."

THE COSTER GAL.

"Of course, Bill, you had that done and cooked. One of those nice little halybi's as you halways 'ave ready just to suit your customers. 'Bilking Bet' was down in Wales a waitin upon her poor sick mother, who was down with the scarlet fever, and not expected to live. My Heye? Eh, Bill, one of your old tricks? But, I say, Bill, don't you get ketched, cos its over the water to Charly with ye hif I ketch ye."

This conversation was carried on in the corner of the room, from which we could see that the group around the fire were preparing to hear a song from "Bilking Bet," who cleared her throat twice with a pull at a gin bottle—no glasses here to annoy a person—and began, in a mellow and not unpleasing voice, the following slang song which is common among the London costermongers, but is seldom heard among the thieves. The song, no doubt, she owed to her early costermonger associations, before she became a pickpocket. She was now one of the most expert in London, and was the kept mistress of a well known burglar, who had, two days before I saw her, broken open a tea shop in the Old Bailey, near Ludgate Hill.

The song was as follows:

"THE COSTER' GAL."

Some chaps they talk of damsels fine,
Being angels bright and fair,
But they should only see my girl,
She is beyond compare,
She is the finest girl that's out,
Her name is Dinah Denny,
When you are out you'll hear her shout
"New Walnuts, twelve a penny!"
Chorus.—S'help me never none so clever,
As my Dinah Denny,
Can shout about, all round about
"New Walnuts, twelve a penny."
Her voice is like a dove,
And bright is her black eye,
I think she does me truly love,
She looks at me so sly.
She sports the smartest side spring boots,
Eclipse her cannot many,
And shows feet small, while she does call
"New Walnuts, twelve a penny."
Chorus, &c.
Rich noblemen may dress their wives
In silk or satin dress,
But Dinah I like quite as well
In her Manchester print, "Express,"
We're going to be wed, and then
If offspring we have many,
We'll be nuts on, and christen them
"New Walnuts, twelve a penny."
Chorus, &c.

"BILKING BET TAKES THE CHAIR."

"Now I think that's werry neat and happropriate to the hoccasion," said a cockney lodger who had successfully begged two-pence from the detective to pay for his lodging, which he handed over to "Purty Bill" as soon as he got the pennies.

"I moves we put Bilking Bet in the cheer? Wot dye say, gentlemen and ladies hall, to the proposition?"

"Hall right. Bet take the cheer and give us some of yer 'Ouse of Commons."

"Bilking Bet" was escorted to the middle of the group, placed standing on a three-legged stool without any visible back, and assuming as stately an air as she was capable of, the young girl, with the most perfect sang froid, began:

"Me lords and gentlemen, and likewise the ladies. Me noble pickpockets, gonoffs, blokes, and pinchers. I am with you this hevening, for what purpose, I hask? FOR WOT PURPOSE I HASK? Why, to be present at the feast which takes place hannerally among the members of our noble purfession—shall I say dignified purfession? No; I won't."

"But ye have said it, Bet," said Kicking Billy.

"Hear! hear! Shut up, will ye, and let the gal tork," said Slap-Up Peter.

"Well," said Bet, broken down in her attempt at a speech, "I move that we have a song from 'Teddy the Kinchin.' Will he hoblige?"

"He will! he will!" said a dozen voices.

"TEDDY THE KINCHIN'S SONG."

"I am sorry, me blokes, that my woice is so werry much out of tune in singing at Her Majesty's Hopera in the Haymarket, but howsumbever, as I have given hup my hengagement at that 'ouse, I'll fake you a few werses to show wot I wonce wos when I wos in woice," said this cheerful young blackguard and thief, who had a pair of eyes like a ferret, and could not have been more than seventeen years of age, as he stood there dressed in the height of his idea of the fashion, with a flashy velvet coat and satin scarf, showing a huge pin. He sang, after clearing his throat with a long drink of gin, as follows:

"TEDDY THE KINCHIN'S SONG."

I am a curious comical cove
Everybody does own O,
Hey ricketty Barlow, Cock-a-doodle-do!
I was born one day when father was out,
And mother she wasn't at home O,
Hey ricketty Barlow, &c.
I went to school and played the fool,
At learning was a shy man.
Hey ricketty Barlow, &c.
The boys they used to hollo out,
"There goes a Simple Simon!"
Hey ricketty Barlow, &c.
Oh lor! oh my! I'm a Simple Simon,
Oh lor! oh my! cock-a-doodle-do!
Where ere I go the folks they know,
And call me "Simple Simon;"
Hey ricketty Barlow, &c.

"Haltogether, please," said the Kinchin.

"TEDDY THE KINCHIN'S SONG."

I used to "kick" the cobbler out,
And rip up people's pockets,
Hey ricketty Barlow, &c.
And I was very fond of throwing stones
And lumps of mud at coppers,
Hey ricketty Barlow, &c.
But now I'm going to settle down,
Won't I cut a shine O,
Hey ricketty Barlow, &c.
I'll marry a gal with lots of Tin,
And won't I spend her rhino,
Hey ricketty Barlow, &c.
Oh lor! oh my! &c.

"Now, once more, and a good haltogether please," and the young pickpocket sat down amid thunders of applause from every one in the cellar belonging to the band of thieves.

TEDDY THE KINCHIN.

The thieves stew was now declared ready for consumption by the chef de cuisine, and as I at least felt no appetite for such a rich dish, we left this underground den of infamy just as a few faint streaks of the coming dawn began to gild the spire of St. Boldolph's ancient church.

"That Purty Bill is one of the greatest scoundrels in London. He is a fence, and we've got him once or twice, but he minds himself now, and we are after his tricks every day. His cellar used to be a brewery, that's why he's got so much room underground, and his game is to let out lodgings, at two pence a night, for a blind, and then they can stay all day at this place until twelve o'clock at night, and if they cannot pay sure for the next night's lodging in advance, unless they are in very good circumstances, he clubs them out, and they have got to pad the hoof until daybreak, and sleep where they can. Good night." And we parted for that twenty-four hours.

[CHAPTER VI.]

DEBATING CLUBS AND COGERS'S HALL.

SHOE lane hath a very unromantic sound for a locality. It does not smell of the aristocracy. It hath not even a slight favor of the Landed Gentry, and no one could possibly take the trouble to find armorial bearings or hatchments for Shoe lane. Yet is Shoe lane a most eloquent place, and there is a little old public house there deemed second only in point of fame by the admirers of forensic eloquence who frequent it, to the House of Commons.

The way was long and dreary that Saturday night that I strolled from Long Acre, whose carriage-shops and leather manufacturers' stalls were all closed for the day; and the sultry London fog came down, blinding the pedestrians, as I turned from Lincoln's-Inn-fields into the better-lighted High Holborn, with the glare from its brassy gin-shops and dirty-looking old houses, that seemed all of them as if a good scouring would have done them an incalculable service in the way of a fresher appearance. I thought that Shoe lane was in a very suspicious neighborhood.

Turning to the left through Farringdon Market, a huge square seemingly devoted to the worship of highly odorous vegetables, I came into the narrow Shoe lane, which runs down at its bottom to Fleet street, just below where the gray stone arch of Temple bar bisects the Strand and Fleet street. There is nothing particularly noticeable about this part of Shoe lane.

SHOE LANE.

There is a ham and beef shop, with its layers of cold meat-pies piled on top of each other in the windows; and across the way there is the inevitable gin-shop, with its polished brass fender outside to keep off the boys who have no money to spend in gin, and there are the enticing signs all over the gin-shop telling of the merits of the brown-stout there vended, and the Burton ale and somebody's "entire" malt liquors which the proprietor assures the public are only genuine at his shop.

The lane is narrow here and not more than three or four men could pass abreast, although there are sidewalks to the lane, or rather apologies for sidewalks. This narrow lane is one of the few remaining relics of old London. Below, at the foot of Shoe lane, runs Fleet street—one of the busiest marts in the world, which is ever jammed and blocked with drays, cabs, and vehicles of all descriptions crowding to and fro, in sight of the mighty dome of St. Paul's; and under the pavement of that street, so famous for its publications and shops, the old River Fleet once ran in a dirty, hideous current, until it emptied its garnered filth into the Thames.

Here, opposite Shoe lane, one of the curious old conduits that formerly supplied old London with water might have been seen about the time of the wars of the Roses, when the English nobles were hard at work cutting each other's throats and making and unmaking kings for the want of something better to do. The cistern erected at the point where Shoe lane intersects Fleet street, was counted one of the handsomest in London. Stow—that quaint, old, musty chronicler—says:

"Upon it was a fair tower of stone, garnished with the image of St. Christopher on the top, and angels lower down, round about, with sweetly sounding bells before them, whereupon, by an engine placed in the tower, they, divers hours of the day and night, with hammers chimed such a hymn as was appointed." Frolicsome Anne Boleyn, the first day that she was queened, rode through Shoe lane on her way to the sacred Abbey of Westminster to receive the gilded toy upon her fair forehead, and pageantry and pomp met her at every step of her palfrey, in Cornhill, Cheapside, Fleet street, and Shoe lane.

In those days the streets and lanes of London were narrow and difficult, and the unfortunate queen that was to be might have touched the over-hanging eaves and gables of the houses in her progress through the city without leaving her saddle. The conduit in Shoe lane was grandly gilded over to do her honor, and ran wine for the whole day. At the base of the conduit a starvling poet sat reciting verses in her honor as she and her newly made ruffian of a husband passed, and no doubt this mediæval Mormon was highly pleased with the conceit. There were towers and turrets erected to do her honor in Shoe lane, and in one of these towers, according to the chronicler, "was such several solemn instruments that seemed to be an heavenly noise, and was much regarded and praised; and, besides this, the conduit ran wine, claret and white, all the afternoon; so she, with all her company, rode forth to Temple Bar, which was newly painted and repaired, where stood also divers singing men and children, till she came to Westminster Hall, which was richly hanged with cloths of Arras."

While Prince Hal was splitting the skulls of fractious Frenchmen at Agincourt and fording the passage of the Somme, Sir Robert Ferras de Chastley held eight cottages in Shoe lane from his king. Here and there was a garden peeping forth in its floral verdure; and here was also the town residence of the Bishops of Bangor, powerful and pious prelates in their day, God wot and odds bodkins; and as early as 1378 they held the tenure by virtue of the patent of the forty-eighth of Edward the Third, which says in most barbarous Latin: "Unum messuag; unam placeam terræ, unam gardinum cum aliis ædificis in Shoe Lane, London."

Times have changed since then in Shoe lane. A bishop of Bangor now, with his train of lances, his men-at-arms, mitre, cross-bearer, and torches, would be a sight indeed in Shoe lane. How that bright-eyed bar-maid at the door of the Blue Pig would stare at his lordship! How the greasy boy in the ham and beef shop would shout at the cope and silks and velvet housings—taking them, perhaps, in an innocent way, for a part of the Lord Mayor's show! And as for the conduit running Claret and Malmsley, the beer-swilling cockneys would not thank headless Anne Boleyn for such washy foreign stuff. Their fancy could only be fed by gin. A man-at-arms would be compelled now-a-days to wash his throat with Bass's bitter beer or brown stout, instead of sack, hippocras, or mead.

SOCIETY OF COGERS.

At last we are in the neighborhood of "Cogers Hall"—the hall of the Ancient and Honorable Society of Cogers. There is a gin-shop at the front, with its low doorway and flaring signs. The windows are well lit, and by the side of the bar is a long, narrow passage conducting the visitor for twenty or thirty feet to a back room, about forty feet long and twenty-five feet wide.

Off the passage are a number of small waiting-rooms, noisy and smoky, with the voices and vile pipes of the occupants. Four rows of tables run along the room, in which are present fifty or sixty persons all of the male sex. They are all decently dressed, for, although the admission is free, yet is the visitor to the Cogers Hall expected to drink or eat something, and the place, with its tariff of prices, though moderate enough to an American, would not suit a costermonger or laborer.

The roof is arched and paneled, done in a feeble imitation of the style of Sir Christopher Wren, who is popularly supposed to have built everything in London after the great fire of 1666. A handsome chandelier depends from an opening in the roof, and is ornamented with a number of glass globes, which serve to light the apartment and dissipate the thick clouds of smoke that constantly arise in the room.

There is a large, gaudy sign in the hall, on which are printed these cabalistic words: "Hot joints are served in this room from one until five." At the farther end of the room, opposite the entrance, is a paneling hollowed back in the wall, the entire room being paneled; and this paneling is shaped like a door, and is gilded. A step from the floor, in the paneling, is placed a chair of honor, which is occupied by the Most Worthy Grand, as he is styled; or, in fact, the chairman of the meeting. Those who are familiar with him go so far in their irreverence as to call this awful personage "Me Grand," and whispers have been heard that his name in reality is Tompkins or Noakes.

Directly opposite this dignitary, at the other end of the room, is a place in the paneling and a chair like to that which I have already described, and this is occupied by a tall, lean man, with side whiskers of a grayish pattern, who has the title of Vice Grand.

But the Vice, or Worthy Wice, is of greatly inferior dignity to the Most Worthy Grand. He is, so to speak, an empty ornament of the feast, and his duties are simple, and confined to calling out in unison with the assemblage, "Hear, hear," or "Good." "You are Right," when the Worthy Grand, in his oracular sentences, is most happy. At other times, in a loud voice he will call the attention of the waiters, who heartily detest him for his interference, to the fact that some customer has drained his beer, or gin and hot water, and needs, therefore, to be served afresh.

Still this man is human, and will listen, when off his seat of duty, to any scandal against the Most Worthy Grand with secret pleasure. In fact, the Worthy Wice, inspired by a generous four-pence worth of gin and hot water, told me aside, in conversation, that the Worthy Grand was unfit for his high position. "He his han hass, sir. He his too Hold. And he 'as no woice watsomever, sir. Bah! that, sir, for Tompkins"—and the Worthy Wice snapped his fingers in an insane manner at the air in which his potent imagination had conjured up the semblance of the Worthy Grand. Sitting down at a table I followed the custom of the place and called for something. On each table were placed a couple of long-shanked clay pipes, and a thin-necked, big-paunched, red-clay jar, which a man sitting near explained to my satisfaction.

"You see," said he in a rather mysterious voice, "we 'aven't much ice to speak of in England; leastways, it is too dear, and this 'ere red clay 'as a peculiar wirtue—it keeps the water as cold as if it was in the waults of Bow Church."

This man was decently dressed, and was, I believe, a drover by profession. He was very fleshy and very red in the face.

AT THE TABLES.

Tissues of fat lay around his eyebrows in layers, and his double chin was dewlapped like one of his own beeves. He had a heavy red hand, and was, as I found out, a true Briton in every sense. I asked him why the place was called Cogers Hall. To this conundrum he confessed himself unable to answer, but after scratching his head the "Beefy One," as I shall call him, made a sign for a waiter to come to the table. "I say," said the Beefy One, "why do you call this place Cogers 'All?" The waiter could not satisfy him, but said that he would call the Master. Well, the Master came, a thin-faced, side-whiskered Englishman, with watery blue eyes and trembling lip. The counterfeit presentment of the Master hung over the Worthy Grand's chair of state, done in oil, and it seemed as if the artist had endeavored, in accordance with the spirit of the Cogers Hall, to give the face an oratorical, Gladstonian expression, and the cloak was folded around the shoulders of the Master as the toga is folded around the shoulders of Tully, in classic pictures. Besides the picture of the Master, several other pictures of Past Worthy Grands were hung as tokens of their former forensic abilities. The Master, in answer to the question why the place was called Cogers Hall, said:

"Well, you see, we calls it Cogers Hall from the Latin ko-gee-TO—to cogitate, to think. Oh, yes, sir, we have been a long time established, sir; since 1756, sir; a matter of a hundred years or so, sir. You are han Hamerican, sir. Oh, yes, sir, we've 'ad George Francis Train 'ere, sir, for many a night, sir; and 'e spoke in that chair, sir; and when he was arrested, sir, in Ireland, the Home Secretary as wos, sir, wrote to me to question me if he had spoken treason, sir, or spoke agin the Queen, sir. Cos ye see, sir, the principle of an Englishman, sir, is to allow every man liberty to say wot he likes, sir, so long as he does not speak agin the Queen or speaks treason. That's an Englishman's principle, sir."

And George Francis Train had spoken in this very room! I could fancy the feelings of poor Artemus Ward when he stood at the tomb of Shakespeare at Stratford. These wooden chairs and benches were hallowed in my eyes henceforward. Men had sat upon those chairs who had listened to the fervid eloquence of a Train, and perhaps some of these very men had survived. Civis Americanus sum.

As the night came on apace, the smoky, old-fashioned, paneled room began to fill up, and before long nothing could be seen but rows of men lining the small tables, puffing vigorously from the long clay pipes, and at intervals taking deep draughts from the large, brightly burnished metal pots, holding a pint each, or perhaps sipping fourpenny glasses of hot gin and water. Along with the little jar of hot water which the waiter brought on demand, were little saucers of sugar—these little saucers never containing, by any chance, more than three lumps of sugar, and each of these lumps being equalized in size with a mathematical nicety. Some of the visitors, more hungry than others, satisfied their longings with "Welsh Rabbits," at sixpence apiece; or, when the rabbits had, in addition, two eggs cooked with them, the Welsh rabbit was called a "Golden Buck," and the waiter, in his greasy tail coat, raised his demand to eightpence.

In a few minutes the Worthy Vice, a gray-bearded man with a meek face and in shabby-genteel clothes, took his seat, and all the chairs in the apartment were turned around by those who occupied them in order that they might hear and see better. The Worthy Vice, who is sometimes entered on the bills of the performance as a "Patriot" when he has to take part in a discussion, read the minutes of the last meeting of the Ancient and Honorable Society of Cogers, which were listened to quietly, and then the attention of the audience was turned to the Most Worthy Grand, who occupied the chair at the other end of the apartment. This most noble Briton, in a quavering voice, having adjusted his vest—which had a tendency to leave exposed the lower part of the shirt-bosom at his stomach where his trousers bisected—opened the proceedings with much solemnity, imitating by hems and haws, as well as he could, the manners of the dullest and most common-place orators of the House of Commons. His business as a specialty was to review the events of the week.

NEWS OF THE WEEK.

"I don't think, gentlemen," said he, "that my task will be a very long one this hevening in reviewing the hevents of the week. There, aw, 'asn't been much a-doing in furrin parts, ah, this week. There 'as been 'a row in Turkee again, and in, ah, fact we might say there is halways a row in Turkee, more or less. There's a man in Hegipt whom we call the Viceroy of that, ah, country, and when he, ah, wos here we gave 'im fireworks and sich, and made a blessed time about him, as we might say vulgarly, so to speak. Now, he has been a invitin' of all the sovrins of Europe on his own hook to see him and his ryal family open the Sooz Canal. Well, he has been, ah, spendin' sich a lot of money that the Sultan comes out in a long letter and calls him a Cadivar, which is a word that I can't understand, being neither Latin nor yet Greek.

"Blessed hif I knowed that ye iver understood Greek or Lating, ither, Jimmy," said an old man who sat observant of the reviewer in a corner, drinking beer from a pewter pot.

"I thank ye all the same, Mr. Wilkins, but I don't like to be interrupted when I'm speaking," answered the Most Worthy Grand.

"You're right, Me Grand. Horder! horder!" shouted several indignant voices.

"I wos goin' to say," continued the Grand, after taking a deep draught of the porter which foamed in the pewter pot on the table before him—"I wos goin' to say that the state of our neighbor, Fronse, just hover the water, is now a spektikle for mankind. There's a great hadoo about the Hemperor's 'elth; and I must say as how he is in a bad way by all accounts. Nobody knows wot his disease is. It may be liver; it may be kidneys. I might take the liberty of sayin', as a rule, kidneys is bad. No one knows wot would be the consequences if the Hemperor was to step out, wulgularly speakin'. It would p'r'aps be the cause of a general war in Europe. Hengland doesn't want any more wars. We 'ave 'ad enough of them. They does no good for the workin' man. ('Hear! hear!') We pays the piper when the dancin' is done; but we never dances ourselves."

"True as the gospel, Jimmy," from a beer drinker.

"Now, there's another question which we all 'ave heard of a good deal, and that's the Halabama claims. They are in a precious muddle, to be sure. They may be right and they may be wrong. But I must say that I don't see where the money is to come from to pay them."

"We'll never pay them. We aint got the "dibs;" leastways, I won't pay any of it," says an irreverent young man whose face was quite flushed with strong drink.

"Well, as far as that goes, if they are to be paid, we know it will come from the pockets of just such people as ourselves in the way of taxes. Its taxes halways."

"I differ from the gentleman who preceded me altogether. Prussia must 'ave the left bank of the Rhine, and I'll put sixteen bullets in the Pope's heart. I tell ye, gentlemen, the Ekumenikal Council will be the downfall of the Romish religion. I'll put sixteen bullets in the Pope's heart," cried out a tall, thin-faced man in a half-clerical suit of black, who got on his feet, and while in the act of energetically expressing his feeling, by a wave of his right hand carried away a glass globe shading the gaslight above his head. The man was very drunk apparently, but by his language seemed to be a person of education. The "Beefy One," who sat by my side, and who had reached his third bottle of beer, whispered to me:

"I say, yon is a fine fellow when he's sober, and can talk poetry by the yard, but he is very drunk, and when he's fuddled he will talk a man blind about the Pope. Will you have some beer? Do take a pot."

It was with some trouble that the fiery Scotch orator was induced to sit down and defer his assault upon the Pope until a more fitting occasion.

At this moment the Beefy One pointed out to me a tall, martial-looking person in black clothes, who seemed to be very restive and looked as if he wanted to speak. He was of large frame, about sixty years of age, and was apparently a man of considerable stamina and backbone. His white whiskers and neat dress gave him the look of a justice of the peace who had dropped in to take a look at the assemblage from curiosity, and to see that the public morals and the constitution were properly taken care of.

COGERS HALL.

While the Worthy Grand was making a series of remarks on the health of the Emperor Napoleon and the menacing attitude of Prussia towards France in a gentle, slipshod way, the stranger looked up at times from the four-penn'orth of gin which he ordered when he came in to give an incredulous, doubting smile to a few of the coterie who sat around him and were evident admirers of his. The Beefy One whispered to me—

"That ole gentlemun is the finest orator as ever was. I tell ye, sir, he can talk when he's agoing. There's no end to his beautiful sentiments, I do say it, although he's a Hirishman. Oh, 'e is a great horator is the Ole One."

LIBERALS AND CONSERVATIVES.

After the review of the week's public events by the Worthy Grand, debate was in order on the topics reviewed by him. I found that the debaters who jumped to their feet one after the other in a manner worthy of the most dignified legislative assemblage, were divided into two parties, liberals and conservatives. The Liberals were the most logical, strange to say; the Tories were most dogmatic and violent. The Liberals—one of them at least—wished to do away with all monarchies and established churches; while the Conservatives, principally belonging to the shopkeeping element, in the audience, were strenuously opposed to the eight-hour law and to the trades-unions. One liberal orator would liked to have seen, as he expressed it, all the kings, barons, prime ministers, and other like despots, placed in one old rotten hulk of a vessel, and then the vessel was to be scuttled on the Goodwin Sands. "And who," said the eloquent orator, "would not say that it would not be a benefit to the human race? Who would not exclaim with me," and here he looked around on his eager audience in a threatening manner, "the more of sich cattle in the rotten old hulk the better?" There was a general grunt of acquiescence from the advanced Liberals at this possibility and a deprecatory shake of the head from one Conservative with a great clay pipe.

Finally, the Irish orator got a chance, and then it was wonderful to see how, in a sarcastic tone, he humbugged his hearers for half an hour by allusions to the good time coming, when every man should have a vote, and every Irish tenant should give up the graceful and sportsmanlike habit of potting from behind the Tipperary hedges all landlords who were in the way of a freehold system. The orator waxed wroth and became pathetic at times as he reviewed the past glories of the Isle of Saints and her present degraded position among nations. Yet in that he was skilful enough, in speaking of the Fenians, to deprecate their acts mildly, but, at the same time, he told his English audience, in the most forcible tones, of the abuses and tyranny that had led to the organization of Fenianism.

"Oh, I say, O'Brien, you are a humbugging of hus with that here gammon habout '98, ye know."

"I give yes me word, me Worthy Grand and gentlemen, that I do not advocate Fenianism at all, at all; but when yes dhrive min to madness by oppression, by acts of oppression such as the world has never seen, can yes blame the wu-r-rum if it turns on yes and bites."

THE SCOTCH PRESBYTERIAN.

No one could reply to this with the exception of the Scotch Presbyterian, who, again rising from his seat, denounced the Pope and Dr. Cumming as accomplices, and declared that at the first opportunity he would cheerfully encounter martyrdom to be able to "put sixteen bullets into the Pope's carcass," as he politely and charitably expressed himself. "I didn't care about your Ekumenikul Council," said he; "it will be the downfall of popishness and prelacy, and those who may go there are welcome; but as for me I would be burned to have him under my pistol."

"Oh, Mac, yer not so bad as yer purtend in yer talk. I'll engage, if his Holiness would give ye the chance, ye'd only be too glad to kiss his toe."

This raised a laugh at the Scotchman's expense, but he violently disclaimed for himself, as a true disciple of John Knox, any intention of submitting to such a degrading act of spiritual submission. The debate continued as the night waned, and at eleven o'clock, when I left the hall of discussion in Shoe lane, the subjects of vaccination, land laws, and coinage were yet to be touched upon by the speakers.

I have given but a glance at this place, which is the oldest established of its kind among a number of discussion halls and forums, whose sign-boards meet the stranger's eye in different parts of the city where most thickly populated. There is invariably a pot-house attached to these debating places, or rather the debating halls are attached to the pot-houses.

The better class of artisans and shopkeepers in a small way are principally the frequenters of the discussion halls. Mechanics with a gift of the gab, and who have five or six shillings a week to spend out of twenty-five or thirty, are to be found here in large numbers. The Most Worthy Grand and the Vice Grand are paid a fixed salary for their stated eloquence, and it is principally their duty to read all the cheap weeklies and dailies, not forgetting the Times, which is very often quoted by them as a sort of a clincher in the argument brought up. A place like this will take in five pounds of a night, and the wages paid to the bar-maids is about sixteen shillings a week. There were two here, and four waiters, who receive sixteen pounds a year and their "grub," as they call it. A small paper of rough-cut tobacco is furnished to each customer for a penny, and the consumption of this narcotic and Welsh Rabbits is encouraged, as they are quite certain to make the customers dry, and this dryness, as a matter of course, leads to the imbibition of plenteous beer and gin and water. These shops are licensed to sell spirits under the new Beer act, and they are compelled to shut off the debate at midnight. As a general thing the most advanced liberalism prevails in these places, and religious sentiments are below par with the audience. Very often it is possible to hear a well educated or scientific man debating in these halls, but, on closer survey, his accent will betray him to be some impoverished French or German physician, or reduced savan, who has no occupation in the hours of the evening, and can, therefore, afford to dispense wisdom to the thick-headed audience, gratis.

About a week after my visit to Cogers Hall I went, accompanied by Mr. Marsh, a member of the Daily Morning Telegraph's staff, and another gentleman connected with the editorial management of the Pall Mall Gazette, to take a look at another debating hall which is situated at No. 16 Fleet street. This place is quite famous in London for the virulence of its debates and the high flavor of its gin. Its Brown Stout is also above reproach.

As usual in all such places there is a public bar here, and this is located at the entrance, and is attended by the inevitable bar-maid, smiling and bedizined in all the glory of a two guinea silk dress, bought perhaps in Regent street or the Oxford Circus.

"WHERE ARE WE NOW."

The room here was not so large a one as that at Cogers Hall in which the orators were in the habit of haranguing their auditors. There were a dozen small tables, around which chairs were placed in a most picturesque confusion. Small white placards printed in blue ink were posted on the walls with the following announcement:

TEMPLE
DISCUSSION FORUM.
ADMISSION FREE.
STRANGERS ARE PARTICULARLY INVITED TO TAKE PART
IN THE DISCUSSION AND TO INTRODUCE SUBJECTS
FOR DEBATE.
THE QUESTION THIS WEDNESDAY EVENING WILL BE
"THE POPE'S MODEL LETTER,"
WHERE ARE WE NOW?
TO BE OPENED BY "A PROTESTANT."
CHAIR TO BE TAKEN AT NINE O'CLOCK.
SUPPER FROM EIGHT TILL TWELVE.
BEDS. PRIVATE SITTING-ROOMS.

There was a venerable looking old fellow in the chair when we entered the Discussion Forum, who lifted a pair of gold rimmed spectacles from his nose to take a look at us. This was the chairman of the meeting, and shortly after we sat down he cried out to a tall person with a short grey raglan coat who was speaking and perspiring at the same time.

"Mister Chowley I will and cannot allow you, sir, to trample on the religious feelings of any man present in this harmonious meeting. We are all brothers here, sir, and the individual who disturbs our peace and quietness, should be to us all as the 'Eathen and the publican, sir." (Hear, hear.)

The tall man with the raglan, who did not like to be suppressed so easily, had taken his seat for a moment much against his will, but now he arose slowly and scornfully looking around him, spoke, with one hand leaning on a chair behind him, and another hand in his breast, as follows:

"Gentlemen, this his an age of science if it is an age of hanythink. Wot does my honorable and noble Roman Catholic friend wish to advance has an argument. Does he mean to tell ME, with my heyes hopen in this here blessed Nineteenth Century, which we are all so proud of, and whose blessed light is the moving cause of so much mental brilliancy—does he mean to tell me for a moment that the miracle of the transposition of water into wine at the wedding of Cana wos han hactual fact. Why gents it his altogether impossible—and no reasonable man in this Nineteenth century can for a moment believe it possible. Wot would Galileo, Kepler, Faraday or sich bright lights of the Nineteenth century say to sich stories? Why gents, there is a chemical change which would have to take place before such a translation, and this chemical transformation could not take place without the assistance of other substances. (Hear, hear.) And gents, as far as the infallibility of the Pope is concerned, why I have only to say in the words of the poet, hand I mention no names, that a piece of fat pork might stick in his gullet as soon as it would stick in mine, and that's all I think of infallibility and fat pork, with the blessed light of the nineteenth century before me." (Hear, hear.)

Mr. Chowley here sat down, thoroughly satisfied with himself and auditory, who applauded him to the echo. Then a member of the Roman Catholic persuasion answered him in a long and splendid oration, which seemed to thoroughly convince every one present that the Catholic side was right, and the Protestant one a most diabolical doctrine. After each man had done his little speech, it was curious, nay amusing, to hear the adherents of either party comment upon the previous argument.

"Oh! I say," said a Presbyterian, "didn't he smash the old Pope neither."

"And wot a blessing he gave His Grace, Archbishop Manning, though?"

"Well," said an ardent Irishman, "I niver heard such a lambeastin as the heretics got to night."

"You might well say that, Pether, and didn't he scald Martin Luther with the holy wather, though," said an honest looking, hard working fellow who sat smoking a pipe.

FARCE AND TRAGEDY.

One thing struck me in all this wilderness of argument and polemic discussion. While the two principals nearly argued their jaws off in the heat of discussion, they failed miserably to convert any of the opposite party, who sat the debate out with a heroic stupidity, understanding with much difficulty about one-third of what was said, and perhaps caring very little for the matter in hand, but sticking to their prejudices to the last, with a partisan fidelity not to be convinced by all the harangues that will take place from that night until the Day of Judgment.

And yet I could not enter a place of this kind in all London, from Temple Bar to Hammersmith, without hearing this same everlasting religious warfare of controversy.

And to add to the joke, hardly one of five of these persons who attend such discussions, were ever in a church of either the Catholic or Protestant persuasion.

Such is life—part farce, part tragedy.

[CHAPTER VII.]

THE CLUBS AND CLUB HOUSES OF LONDON.

E cannot conceive of any greater contrast than that which exists between the wretchedness and squalor of the lodging houses, and the splendor and refined elegance, combined with comfort of the Club houses of London, which are chiefly situated in Pall Mall, St. James street, and the neighborhood of lower Regent street.

Club life has attained its greatest perfection in London. No city upon the Continent can compare with it for the number of its club houses, the splendor of their architecture, their luxurious furniture, and the standing in society of their members.

INTERESTING STATISTICS.

There are, I believe, upward of fifty clubs in London, in which all the professions, and all the stations of life find representation, with a roll of perhaps 45,000 members. The following are the principal clubs with the cost of ground and construction: Army and Navy Club, George's street, St. James' square, 1,450 members, £100,000; the Conservative Club, St. James' street, 1,500 members, £81,000; Garrick Club, King street, Convent Garden, 500 members, £25,000; Junior United Service Club, corner of Charles and Regent streets, 1,500 members, £75,000; Oxford and Cambridge Club, Pall Mall, 1,200 members, £100,000; Reform Club, 1,400 members, £120,000; University Club, Pall Mall East, 500 members, £20,000; Wyndham Club, St. James' square, 600 members, £30,000; Westminster Club, Albemarle street, 560 members, £15,000; Athenæum, Pall Mall, 1,200 members, £60,000; Carlton, Pall Mall, 800 members, £100,000; Guards Club, Pall Mall, 500 members, £40,000; Oriental, Hanover square, 800 members, £30,000; Traveler's, Pall Mall, 700 members, £30,000; Union, Cockspur street, 1,000 members, £25,000; United Service Club, Pall Mall, 1,500 members, £70,000; White's Club, St. James' street, 550 members, £20,000; Boodles, St. James' street, 500 members, £15,000; Cavendish Club, 307 Regent street, 500 members, £15,000; and Civil Service Club, 86 St. James' street, 1,000 members, £45,000.

Besides the before-mentioned clubs there are the following, which rank nearly but not quite as high among Club men:

In these several clubs each member is elected by ballot, and pays an entrance on admission, and afterward an annual subscription, which varies like entrance fees in different clubs.

Thus, in the Athenæum, the entrance fee is £26.5s., annual subscription, £6.6s. Arthur's, entrance £21, subscription, £10 10s. Brooks, entrance, £9 9s., subscription, £11 11s. Carlton, entrance, £15 15s., annual subscription, £10 10s. Conservative Club, £28 7s., subscription, £8 8s. Garrick Club, entrance, £21, subscription, £6 6s. Junior United Service, entrance, £30, subscription £6. Oxford and Cambridge Club, entrance, £21 5s., subscription, £6 6s. Reform Club, entrance, £21 5s., subscription, £10 10s. Travelers' Club, entrance, £31 10s. Union, entrance, £38 10s., subscription, £6 6s. United Service Club, entrance, £36, subscription, £6. Whittington, entrance, £10 10s., subscription, ladies £1, gentlemen, £2 2s. Wyndham, entrance, £27 6s., subscription, £8.

When clubs were first started they were regarded with much hostility as being most antagonistic to domestic life, and the ladies displayed an intense spirit against them. The clubs, however, survived and flourished under their enmity, and it was found that they discouraged coarse drunkenness, the prevalent vice of Englishmen; encouraged social intercourse—of which ladies partook of elsewhere; refined the manners of the members, constituted courts of honor, and tended most materially to the manufacture of gentlemen.

The London clubs are private hotels on a vast and magnificent scale. They have billiard rooms, coffee rooms, nine-pin rooms, splendid libraries, saloons, and furniture, and plate of the costliest and rarest description.

LUXURIOUS DINNER—LADIES EXCLUDED.

All the refreshment which a member has, whether breakfast, dinner, supper, or wine, are furnished to him at the market cost price, all other expenses being defrayed from the annual subscriptions. For a few pounds a year, advantages are to be had, which no incomes but the most ample could procure. The Athenæum, which consists of twelve hundred members, can be taken as a good example of the rest. Among the members can be reckoned a large proportion of the most eminent persons in England—civil, military, and ecclesiastical, peers, spiritual and temporal, commoners, men of the learned professions, those connected with the sciences and arts, and commerce, as well as the distinguished who do not belong to any particular class, and who have nothing to do but live on their means, bore their tailors, and admire their family genealogy, and their own figures. These men are to be met with day after day at the clubs, living with more freedom and nonchalance than they could at their own houses. For six or eight guineas a year every member has the command of an excellent library, with maps, the daily London papers, English and foreign periodicals, and every material for writing, with a flock of gorgeous flunkies, in powder and epaulettes, to attend at the nod of a member, and a host of youthful pages in buttons and broadcloths. The club is a sort of a palace with the comfort of a private dwelling, and every member is a master without having the trouble of a master. He can have whatever meat or refreshment he desires served up at all hours, with luxury and dispatch. There is a fixed place for everything, and it is not customary to remain long at table. You can dine alone, or you can invite a dozen persons to dine with you, females being excluded. From an account kept at the Athenæum for one year, it appears that 17,323 dinners cost on an average 2s. 9¾d. each, and the average quantity of wine drank by each person at these dinners was a small fraction more than a pint for each. The bath accommodations are the finest that can be imagined.

The kitchen of the London clubs cannot be equaled in the world, and the chief cooks who have charge of the kitchens, have each an European fame. Alexis Soyer, the greatest cook since Ude or Vatel, had, for a long time, the charge of the kitchen of the Reform Club, and the kitchen of this club, of which John Bright, and all the leaders of the English liberals are members, is the finest in London.

A description of this kitchen will in a measure answer for that of any other London club, and I will give it here for the information of those who are curious in such matters.

The kitchen, properly so called, is an apartment of moderate size, surrounded on all four sides by smaller rooms, which form the pastry, the poultry, the butchery, the scullery, and other subordinate offices. There are doorways but no doors, between the different rooms, all of which are formed in such a manner that the chief cook, from one particular spot, can command a view of the whole. In the centre of the kitchen is a table and a hot closet, where various knicknacks are prepared and kept to a desired heat, the closet being brought to any required temperature by admitting steam beneath it. Around the hot closet is a bench or table, fitted with drawers and other conveniences for culinary operations. A passage going around the four sides of this table separates it from the various cooking apparatus, which involve all that modern ingenuity has brought to bear on the cuisine.

In the first place there are two enormous fireplaces for roasting, each of which would, in sober truth, roast a whole sheep. The screens placed before these fires are so arranged as to reflect back almost the entire heat which falls upon them, and effectually shields the kitchen from the intense heat which would be otherwise thrown out. Then again, these screens are so provided with shelves and recesses as to bring into profitable use the radiant heat which would be otherwise wasted.

MODEL KITCHEN.

Along two sides of the room are ranges of charcoal fires for broiling and stewing, and other apparatus for other varieties of cooking. These are at a height of about three feet from the ground. The broiling fires are a kind of open pot or pan, throwing upward a fierce but blazeless heat; behind them is a framework by which gridirons may be fixed at any height above the fire, according to the intensity of the heat. Other fires open only at the top, are adapted for various kinds of pans and vessels; and in some cases a polished tin-reflector is so placed as to reflect back to the viands the heat. Under and behind and over and around, are pipes, tanks, and cisterns, in abundance, containing water to be heated, or to be used more directly in the processes of cooking.

A boiler adjacent to the kitchen is expressly appropriated to the supply of steam for "steaming," for heating the hot closets, the hot iron plates and other apparatus. In another small room the meat is kept, chopped, cut, and otherwise prepared for the kitchen. There are also in the pastry room all the necessary appliances for preparing the lightest and most luscious triumphs of the art. In another room there are drawers in the bottoms of which blocks of ice are laid, and above these are placed articles of undressed food, which must necessarily be kept cool.

There is a cheerful air, an air of magnificence about these superb kitchens, which would charm a good housewife. Here all the genius that can be brought to bear upon cookery is concentrated, and the head cook would not deign to notice any person of less rank than a baronet, while in superintendence. Although there are twelve hundred members or over, yet he is not responsible to any individual one, and the only authority in the club to which he has to bow is the eight or ten members of the House Committee, whose decrees even to this great being are arbitrary.

The pots and pans are of an exceeding brightness, and the entire system is perfect. In one corner of the kitchen is a little stall or counting-house, at a desk in which sits the "Clerk of the Kitchen." Every day the chief cook provides, besides ordinary provisions which are certain to be required, a selected list which he inserts in his bill of fare—a list which is left to his judgment and skill.

Say three or four gentlemen, members of the club, determine to dine there at a given hour, they select from the bill of fare, or make a separate "order" if preferred, or leave the dinner altogether to the intellect of the chef, who is sure to be flattered by this dependence on his judgment. A little slip of paper on which is written the names of the dishes and the hour of dining, is hung on a hook in the kitchen on a black board, where there are a number of hooks devoted to different hours of the day or evening. The cooks proceed with their avocations, and by the time the dinner is ready the clerk of the kitchen has calculated and entered the exact value of every article composing it, which entry is made out in the form of a bill—the cost price being that by which the charge is regulated—nothing is ever charged for the cooking. Immediately at the elbow of the clerk are bells and speaking tubes, by which he can communicate with the servants in the other parts of the building.

Meanwhile a steam engine is "serving up" the dinner. In one corner of the kitchen is a recess, on opening a door in which we see a small platform, square-shaped, calculated to hold an ordinary sized tray. This platform is connected with the shaft of a steam engine by bands and wheels, so as to be elevated through a kind of vertical trunk leading to the upper part of the building; and here are the white-aproned servants or waiters ready to take out the hot and luscious smelling viands from the platform, to the member or members of the club who are anxiously awaiting dinner.

Architecturally speaking the club houses are the finest buildings in London, and in the west end of the town, and in the vicinity of the parks they do much to beautify the city; these massive, richly decorated, and pillared palaces of exclusiveness.

The "Heavy Swell" Club of all London is the "Guards" in Pall Mall. There are three or four regiments of the Queen's Household Brigade stationed always in London to guard the sacred person of the Queen, and it is from the officers of these crack regiments that the members of the club are balloted for. These fellows are supposed to bathe in champagne, and dine off rose water; they are afraid to carry an umbrella thicker than a walking stick, they hate "low people," and devote their existence to killing time, yet are withal sensitive, honorable in many things, (except paying their grocers, wine and haberdashing bills,) and will fight as becomes the descendants of the men who dyed the sands at Hastings with their blood, to bequeath a rich and fruitful kingdom to those who now inherit it.

THE CONSERVATIVE AND GARRICK CLUBS.

The Conservative Club is frequented by those athletic and slow going squires and gentlemen who are always ready to applaud Mr. Disraeli in the House of Commons, and are willing to serve as special constables on days when the English democracy become restive and open their eyes to the fact of their being plundered and robbed every day of their lives. It was from the Conservative Club that Mr. Granville Murray was expelled by the secret influence of the moral Prince of Wales, simply because following his duty as a journalist he had told the hereditary regulators of England that they were out of place in the nineteenth century.

CONSERVATIVE CLUB HOUSE.

The Garrick Club is, as its name indicates, made up of artists, dramatists, actors, newspaper writers, and authors. It numbers among its members Charles Reade, Tom Taylor, Charles Dickens, Bulwer, Wilkie Collins, Anthony Trollope, Andrew Halliday, George Augustus Sala, Mr. Delane of the Times, H. Sutherland Edwards, William Howard Russell, Edward Dicey, Thornton Hunt, Editor of the Telegraph, John Ruskin, and I believe Thomas Carlyle's name was proposed as an honorary member; Charles Kean, Thackeray, Charles Matthews, Sr., who founded the club, W.H. Ainsworth, the novelist, the Blanchards, the Mayhews, Samuel Lover, Charles Lever, John Oxenford, Louis Blanc, Walter Thornbury, Lascelles Wraxall, Edmund Yates, John Hollingshead, formerly critic of the Daily News, James Greenwood, Frederick Greenwood, Brough, Dudley Costello, Lord William Lennox, Thomas Miller, Cyrus Redding, and other well known literary men belong to or have at some period or another been members of this club. American authors, artists, and actors, are always welcomed here, and among the habitues of the Garrick may be found Lester Wallack, H.E. Bateman, and others. The Garrick is noted for its famous gin punch which is a specialty here, and for which the following ingredients are necessary to composition; pour half a pint of gin on the outer peel of a lemon, then a little lemon juice, a glass of maraschino, a pint and a quarter of water, and two bottles of iced soda water. This is a most fragrant punch and not very intoxicating. The collection of pictures at the Garrick is very fine, and embraces nearly all the people, both male and female, who have made themselves famous in English histrionic art, among whom may be noticed Elliston, Macklin, Peg Woffington, Nell Gwynne, Colley Cibber, Mrs. Bracegirdle, Garrick as Richard III, John Phillip and Charles Kemble, Charles Mathews, Mrs. Siddons, Macready, Miss Inchbald, Edmund Kean, Kitty Clive, Mrs. Billington, and various others. Some of these portraits have been painted by the first of English artists. This gallery is only rivalled by that in Evan's Supper House in Convent Garden, where there is a fine and similar collection.

The Reform Club has among its members John Bright, W. E. Gladstone, Lord Hatherley, the present Lord Chancellor of England, the Duke of Argyll, W.E. Forster, Lord Dufferin, and other well known liberal nobles. About a year ago John Bright and W.E. Forster, his able aide-camp, resigned from the membership of the Reform Club, owing to the fact that a correspondent of an American journal, proposed by them, had had been black-balled in the Reform Club. This correspondent was Geo. W. Smalley of the New York Tribune. I believe that the club reconsidered their decision and admitted Mr. Smalley, and Mr. Bright and Mr. Forster are now members of the club. Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke, editor of the Athenæum, is a member of the Reform Club.

CARLTON CLUB.

The Carlton Club ranks high among the Tory or anti-liberal clubs of London, has a very rich proprietary and a magnificent edifice in Pall Mall. The Right Hon. Spencer Horatio Walpole, one of the members for Cambridge University, and Alexander Beresford Hope, one of the proprietors of the Saturday Review, who was a member of Parliament during the American Civil War, and a bitter foe of the North, are both members of the Carlton Club, as is also Lord John Manners, a prominent Conservative noble, and fifth son of the Duke of Rutland. John Laird, M.P. for Liverpool, the builder of the Alabama, is also a member of the Carlton Club.

Lord Cole, a son of the Earl of Enskillen, and a chief accomplice with the Prince of Wales in the Lady Mordaunt scandal, is a member of the Carlton.

CARLTON CLUB HOUSE.

Gregory, the member for Galway, also a sympathizer with the Slaveholder's Rebellion, belongs to the Carlton. To be brief, this Carlton Club, essentially aristocratic and inimical to democracy all over the world, contributed more individual moneyed and social influence and support to Jeff. Davis than all the London Clubs put together.

I might state here that Bass, the great East India Pale Ale man, is a member of the Reform Club, while Sir Arthur Guiness, the Dublin Brown Stout man, Bass's great rival, is a member of the National Club, which is pseudo liberal. Jonathan Pim, the rich Irish Quaker, a member for Dublin City like Guiness, does not belong to any London club and keeps away from the flesh pots of Egypt. John Francis Maguire, M.P. for Cork, is a member of the Stafford Club, which numbers some of the Catholic families in its roll of membership. Sir Patrick O'Brien, an amusing Irishman who frequents the Cremorne a good deal, belongs to the Reform Club. The present Earl of Derby, late Lord Stanley, who was expected to lead the liberals in the House of Lords, but does not give much promise of doing so while he is an active member of the Carlton Club.

The Right Hon. George Goschen, a Jewish merchant, who is President of the Poor Law Board, yet quite a young man and promising, has his name inscribed on the lists of the Reform and Athenæum Clubs, and Robert Lowe, the witty, sarcastic, and clear-headed Chancellor of Exchequer, are lights in the Reform Club. Edward Sullivan, the Irish Attorney General, may be seen at the Reform, and George Henry Moore, a countryman of his, and an apologist for the Fenians, is a habitue of Brook's Club in St. James street. Sir John Evelyn Dennison, the Speaker of the House of Commons, while in town during the session, when dinner time comes, always doffs his gown and wig and toddles around to the Reform Club for a chop or steak, and a glass of wine. Vernon Harcourt, who signs himself in the Times "Historicus," represents Oxford Borough in the House of Commons, and is a member of the Oxford and Cambridge University Club. A good story is told of "Historicus." Three heavy swells of the Guards were dining at the Star and Garter at Richmond, and all three made a wager that they each could boast of the biggest bore in London as an acquaintance. The discussion wore high, and they agreed to test it by bringing each his bore to dine on a set day, and at a set hour, at the "Star and Garter." When the day came two close carriages were drawn up to the "Star and Garter," and out of each leaped one of the gentlemen who had made the wager. They were both disappointed in their bores, and came without them as they had previous engagements. A third carriage drove up, and out of it leaped the third Swell who had made the wager, with a tall gentleman in a cloak. As soon as the stranger uncovered and presented the smiling countenance of "Historicus," the two swells cried out in astonishment,

"By J-a-a-v ye knaw, that's not f-eh-ah—he's got our bo-a-h!"

OXFORD AND CAMBRIDGE CLUB HOUSE.

Whalley, the religious madman, belongs to the Reform Club, and so does the Right Hon. Hugh Childers, First Lord of the Admiralty.

Kinglake, the historian, who bribed his way into the House of Commons, and afterwards testified to it without shame, is a member of Brooks, the Travelers, the Athenæum, and the Oxford and Cambridge Clubs.

Sir Robert Peel, the member for Farnsworth, is to be found at Brook's and Boodle's. Sir Henry Lytton Bulwer, formerly ambassador at Washington, at the Reform Club. Layard, the Nineveh discoverer and now English ambassador at Madrid, belongs to the Athenæum Club. The O'Donoughue at the Stafford and Reform Clubs, while young Mr. Gladstone, son to the Premier, modestly drinks his wine at the New University Club. Lord Carrington, a boon companion of the Prince of Wales, is a member of the Guards Club, and Sir Francis Crossley, the great Yorkshire manufacturer, may be seen nightly during the session passing his hours in the Reform and Brook's Clubs.

Queer and strange reminiscences cling to the London Clubs like barnacles to a packet ship. At the Alfred Club, George Canning, one of the greatest men ever known in England, used to take a steak and onions alongside of Lord Byron, who was always partial to Madeira negus.

Louis Napoleon, in his cheerless and hard up days, ate his eighteenpenny dinner at the Army and Navy Club in silence, while aristocratic Englishmen sat around chaffing and joking and taking no part in the sorrows of the exiled nephew of his Uncle. Since then dynasties have changed, and now a magnificent piece of Gobelin tapestry work, the "Sacrifice of Diana," worthy to be the gift of a sovereign, hangs in the club house of which he was once a member. The Emperor presented it to the Club.

The stock of wine in the cellars of the Athenæum is worth about $30,000, and is never allowed to run down or deteriorate, and its yearly revenue amounts to about $50,000.

BEEFSTEAK CLUB.

The Beefsteak Club is a coterie of choice spirits who meet over the Lyceum Theatre to eat beefsteaks and drink tobys of ale, each member bringing his own beefsteak and furnishing his own jokes. Several noblemen belong to it, and the President wears as his emblem of office, a golden gridiron. Peg Woffington was at one time a member of this club.

UNITED SERVICE CLUB.

The Duke of Wellington was in the habit of dining at the United Service Club, in Pall Mall, off the roast joint of beef or mutton, and one day he was charged 1s. 3d. for his plate of meat instead of 1s., the proper charge. He declared he would not pay the extra three-pence, and denounced the swindle until the three-pence was deducted, when the old soldier became satisfied and said that he would have paid the extra charge, but that he did not wish to establish an unjust precedent whereby others might suffer.

Just one hundred years ago a man dropped down at the door of White's Club, which is still flourishing in St. James' St., and the crowd of loungers in the bow windows immediately began to lay wagers whether the man was dead or not. A charitable person suggested that he be bled, but those who had wagered refused to allow it, saying that it would affect the fairness of the bet. In 1814, a banquet was given to the allied sovereigns at White's, which cost over $50,000 of American money, and the next year after a banquet was given to the Duke of Wellington which cost £2,480 10s. 9d. George IV, and Chesterfield, the master of politeness, were members of White's Club.

During the hard winter of 1844, the aristocratic clubs of London contributed to the starving poor of the metropolis, 3,104 pounds of broken bread, 4,556 pounds of broken meat, 1,147 pints of tea-leaves, and 1,158 pints of coffee-grounds. Otherwise these leavings might have been given to swine to fatten them.

DEMOCRATIC CLUB.—LADIES ADMITTED.

Gambling was carried on to a very high pitch at one time in the London clubs, but many have mended within twenty years. Crockford's Club House, No. 50 St. James' street, was known all over the world, and kings, princes, ambassadors, and statesmen, were inscribed upon its rolls as members. It no longer exists, however.

Crockford started in life as a fishmonger, in the old bulk-shop next door to Temple Bar Without, which he quitted for "play" in St. James'. He began by taking Watier's old club-house, where he set up a hazard-bank, and won a great deal of money; he then separated from his partner, who had a bad year, and failed. Crockford now removed to St. James' street, had a good year, and built the magnificent club house which bore his name; the decorations alone are said to have cost him £94,000. The election of the club members was vested in a committee; the house appointments were superb, and Ude was engaged as maître d'hôtel. "Crockford's" now became the high fashion. Card-tables were regularly placed, and whist was played occasionally; but the aim, end, and final cause of the whole was the hazard-bank, at which the proprietor took his nightly stand, prepared for all comers. His speculation was eminently successful. During several years, everything that anybody had to lose and cared to risk was swallowed up; and Crockford became a millionaire. He retired in 1840, "much as an Indian chief retires from a hunting-country when there is not game enough left for his tribe;" and the Club then tottered to its fall. After Crockford's death, the lease of the club-house (thirty-two years, rent £1,400) was sold for £2,900.

The Whittington Club is the only democratic club in London. It was started twenty-four years ago by Douglas Jerrold, who became its first president. It combines a literary society, with a club house, upon an economical scale, and contains dining and coffee rooms, library and reading rooms, smoking and chess rooms, and a large hall for balls, concerts, and soirees. Lectures are given here, and classes are held for the higher branches of education, fencing, dancing, etc. Ladies have all the privileges of gentlemen or members in the restaurant, and in balloting, while their dues and subscriptions is half that of the male members. This is the largest club in London, and combines all classes, having a roll of 1,700 members, all of whom are to be considered active. The Whittington Club is the only one in London where a person may be proposed without having a crest, or without belonging to a "good family," which means to loaf or idle a life away, and live upon the bread which is furnished by the blood and sweat of what these dandy Club men call the "lowah closses."

[CHAPTER VIII.]

THE ABBEY-CHURCH OF WESTMINSTER.

HIS is the Pantheon of England's Greatest Dead. As I stand here under the groined roof of this vast and glorious Nave, with the sunbeams streaming in through rose windows, and falling softly on sculptured figures and tombs of Kings and Queens long mouldering in the dust, their bodies recumbent in monumental brass, their hands clasped as in prayer, with heroes, and poets, and statesmen, law-givers, and royal murderers, lying silently around me on either hand, and under my feet beneath the worn and antique stones which form the pavement, I realize that I am in the Valhalla of the Anglo-Norman Race, a race that has been prolific of strong wills, great minds, and heroic deeds.

This is the most sacred spot in all Great Britain, this spot enclosed by the four walls of Westminster Abbey. It does not seem an edifice raised by human hands, rather would it appear, as I look to the roof, supported by most marvelous pillars, resembling an interlaced avenue of royal forest trees, that it had been constructed by beings of another world.

It was a grand faith that inspired Westminster Abbey, a faith that believed in sacrificing all earthly aspirations for the honor and glory of God.

Thus musing I am interrupted by a tap on the shoulder, as I stand leaning against a pillar in the gloom of the vast pile.

"Would you like to see the Habbey, sir?—its sixpence to see the Chapels—there's nine on 'em: the Hambulatory, the Nave, Transept, Choir, Chapels, and Cloisters, are free—beautiful sights—only sixpence, sir."

I turned, and saw a man in a black fustian gown, bareheaded, with a tall thin stick in his right hand; he was old, and seemed to need its frail support. This was a prebendary's "Verger," a sort of a porter or Abbey guide, whose main object was to collect as many sixpences as possible, but ostensibly he was a cicerone of the monuments and architectural beauties of the Cathedral Church of St. Peter's, Westminster.

Numbers of visitors were straying in and out of the Abbey, looking at the monuments, criticising the works of art, the mural tablets, or gossiping over the ashes of dead Kings, as if they were in a concert room, while here and there might be seen some scholar or learned man delving for facts, and poring over the musty Latin of the crumbling tombs.

In Westminster Abbey rival statesmen rest in peace, the tongue of the orator is mute, side by side rest the Crowned head and the Chancellor with his great seal, the Archbishop and the Play-actor, the philanthropist and the seaman, who died by his guns on the deck of the vessel of war, the divine and the physician, the Princess and the Soubrette, all mingle common dust together.

In Westminster Abbey, the powerful, spiritual, Roman Catholic prelate has celebrated High Mass with more than Eastern magnificence, the Introit has issued forth from his lips, and the acolytes have answered his "Dominus Vobiscum" with their "Amen;" and here the stern Puritan has knelt in his less formal prayer.

Here the dread sentence of excommunication has been launched forth in all its terrors from the lips of Papal legates, enthroned, and in Abbot John Estney's room Caxton printed the first English Bible.

Here the magnificence and pomps of the coronation of a King have been followed by the solemn and beautiful burial service for the dead, and the pealing organ, and the swelling choir, reverberating through the lofty grey-grown aisles, have chained men's minds to the power of Almighty God.

DIMENSIONS OF THE ABBEY.

Westminster Abbey is the finest and noblest specimen of Gothic architecture in all England.

WESTMINSTER ABBEY.

Its dimensions are:

In a fine vault, under Henry VII's Chapel, is the burying-place of the Royal family, erected by George II, but not now used.

The cost of Henry VII's Chapel was originally about £200,000 of the present money, but since then £50,000 in addition have been expended in repairs. The roof is the most beautiful piece of work of its kind in the world, and is not excelled by any Saracenic or Moorish ornamentation known.

No living being has ever computed the cost of the Abbey itself, but the sum, altogether, since the foundations were built, must be very great.

The "Lord Abbot of Westminster" was one of the most powerful barons in England, and sat in Parliament as a great spiritual peer.

The Abbey Church, formerly arose a magnificent apex to a Royal palace, surrounded on all sides by its greater and lesser sanctuaries, (where no criminal could be arrested,) and its almonries, where a profusion of food was daily delivered to the poor, and raiment to the naked. It had its bell-towers, the principal one being 72 feet 6 inches square, with walls 20 feet thick; chapel, gate towers, boundary walls, and a train of other buildings, of which we can at the present day scarcely form an idea.

A WEALTHY SOCIETY.

In addition to all the land around it, extending from the Thames to Oxford Street, and from Vauxhall bridge to the Church of St. Mary-le-Strand, in a demesne of three square miles, on what is now the most valuable part of London, the Abbey of St. Peter's, Westminster, possessed besides, ninety-seven towns and villages, seventeen hamlets, and two hundred and sixteen manors. Its officers fed hundreds of persons daily, and one of its priests, who was not an Abbot, entertained at his Pavillion at Tothill, a King and Queen of England, with so large a retinue that seven hundred dishes did not suffice for the first table, and the Abbey butler, in the reign of Edward III, rebuilt, at his own expense, the stately gate-house which gave entrance to Tothill Street, and a portion of the wall remains to this day.

During the long ages, while men of noble Norman birth monopolized nearly every office of emolument and trust in the kingdom, nearly all the Lord Abbots of Westminster were of Norman birth or extraction. To be chosen Lord Abbot of Westminster, it was necessary for the Monks, headed by the prior, to select the Abbot "per Viam Compromissi," that is, the Monks met in a body and selected a chosen few, who, in their turn, selected the Lord Abbot. Then there was the method "per Viam Spiritus Sancti," which means by the special influence of the Holy Ghost, or all the Monks of the Abbey concurring unanimously in the election. After that the assent of the King had to be got, and the assent of the Lord Bishop of the Diocese, and even then all was not secure, for the newly elected Abbot was often forced to make the long and tedious journey to Rome and get the investiture of the Abbey from the Pontiff, in person, and sometimes this cost money, and trouble, that a person would hardly credit in these days. Abbot Richard de Kedyington, who had been prior of Sudbury, a cell subject to Westminster Abbey, on his election made the journey to Avignon, where the Pope was, for confirmation, and was three years there before he obtained investiture, and then it cost him eight thousand florins,—a large sum of money in those days—to obtain it. In 1321, when 5,500 florins had been paid, Pope John XXII remitted the remaining 2,500 florins of the debt.

Abbot Richard de Crokesley, together with a number of other nobles, and Poitevins, who had incurred the enmity of a powerful party who were opposed to court favoritism, were poisoned by the steward of William, Earl of Clare, and Crokesley died July 1258, of the effects of the poison.

Phillip de Lewisham, who was elected to succeed Crokesley, was so gross and fat that he procured a dispensation, so that he would not have to go to Rome to be confirmed. An able deputation of monks went in his place, and when they returned with the Pope's confirmation, after having to pay 800 marks to certain Cardinals, who opposed it, they found that Abbot de Lewisham had died during their absence.

Gislebertus Crispinus, a monk, of the abbey of Bec, in Normandy, and belonging to one of the noblest families in that duchy, was chosen abbot in 1082. He was a very learned man, and held a great disputation at Mentz, in Germany, with a deeply versed Jew, on the "Faith of the Church against the Jews."

Gervase de Blois, an illegitimate son of King Stephen, was made abbot in 1141. This man was not fit to be a priest, being insolent, arbitrary, and unjust, and, instead of attending to his duties as head of the abbey, he was often in armor, depredating, or hunting, or hawking. He dissipated the manors, livings, tithes, vestments, and ornaments of the abbey, and was finally admonished to behave himself by Pope Innocent, but the abbot disregarded the admonition of the Pope and was then deposed by King Henry II, in 1159. He died in a year after.

The Lord Abbot Laurentius, his successor, was a wise, just, and prudent man, much trusted by King Henry II, and the Empress Maud. It was Abbot Laurentius who first obtained for himself and successors the privilege of wearing the mitre, ring, and gloves, until then the symbols of Episcopacy, and only allowed to the Bishops by the Pope. The wearing of these symbols gave the mitred abbots of Westminster, and other abbeys, the right to sit as peers in parliament, the same as bishops to whom the right belonged exclusively, before Abbot Laurentius obtained the grant.

REVENUES OF ABBEY IN 1540.

Simon Langham was one of the greatest abbots that ever wore the mitre in the abbey. He was made Lord Chancellor of England, and Archbishop of Canterbury, Bishop of Ely, and Lord Treasurer of the Kingdom by Edward III. It was this prelate who deprived John Wickliffe of the mastership of Canterbury Hall, Oxford, which was the first cause of Wickliffe's investigating the scriptures.

On the 16th of January, 1540, the Abbey of Westminster, which had been established for more than nine hundred years, having been founded by King Sebert, a Saxon monarch, and his wife Ethelgoda, in honor of St. Peter who was said to have appeared to the King in a dream, was dissolved by order of Henry VIII, and the abbey was surrendered to the King by Abbot Benson and twenty-four monks. The annual revenue, which included the gross receipts, amounted to £3,977, equal to twenty times the same amount of English money of to-day.

Westminster was made a bishopric, the abbey was advanced to the dignity of a Cathedral, with an establishment of a bishop, (Thomas Thirleby, dean of the King's Chapel,) a dean, twelve prebendaries, and inferior officers. Abbot Benson, who was always on the winning side, was made dean of the Abbey, five of the monks were chosen prebendaries, four other monks were made minor canons, and four more were elected to be King's students in the University. The other twelve monks who did not approve of the change were dismissed, with pensions of from ten pounds a year to five marks. A revenue of £586 a year, and the Abbot's house was allotted to the Bishop. Dean Benson died in an unhappy state from the repeated attempts made by the rapacious nobles and courtiers to deprive him of the lands of his deanery. He was buried in the abbey, but the inscription on his tomb was obliterated. The bishopric of Westminster lasted only ten years, and was then suppressed and reunited to that of London, to which it has since belonged. Numerous attempts were made by the partisans of the See of London to rob and deprive the abbey of its lands and revenues, and hence arose the saying of "robbing Peter to pay Paul," which is explained by the fact that the patron saint of the See of London was St. Paul, while St. Peter was the guardian of the Abbey of Westminster.

In 1556, Queen Mary being on the throne, the Church of Westminster again became an abbey by order of the Queen, and John Feckenham was made abbot of Westminster. He was held in general esteem for his learning, charity, and piety, and he was continually engaged in doing good offices for the Protestants who suffered by the laws of the realm for their faith. Three years after, Mary having died, the monastery was again suppressed by order of Queen Elizabeth, and the abbot and monks were again turned out of the abbey. In 1560 the abbey, by enactment, was made a collegiate church, which it remains to this day, and was endowed with the lands which had belonged to the abbot and monastery. Since that time Westminster Abbey has been governed by a dean and chapter, and has had thirty-three deans in regular succession of the Protestant faith.

The Abbey has the following large clerical staff for its government:

One Dean, eight Prebendaries, one of whom is a Lord, and another a Bishop; a sub-Dean, an Archdeacon, a Precentor, five minor Canons, eleven Lay Clerks, two Sacrists, a Dean's Verger, a Prebendary's Verger, a High Steward, who is a Duke, a Deputy High Steward, a Coroner, a High Bailiff, Searcher and Bailiff of the Sanctuary, a High Constable, a Head Master of Westminster School, Second Master, forty Queen's Scholars on the Foundation, a Steward of the Manorial Court, two Joint Receiver's General, a Chapter Clerk and Registrar, an Auditor, a Commissory and Official Principal, a Registrar of the Consistory Court, and a Deputy Registrar, an Organist and Master of the Choristers, twelve Almsmen, four Bell-ringers, two Organ-blowers, an Abbey Surveyor, a Clerk of the Works, a Beadle of the Sanctuary, and last of all a College Porter and four Probationary Choristers, in all a staff of eighty persons, a very slight reduction upon the old administration of the Abbots of Westminster. These different office holders, in all, receive salaries of about one hundred thousand pounds a year, and the cost of the school, and the repairs of the abbey, make the sundries amount to about twenty thousand pounds a year additional.

TOMB OF SHAKESPEARE.

In the general plunder of monasteries and church property, which distinguished the reign of Henry VIII, Westminster Abbey suffered severely, but it was still worse treated by the Puritans in the great civil war, the abbey being used as a barrack for the soldiers, by the Parliament, who wantonly destroyed many of the tombs and monuments that adorned the various chapels, the altars in the chapels dedicated to the different saints being thrown down, the images broken, and the richly stained windows shattered into fragments. The restoration of the edifice was intrusted to Sir Christopher Wren, who built St. Paul's, but he made a very botching piece of work in the additions which he gave to the towers at the west end.

The imitation of the Gothic style in Wren's additions are wretched and out of place in such an edifice as the Abbey. The front of the Abbey has no columns or pierced works of carving, to which the Gothic style owes so much of its lightness and elegance, and there is a mixture of ornamentation such as the broken scrolls, masques, and festoons over the grand entrance, which gives it a very heavy, flat appearance.

SHAKESPEARE'S TOMB.

The Abbey is very rich in monuments of all kinds, some of which are very fine works of art. All along the walls, in the transepts and aisles, in the Nave, in the chapels, in the flooring of the Abbey, and everywhere around me I saw tablets, tombs, inscriptions, and medallions.

Among the most noticeable are those of Ben Johnson, John Milton, Geoffrey Chaucer, the father of English poetry and first poet buried in the Abbey, A.D. 1400, Dryden, Thomas Campbell, William Shakespeare, Oliver Goldsmith, Joseph Addison, Handel the musician, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Dr. Samuel Johnson, Sir William Davenant, and Robert Southey, in the "Poet's Corner," which is situated in the south transept. They are all richly ornamented with busts, effigies of the deceased, or allegorical designs in marble, or brass, or bronze.

The tomb of Shakespeare is of marble, with a full length figure of the great poet leaning on his left elbow, and has the following epitaph written by John Milton, who was best fitted to write it:

What needs my Shakespeare for his honored bones,
The labor of an age in piled stones,
Or that his hallow'd relics should be hid
Under a star-y pointing pyramid!
Dear son of Memory, great heir of fame,
What need'st thou such weak witness of thy name,
Thou in our wonder and astonishment
Hast built thyself a live-long monument,
For whilst to the shame of slow-endeavoring art
Thy easy numbers flow, and that each heart
Hath from the leaves of thy unvalued book
Those Delphic lines with deep impression took;
Then thou our fancy of itself bereaving
Dost make us marble with too much conceiving;
And so sepulchred, in such pomp dost lie,
That kings for such a tomb would wish to die.

Milton's epitaph is as follows:

"Three great poets, in three distant ages born,
Greece, Italy and England did adorn;
The first in loftiness of thought surpass'd.
The next in majesty—in both the last.
The force of Nature could no farther go,
To make the third, she joined the former two."—

John Gay, the author of the "Beggar's Opera," wrote his own epitaph, which is on his tomb;

"Life is a jest, and all things show it;
I thought so once; but now I know it."

There is a sarcophagus to Major John Andre who was executed as a spy by order of George Washington. It has a representation of a flag of truce, and Britannia in tears.

TOMB OF MILTON.

Mrs. Oldfield, the actress who coquetishly ordered that she should be buried in a fine Holland chemise, with a tucker, and a double ruffle of lace, and a pair of white kid gloves, has a monument with an inscription by Pope. Isaac Newton has also a very fine monument, and William Pitt's monument cost £6,000. Henry Grattan, Robert Peel, Charles James Fox, William Wilberforce, George Canning, and Lord Palmerston also have monuments.

THE LAST CATHOLIC FUNERAL.

Mary Queen of Scots, and the Queen who slew her, have magnificent monuments near each other, and similar in style. The funeral of Queen Mary, sister of Queen Elizabeth, was the last one which was celebrated in the Abbey with the ceremonial of the Roman Catholic Church. She died in 1558, and her body was brought from St. James Palace with great pomp to the Abbey, on a splendid chariot. It was met at the great entrance of the abbey by four bishops and Lord Abbott Feckenham in mitre, robes, and with crozier. The body lay all night under the hearse, with a guard of nobles and pages to watch it. On the fourteenth day of December it was interred in the vault, and a plain black tablet was erected to be placed over it by King James I, with the inscription:

ET MARIA SORORES
IN SPES RESVRRECTIONIS.

James II, who sought to re-establish the Roman Catholic Faith in England, (like Queen Mary,) died at St. Germain En-Laye, in France, and has no tomb in the Abbey. His intestines were given to the Irish College, in Paris, the brains to the Scotch College, and the heart to the Convent of Chaillot.

Admiral Kempenfeldt, who was drowned on the man-of-war Royal George, which sunk with eight hundred men, all of whom were lost, off Spithead, in 1782, is also buried here, with the epitaph on his tomb, written by Cowper the poet:

"Toll, toll, for the brave—
Brave Kempenfeldt is gone;
His last sea-fight is fought;
His work of glory done.
His sword was in its sheath,
His fingers held the pen,
When Kempenfeldt went down,
With twice four hundred men."—

TOMB OF MARY, QUEEN OF SCOTS.

The Chapel of Edward the Confessor, who founded the Abbey, is full of dead Kings and Queens, so full that a poet has written of the commingled Royal dust that is here reposing:

"Think how many royal bones,
Sleep within these heaps of stones.
Here they lie, had realms and lands,
Who now want strength to lift their hands.
Where, from their pulpit sealed with dust,
They preach, 'In greatness is no trust!'
Here's an acre, sown indeed,
With the richest, royalest seed,
That the earth did e'er suck in,
Since the first man died for sin."

INTERMENTS DURING THE MIDDLE AGES.

Here lies buried Edward the Confessor, before whose tomb was kept continually burning a silver lamp. On one side stood an image of the Virgin, in silver, adorned with two jewels of immense value, presented by Eleanor, Queen to Henry III; on the other side stood an image of the Virgin, carved in ivory, presented by Thomas a-Becket. Edward I offered the Scotch regalia and the antique stone on which the Kings of Scotland were crowned at Scone; this latter relic is still preserved. This shrine was composed of various colored stones, in Mosaic work; but it is so dilapidated that very little idea can be formed of its original beauty and grandeur.

Queen Editha, Queen Maud, Edward I, Henry III, Elizabeth Tudor, daughter of Henry VII, Queen Eleanor, Henry V, the victor of Agincourt, Queen Phillippa, Edward III—with his sword, seven feet long and weighing eighteen pounds, together with his enormous shield, hanging to his tomb,—Margaret of York, Richard II, and a host of others, are here buried. Their tombs are of magnificent workmanship, with full length figures lying recumbent and their hands clasped in prayer.

The Abbots and Priors of the abbey are buried in the walks of the Cloisters, and I stood on three of these mural slabs, and looked at the worn, full length effigies of the dead abbots, in full abbatical robes, ring on finger, mitre on head, and crozier in hand, their Latinized names almost worn away by the footsteps of the hundreds of thousands of men and women who had paced the Cloisters since they were interred, seven hundred years ago. And yet these tombs in Westminster Cloisters are but as yesterday, when compared with the Pyramids of Egypt, or a geological formation.

It was in Westminster Abbey that all the Kings and Queens of England have been crowned, and when a monarch had been crowned previously, as in the case of Henry III, whose coronation took place at Gloucester, it was thought proper to have the ceremony again performed at Westminster, in the presence of the nobles and the chief ecclesiastical dignitaries of the land; the Archbishop of Canterbury always officiating in the august ceremonial.

What wondrous scenes this proud old Abbey has witnessed! I can but enumerate a few of these however. One day in the middle of Lent, 1176, the King and his son came to London, while a Convocation of the Clergy was being held in Westminster Abbey. The Papal Legate was present, and the Archbishops of Canterbury and York were also present. Thomas a-Becket had been murdered by order of the reigning King Henry II. Becket had been Archbishop of Canterbury. In the Convocation the then Archbishop of Canterbury, as Primate of the Kingdom, sat on the right hand of the Papal Legate. The Archbishop of York seeing this, when he entered the Abbey, came in a rude manner and pushing between the Primate and the Legate, as if disdaining to sit on the left hand of anybody, thrust himself into the lap of the Primate in a swash-buckling manner. The Primate would not move, and no sooner had the insult been offered than the Bishops and Chaplains in the Abbey ran to the dais and pulled my Lord of York down and threw him to the ground, and began to beat him severely. The Archbishop of Canterbury then sought to save him, and when he, the Archbishop of York, got on his feet, he straightway went to the King whom he had advised to murder Thomas a-Becket, and made complaint of the outrage which had been offered him. The King laughed at him for his pains. As he left the Abbey the monks, and priests, and bishops, with a loud shout cried out at him, "Go, traitor, thou didst betray the holy man Thomas a-Becket; go get thee hence, thy hands yet stink of blood."

When the news reached the Archbishop of York (previously) that the Archbishop of Canterbury (Becket) had been assassinated on the steps of the Altar, he ascended his pulpit and announced the fact to his congregation as an act of Divine vengeance, saying that Becket had perished in his pride and guilt like Pharaoh.

In 1297, Edward I offered at the shrine of Edward the Confessor, the famous stone, crown, and sceptre of the Scottish Sovereigns, together with the Coronation Chair, now in the Abbey, on which all English monarchs have to sit to be crowned. This chair was taken from the Abbey of Scone, in Scotland, by Edward, having been brought to Scotland by King Fergus from Ireland, three centuries before the Christian Era. Before that period, it is said to have been used for many hundred years by the Irish Kings for a like purpose.

CORONATION OF WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR.

The Scots were very eager to get the stone back for the reason that a legend existed that whoever possessed the stone should rule Scotland. This old stone chair, or rather oaken chair with a stone seat,—twenty-six inches in length, sixteen inches and three quarters in breadth, and ten and a half inches in thickness—has seen many strange changes in dynasties, for every king since Edward I, has sat in it on his coronation day.

The ceremonies of coronation were very grand in the olden time and much of their splendor has passed away or has become obsolete.

CORONATION CHAIR.

One of the grandest sights ever witnessed in the Abbey was when Aldred, Archbishop of York, crowned William the Conqueror, King of England. The mail clad bodies of Norman soldiery lined every part of old London to keep down the Saxons, while William, superbly mounted, and followed by a train of two hundred and sixty barons, lords and knights, entered the Abbey. When the multitude reached the high altar, Geoffrey, Bishop of Coutances, asked the Normans if they were willing to have the Duke crowned King of England, and the nobles, knights, and priests, among whom the English lordships and abbeys were already parceled out, cried aloud with one voice that they were. The Norman horsemen without the walls of the abbey hearing the shout, fancied that the Saxons within had attacked their countrymen, and immediately they set fire to the houses around the abbey, and in a few minutes the abbey was deserted of friend and foe alike with the exception of William and a few priests who stood firm, although the Duke trembled violently as the crown was placed upon his head. He declared that he would treat the English people as well as the best of their kings had done, vowing by the Splendor of God, his usual oath.

The coronation of Richard I, the Lion Heart as he was called, was attended with great pomp.

On the third of September, 1189, the Archbishops of Canterbury, Rouen, Treves in Germany, and Dublin, arrayed in silken copes, and preceded by a body of clergy bearing the cross, holy water, censers and tapers, met Richard at the door of his privy chamber in Westminster Palace, and proceeded with him to the Abbey. In the midst of a numerous body of bishops and ecclesiastics, marched four barons, each with a golden candlestick and taper, then in succession—Geoffrey de Lacey with the royal cap, John the Marshal with the royal spurs of gold, and William, Earl of Striguil and Pembroke, with the golden Rod and Dove. Then came David, brother to the King of Scotland, and present as Earl of Huntington, and Robert, Earl of Leicester, supporting John the King's brother, the three bearing upright swords in richly gilded scabbards.

Following them came six barons bearing a chequered table, upon which were the King's robes and regalia, and now was seen approaching the central object of this gorgeous picture—Richard himself, under a gorgeous canopy stretched by six lances, borne by as many nobles, having immediately before him the Earl of Albemarle with the crown, and a bishop on each side. The ground on which he walked was spread with rich cloths of Tyrian dye.

THE MASSACRE.

At the foot of the altar, Baldwin, Archbishop of Canterbury, administered the oath, by which Richard undertook to bear peace, honor, and reverence to God and Holy Church, to exercise right, justice, and law, and to abrogate all wicked laws and customs. He then put off all his garments from the middle upwards, like a modern prize fighter, except his shirt, which was open at the shoulders, and he was annointed on the head, breast, and arms, with oil, signifying glory, fortitude, and wisdom. He then covered his head with a fine linen cloth and set the cap thereon, placed the surcoat of velvet and dalmatica over his shoulders, and took the sword of the Kingdom from the Archbishop to subdue the enemies of the Catholic Church, and then put on the golden sandals and the royal mantle, which last was splendidly embroidered, and was led to the altar, where the Archbishop charged him on God's behalf, not to presume to take this dignity upon him unless he were resolved to keep inviolably the vows he had made; to which the king replied:

"By God, His grace, I will faithfully keep them all: Amen." The crown was then handed to the Archbishop, by Richard himself, in token that he held it only from God, when the Archbishop placed it on the King's head; he also gave the sceptre into his right hand, and the royal rod into his left.

At the close of this part of the ceremony Richard was led back to the throne, and High Mass being performed with grand pomp, Richard offered as was usual, a mark of pure gold to the altar.

While the coronation was going on inside massacre and arson reigned outside of the Abbey. Before the ceremony, Richard, by proclamation had forbidden all Jews to be present at Westminster, either within or without the Abbey, but some members of that persecuted race had rashly ventured within the walls, and a hue and cry being set up at what was deemed a sacrilege, the populace ejected a prominent Israelite and beat him with sticks and stones. In a few minutes a report spread that the King had ordered the destruction of the Jews, and the furious mob spread all over the city, burning the houses and destroying the lives of the miserable Jews. Men, women, and children of tender age were burned alive in their domiciles, where resistance was made to the mob, and the cries of the murdered children blended discordantly with the sounds of the shaums, and jongleurs, and the shouts of the rabble, who were celebrating the coronation. The riot became so formidable that at last Richard, who was at dinner in Westminster Hall, ordered the Chief Justiciary of the Kingdom, Ranulf de Glanville, to go and quell it, but this was more easy to order than to perform, and the King's officers were driven back to the Hall.

Through all that night and day the pillage, arson, and massacre continued, and the next day the King hanged three of the rabble as an atonement.

At the coronation of Henry IV, Sir John Dymoke, the Champion of England, rode into the Hall of Westminster Palace, where dinner was being served to the King, on horseback in complete armor, with a knight before him bearing his spear, and his sword and dagger by his side, and presented a label to the king on which had been written a challenge to any knight, squire, or gentleman, who dared declare that Henry was not rightful King of England. He then had a trumpet blown, and cried out that he was ready to fight in the quarrel. The label was then taken and cried by the heralds in six places in the town of Westminster, but no person seemed ready to fight although Richard II had been deposed by Henry IV and was then in a neighboring dungeon.

That most atrocious medieval fraud, Richard III, when about to be crowned King, walked barefoot from Westminster Hall to the Abbey, a distance of about six hundred feet, to let the crowds witness his resignation and humility.

When Edward VI, a boy of sixteen, was about to be crowned, he laid himself down upon the steps of the altar on his stomach while Cranmer, Lord Archbishop of Canterbury, opened his shirt and rubbing the oil between his shoulder blades, anointed him.

James I, who hated tobacco and witches, forbade the people to come to Westminster to witness his Coronation, as the plague was then raging, and James did not wish to catch the distemper.

OMEN OF ILL LUCK.

Charles I was crowned February 2, 1626, and his Queen, Henrietta, being a Catholic, was not a sharer in the Coronation, nor was she a spectator, and she would not accept the place fitted up for her in the Abbey, but stood at the window of the Palace gates to look at the crowd and procession, while her retinue of French ladies, nobles and servants, were dancing within. When Charles walked up to the altar to ascend the throne, Laud, who was Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Duke of Buckingham, Lord High Constable of England, offered him their hands on either side to ascend the throne, but the King smilingly refused their hands and said:

"I have as much need to help you, as you have to assist me."

Then Laud presented the King to the great crowd of Nobles and people, and said, in an audible voice, "My masters and friends, I am here come to present unto you your King: King Charles, to whom the crown of his ancestors and predecessors is now devolved by lineal right; and therefore I desire you by your general acclamation, to testify your consent and willingness thereunto."

Not a voice answered, and there was a stillness as of the grave through the vast spaces of the Abbey. It was a bad omen of a reign, which ended so disastrously, for the listening monarch.

At last the Earl-Marshal, Lord Arundel and Howard, said to the spectators present: "Good people, I pray thee, why call ye not right lustily, 'God save King Charles?'"

Thus admonished, they with one voice exclaimed, "God save Charles, our King." In the adjoining hall, Oliver Cromwell was inaugurated Lord Protector of England, with a quiet ceremonial, attended by ushers, life guards, State coaches, the Long Parliament, and several troops of horse.

When James II was crowned, the Royal bauble tottered on his head, and this was supposed to be a prophetic omen of ill luck.

When George III was made King, with great pomp and circumstance, there was present, unknown to the crowd, a young man who must have witnessed the placing of the Golden Circlet on the brow of this fat, Hanoverian Prince, with strange emotions. He could have said with truth, "My place should have been by that chair; my father should have been sitting in it," for it was the young Pretender, Charles Stuart; the last of his royal and unfortunate race.

At all the late Coronations, the magnificent pomp and ceremonial of the Middle Ages have been omitted, and the last time that these Ceremonies were carried out was at the Coronation of George IV, when the Celebration was a very fine one.

The wood-work of the Choir was removed and boxes erected, affording an uninterrupted view of the Nave and Chancel, showing the Peers and Peeresses in all their magnificence of robes, of satins and silks, and head-dresses of feathers and diamonds. To these were added the brilliantly illuminated surcoats of the Heralds and Kings-at-arms, while the King himself sat in the royal Chair of State, which is over two thousand years old, and there received homage from the great officers of State, and Peers of the Realm, the Crown on his head and Sceptre in his hand, the Garter and George around his neck, and the velvet robes enfolding his body, which was then scorbutic from disease and dissipation.

The challenge of the Champion of England was at this ceremony delivered for the last time. After the banquet was over, at which seventeen thousand pounds of meat, three thousand fowls, one thousand dozen of wine, ten thousand plates, and seventeen thousand knives and forks, were among the items, came the challenge to all who dared to dispute the right of George to the throne of England.

It was an imposing sight, as the Duke of Wellington, with his Ducal Coronet ornamented with strawberry leaves, on his head, and in his flowing Peer's robes walked down the hall, cheered by the officers of the Life Guards, who were present. He shortly afterwards returned, mounted, and accompanied by the Marquis of Anglesey, the one-legged cavalry officer of Waterloo, and Howard, Duke of Norfolk, the Hereditary Earl Marshal of England.

THE BANQUET AND CHALLENGE.

The three Nobles rode gracefully to the foot of the throne, paid their homage, and then backed their horses down the lofty hall. The hall doors of the Palace opened again, and outside, in the twilight, a man in complete armor of Milan proof, appeared on horseback, outlined against the shining sky. He then moved, passed into darkness, and under the massive arch, and suddenly Howard, Wellington, and Anglesey, stood in full view of the vast assemblage, with the palace doors closed behind them. This was the finest sight of the day, as the Herald read the challenge, a glove was thrown down by a gauntleted hand as a token of defiance, which was taken up instantly by Wellington, and then they all proceeded to the throne, trumpets blowing, people shouting, and flower-girls strewing the way with baskets of flowers.

The funerals of Lady Palmerston and George Peabody were the last that have taken place in Westminster Abbey, and at the funeral of the former a London reporter, in his eagerness to get an item, fell into the grave of Lady Palmerston and nearly frightened a young lady mourner out of her senses. Such is the story of this Mausoleum of Royalty and Heroism. Westminster Abbey is only equaled for the antiquity and grandeur of its mortal remains by the Abbey of St. Denis, in France, and those world-old cemeteries, the Pyramids of Egypt.

[CHAPTER IX.]

THE COSTERMONGERS AND RAG FAIR.

HERE is a wide, short street, or rather road, in the heart of London. The buildings are mean, the people who cluster against their doorways and in the alleys and courts that branch from this short, wide street, are wretched in appearance; their garments are patched and in piecemeal, and when untorn they are greasy and besmeared with filth.

In this street, crowded at night—on Saturday night it is almost impassable—children of a tender age may be seen begging for coppers and soliciting assistance from those of more mature years, but to the full as wretched as themselves. Vice is in every glance of their eyes. Crime has already made its graven lines in their young faces, and their language or dialect, (for it is not a language), is a combination of uncouth sounds, obscene imagery, and slang corruptions of the English tongue.

ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY'S GARDENS.

This street, or road, is called the "New Cut," and is situated in Lambeth on the Surrey side of the Thames. It is reached from the City by Waterloo Bridge and the Waterloo road, and from the West End by Lambeth and Vauxhall bridges. Thousands are born, baptized, many beget children and die within the municipality of the Great Metropolis, and yet have never seen the New Cut—nay, have never even heard of it, or if they did, the word would have as much meaning to them as the plains of El Ghizeh, or the source of the Nile to a Bow Cockney. Yet there are thousands who are born here in this New Cut who live and die in it and make a living for themselves, after a fashion, who, if not content with, are certainly unaware of any method of changing or bettering their lot in this life.

Narrow, dark, and mean streets run contiguous to the New Cut, and branch from it in a winding, snaky way. A decently-dressed man is not safe in this street, and the only sound of civilization to cheer him, once lost in the mazes of these festering lanes and alleys, teeming with low pot-houses, tap-rooms, and wild-looking children, bold, bad-looking desperadoes of men, and reckless, obscene women, is the low, rumbling sound coming like the approaching thunder to his ears every few minutes as the loaded passenger trains dash to and fro on the Northwestern and Southeastern Railways.

The New Cut runs into the Lower Marsh and is flanked by Wootton, White Horse, Collingwood, Eaton, Marlboro streets, and the Broad Wall. To the west are Thomas, Isabella, and Granby streets, and from all this misery and destitution of a quarter where the inhabitants are packed like rabbits in a well-stocked warren, the road leads through the Upper Marsh down to the rare pleasaunce or garden of the palace of the Archbishop of Canterbury, one of the most sumptous ecclesiastical retreats in England. The Archbishop's gardens, although located in the heart of a populous city, cover as much ground, it is calculated, as gives sleeping and eating room to 11,000 human beings in the New Cut district.

It is true that the river rolls sluggishly five or six hundred yards below the New Cut, and those who are tired of dog's meat, rotten vegetables, and the offal of the street markets for their common food, and of sleeping eight in a room on straw which is not even clean, can at any time deliver their bodies from further pain and starvation, and their minds from a daily never-ending struggle as to how the dog's meat and decayed offal may be procured, by a quick plunge in the river, near by.

This quarter is the principal resort of the "costermongers" of London. The word "costermonger" has an equivalent which is better known as "peddler." All those who vend or hawk vegetables, fruit, carrion meat, game, fowl, ginger beer, nuts, or, in fact, any of the numerous articles or commodities of refuse merchandise found on the barrows and wagons of the London peddlers, are called by the London term "costermongers." The word is an old one used by Shakespeare, and therefore has, if none other, the merit of antiquity of the most genuine kind.

There are in London proper, embracing its suburbs, of both sexes—including men, women, and children—according to information which I had procured from the police and physicians, who have means of knowing, about 23,000 costermongers. These people are from daybreak until midnight in the open air, I might say, for their marketing is done as early as four or five o'clock in the morning; and then, after an hour or so spent in marketing, comes the cheap, scanty breakfast, consisting of a pound of bread, a "saveloy," which is a sort of a sausage, at a penny a piece, about four inches long and two inches in circumference, quite succulent to the costermonger's palate, or perhaps a piece of beef or bacon of the kind that is vended from barrows in the London streets at two pence a pound, the refuse of the butchers' shops and pieces unfit for a ready sale.

Among these refuse pieces are small portions of ham, shoulders, and pork, fragments of bacon, "snag" pieces, and mutton, and a very suspicious veal, which is often sold by these same hawkers in the suburbs to old maids for cats' meat. Sometimes the "coster" will take a pint of sloppy coffee, which he gets for three half-pence, with his brief breakfast; at other times he prefers a quartern of gin "neat," at two-pence; and again he will be satisfied with a mug of beer at two-pence. As early as 7 o'clock in the morning the hideous noises, which can only come from the throat of a costermonger, are heard in the London streets, awakening those who wish to sleep late, and, to make matters worse, no person, unless the costermonger himself, can by any application ever understand the exact words of their cries. They are only to be recognized by sound, and, therefore, it is always necessary to appear at a window or doorway in order to discover the precise article which the coster wishes you to buy.

SALE OF WATER CRESSES.

I visited the New Cut on a Saturday night, which is the great market night, when traffic is at its height in the neighborhood. The wide, short street, which runs into a half circle at its end, was filled with people. The noise was of that indefinite kind which is hardly to be described. Stands, barrows, and wagons, having ponies and asses attached, were placed along the gutters, with smoky lamps fed with a disagreeable smelling oil, from which a dusky flame was shed over the street, showing the faces of the venders as they gave tongue to many different cries.

"Whelks," a small shell-fish, like the American mussel, were heaped in thousands on the heads of barrels and tables, and ham sandwiches, at a penny apiece, and boiled potatoes, with sheeps' trotters, oysters, fried fish, oranges, apples, plums, and, in fact, every kind of fruit and vegetable were for sale. Little ragged boys and girls, their feet bare and dirty, ran hither and thither, importuning the passers-by to purchase their matches and water-cresses. Here water-cresses and radishes are sold together in bunches at a penny a handful. Some of these small children are up as early as five o'clock in the morning, to purchase the water-cresses at Farringdon market, and from that time until midnight, or until the theatres close, they are crying their water-cresses, which they carry with them through the London streets in a basket.

The whelks are sold at two a penny, and are accounted a delicacy by the poor of London, when properly seasoned with pepper, salt, and vinegar. They are very much relished in the pot-houses of the metropolis by hard drinkers when pickled in this fashion, and in any tap-room of a Saturday night it is not uncommon to find men or women peddling these shell-fish to those who have been drinking freely. The costermongers are universally great gamblers, and earning during the week from twelve to thirty shillings, as their luck may run with the purchasing community, yet it is not an uncommon occurrence for them to gamble away as much as fifty per cent. of their week's earnings in various games of chance.

These people have no religious belief whatever, and do not know anything even of the rudiments of religious instruction. To them God is some indefinite being whose attributes are unknown, and whose immutable laws are disregarded simply from utter ignorance. They never darken a church door, and tracts are received by them with the most supreme disgust.

A number of missionaries have labored among them in vain for any great result, chiefly dissenting clergymen, and, although they will listen to them patiently enough, yet they look upon them as the representatives of wealth and intelligence, and they cannot tell the difference between a Wesleyan minister who holds forth on a Sunday morning, with a big banner, calling upon them to repent, in the dark alleys of Bethnal Green and Whitechapel, and the richly beneficed divine of the Church of England who rolls by in a carriage, totally heedless of their condition, bodily or spiritual. All men who wear white neck-cloths are called parsons, and are disliked by the "costers." Besides, they have not learned to read, and tracts are useless to them, were they willing to study their contents.

The marriage relation is utterly ignored among them, and, if what the police told me be true, not ten per cent. of the costermongers who live with women and vend their goods in common are married. At fifteen years of age the young costermonger leaves father and mother to cleave to a girl of his own age, also the child of a costermonger, bred in the gutters of the metropolis, and, having purchased a barrow for ten shillings, and an ass for perhaps £2, the pair begin the world practically man and wife, but without ever dreaming of calling in the assistance of the minister to bind them together in the bonds of lawful wedlock.

HEATHENISM OF THE COSTERS.

A marriage certificate in a costermonger's den would, indeed, be a curious and unusual relic, as would also the marriage ring, which is looked upon in civilized society as the seal and confirmation of the wedding ceremony. They say that they cannot afford to pay a minister's fee, and as their code of morals is beneath mention they do not see the necessity of the expenditure. Their children grow up in the same way, bred, as their parents have been, to hawk and cry from dawn until darkness, and thus the costermongers increase, more savage in their usages than the American aborigines.

Mind, I am now speaking of the English costermongers, for, with the Irish costermongers, both male and female, who are still lower in the social scale as far as the goods of this world go, it is different. While the English coster cares not for the visits of the minister of the Protestant faith, the Catholic priest is ever welcome among his wretched and degraded flock in Whitechapel, in the New Cut, in St. Giles, or Lambeth, and he is beloved by them in their own rude, reckless way. The Irish costermonger believes most firmly in the sanctity of the marriage ceremony. With a few exceptions, their children, however wretched and miserable their lot may be in the future life, are born in wedlock, and the slur of illegitimacy cannot be thrown up at them. They will always have a few coppers to give their priests to help those more miserable than themselves, and, though these children but rarely receive the benefits of a common English schooling, they are more eager to learn and more ready to seek instruction than the children of their English neighbors.

I inquired of one of these costermongers, who had a fried-fish stand in the New Cut, and sold sprats all cooked and ready for eating, if he could read. He seemed rather an intelligent fellow, in his way, and had by no means the uncouth, ruffianly look that I noticed in many of the men's faces who were engaged in selling vegetables, fish, whelks, and periwinkles in the street. He had a little smoky lamp depending from a sort of gallows over his cart, and he spoke cheerfully:

"Well, I'm not much of a reader, like you gentlefolks be; but I picked up a little book schoolin' at the Ragged schools by night, when I had four puns saved, last winter. The letters wor a cruel bother to me at first, and I most guv it hup at the beginning, sort o' faint-hearted; but the teacher, as wos a Miss Spencer, she wos a good gal, and she says to me (about Christmas it wor), 'Jimmy, you'll never learn to read hif you don't persewere, and I know, Jimmy, you can persewere hif you want to.' Ye see, sir, I had just gived the blessed book a kick into a corner of the room, like mad; cos vy, the blessed letters wor so cranky and they wor all so mixed hup together that I lost my 'ead as it wor, and I couldn't make nothink hout of their shapes. But that gal, Miss Spencer, she wor a topper and no mistake. She guv me a kind of a smile, and bless me hif she didn't go to the corner of the room and she takes hup the book as I had flung down, with 'er pretty little fingers, and vith that she puts hit into my 'and, hand then I 'adn't the 'art to refuse the gal; and that wos the way as I larned to read; and now I reads Reynold's Weekly hevery Sunday mornin' to my maty, the boiled potato man, which is 'ere to speak for 'isself, sir."

The boiled potato man was advanced in years—a hardy, rugged-looking fellow, who seemed as if he would like to read like his "maty," but could not muster up courage to begin so late in life. I mentioned casually to him that a great Latin grammarian had, at an early stage of the world's history, made the attempt to learn Greek, being then seventy years of age. His characteristic reply made me see that my remark had struck him in the wrong place.

"Well," said he, "hif that blessed hold Latting, as ye calls 'im, had to 'awk biled pertaters from mornin' till night in the New Cut, and go 'ome to three kids vith, maybe, honly sevenpence for 'is day's vork, I'm blessed hif 'ee'd a-bother'd 'is precious hold soul a-learnin' Greek, or hany other lingo. I finds henuff to do vith the mealys, vithout a-troublin' myself habout the books as I see heverywhere I goes. N-i-c-e 'ot pertaties—hall smokin' 'ot—a-penny apiece!"

VICTORIA THEATRE—NEW CUT.

I bought a hot potato and a sprat, and left the two wondering if I had been "gaffing" or "larkin'" on 'em; and passing through the crowded street, past butchers standing at their doors in dirty aprons, sharpening their knives in a business like manner; past water-cress and match girls, who seemed to spring out of the gutters, so thick were they; past drunken, noisy women, staggering home to their miasmatic dens, with bunches of vegetables or chunks of meat in their arms, wrapped in coarse brown papers, dirty children following their footsteps, gaunt and shadowy-like; past reeking, greasy coffee-shops, the very sign-boards of which were redolent of eel pies, kidney stews, and all the abominations which are devoured in this neighborhood daily and nightly, by the poor people who are forced to eat this food, the refuse of the slaughter-houses of mighty, populous London, from that stern, blind necessity which knows no law, and I came upon a crowd of the working people—costermongers, peddlers, match-women, and young lads and girls—who find habitations in the dusky lanes and frightful courts of the neighborhood. I stood before a large, dark-looking building, which seemed like a prison, its frowning, dirty facade being no evidence that it was a place of amusement. But it was a place of amusement, or, rather, a place of torture. This was the "Royal Victoria Theatre," New Cut, Lambeth.

THE NEW CUT.

The Victoria Theatre, or the "Vick," as it is called by its patrons, is one of the most democratic places of amusement, if not the most democratic in London. In another place I will attempt to describe the strange sights which I saw inside of its walls, but at present I shall confine myself to giving my readers a view of the "Old Clothes" district, which is chiefly inhabited by the lower class of the London Jew peddlers or hawkers.

Dick Ralph was a patrolman bold, who did duty in the "H," or Smithfield Division of the City of London police, and was rewarded for his vigilance and attention to duty by being promoted to the office of "special," under probation, in the old Jewry squad of detectives.

Dick had lately married and was the proprietor of a fine chubby boy of fifteen months old, who resembled his father in every respect, having the same red flush in the cheeks, the same black eyes, which sparkled like diamonds, and the same little chubby nose. The family lived back of St. Paul's towering pile, in a little lane or court which ran around the old sheds that formed a part of the Old Market or Newgate shambles, and was the principal fresh meat mart before the New Smithfield Market had been built.

Ralph had been detailed by Inspector Bailey to visit Petticoat lane, Houndsditch, Bevis Marks, and the Minories with me, and we were to go together to the Sunday market in this district, which is almost entirely inhabited by Jews, although a greater part of the out-door trade and costermongering is done by Christian Cockneys.

I found Ralph living up a two-pair back, in one of the queerest, old-fashioned wooden houses in the Newgate shambles. Directly over my head was the dome of St. Paul's, with the morning fog clearing away from its peak, and the sun was gradually appearing to gild the tall cross on the apex, and the tower of St. Faith's, under St. Paul's. The stairs were ricketty and dark, and the wainscotting quite fanciful. A woman of twenty-five or six years of age, rather tidy in appearance, I saw holding the big chubby baby, the pride of the Ralph family. The family were at breakfast, and had been busy discussing fresh plaice and soles from Billingsgate. The baby was allowed to tumble all over the floor and bite its fingers.

"How are you this morning, sir," said patrolman Ralph; "it promises to be a pertickelerly fine Sunday does this, and a nice one for stroll to see the sights."

Ralph took down his hat and overcoat from a nail, and bidding his wife good-bye affectionately, we strolled out into the streets.

We took a walk up Newgate street to Cheapside, through the Poultry, through Cornhill, passing the Bank and Mansion House on our way, and finally opposite the Aldgate Church, with its curious old Sir Christopher Wren spire, we found ourselves standing against the railing which encloses a little green square of grass belting the church.

"Now, sir," said Dick Ralph, "we are just going into one of the worst places in London. There's a regular mob here all the time, and hits just as much as a man can do to pass the peddlers without having his 'at and coat taken hoff him by the Sheenies who are selling of hall sorts of things on the Sunday market. You can buy hanything from a gimlet here in Petticoat lane to a suit of clothes in Rag Fair."

PETTICOAT LANE.

Houndsditch is a wide street which runs down from the Aldgate High street to Bishopsgate street. At the other end is the street called the Minories, going in the direction of the Tower, which frowns upon the river. Here, also, is the district called "Petticoat lane," which embraces a number of short streets, courts, lanes, and filthy alleys, with such characteristic names as "Sandy's Row," "Frying Pan alley," "Little Love court," "Catharine Wheel alley," "Hebrew Place," "Fisher's alley," "Tripe yard," "Gravel lane," "Harper's alley," "Boar's Head yard," "Stoney lane," "Swan court," and "Borer's lane."

These are only a few of the choice thoroughfares in this locality, and all of them are dirty and swarming with a class who obtain their living in the streets. There are, it is calculated, living and doing business in Petticoat lane and its lesser tributaries of streets and alleys, about six thousand men, women, and children who profess the Jewish faith, and are in humble circumstances, who have to struggle and compete with the Irish of the poorer class in the street trades, though the Jews have a monopoly of the old clothes' trade.

Houndsditch is in every way superior to the other streets which surround it. It is wider, the shops are of a better order, and it is noticeable that very few of their doors are open on a Sunday morning. As the detective and I passed through the street I noticed such names as "Abrams & Son," "L. Benjamin," "Isaacs & Co.," "Moses & Son," "Hyams & Co.," and other like names over the doors of fruit shops, jeweller shops, mercer shops, clothiers, and in one or two instances, over the doors of small publics. It is, however, not a common thing to find a Jewish name over a liquor shop door in London.

"We are in the very nick of time to see the show," said Ralph to me—it was nearly nine o'clock of the Sunday morning, and we had gone down Houndsditch about three of our New York blocks.

"The market is from eight o'clock Sunday morning until about two in the hafternoon, and the business is as brisk as can be all that time," said Ralph.

The houses were all old, and all of them had a slouching, mean look, with funny gables, grimy windows in the upper stories, and queerly peaked and stunted roofs, overhung by tubular red chimneys, which stood up like rows of corn in a field when seen from a distance.

The people whom we met in the streets had an Eastern look, with peculiarly brilliant, almond-shaped eyes, and prominent noses. Some others had the Celtic features and spoke to each other with the unmistakable brogue. The policemen that we met, too, seemed to partake of the characteristics of the place, and I fancied that I could trace a resemblance in their faces to those by whom they were surrounded.

Crossing the street, we went through a court about a hundred feet wide, that seemed to lead into a covered shed, from which came a din and clamor of voices that was almost deafening.

There was a wooden building like a market covered over, to to which we ascended by a flight of three steps.

"This is the Rag Fair, sir; I suppose you heard on't before. It's a werry strange place, Rag Fair. But don't stop to look at anythink, or them as keeps the stands will tear you to pieces to make you buy."

A CONGRESS OF RAGS.

Although I took as much heed as possible of the injunction, it was impossible not to look. It was a very queer place in more senses than one. To get an idea of it take a section of Washington Market, New York, with its stalls and blocks, and buyers and sellers; and on the walls where the pork, mutton, and beef are hung to be inspected and sold, and, instead of the flesh of the cow, pig, and peaceful sheep, hang hundreds upon hundreds of pairs of trousers—trousers that have been worn by young men of fashion, trousers without a wrinkle or just newly scoured, trousers taken from the reeking hot limbs of navies and pot boys, trousers from lumbering men-of-war's men, from spruce young shop boys, trousers that have been worn by criminals executed at Newgate, by patients in fever hospitals; waistcoats that were the pride of fast young brokers in the city, waistcoats flashy enough to have been worn by the Marquis of Hastings at a race-course, or the Count D'Orsay at a literary assemblage; take thousands of spencers, highlows, fustian jackets, some greasy, some unsoiled, shooting-coats, short-coats, and cutaways; coats for the jockey and the dog-fighter, for the peer and the pugilist, pilot-jackets and sou-westers, drawers and stockings, the latter washed and hung up in all their appealing innocence, there being thousands of these garments that I have enumerated, and thousands of others that none but a master cutter could think of without a softening of the brain, take two hundred men, women, and children, mostly of the Jewish race, with here and there a burly Irishman sitting placidly smoking a pipe amid the infernal din; and shake all these ingredients up well, and you have a faint idea of what I saw in Rag Fair.

Take five thousand pair of shoes, boots, gaiters, bootees, brogans, watermen's boots, shoes of criminals, and suspicious-looking boots, taken from the feet of thieves, flashy-looking women's gaiters and cordovans purchased from prostitutes and wretched women in garrets, who had sold them to buy food or a drink of gin.

Take all these articles, scatter them around, hang them on nails and hooks depending from greasy stalls ascending to the old tumble down roof, and then the reader will have a dose offered to him such as I got when I fell on Rag Fair, Petticoat lane.

It was by far the strangest scene I had ever looked upon. London has nothing like it elsewhere, and New York, which is really destitute of any specially salient characteristic, could not in fifty years' time organize and bring together such a mass of old clothes, grease, patches, tatters, and remnants of decayed prosperity and splendor. In every old tattered trousers there was an unwritten epic; in every gaudily fashioned waistcoat there was a tale perhaps of sorrow and sadness and want, if any one could but point it out.

The patches and rents that were botched up and mended, showed the hasty repairs in the old coats that hung in platoons and files from the niches; the jagged sewing and frayed edges in each of these old garments, could they speak, would tell an astonishing tale, or furnish the groundwork of a plot for a popular drama.

The stalls were in rows, and the men and women and boys who did business there kept running about all the time I remained in the fair, shouting and screaming like possessed beings. Their great aim and object was to catch some unfortunate visitor by the lappel of his coat or snatch his elbow, his coat-tail, or any other available part of his clothing, hold on to him, shake an old waistcoat in his face, and if he didn't want a waistcoat, shake a dirty old pair of trousers in his face, talking all the time in an imploring, or may be a trembling tone, until the man would be compelled to break away by sheer force or call the police, who seemed to have enough to do in this place.

RAG FAIR.

I stopped for a moment to look at a stall where about a hundred pairs of boots and shoes were displayed in rows, the thick-soled heavy-looking brogans of the laborer ranged next to the nicely-fashioned gaiter of the elegant, with their well-turned toes and arching insteps, and the man, a sharp-featured Hebrew, who was proprietor, seized me and thrust a second-hand pair of boots in my face, saying at the same time:

MODUS OPERANDI OF SELLING.

"You wan'sh a nish pair o' bootsh? S'help, I shells you thish pair for two shillings, and they wash never made lesh than a guinea and a half! Don't you want to buy these sphlendid bootsh; s'help me, I only makes'h two pensh?"

I tried to get away, but he held to my arm and kept shaking the boots, while his sharp, black eyes glittered like sword points at the prospect of losing a sale. At last the detective, losing patience, jerked him away, and we passed on to the next slop stand.

This was kept by an old Irish woman. The Jew was all mercantile acerbity and sharpness. This old humbug of a female Celt was all treacle and honey.

"Ah, then, it's the foine gentleman that ye are. It's easy to see the good dhrop is in ye. May be it's a likin' ye'd be taking to this sphlindid waistcoat; that's all the fashion now, and it's well it 'id look on yer fine figger. And don't ye want nothing at all to wear? And shure ye wouldn't be afther goin' naked like an omaudhaun in the streets and havin' the people shoutin' after ye?"

"How much rent d'ye pay for this stall," said I to her, to get her off a topic by which she made her living.

"Is't the durty rint ye mane? Well, it's enouff for the ould hole. I pay sixpence a day in advance, and the devil resave the penny I've turned yet, this blessed mornin."

"Have you any one to support beside yourself?"

"Well, indade, I have two childher, and its small comfort they are to me. One of thim, the eldest, is down wud scarlet favir, and the docthor says it tin to one if she'll ever recover."

"You see sir," said the detective, "the people who rent stands from the men as own this place, they have to pay sixpence a day to 'old the stand. But those fellows as you see running around like lunatics, and a borin of every one, they pays two pence a day rents—cos why they 'ave no stands and honly walk habout with the clothes hon their harms."

"Yis, and I wish you'd sind them to the divil, the haythens—they niver give an honest woman a chance to make a penny be hook or be crook, wud thim runnin all over the fair."

"Halso, we never allows the 'awker as has no stands to stay in one place," said Dick Ralph, "cos hif we did, that would ruin the business of the people as pays rent for the stands. So we keeps them a movin' hon, and they doesn't like it, but we have got to do it, or else they would have rows hall the Sunday through with the nobs as keeps the stands. You see, the wery minute one of the 'awkers gets hopposite a stand, he collects a crowd and—now, there goes one now;" and he pointed to a fellow with a pair of trousers, who was bawling his goods out while a policeman had him by the neck shoving him along by main force.

"Oh, some of these lads are precious 'ard coves, I tell you, to manage. Some of them will fight and curse at you like as hif they wor made of brass. But we never talks long to them, 'cos hif we did Rag Fair would be too much for the force."

"How much a day do the hawkers make on an average?" I asked Ralph.

"Well, I can't tell, because they are sich werry 'ardened liars. I axed one the werry last Sunday as I wos 'ere. Says I, 'old Benjamin, how much do you take in on a day's work on a haverage?'"

"Oh! blesh your 'art," sez he, "some days I hash two pounds profit, and some days I makes a shillin' by 'ard vork."

"Now ye see," said Ralph, "I knew he was of gaffin me, for he was not worth two pounds, body and soul, and I don't suppose he never made more than half a crown in a day and do his best. Then Old Benjamin spends it hall in fish. The Jew peddlers here are wery fond of fish on Saturdays. They would go without a meal in three days to have a fresh mackerel on Sunday. And they are werry pertikler as to who kills the meat before they buys it."

Determining to make another attempt to see Petticoat Lane on a week day, I bade the polite policeman and the highly odorous quarter of the Old Clothes sellers, a very good day.

[CHAPTER X.]

FROM NEWGATE TO TYBURN.

ET us look at Newgate. This stern old pile of stones heaped upon stones, grey and grim, the burden of whose sighs afflict the weary skies above.

The strangest kind of a fascination hung over me as I looked at its Gate, cut in the deep wall like the entrance to a rocky cave. The spiked sill spoke of gibbets, the bars and locks and bolts of a felon gang, who dragged their blind life away, day following day, for them without hope, the outside world vacant, dumb and blank as the Ages, to their crime begotten souls, whose only music was the clank of fetters and the hoarse grating of iron hinges.

The building itself, covering half an acre, seemed sealed like a sepulchre. There was nothing to be gotten out of it, one way or the other. No one can have even looked at this terrible prison of Newgate without a shudder of despair for his kind.

Only on certain recurring Black Mondays did it yawn like a grave in the face of a great swearing mob, to put forth something into the open in the shadow of St. Sepulchre's, that was half dead; to take it back after an hour quite dead; and then it relapsed into its old, inscrutable dumbness.

Now Gate of Ivory, now Gate of Horn—now a porch above which might be inscribed the despairing legend of the Inferno, now a wicket at which the charitable might tap gently, fraught with messages of mercy to the fallen creatures within—the portal of Newgate could assume chameleon hues, not always hopeless.

Next to the spikes of Newgate, the visitor must always mark for lasting remembrance, the stones of Newgate doorsteps. They are not perhaps more than eighty years old, but they look more worn than the jambs of Temple bar—more decayed than the wheel windows of the Cloisters of Westminster Abbey. They are ancient through use, and not through time.

The Hall of the Lost Footsteps at Versailles is but an empty name, but the millions of footsteps that have worn Newgate stones, must make it an abiding reality. Here have united all the crooked roads. Here have fallen the last steps on the stones of the ford of the Black River. Beyond the steps has loomed the City of Dis.

How many footsteps! how many!

Lord George Gordon, after the riots and burnings of 1780, wrecked and crazy, totters feebly up Newgate steps to die in the prison which his murderous associates had attempted to burn. Desperate Thistlewood, fresh from the loft in Cato street, where his fellow conspirators were dragged—reeking from the murder of Smithers, whose ghost followed him to the gallows, is brought here heavily chained from the Tower Dungeon, in which the ministry with frantic fear had at first immured him.

He and his gang will leave Newgate no more save by the Debtor's Door, where the Man in the Mask—one of the few unsolved mysteries of the Nineteenth century—will do his horrible office upon them and hold up to the populace five severed heads, who at first shudder, but growing hardened by the dripping sight of blood, will cry as the clumsy butcher lets the last head fall—

"Hallo, butter-fingers!"

Down Newgate steps at dead of night, how many corpses of uncoffined wretches have been borne in sacks, to be dissected at Old Surgeon's Hall, over the narrow causeway which skirts the prison.

EXECUTION OF BARRETT.

The dread gaol keeps its secret better now. No grapnel hauls forth the dishonored carcass of the dead criminal for exposition at the Gemonian steps.

The place is doubly a Golgotha, and murder is buried on the spot where it has been slain.

Here died brave hearted Michael Barrett, the victim of the last public execution which will ever take place in Newgate, just three short years ago. How the huge metropolis seethed and boiled like a world-cauldron that day of days!

Condemned to die as a Fenian conspirator, he gave his life gallantly for his native land, and in his last hour frightened England more than a hundred living Barretts could have done.

I stood before Newgate with a member of the Old Jewry force who had seen the execution of Barrett. From the fact that the government, after that day, has prohibited any more public executions, his description of the scene will be worthy of recounting to my readers. The detective was a young man, and intelligent beyond his class. We were standing outside of the prison gate.

The lane or street of the Old Bailey, which begins at Ludgate Hill, one block below St. Paul's Cathedral, runs toward Newgate street, parallel with Giltspur street which it enters, and forms before ending a triangular space of about two acres square measurement. At the angle, formed by the Holborn Viaduct, which ends here, (Giltspur street and Newgate street,) is the old Church of St. Sepulchre. To the right and behind us, we could just trace the ornamented and beautiful facade of Christ Church Hospital. To our left and below us was the Sessions Court in the Old Bailey, a place in some respects like the Tombs Court and the Court of General Sessions in New York, were both courts to be combined. I am thus particular in order to show my readers where and how Michael Barrett, the last Newgate victim, died.

"Well, you see, Sir," said my Old Jewry friend to me, "the week as Barrett wos hung wos a busy week with us. Up all night sometimes and all day, searching the holes and corners and dark places of the city for Fenians. We got information that they wos going to blow up St. Pauls, one day—another day we hears that they had a plot to bust hup the Bank of Hingland—then they were to burn down the Tower and the 'Oss Guards, and then somebody told us that they meant to send Westminster Habbey and Buckingham Palace sky high—and this way and that way we wos worrited to death with hinformation. One night I was detailed to St. Paul's to watch the crypts or vaults under the Cathedral, where the Fenians intended to put a lot of gunpowder to blow it hup. I staid there all night with some more of the men detailed, and a precious cold job it wos, we hiding among the vaults snapping our fingers and shivering like geese in a pond, and not a Fenian within three miles of us. That wos a lark, and the newspapers laughed at us, and had comic picters of us standing in the cold, for their hedification."

"Another night we hexpected them to set fire to the 'Ouses of Parlyment, and a blessed shame it would have been to have destroyed sich a fine hedifice, and there I wos night after night, a-playing hide and seek among the galleries and Towers of the 'Ouse, watching for Fenians and hexpecting to get a stab in the back, and all the time I wos wishing as how I could get relief, so as to get a pot o' beer in the King's Arms in Parlyment street."

DYING FOR AN IDEA.

"Well, Sir, at last came the busting and blowing up of Clerkenwell Prison, and a nice row that made all through England—and while the fellows as did it walked off quite cooly—Barrett and a few more who wos suspected, and who wos as I believe really hinnocent—of the Clerkenwell affair—wos taken and tried right over here in the Sessions Court (pointing with his hand over the wall of the Old Bailey Court), and he stood up in the dock that day as he wos found guilty, and I must say he was as brave a man as I ever saw—and defied the big wigs and all on them, and said he was not afraid to die, and then he told them that if it was twenty lives he would give it for "dear Ireland,"—thems just the words he said, and although I don't like Fenians or Fenianism, I must say for him that he was no more afraid than I was, that is if you can judge from a man's face at such a hawful minute.

"The night afore his execution I was in his cell; I was let in by a friend of mine the turnkey, and I spoke to him kindly, cos you see I didn't feel exactly like as if he wos a man who had committed a common murder or robbed for a living, cos why, you see, a lawyer told me as how he was dying for an idea, like Russell or Hampden or some others of them Big Guns.

"I sez to him:

"How do you feel Mr. Barrett?"

"I feel well, thank you said he;" one of the turnkeys wos watching him, sitting up with him, and he had a light in his cell—he was ironed.

"They are putting up the scaffold," said he to me without a bit of fear.

"Yes, and I'm sorry for it," said I, "Mr. Barrett—is there anything I can do for you."

"Nothing," says he, standing up and turning down the book which he was reading, his chains clanking around his legs—"Nothing—but you see me the night before I die—tell those who employed you that Michael Barrett has made his peace with God—and is not afraid to die. Tell them," and he commenced reciting poetry like, with his eyes on the ceiling of his cell:

"Whither on the scaffold high
Or in the battle's van;
The fittest place for man to die
Is where he dies for man."

"Them's the lines as near as I can remember, for I saw them in a book after, and that made me recollect them.

"During the night they were busy in putting up the scaffold, and three or four thousand special constables were sworn in by the magistrates, cos why, they were afraid that the Fenians would rescue Barrett, and I, as well as every other man, wos armed with a six-barrelled revolver. When the morning came there must have been a hundred thousand people in the streets and all around here. Hundreds staid up all night to get a chance for a good place to look at him, and there was more than three thousand women, and as many children in the crowd around the scaffold. The top of the scaffold, I mean the frame, was about twelve feet above the street, and the platform was about six feet high, so that hevery one was able to see him. Fifteen hundred police in uniform were drawn hup around Newgate, and to prevent the crowds from pushing or rescuing the prisoner, a barricade of trees was built at a distance of two hundred feet from the scaffold hevery way. Five hundred police in plain clothes were among the crowds armed with revolvers, and troops were stationed at all the barracks in the city so as to be ready for any attempt to save his life. The crowd Sir, was for all the world like a surging sea, and people were buying and selling of histers, and liquors, ginger beer, whelks, fruit and cigars, just the same as if they were at a fair, and men and boys were crying ballads and singing, and some of them were peddling Barrett's printed confession. Now you see, Sir, that was a humbug, becos Barrett never made no confession, but they sold just as well as if he had made one, at a penny a piece.

"Well, when St. Sepulchre's bell struck eight, which is always the signal, they brought him ought, and although the air was cold and some of us were shivering from standing up so long without anything to eat or drink, he never trembled at all, but looked at every man and woman of all that wos there with a smile, and a steady look.

"'He's a game un,' I heard many a man say, and our fellows who had such hard work watching the Fenians by night and by day, had no hard feelings agin the brave fellow then. The women around the scaffold waved their handkerchiefs to him, you see, Sir, the women, bless them, are always up to such blessed games, and there was some man in the crowd when the rope was put around his neck, who wore a fur coat, and seemed like an American, who cried out as loud as he could—

"Good heart—Michael Barrett—this day. All is not lost while one drop of Irish blood remains."

THE PESTIFEROUS PRISON.

"I saw the man, and I made a jump for him with two of my pals, but the crowd opened and let him pass through,—it seemed a purpose like, and just then I heard a roar and a great convulsive sob, and the crowd pushed this way and crushed that way, almost smothering me, and I nearly fainted from the awful squeezing I got, and I picked up a little girl from atween my feet, and when I looked up Barrett's body was a swinging to and fro from a rope, and all was over, and believe me, Sir, I was glad of it when it was over."

THE LAST EXECUTION AT NEWGATE.

It was high noon when I arrived at Newgate, and my visit was paid chiefly to that part of the prison devoted to the subsistence of the prisoners. I passed through the corridors and passages, and door after door, and hinge after hinge grated as I advanced with a companion. All around the prison are the high walls of the neighboring buildings, and attached to them are precipitous sheds with spikes to prevent the escape of prisoners who may succeed in getting as far as the yard. On top of the prison is a huge circular fan which revolves and gives ventilation to the interior of the jail. This improvement was the result of the labors of the great philanthropist John Howard.

In the old days Newgate was a hell upon earth. During the Eighteenth century prisoners endured the tortures of the damned here. Jail birds were shackled to the floor to prevent their escape, and mouldy bread and stinking water was given them to drink until their stomachs loathed the appearance of food. Their beds were of stinking straw, the rain from the heavens dripped through the roof upon them, the frost and cold eat into their bones; they festered in dirt, disease, and destitution, till their limbs broke out in horrible blains, and ulcers and all kinds of agues and dysenteries swept down upon them. Then in this terrible state, after rotting for months awaiting a trial, they came into the dock at the Old Bailey with the jail fevers upon them to slay with the pestiferous miasma which exhaled from their bodies, judge, jury, and pettifogging attorneys.

The prisoners were so crowded together in dark dungeons, that the air becoming corrupted by the stench, occasioned a disease called the "goal distemper," of which they died by dozens every day. Cartloads of dead bodies were carried out of the prison and thrown in a pit in the burying-ground of Christ's Church without ceremony. The effluvia in the year 1750 was so horrible that it made a pestilence in the whole district. Four judges who sat in the Session, a Lord Mayor, several aldermen, and other civic dignitaries were carried off by the distemper, together with a number of lawyers and jurors present at the trials of Newgate criminals.

GETTING WEAK IN THE BACK.

Then at last the prison was cleansed, and a system of ventilation introduced, which made some improvement in the condition of the prisoners. Still, Newgate was a disgrace to Christendom, and just one hundred years ago Parliament made a grant of £50,000 to construct a prison. Beckford, author of Vathek, and then Lord Mayor of London, laid the first stone. In 1780, Lord George Gordon, with his No-Popery rioters, burned down that part of the prison which had been constructed, and set at liberty three hundred of the prisoners confined there. £40,000 in addition had to be granted before the building was completed.

On an average there are between two and three hundred prisoners held in durance in Newgate, and twelve sessions are held during the year at the adjoining Old Bailey Court for their trial. This is called the Central Criminal Court, and it is here, in this very court, that Jack Sheppard, Dick Turpin, Claude Duval, Sixteen String Jack, Tom King, and all the other heroes of the yellow covered literature, were tried, condemned, taken in fetters to Newgate, and from thence to Tyburn Tree to hang by the neck until they were dead.

The Judges of the Old Bailey Court are the Lord Mayor, Aldermen, Recorder, and Common Sergeant of London, and the Judges of the Courts at Westminster Hall, who sit here by rotation to assist, by their superior legal knowledge, the inferior local magistrates.

The prison is divided into a male and female side, but beyond this there is little classification; the pickpocket, the swindler, the embezzler, the murderer, are all associated together; while the hardened offender and the one who is merely suspected of crime, but too often share the same cell, and feed at the same board.

There are separate cells, so that every one averse to society may dwell alone if he or she chooses, but in conversation with the turnkeys, I learned that the privilege was rarely claimed.

"Why, Lord bless your heart, Sir," said a turnkey to me, "there isn't one of the birds in this ere cage that wouldn't go down on his blessed knees and beg hoff if he was to be locked up alone for forty-eight hours. Ye see, sir, it sickens them, it does, to be alone and hear no one's voice but their own. There's a few of the high 'uns at first, when they come here, are werry hoffish and have a sort of a "how-dare-you-look-or-speak-to-me-air," but before three days they gets weak in the back and then they'll give a guinea a minute to look at a face if it only wor a monkey's dirty mug."

When prisoners become refractory, solitary confinement, for a few days, is the punishment, and it never fails to tame the most intractable. The beds of the prisoners are in tiers one above the other, like the berths on an emigrant ship, only that they are clean almost to painfulness. The beds consist of a hard mattress and coarse coverings, sufficient in all seasons to keep them comfortably warm. A plain deal table and bench constitute the only furniture of the place, and these, with the floor, are daily scrubbed into a state of scrupulous cleanliness by the inmates of the cells. There are paved court yards in which the prisoners may walk and breathe the small quantity of pure air that can circulate between those high and gloomy walls, surmounted by formidable spikes to impede the climber.

I went into the kitchen of Newgate and found it to be a commodious and well-fitted apartment, very like the kitchen of the Reform Club, only not so luxurious, from its want of French dishes, and I found here boilers, stoves, ranges, saucepans, kettles, and all that a chef could need for his cuisine. This was not the kitchen of the Old Newgate of which Ainsworth delights to tell, where the hangman used to seethe in a cauldron of molten pitch the heads and quarters of victims executed for treason, whose several members were afterwards affixed to the spikes of Temple Bar or London Bridge.

I saw the rations of each prisoner served out in tin panikins and platters, and the bread served was as white as any I ever ate. There were three large and beautiful potatoes allotted to each one, and three ounces of boiled beef, good and tender and free from bone, just of the same quality which I had seen served a few days before in the barracks of the Grenadier Guards down in Westminster. The meat might not have all the accessories and sauces which a Delmonico or a Blanchard could provide, but it was palatable and tender to the taste.

On "off" days they have soup and thick gruel for breakfast, and sixteen ounces of bread per day. They never get beer, butter, milk, cheese, cabbage, tea, coffee, or eggs.

HOTEL REGULATIONS.

So, after I had seen all this "bee bread," the hunks of meat duly weighed out, the potatoes and lumps of bread packed in their panniers and delivered out from door to door—the chief warder and I began to ascend a very Mont Blanc of iron staircases, and visited, one after the other, the cells of the wicked hive; in which, God knows, there was no honey making, but only wax, bitter as the book which the Apostle swallowed.

The original "comb," many stories high, had been built in one of the former yards of the gaol. The space between the different tiers of cells was quite sufficient for ventilation; but the architects had of necessity trusted more to height than to breadth, and this increased the hive-like appearance of the place. But when I came down again, the remembrance of what I had seen fresh upon me, all these iron staircases and galleries, all these shining locks, bars, numbers, plates, and "inspection holes," all these recrossing and crossing pillars, trusses, and girders, made me think that I had just left some great, bad exhibition of products of the devil's industry. One cell was, in all save its occupant, twin brother to its neighbor on either side; and so on, tier above tier, until the whole nest had been explored. I forgot to ask how many feet broad, by how many feet long, was each dungeon.

But here is one—the type of all the rest. It is as large say, as a cabinet particulier, to hold four, at Vachett's or the Moulin Rouge; but it is given up to the occupancy of one man. It is a hundred times cleaner than ever was cabinet in Paris restaurant; and here the lodger eats, reads, and sleeps. His bedding lies on a shelf on the right corner as you enter the cell. It is a pile of rugs, matting, mattress, or some other kind of bedding, packed and folded up with mathematical accuracy, with an assortment of straps and hooks disposed in corresponding order. These hooks will, by and bye, at eight o'clock, be inserted in rings in the whitewashed cell, when the prisoner will make his bed and sleep athwart his cell.

There are his gas-pipe, his basin, and mug; there is a little desk-formed table, which he can prop up with a wooden support, to eat his meals upon; there are his tin panikin and wooden spoon, his Bible, prayer-book, and hymn-book, his comb, his salt-cellar, with a neat cover of blue paper. Everything shines, glistens, sparkles, almost as bravely as the gew-gaws in Mr. Benson's shop outside. The floor is of shining asphalte. The covered ceiling is without a flaw. The walls are unsmirched. A neat copy of the regulations enforced in this "hotel"—the code of discipline framed by the Sheriffs—are hung up for the prisoner's guidance. He has a ventilator, by means of which he can regulate the temperature of his cell; and I noticed that the chief warder had to tell almost every prisoner that he was keeping his cell too warm.

Among the many afflicting scenes that have taken place in the vicinity of Newgate, was that of February 23, 1807, when two men, named Haggerty and Holloway, were hanged for the murder of Mr. Steele, on Hounslow Heath. The greatest interest had been excited by the trial of these two men, and an immense crowd assembled to witness their execution.

By five o'clock in the morning every avenue was blocked up; every window that communicated a view of the place was crammed, and wagons, arranged in rows, groaned under the weight of the eager multitude. The pressure of the assemblage was tremendous; and when the criminals had been turned off—when they had given their last death struggle—the mass of the people began to move. But there was no room for them to move in.

Immediately rose the shrieks of affrighted women in the crowd, which but increased the alarm, and made each individual struggle to get out of the multitude. Hundreds were trodden under foot, and the furious and frightened crowd passed over them.

At last the confusion ceased a little, and the ground became comparatively clear.

DRINKING FROM ST. GILES' BOWL.

Some who had been thrown down arose but with little damage, and went home, but forty-two were found insensible, of this number twenty-seven were quite dead, of whom three were women. Of the other fifteen many had their legs or arms broken, and some of them afterward died. Since that occurrence barriers have been erected and executions have taken place without loss of life. The system of hanging in chains has also been abolished, and Newgate may one day hope, like its brother of the Bastille, for the light of freedom to break in upon its hell-holes, and show to humanity how like devils are men clad with a little brief authority.

Eighty-three years ago, the last victim, taken from Newgate to Tyburn Tree, was hung there upon the gallows in chains. The name of the criminal was John Austin. Tyburn was anciently a manor and village some miles west of London, and on this fated spot, in 1330, Roger de Mortimer was hanged, drawn, disemboweled, and quartered, for high treason. The gallows was a triangle upon three legs. Long years ago, when Dan Chaucer wrote his lays, criminals were taken to Tyburn, and hung from a lofty elm tree, which overshadowed a brook or "burn," hence the term of "Tyburn Tree." The gallows, in after years, stood on a small eminence at the corner of the Edgeware Road, where a tool-house was subsequently erected.

Beneath this spot, where the gallows formerly stood, the bones of Bradshaw, Ireton, and others, who had voted for the death of Charles I, repose, their remains, having been taken from their graves, after the Restoration, and thrown here. Around the gibbet were erected open galleries, like those at a modern race-course, from whence many thousand people, of both sexes, were wont to feast their eyes on the dying struggles of the condemned. "Mamma Douglas," an old toothless woman, held the keys of these seats, and she was, facetiously, called the Tyburn "pew opener." Prices of seats to witness the sport, varied from one and sixpence to three shillings, and in one instance, a reprieve having arrived for the prisoner in time to save his life, the mob became enraged at their disappointment, and tore up the benches. The criminal was conveyed in a cart to Tyburn, the parson chanting prayer and hymn on the route, and in passing through the quarter of St. Giles, a bowl of ale was always offered to the condemned to drink, the procession of Sheriffs, Stavesmen, and Constables, halting on the way for the purpose. Among the famous criminals executed here were Perkin Warbeck, for plotting his escape from the Tower, 1534; the Holy Maid of Kent, and her associates, 1535; the last Prior of the Charter House, same year; Southwell, the poet, 1615; Mrs. Turner, hanged in a yellow starched ruff, for the poisoning of Sir Thomas Overbury, 1628; John Felton, assassin of Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, 1600; and in 1662 five persons who had signed the death warrant of Charles I; 1684, Sir Thomas Armstrong (Rye House Plot); 1705, John Smith, a burglar, having been hung for fifteen minutes, a reprieve arrived, and he was cut and bled, which saved his life. Jack Sheppard was hung in 1724; Jonathan Wild, the thief taker, in 1725, and Catharine Hayes was burnt alive here in 1726, for the murder of her husband, as the indignant mob would not suffer the hangman to strangle her, as was usual, before the fire was kindled. In 1760, Earl Ferrars, who had murdered his steward, rode from the Tower to Tyburn, in his open landau, drawn by six horses, and was hanged with a silken rope, the hangman and the mob fighting for the rope, while the latter tore the black cloth on the scaffold to pieces. Oliver Cromwell's body was taken up and here, long years after he had died, hung from the tree, while his head was set on a spike of Westminster Hall. The other famous hangings were as follows: 1767, Mrs. Browning, for murder; 1774, John Rann (Sixteen-Stringed Jack), highwayman; 1775, the two Perraus, for forgery; 1777, Rev. Dr. Dodd, forgery; 1779, Rev. James Hackman, assassination of Miss Reay: he was taken from Newgate in a mourning coach. 1783, Ryland, the engraver, for forgery. 1783, John Austin, the last person executed at Tyburn.

[CHAPTER XI.]

DOCTOR'S COMMONS.

NE of the queerest old rookeries in London is the little old edifice in Great Knight-Rider street, just back of St. Paul's Churchyard, with its nest of courts and its ancient quadrangle, where people go to get licenses to marry—or to have divorces granted them, or to examine or prove wills—or perhaps to have a suite entered for salvage or flotsam, or jetsam,—where David Copperfield paid a thousand pounds to receive his matriculation as a proctor. This curious old relic of Roman Catholic England, where the wills of the British nation are preserved, is known as Doctors' Commons.

It is a college of civil, canon, and maritime law, and here all cases that belong to these three divisions of English law, as also divorce suits, are entered, argued, and decided.

The lawyers who practice here are all well to do, snug, aristocratic old fellows, and enjoy good living and nothing to do as no other disciples of the legal profession can.

It is called Doctor's Commons because the doctors or students at law used to eat in common, or dine together in a hall in the old days when the Archbishop of Canterbury acknowledged the supremacy of the See of St. Peter.

In the Doctors' Commons are—the Court of Arches, named from having been formerly kept in Bow Church, Cheapside, originally built upon arches, and the Supreme Ecclesiastical Court of the Province of Canterbury—the other English Ecclesiastical Province being that of York; the Prerogative Court, where all contentions arising out of testamentary causes, are tried; the Consistory Court of the Bishop of London; and the High Court of Admiralty; all these courts hold their sittings in the college hall, the walls of which are covered with the richly-emblazoned coats of arms of all the doctors who have practiced here for two hundred years past.

The Court of Arches has a jurisdiction over thirteen parishes, or "peculiars," which form a "Deanery," exempt from the authority of the Bishop of London, and attached to the Province of the Archbishop of Canterbury, who is Primate of England. This court decides, as in the days of Wolsey, in all cases of usury, simony, heresy, sacrilege, blasphemy, apostacy from Christianity, adultery, fornication, bastardy, partial and entire divorce, and many exploded offenses, which in the Nineteenth century become farcical when tried in an ecclesiastical court. Fighting or brawling in church or vestry are also offenses under the jurisdiction of this absurd old court, but they are seldom or ever brought up in these days, as the newspapers are sure to seize upon such trials as subjects for derision and satire. Still the statutes are in existence and will probably never be repealed until the Established Church of England is abolished.

There are several Registries in Doctors' Commons, under the jurisdiction of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the bishops. Some of the very old documents connected with them are deposited for security in St. Paul's Cathedral and Lambeth Palace. At the Bishop of London's Registry, and the Registry for the Commission of Surrey, wills are proved for the respective dioceses, and marriage licences are granted. At the Vicar-General's Office and the Faculty Office, marriage licences are granted for any part of England. The Faculty Office also grants Faculties to notaries public, and dispensations to the clergy; and formerly granted privilege to eat flesh on prohibited days. At the Vicar-General's Office, records are kept of the confirmation and consecration of bishops.

MARRIAGE LICENSES.

Marriage licences, when required by persons who profess the faith of the Established Church of England, are always procured in Doctors' Commons upon personal application to one of these old fogy Proctors, whom I saw running around the quaint quadrangle, like a hen on a hot griddle, with a roll of papers in his fleshy, fat hands. A residence of fifteen days is necessary to either bride or bridegroom, in the parish in which the marriage is to be solemnized, or not much longer than it takes a repeater to become a useful if not a legal voter in New York City. This little antique court of Doctors' Commons is in fine one of the pious swindles that the English people delight in perpetuating and groaning under, while the sinecurists make pots of money, and laugh and grow fat on the pious plunder. There are all kinds of little dodges in Doctors Commons, so that when a suitor enters here it is like a dip into chancery litigation; the victim being plucked before he leaves. Even to get married is very expensive in Doctors' Commons. The expense of an ordinary license is £2 12s. 6d.; but if either party is a minor, there is 10s. 6d. further charge; and if the party appearing swears that he has obtained the consent of the proper person having authority in law to give it, there is no necessity for either parents or minor to attend. A special license for marriage is issued after a fiat or consent has been obtained from the Archbishop, and is granted only to persons of rank, judges, and members of parliament, the Archbishop having a right to exercise his own discretion.

The expense of a Special License is usually twenty-eight guineas. This gives privilege to marry at any time or place, in private residence, or at any church or chapel situate in England; but the ceremony must be performed by a priest in holy orders, and of the Established Church. With the marriages of Dissenters, including Roman Catholics, Jews, and Quakers, the Commons has nothing to do, their licenses being obtainable of the Superintendent-Registrar. A Divorce when sought is carried through one of the courts in this profession (according to the diocese), and is conducted by a proctor; the evidence of witnesses is taken privately before an examiner of the court, and neither the husband, wife, nor any of the witnesses, need appear personally in court. A suit is seldom conducted at an expense less than £200.

Then there is the High Court of Admiralty, a "precious old swindle," as a seafaring man told me it had proved to him. He was a seaman before the mast, and to get a sum of eight pounds six and four-pence, he was compelled to pay eleven pounds of costs and fees. It comprises the "Instance Court," and the "Prize Court," where the famous Lord Stowell, in one year, adjudicated upon 2,206 cases connected with the high seas.

DOCTOR'S COMMONS.

The Instance Court has a criminal and civil jurisdiction; to the former belong piracy and other indictable offences on the high seas, which are now tried at the Old Bailey; to the latter, suits arising from ships running foul of each other, disputes about seamen's wages, bottomry, and salvage. The Prize Court applies to naval captures in war, proceeds of captured slave-vessels, &c. A silver oar is carried before the Judge as an emblem of his office. The business is very onerous, as in embargoes and the provisional detention of vessels, when incautious decision might involve the country in war; the right of search is another weighty question.

PAYING THE PIPER.

The practitioners in this court are advocates (D.D.C.L.) or counsel, and proctors or solicitors. The judge and advocates wear in court, if of Oxford, scarlet robes and hoods lined with taffety; and if of Cambridge, white minever and round black velvet caps. The proctors wear black robes and hoods lined with fur.

The College has a good library in civil law and history, bequeathed by an ancestor of Sir John Gibson, judge of the Prerogative Court; and every bishop at his consecration makes a present of books.

After a case has been worked slowly through one of these ecclesiastical courts, it is then transferred to another, and after bowling the cause about for years it is just possible that it will be lost for the suitor. Suits are brought in Doctors' Commons for the most ridiculous and trivial causes, and once a man gets into the Commons, he is made to pay the piper while the sleek, fat proctors, dance right merrily to the music paid for by their unhappy victims. A case in point I will mention. The cause had just been tried in the Archdeacon's Court, at Totness, and from thence an appeal had been sought in the Court at Exeter, thence it went to the Court of Arches, and from there to the Court of Delegates, and after all this fuss and expense, the question in discussion was to know which of two persons had the legal right to hang a hat on a certain peg! This is sober truth, and no exaggeration.

But the great perfection of legal scoundrelism was, in a case where a man, named Russell, whose wife's character had been impugned by a person named Bentham, at Yarmouth, was tried. This gentleman could find no remedy in Common Law for the defamation, so he must needs go to Doctors' Commons and the Ecclesiastical Courts. The Proctor's bill amounted to £700 after the case had gone through several courts, and finally each party had to pay his own costs after the case had been continued six or seven years; the special beauty of Ecclesiastical Courts being, that once a victim brings a suit, he is never allowed to withdraw it until it has gone the rounds of every court, thus giving fees to a score of persons, one-half of whom never hear of the case until they make up their minds to send in a bill for money. Finally, after seven years of this pious warfare, Mr. Russell, being a poor man, was ruined, and his wife's character was not half as good as when he began the suit.

The Prerogative Will Office is, however, the busiest and most interesting place in Doctor's Commons. Wills are always to be found here at half an hour's notice, and generally in a few minutes. They are kept in a fire-proof, strong room. The original wills begin with the year 1483, and the copies date from 1383. The latter are on parchment, strongly bound, with brass clasps. Here I saw the will of Shakespeare, on three folios of paper, each with his signature, and with the inter-lineation in his own handwriting: "I give unto my wife my brown, best bed, with the furniture." There is kept, also, the will of Milton, which was written when the poet was blind, and set aside by a decree of Sir Leoline Jenkins. And I saw alongside of Milton's will, the last testament of the soldier of democracy, Napoleon Bonaparte, made at St. Helena, April, 1821.

In one year 40,000 searches were made here for wills, and 7,000 extracts were made from testaments. There were, also, 5,000 commissions issued for the country. Some of the entries of wills made by the early Monks are beautiful specimens of illumination, the colors remaining fresh to this day.

Let us take a look into the Will Office, and give a glance to one of the most interesting phases of the drama of human life.

THE FORGOTTEN SAILOR.

People are passing rapidly in and out of the narrow court, their bustle alone disturbing the marked quiet of the neighborhood. At the end of the court, we ascend a few steps and open a door, when the scene exhibited in the sketch is before us. All seems hurry and confusion, the solicitors turning over the leaves of bulky volumes and folios at the desks, long practice having taught them to discover at a glance the object of their search; rapidly to and fro move those who are bringing the tomes and taking them back to the shelves where they belong, and as rapidly glide the pens of the numerous copyists who are transcribing or making extracts from wills, in all their little boxes, along both sides of the room.

But as we begin to look a little more closely into the densely packed occupants' faces, we see persons who are certainly not solicitors' clerks, nor officials of Doctor's Commons, but parties whose interests in a worldly point of view may be materially benefited or damaged by the investigations they are ordering to be made.

Even the weather-beaten sailor, whose rugged face one would take to be proof against any fortune, betrays a good deal of sensibility. He has just returned probably from some long voyage, and one can fancy him to have come to Doctor's Commons to see whether the relative, whom the newspapers have informed him is dead, has left him, as he expected, the means to settle down quietly in a little box at Deptford, Greenwich, or Camberwell, or some other sailor's paradise.

He steps up to the box on the right hand as directed, pays his shilling, and gets a ticket, with a direction to the calendar, in which he is to search for the name of his deceased relative. He must surely be spelling every name in that page he has turned over—ah, there it is at last; and now he hurries off, as directed to, with the calendar, to the person pointed out to him as the Clerk of Searches. A volume from one of the shelves is laid before him, the place is found, and there lies the object of his hopes and fears—the great hopeful or threatening will. Line by line his face begins to grow darker—a ghastly grin at last appears—he has not been forgotten—there is a ring perhaps, or five pounds to buy one, or some such trifle; he closes the book with a bang and a curse, and the sailor hurries back to his ship and to storm and danger on the deep, deprived of all the contentment that had so long made him satisfied with his hard lot.

But here is another picture. A lady dressed in a style of the most gorgeous splendor, whose business is of a more important kind than a mere search—she is probably an executrix of a will—and is just leaving the office, when she meets at the door another lady, to whom she makes a low courtesy, with an expression of decided malice on her showy countenance. The successful legatee can be seen in her face, while blank and startled disappointment appears in the other woman's features.

Such is Doctors' Commons—and Such is Life.

[CHAPTER XII.]

THE BOHEMIANS OF LONDON.

OING east through Oxford street, when you get near High Holborn, there is a narrow thoroughfare called Dean street. Turn down this and it will bring you to Carlisle street, a short and dark lane, a street only in name. This short street brings you to Soho Square, famous for its sauces and pickles all over the world from Calcutta to New York.

The neighborhood is a very quiet one, as by its peculiar exits and passages it is cut off from the busiest part of London on either side of it, and leaving the Holborn or Oxford street, with their crowded traffic, shops, busses, and cabs, in a moment you are in this quiet square, with its little dot of green, fresh grass; that seems a relief after the arid business waste which you have just left. Just opposite is Greek street, which leads to St. Martin's lane, where a nest of small dealers in milk, butter, eggs, and groceries herd together, and where the poor, mean chop-houses form a perfect rookery, from which comes the fumes of hot coffee, muffins, mutton chops, and kidneys all the long day. Little dirty, rosy-cheeked children play here in the gutters right merrily all the day through, and the noises of the peddlers' cries, and the joyous mirth of the children "glorious at their games," are the only sounds that break the remarkable stillness of the noonday hour.

When the gray in the sky begins to deepen, and the shades of night fall over and around this quiet square, then the scene changes, and life and bustle and noisy interchange of voices fill the solitary place, which the shabby gentility of the neighborhood cannot repress or keep down. Then the coffee-shops become vocal, the pot-houses are once more vivacious, and streams of thirsty and hungry men and women pour into these places, and come out refreshed with beer and replete with cheap but plenteous food. This neighborhood is savory with macaroni and oils, betokening the presence of the Italian element, who flock to Soho Square in great numbers when they arrive in London. There are "albergos" and wine-shops where you may obtain a quarter of a fowl for ninepence, and a bottle of Marsala, which is only a darker and stronger sherry under another name, and you can get olives and brandied cherries, at dessert, for a few pence. The women who attend in these places are fat, jolly-looking persons, with rounded forms, finely shaped faces, and magnificent black hair, done up in massive bands, and they sit many hours of the day knitting on low stools at the doors of these foreign-looking inns. The customers who frequent these places are wealthy organ-grinders, men who cast figures from potters' clay and plaster of Paris, musicians and porters in the Italian warehouses along the docks, medical students, Bohemians, and the riff raff in general. One of the clay figure men wanted to sell me a well executed full length figure of Thackeray, with his spectacled, kindly face, at 7s. 6d., for which I was asked a guinea in Drury Lane, the workmanship and material being fully as good in every essential.

In the heart of Soho Square is this little dark Carlisle street, and in the centre of Carlisle street is a small, dingy public-house, called the "Carlisle Arms," which is one of the resorts of the Bohemians of London.

COCKERELL'S LODGINGS.

This old place has been from time immemorial frequented by them, and here I was brought one cool September evening by the head clerk of one of the leading publishing houses of London. This clerk was still a young man, but he had the best knowledge of books and general literature that I have ever found in a man of his position. He knew at a glance how much a book would bring, who wrote it, when it was published, and how many copies were to be got, were they to be dug out of the mustiest book-stall in London. He had a familiar acquaintance with all the members of that strange tribe of litterateurs who contribute to the magazines and weekly and daily press of this the greatest newspaper city in the world. He knew who it was who wrote the last flash novel, how much he got for it, and whether he had drunk the proceeds or not. Every first and fourth class reporter in London, all the dramatic witlings and punsters, the great short-hand guns of the House of Commons, the book reviewers, and the dramatic and musical critics, were to him everyday acquaintances, and they all in turn paid him a cordial respect for his universal knowledge. I shall call him Cockerell, this marvel of booksellers' clerks.

At 8 o'clock I called at Cockerell's lodgings, which were in Rupert street, near Holborn. He lived quietly in a nice, cosy room, filled with rare and curious editions of the works of which he was most fond, and everything around the place, from the brass andirons to the quaint clock in the chimney place, betokened a steady-going, well-informed man. The "Newgate Calendar," "Cruikshank's Almanacs," for twenty years, finely illustrated, "The Slang Dictionary," "The Streets and Antiquities of London," "A History of Signboards," "Hansard's Debates," a folio "Shakespeare," "The Heads of the People," illustrated by Kenny Meadows, "Debrett's Peerage," "The Lords and Commons," several volumes of Balzac, a volume with the wills and autographs of the Doges of Venice, "Macaulay's Lays," some of "Sala's Sketches," a bound series of the Saturday Review, and some volumes of "Punch," were among his collection, besides a complete collection of the British plays, and a number of Gilray's sketches, framed, hung from the walls. "Show me a man's library, and I will tell you what he is," somebody has said, and I believe the above works, picked out of a large library, best explain the character of the head clerk who was to be my companion for the night's adventure. Putting on his collar, gloves, and an old slouch-hat, Cockerell and I reached the hall, where the maid-servant, looking suspiciously at the writer, inquired from her master what time he would be home.

"I don't know, Jenny, exactly," said he, "but it will be some time before the cocks crow."

Having arrived at the "Carlisle Arms," we walked in, passing the bar, and found our way through a low passage into a back room about twelve feet wide by fifteen in length. The ceiling was low, and there was no ornament to be seen with the exception of a steel engraving of the Duke of Wellington on horseback, surrounded by a mounted staff, and surveying through a field-glass the broken columns of the first Bonaparte from an elevation on the plain of Waterloo. There were but three persons in the room, which had a round oaken table in the centre, and a quadrangle of wooden benches,—when I entered. My well-informed friend was saluted with hearty greetings by all present, and was asked what he would have to drink. This is an anachronism in English customs, for the people of this tight little island generally allow a friend to pay for his own drink, as a custom which has long ago been endorsed by the best authorities. There is no such folly known here as may be seen in every American public house, where the free and independent electors stand at a bar each hour in every day, treating one and the other with a promiscuous and reckless generosity. But among Bohemians all over the world it is different. If they cannot pay for a drink, they will call for it and treat each other with a liberality which is, to say the least, a most praiseworthy trait.

A PINT OF COOPER.

I forgot to mention that there were two vases, with faded artificial flowers, on the rusty old chimney-piece, and these flowers seemed to the Bohemians like the waters of an oasis in the desert to a party of Bedouins. All else was a blighted, sandy waste of small talk, tobacco smoke, and weak gin and water. The principal spokesman of the party, who was quite bald-headed and had but two or three teeth, rang the bell behind the door, and presently the pot-boy appeared. In the lowest of London publics the pot-boy waits upon the customers, washes the pewter pots, and cleans the tables with a dish-cloth, for a stipend of ten shillings a week in British coin. The pot-boy had not more than made his appearance when in came the bar-maid, with natural light hair, one of the first bar-maids I had seen in London whose hair was not dyed.

A BOHEMIAN CAROUSE.

The bar-maid surveyed the room and its occupants calmly, then asked for the orders. The pot-boy, feeling that he was only a subordinate, retired in disgust, with his dish-cloth on his left arm. One man called for "sherry weak," another for "gin and water," and a third for a "pint of cooper." The cooper was brought in a metal mug, with hoops girding it, and for this reason, I believe, the mug is called a "cooper." Pretty soon the room began to fill with stray Bohemians, who dropped in one by one and took their seats as if they feared no eviction.

In half an hour there were a dozen present, and the room was so crowded that two of them had to stand up. One or two were dandies, and wore heavy scarfs and pins, and talked French because, forsooth, they had been on the Continent. Some of them were artists on the half score of comic weeklies which are to be seen in the windows of every news-shop in London. Some were wood-engravers, some were painters in a small way, and there were correspondents of the Birmingham, Manchester, and Liverpool papers also present. All were in the literary or artistic line, and a few had been in the gallery of the House of Commons as reporters, doing short-hand work, and there was one really clever artist, who had illustrated books by some of the best authors in England. This man was a little scant of hair on the top of the forehead, and had a light moustache. He had been to many prize-fights, and had gloated over many a frightful murder, through his sketches in the weekly illustrated newspapers. He was a merry, good-natured fellow, with a genuine fund of pleasant anecdote and a liking for Burton ale.

There was another man very quiet in appearance, and wearing a gray mixed sack coat, with his bosom open in the style of Walt Whitman. He puzzled me when I first looked at him, but after a while I found that he was a German by birth, very recondite,—from Lower Prussia, domiciled in London for many years, who had written a work with the mystical title of "Entities of God." None of his intimates had ever even read this book; with the exception of one man, (a dear friend,) who was in his debt, and had honored his friendship so far as to read the preface, but could not get any farther for a different reason from that assigned by the Heidelberg student, who, after reading a work of John Stuart Mill, threw down the book in disgust, saying that "it was too clear;" yet he was respected in this mixed assemblage of topers and clever fellows, because he had written a book that no one could understand. Such is the force of intellect.

There were two Irishmen present who sat in a corner together, drank together, gave each other a light for the pipes which they smoked, and quarreled with a fraternal regard.

THE RADICAL AND CONSERVATIVE.

One was an old man with a grey moustache, an Orangeman, who had been in America in the old days when Virginia and South Carolina ruled the Senate of the republic, and since then he had been a correspondent by turns for some of the London newspapers abroad, and again a literary hack for the shabby sheets that are read in the obscure holes of the city. His friend was a much younger man, full blooded, and a thorough Irish Nationalist, although he disclaimed Fenianism. He was a reporter, and had an extensive knowledge of his professional associates on the London press. His name was Fitzgerald, and his venerable friend was known as Dawson. The German of the profound intellect was called Meyer, or Herr Meyer. The names of the French dandies I have forgotten; they were but poor specimens, and did not furnish any entertainment during the evening.

There were two reporters of the morning press at this feast of reason and flow of beer, but they did not contribute much amusement to the party, as they were discussing the respective rates of salaries on the Daily Bludgeon and the Morning Budget during the entire evening's conversation. The two Irishmen were perpetually at loggerheads about politics, "Fitz" being a Radical, Dawson a Conservative Churchman of the old school. Occasionally they gave each other the lie, and then I expected to see them striking out at each other; but in three minutes after they would vow eternal friendship, and shake each other's hand with great warmth. The name of the artist was Sullivan. Sullivan hailed the head clerk with great feeling, and as he sat down there was a drink all around.

"Well, old Cockerell," said the vivacious Fitz, "how is Slogger's book getting on with yeer people?"

"It 'ill soon be published. We have it on hand now, and expect to sell twenty thousand copies. The pictures will sell it alone, although, I must say, Slogger's text is very good for his subject. We are getting all the trade now. Every fellow that thinks he can scribble comes to us, and the big fish are also in our net. Murray must have been cut up pretty bad to find Gladstone leaving him and going to McMillan. It all comes of having a magazine. A publishing house that can command the columns of a well circulated magazine can print as many books as they like, and, what is better, they can sell them. Our house does the heavy flash business, and it pays well. Old 'Swoslam' is a keen blade, and is always on the lookout for a novelty. McMillan has sold, I'm told, four editions of their magazines having the Byron article. Well, old fellow, how are you (to Sullivan), and what are you doing?"

"I'm fhoine, me dharling, and me appetite is just as good as ever, but me powers of dhrinking are failing fast. As for what I'm doing, Miss Sthabber has got me to make pictures for her new novel, which she got a hundred and fifty pounds for in the 'Thames Mag.,' and now she is going to publish it in book form. It's a nice title she has for it, 'The Red Divil of the Yallow Mountin; or, the Ghost of the Place de Greve.' I sometimes think the woman is going crazy whin she sinds for me in the mornin' to talk to her about her new books down Brompton way, where she lives. I generally find her in bed with a decanther of brandy, a pot of coffee, and a square box of cigarettes by her bedside on a table. 'Soolivan,' said she, 'I want two Convent scenes in the sixth chapter; a rocky pass, with a skeleton standing in the middle of the gap, his grisly arms outstretched, for the ninth chapter; and in the fifteenth chapter you must give me a powerful tableoo where the chief butler is discovered in the room off the banquetting hall poisoning his misthresses's wine.

"'For the details I'll trust to your powerful Irish imagination; and now, Soolivan, you low blackguard, turn your back and help yourself to the brandy while I'm putting on me wrapper, as I don't wan't you to be making fancy pictures of 'Vanus going to the Bath,' or any such gammon as that, for pot-houses, with the great female London novelist—I believe that's what they call me, isn't it, Soolivan?—as an original.' Indade, I think that Miss Sthabber is more nor half mad, but I must say that she is the divil at plots and incidents, and she drinks excellent brandy."

THE SHORT-HAND REPORTER.

"Stabber is a clever woman," said Cockerell, the head clerk. "Whackem & Co., Paternoster Row, sold thirty-two thousand copies of her 'Blue-Eyed Demon' in three months, and she refused £950 for it from an Edinburgh house, so Whackem must have given her more. By the way, do any of your fellows know the name of this man who has written the last new novel 'Girded with Steel?' I fancy he must be one of your newspaper fellows, because he has a lot of stuff in it about 'leader writing,' 'my note-book,' 'two columns is more than earthquake should be allowed in a newspaper,' and there are, besides, the details of editorial life which an outsider could not know. Who is he?"

"Oh, he's a young reporter on the Omniverous Clam, but I could not give his name on a pint of honor," said Fitz. "He's a clever chap, though, and will make his way. He's only been two years in the professhion, and he's the best short-hand man on the Clam now, so maybe you know who I mean now."

"It's Billingsgate," said one.

"No, it's Gravelly," said another.

"Boys, ye are not right; it's Goby, and he's five hundred and fifty pounds the betther of it, which is a nice little lump for a reporther who gets five guineas a week, and has to work like a horse for that in the session," said Fitzgerald.

"Reporthers have harder work now then they had whin I first went in the Gallery," said old Dawson. "Me father, as yez know, boys, was a reporther before me; and I might say it runs in the family. Ah! thim were good times, boys, when the ould man did his short-hand wurruk. He knew all the great reporthers of the day; and fine fellows they were, too. There was William Radcliffe, the husband of the woman who wrote all the bloodthirsty novels. Radcliffe was a mimry reporther, and he'd go to the House and sit the debates out, and nivir take a note at all, at all. Then he'd go to the office and dictate two different articles at a time to the juniors who took it all down, and out it came, sphick-and-sphan, in the morning, without a flaw.

"Then there was another grate fellow, ould Billy Woodfall, who had a paper of his own called the Diary; and that was before the House allowed the reporthers to take notes during the debates. They used to call him "Mimory Woodfall," because he'd never forget anything that he had heard; and when strangers would come from the country to visit the House the first questions they would ask would be, 'Which is Woodfall?' 'Which is the Sphaker?' Me fawther told me many a story about him. He had a fashion of bringing hard-boiled eggs with him, which he carried in his hat, and whin he came to the House he'd take off his hat carefully, put it between his knees, take the eggs out, keeping his head well down for fear the Sargint-at-Arrums would see him eating, and then he'd brake the shells and eat the eggs with as great relish as if they were game pies. A reporther on an opposition paper wanted to play a joke on Billy one night, and when he laid his hat down he took the two hard-boiled eggs out and put two in the hat that had nivir been boiled at all, and when Billy wint to crack the shells the yoke sphattered all over his breeches, bedad, so it did. Billy nivir forgave the joke until the day of his death. Woodfall did all his own reporthin', and the Diary did well for a time, until the Morning Chronicle started in opposition, with Perry at the head of it. Perry hired a lot of reporthers to take notes of the debates and write them out, and by the time that Woodfall had his notes written out, the Chronicle was selling in every sthreet in London; and that was what took all the wind out of poor Billy's sails."

"Perry was a foine reporther himself, and when the House was thrying Admiral Palliser and Admiral Keppel for their loives, Perry'd send in eight or ten colyums every week of the debates, without any assistance; but, bedad, we wouldn't think much of that now. Woodfall used to say, in a joking way, that 'he had been fined by the House of Commons, confined by the House of Lords, fined and confined by the Coort of King's Binch, and indicted in the Ould Bailey,' for his offinces. Oh, them were foine times, bedad, whin you could go in and get yer nice chop and yer glass of sherry, or a sweet little sthake fresh from the rump, and maybe have the Juke of Wellington and George Canning sitting at the same table wid ye; and they'd be at the chops and sthakes too."

A SONG FROM THE SPEAKER.

"Dawson, me boy, tell us about Mark Supple and the Quaker, and take another jugfull of beer to wet yer whistle," said the artist, who had just withdrawn his nose from the pewter pot which he was now sadly contemplating in its mournful emptiness.

"Oh! is it Supple ye mane, Jimmy. I'll tell ye all about him, yer riverence, and I'll take a pint of sthout to strinthin' me nerves afore I begin. Ye see," said Dawson, after he had taken a long pull at the mug, "Mark was fondher of a joke than he was of his breakfast. He was a good reporther, too, and liked a little dhrop now and thin, like more of his counthrymin, God forgive thim. One night Mark was in the gallery reporthing for the Morning Chronicle, when Mr. Addington was the Sphaker. Mark was a big, raw-boned native of sweet Tipperary, and was fond of hearing a song at all times. He used to take a glass of wine or two in Bellamy's, and thin go up in the gallery and take out his note-book and whack away with the pot-hooks and colophons. Mark was a foine scholar and a janius. They say he'd dhress up a mimbir's speech, and put retterick and flowers and poethry into a dull six-mile oration, and it used to puzzle the mimbirs so that they would hardly know their own words again. Of course, they all liked Mark, and he sometimes took a good dale of freedom with thim.

"He had a mighthy quare style intirely with him, and an English mimbir who was fond of a joke, like Mark's self, said that Mark's style of reporthin' was 'a mixture of the hyperbolical, with a vane of Orientalism and a dash of the bog-throtter.' They are quick enough, God knows, to sneer about the poor bog-throtters. Well, this night was a quiet one in the House. A number of the mimbirs were asleep, some were nodding, some were at their dinners; and when Mark looked down from the gallery the Sphaker, Mr. Addington, had nothing to do, and there was a silence in the House so that you might have heard a pin dhrop. All at once Mark called out in a reckless loud voice:

"'A song from Mr. Sphaker.'

"You can imagine the horror of Mr. Addington as he stood up, his tall, thin figure stretched to its full linth, and his peevish eyes scanning the House from top to bottom. Every one roared out laughing, and William Pitt had the tears sthraming down his ould, withered cheeks. After a while the House recovered its gravity, or rather its stupidity, and the Sarjint-at-Arrums began his search for the man who had hallooed in the sacred place. He went up among the reporthers, who all knew the offindhir; but none of the boys would tell on Mark, who was well liked; and, bedad, the Sarjint-at-Arrums was bursting his skin with rage. Seeing that he could not get any information, he turned to Mark, who was looking as solemn as a toomstone, and asked him if he knew who had called for a song.

"Mark purtended that he was very busy with his pencils, and, nivir sayin' a wurd, pointed his finger to a fat Quaker who sat asleep, two or three seats off, with his hands clasped quietly over the pit of his stomach. The Quaker was seized in a minute, and given into the custody of the House, vainly declaring his innocence, and was kept in confinement two hours, until Mark, in a manly way, acknowledged his crime, and was put in the Quaker's place, to meditate on his foolishness. He was brought to the Bar of the House thin, and let off, whin he promised to do betther in the future, and nivir call upon the Sphaker for another song."

"Tell us about Supple and Wilberforce, Dawson," said Fitzgerald to the veteran.

"Oh, that wasn't Supple that played the thrick on Wilberforce: that was Pether Finnerty," said Dawson. "Pether was on the Chronicle; and one night, when the House was full of business, Pether sat drinking too long in Bellamy's and lost his turn. When he got into the House, he asked some of the boys, who had been sphakin'? One of them who had been present told Pether that Wilberforce had been sphakin' for an hour.

"'What did he say?' says Pether.

"'Take out yer book, and I'll give it to ye, me boy, in a jiffy,' says the other. Pether was so far gone that he would have made Wilberforce say anything, however ridiculous, and when the other reporther began as follows, he did not see the joke:

"'Potatoes make men healthy, vigorous, and active; but, what is still more in their favor, they make men tall'—

"Did he say that, the jewel?" said Pether, who was touched with this tribute to the esculent of his native isle.

THE BEAUTIFUL POTATO.

"I'll give you my word, he said it,—'and when I look around this house, and see before me such fine, vigorous specimens of Irish manhood, all reared on the potato, and think of my own stunted, weak figure and attenuated frame, I must always regret and lament that my parents did not foster me on that fragrant and genial vegetable, the beautiful potato.'"

"'Oh! murther!' said Pether; 'but Wilberforce is the fine fellow to use such poetical language;' and off he wint to the Chronicle office to write out his notes. And the next morning there it was—the thribute to the potato and all the rest of it—and all London was laughing at Wilberforce, and every one believed that he was drunk when he spoke the words. The next day Pether was brought before the bar of the House to stand his trial, and Wilberforce rose and said:

"'Mr. Speaker and Gentlemen: Were I capable of using such language as was attributed to me in a morning journal, in its reports of yesterday's debates, I would be unworthy of the attention which I now claim from this House and unfit to occupy a seat in this honorable body. Rather would I be worthy of a straight-jacket in a lunatic asylum, where I might learn better sense of the dignity of this House.' Pether was let off, like Mark Supple, and he was ever afterwards very careful in his reports. But the joke stuck to Wilberforce's coat for many a long day afther."

By this time the greater part of the Bohemians had left for their homes, and after a song and a few more stories from Fitz and Sullivan, the erratic band broke up, and the tap-room was deserted. Such was the scene—a singular one—which occurs in the old dingy Public House night after night among the wandering journalists and penny-a-liners of the London press and their associates of kindred professions. The old, haunted Public could tell many a ludicrous story of a like kind had it a tongue to speak—of the amusing, wandering, never-do-well Free Lances, of the Press, who find food and clothing, and a good deal to drink, by their ephemeral contributions to the journalistic and light literature of England's metropolis.

In addition to the "Carlisle Arms" there is another resort of the higher class of writers, authors, and artists, in the neighborhood of the theatres, and this place is known to those who frequent it as the "Albion." At the Albion, there is an excellent restaurant, and well-cooked viands, and wines of the best quality, may be obtained there at reasonable prices. Choice little dinners, illuminated by wit and humor, are given here by journalists to each other.

[CHAPTER XIII.]

TOWER, PALACE, AND PRISON.

HE sun has risen and set for a thousand years on its gray walls; the grime and verdure of a thousand years have cemented its hoary stones; nations have grown and decayed; dynasties have been founded and wrecked irretrievably; a New World has been discovered, and inventive genius has almost changed the face of the earth and yet the Tower of London, (cemented by the blood of beasts, as the fable has it,) which saw the beginning and progress of these changes, still endures, and will no doubt endure to the end of time.

TOWER OF LONDON.

It seems a long, long time ago, that bleak Christmas day of the year 800, when the Pope of Rome placed the Iron Crown of Lombardy upon the annointed head of Charlemagne under the dome of St. Peter's, amid the huzzas of the multitude of Frankish warriors and barons who witnessed the sacred ceremony, and yet far back in that nearly barbarous age, the chroniclers tell us in their scholastic volumes of the monasteries, that a Tower existed in London and on the same spot where now the wardens patrol in their red tunics and explain historical conundrums to dull Cockneys.

And some of the chroniclers go farther back and profess to believe that the Tower is as old as the Roman occupation of Britain, and do not hesitate to say that Julius Cæsar, who has been accused of so many good and bad deeds, was the founder of the old forbidding pile of masonry.

Be that as it may, it is old enough to have earned a lasting infamy, only once deserved in history by another grim fortress,—its twin brother and accomplice in blood and oppression, the Bastile Of Paris. That foul excresence on the fair face of the Earth has been swept away by the stormy sea of a people's vengeance, while the Tower of London still remains as a lesson of tradition, to tell of the crimes that God has permitted kings and dwellers in high places to perpetrate against the people, who have suffered and died and made no sign.

The charge to see the Tower of London is only sixpence in these days, and for a sixpence a visitor may see everything; dungeon and trap door, axe and scaffold, crown jewels and prison bars, the cages and the dungeons and graves of those who suffered and died here during the long night of centuries,—and all this for a paltry sixpence.

Amid the tramp and thunder of a hundred battles it has stood unshaken; it is too strong for the destroying hand of man; and time, as if in reverence, has trod lightly as he has stepped over its massive walls.

I saw its towers; four of them, standing up against the sky, bellshaped and surmounted by weather vanes, one day from London Bridge, and having a curiosity to see a structure, which even more than Westminster Abbey is coeval with authentic history, I walked slowly to Tower Hill, passed along the firm drawbridge, paid a sixpence and entering under the spiked portcullis, I found myself in the Lion Tower which stands at the corner of the moat or Tower ditch facing the Thames.

DELIVERING THE KEYS.

The extent of the Tower within the walls is twelve acres and five roods. The exterior circuit of the ditch—now a garden, or rather an apology for a garden—surrounding it, is three thousand one hundred and fifty-six feet. On the river side is a broad and handsome wharf or graveled terrace, separated by the ditch from the fortress and mounted with sixty pieces of ordnance, which are fired on the royal birthdays, or in celebration of any remarkable event. From the wharf into the Tower is an entrance by a drawbridge. Near it is a cut or short canal connecting the river with the ditch, having a water entrance called the "Traitor's Gate,"—State Prisoners having been formerly conveyed by this passage to Westminster, where the two Houses of Parliament now sit, for trial. Over the Traitor's Gate is a building containing the waterworks which supply the interior with water.

Within the walls of the fortress are several streets. The principal buildings which it contains are the White or principal Tower, the ancient Chapel of St. Peter-ad-Vincula, the Ordnance-Office, the Record Office, the Jewel's House, the Stone Armory, the Grand Storehouse, and the Small Armory, besides the house belonging to the Constable of the Tower and other officers, the barracks of the garrison, and the sutler's shops, commonly used by the soldiers. It is generally a regiment of the line which serves as a garrison for the tower.

The principal entrance to the Tower is to the west. It consists of two gates on the outside of the ditch, a stone bridge built over the ditch, and a gate at the end of the bridge.

These gates are opened every morning with a strange, and for the Nineteenth century, a very fantastical ceremony.

The Yeoman-Porter with a sergeant and six men march to the Governor's house for the keys.

Having received them, he proceeds to the innermost gate, and passing that, it is again shut. He then opens the three outermost gates at each of which the guards rest their firelocks while the keys pass and repass. The gravity with which the guards perform this ceremony, and the nice precision with which they manoeuvre, is calculated to make everybody but an Englishman laugh.

On the return of the Yeoman-Porter to the innermost gate, he calls to the warden on duty to take the Queen's keys, when they open the gates, and the keys are placed in the warden's hall.

At night the same formality is used in shutting the gates; and as the Yeoman-Porter and the guard, return with the keys to the Governor's house the main guard which, with its officers, is under arms, challenges him saying:

"Who comes there?"