GEORGE AUGUSTUS SALA,
THE AUTHOR OF “TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK.”

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

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

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

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

PREFACE.

TO AUGUSTUS MAYHEW.

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

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

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

“Awake, my Mayhew: leave all meaner things

To low ambition and the pride of kings.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let Fancy guess the rest.—Buckingham.

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

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

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

GEORGE AUGUSTUS SALA.

CONTENTS.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The city now doth like a garment wear

The beauty of the morning....

Never did Sun more beautifully steep

In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill.

Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep.

The River glideth at its own sweet will;

Dear God! the very houses seem asleep,

And all that mighty Heart is lying still.”

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

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

“Spend Herring first, save Salt Fish last,

For Salt Fish is good when Lent is past.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BILLINGSGATE MARKET: CARRYING FISH ASHORE.

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

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

BILLINGSGATE: THE FISH SOLD BY AUCTION.

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

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

“O! ’tis my delight on a Friday night,

When sprats they isn’t dear,

To fry a couple of score or so

Upon a fire clear.

“They eats so well, they bears the bell

From all the fish I knows:

Then let us eat them while we can,

Before the price is rose.”

(Chorus—ad libitum) “O! ’tis my delight,” &c.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“So the ‘Times’ takes an interest in the case of Geils;

I wish it would take some in my eels!”

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

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

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

“Pendennis.”

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

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

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

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

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

PUBLICATION OF THE “TIMES” NEWSPAPER: INSIDE THE OFFICE.

PUBLICATION OF THE “TIMES” NEWSPAPER: OUTSIDE THE OFFICE.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

COVENT GARDEN MARKET: THE WEST END.

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

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

COVENT GARDEN MARKET: EARLY BREAKFAST STALL.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“O! let us love our occupations,

Bless the squire and his relations,

Live upon our daily rations,

And always know our proper stations.”[2]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PARLIAMENTARY TRAIN: INTERIOR OF A THIRD CLASS CARRIAGE.

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

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

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

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

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

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

EIGHT O’CLOCK A.M.: ST. JAMES’S PARK.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EIGHT O’CLOCK; OPENING SHOP.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No one is so accursed by fate,

No one so utterly desolate,

But some heart, though unknown,

Responds unto his own.”

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

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

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

“When you tork

You are like roast pork.”

Or,

“Say, luvley chine,

Will you be mine.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nor must we linger, either, beneath William Rufus’s carved roof-tree, so ingeniously heightened, and otherwise transmogrified, by Sir Charles Barry and his satellites. This is a different Westminster Hall to that which I knew in my childhood, just after the great fire of ’34. There was no great stained glass window at the end then, no brazen Gothic candelabra, no golden House of Lords in the corridor beyond, where the eye is dazzled with the gilding, the frescoes, the scarlet benches and rich carpets, and where the Lord High Chancellor sits on the woolsack, like an allegory of Themis in the midst of a blaze of fireworks. In my time, the keeper of her Majesty’s conscience and the Great Seal sat in a panelled room, like a dissenting chapel. Let us hasten forth from the Great Hall, for it is full of memories. I spoke of famous footsteps on the Mall, St. James’s; how many thousand footsteps—thousands?—millions rather, have been lost here in fruitless pacing up and down! Westminster Hall is always cool: well it may be so; the dust was laid and the air refrigerated centuries since by the tears and the sighs of ruined suitors. What a wondrous place the old hall is! what reminiscences it conjures up—they will not be laid in the Red Sea—of the gorgeous banquets of the Plantagenets, of the trials of Laud and Strafford, and of Laud and Strafford’s master; of Mr. Jonathan Wild’s ancestor walking the hall with a straw in his shoe; of poor little Lady Jane Grey and Guildford Dudley, her husband, standing their trial here on a velvet-covered platform in the midst of the hall, for treason to Bloody Mary. Did they ever cut a state prisoner’s head off in Westminster Hall, I wonder, as they did Mary Stuart’s in the hall at Fotheringay? The place is large enough.

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

Once again I stand within the precincts of the Queen’s Bench; but where is my Lord Owlett, where the bewigged barristers and the jury-box with the “twelve honest men” within wiping their semperperspiring foreheads? I am standing in the centre of a vast gravelled area, bounded on the south side by a brick wall of tremendous height, and crowned by those curious arrangements of geometrical spikes known as chevaux de frise. To the north there is a range of ordinary-looking houses, the numbers of which are painted very conspicuously in white characters on a black ellipse above the doors, about which, moreover, there is this peculiarity, that they are always open. If you peep through the yawning portals, you will see that the staircases are of stone, and that the roofs of the rooms on the ground-floor are vaulted. There are no barred windows, no bolts, bars, or grim chains apparent, though from the back windows of these houses there is a pleasant prospect of another high wall, equally surmounted with chevaux de frise. When the spider has got the fly comfortably into his web, and has satisfied himself that he can’t get out, I daresay that he does not take the trouble to handcuff him. In the midst of this gravelled area stands a pump, known as the “Dolphin;” to the right of this institution, and somewhat in the back-ground, is a great square building, called the “State House.” The rooms here are double the size to those in the houses I have alluded to, and are accorded by the governor of the place as a matter of favour to those inmates of the—well, the college—who can afford to fill them with a sufficient quantity of furniture. Close to the State House is a strong iron gateway, through which the guardians of the college have a strong disinclination to allow the under-graduates to pass, unless they be furnished with a certain mysterious document called “a discharge.” The guardians themselves are ruddy men with very big keys; but they seem on the very best terms with the gentlemen whose intended exercise outside the walls they feel compelled (doubtless through solicitude for their precious health) to debar, and are continually bidding them “good morning” in the most affable manner; it being also one of their idiosyncrasies to rub their noses with the handles of the big keys while going through the salutation. In days not very remote there were certain succursals, or chapels of ease, to the college, in the shape of dingy tenements in the borough of Southwark, extending as far as the Elephant and Castle; and in these tenements, which were called the “Rules,” such collegians as were in a position to offer a fantastic guarantee entitled a “Bail Bond,” were permitted to dwell, and thence they wrote letters to their friends and relations, stating that the iron was entering into their souls, and that they were languishing—well, never mind where—in college. These “rules” were abolished in the early years of her present Majesty’s reign; and at the same time a stern Secretary of State prohibited the renewal of a notable saturnalia called “a Mock Election,” of which no less celebrated an artist than Haydon painted a picture (he was himself a collegian at the time), which was bought, for considerably more than it was worth, by King George IV. The saturnalia was fast falling into desuetude by itself; but the Home Secretary also interfered to put a stop to the somewhat boisterous conviviality which had reigned among those collegians who had money, from time immemorial, and which had converted the Queen’s Bench into a den of the most outrageous and disgraceful dissipation and revelry. Under the present not very stringent regulations (considering what a carcere duro is, the other alma mater of Whitecross Street, to say nothing of the hideous place called Horsemonger Lane), the collegians are restricted to the consumption of one quart of beer—which they may have just as strong as ever they like—or one imperial pint of wine, per diem, at their option; yet it is a very curious fact, that no collegian who was flush of cash was ever found to labour under any difficulty in providing sufficient refreshment for his friends when he gave a wine party in his room. The payment of rent is unknown in the college; and it is but rarely that the time-honoured system of “chummage,” or quartering two or mere collegians in one room, and allowing the richest to pay his companions a stipulated sum to go out and find quarters elsewhere, is resorted to. As a rule, the collegian on his arrival, after spending one night in a vaulted apartment close to the entrance, and which bears a strong resemblance to the Gothic vault described in “Rookwood”—an apartment known as the “receiving ward”—has allotted to him, by solemnly-written ticket, a whitewashed chamber of tolerable size, moderately haunted by mice, and “passably” infested by fleas. Straightway there starts up, as it were from the bowels of the earth, a corpulent female rubicund in countenance, tumbled in garments, and profuse in compliments, assuring him that he is the very “Himage of the Markis of Scatterbrass, which his aunt let him out by composing with his creditors,” or “Capting Spurbox, of the Hoss Guards, as ’ad champagne hevery mornin’, and went through the court payin’ nothink.” She, for a small weekly stipend—say, five shillings—agrees to furnish your room; and in an astonishingly short space of time you find the bare cube transformed into a sufficiently comfortable bed-room and sitting-room. For eighteenpence a week extra you may have a double green baize door with brass nails, like a verdant coffin, and white dimity curtains to your windows, with real tassels. In the train of the stout tumbled female, there always follows a gaunt woman of no particular age, with ropy hair, a battered bonnet, and scanty garments apparently nailed to her angular form, who expresses, with many curtsies, her desire to “do for you.” Don’t be alarmed; she simply means that for three or four shillings a week she will clean your room, boil your kettle, and bring up the dinner, which has been cooked for you in the common kitchen of the college. She, too, has an acolyte, a weazened old man in a smock frock and knee shorts (though I think that he must be dead or have left college by this time[3]) who for a shilling a week will make your boots shine like mirrors; who resides here, and has resided here for many years, because he can’t or won’t pay thirty pounds, and who is reported to be worth a mint of money. So here the collegian lives, and makes as merry as he can under adverse circumstances. The same tender precautions adopted by the authorities of the college to prevent the unnecessary egress of those in statu pupillari, are enforced to preserve a due state of morality among them. There is a chapel, as there is an infirmary, within the walls; the lady collegians, of whom there is always a small number in hold, are kept in jealous seclusion. Dicing and card-playing are strictly prohibited, and contumacious contravention of the rules involves the probability of the recalcitrant student being immured in a locus penitentiæ called the “Strong Room.” There he is kept for four and twenty hours, without tobacco. Horrible punishment! This is in the college attached to her Majesty’s Bench. Pshaw! Why should I beat about the Bench, or the bush, any longer, or even endorse the quibble adopted by those collegians who wish to have their letters addressed to them genteelly, of “No. 1, Belvidere Place?” That which I have been describing is a debtors’ jail—the Queen’s Prison, in fact.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Happy, happy, happy pair!

None but the brave,

None but the brave,

None but the brave, deserve the fair.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

NOON: THE JUSTICE-ROOM AT THE MANSION HOUSE.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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