S A U N T E R I N G S I N A N D A B O U T
L O N D O N.

LONDON:
J. WERTHEIMER AND CO., PRINTERS,
CIRCUS-PLACE, FINSBURY.

SAUNTERINGS IN AND ABOUT
LONDON.

BY
MAX SCHLESINGER.
THE ENGLISH EDITION
BY
OTTO WENCKSTERN.
LONDON:
NATHANIEL COOKE, MILFORD HOUSE, STRAND.
——
1853.

PREFACE
TO THE ENGLISH EDITION.

PREFACES, generally speaking, are pleadings, in which authors, anticipating public censure, and well knowing how richly they deserve it, adduce sundry reasons why their books are not shorter or longer, and altogether different from the volumes which then and there they bring into the market.

I need not make any such excuses, for I did not write for an English public, nor did I ever pretend to popularity in England. The “Saunterings” were intended for the profit and amusement of my German countrymen; and I must say I was not a little pleased and surprised with the very flattering reception which my book experienced at the hands of the English critics. Their favourable opinion, which they so emphatically and—I am selfish enough to go the whole length of the word—so ably expressed, has probably caused the production of the book in an English dress. The critics, therefore, must bear the responsibility, if the general public should happen to condemn these “Saunterings,” as “weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable,” and shelve them accordingly.

Max Schlesinger.

London, October, 1853.

CONTENTS.

SAUNTERINGS IN AND ABOUT LONDON.

CHAPTER I.

IN WHICH THE READER IS INTRODUCED TO SOME OF THE AUTHOR’S FRIENDS.—THE ENGLISHMAN’S CASTLE.

“ARE you aware, honorable and honored Sir John,” said Dr. Keif, as he moved his chair nearer to the fire, “are you aware that I am strongly tempted to hate this country of yours?”

“Indeed!” replied Sir John, with a slight elongation of his good-humoured face. “Really, Sir, you are quick of feeling. You have been exactly two hours in London. Wait, compare, and judge. There are thousands of your countrymen in London, and none of them ever think of going back to Germany.”

“And for good reasons too,” muttered the Doctor.

“May I ask,” said Sir John, after a short pause, “what can have shocked you in England within two hours after your arrival?”

“Look at this cigar, sir! It won’t burn, has a bad smell, drops its ashes—and costs four times as much as a decent cigar in my own country. Can you, in the face of this villanous cigar, muster the courage to talk to me of your government and your constitution? This cigar, Sir, proves that your boasted civilisation is sheer barbarity,—that your Cobden is a humbug, and your free-trade a monstrous sham!”

“Does it indeed prove all that? Very well, Sir German,” cried Sir John, with a futile attempt to imitate the martial and inquisitorial bearing of an Austrian gendarme. “Come, show me your passport! Did any one here ask for it? Did they send you to the Guildhall for a carte de sureté? Have the police expelled you from London? It’s either one thing or the other. It’s either sterling liberty and cabbage-leaf cigars, or real Havanas and all the miseries of your police. Take your choice, sir.”

“But I cannot take my choice, sir!” cried Dr. Keif. “They have hunted me as you would hunt a fox, across all their fences of boundary lines to the shores of the ocean, and into the very maw of that green-eyed monster, Sea-sickness, which cast me forth vomiting on this barbarous island, where men smoke lettuce and call it tobacco!” saying which, the doctor flung his cigar into the grate, and sung, “Was ist des Deutschen Vaterland?”

But the reader will most naturally ask, Who is this comical doctor, and who is Sir John?

To which I make reply—they are two amiable and honest men who met on the Continent years ago, and who, after a long separation, met again in the heart of London, in Guildford-street, Russell-square.

Dr. Keif is an Austrian and a journalist. There is good in all, but none are all good. Dr. Keif makes no exception to the common rule. He was so far prejudiced as to write a batch of very neat Feuilletons, in which he asserted that the Croats did not altogether conduct themselves with grace at the sacking of Vienna, and that the Bohemian Czechs are not the original race which gave birth to all the nations of the earth. He denied also that German literature and science have ever been fostered by the Servians; he alleged that Göthe had done more for the advancement of science than the twenty-first battalion of the Royal and Imperial Grenadiers, and he was abandoned enough to avow his opinion that a bad government is worse than a good one. On account of these very objectionable prejudices, the Doctor was summoned forthwith to depart from Leipzig in Saxony, where he lived, and proceed to Vienna, there to vindicate his doctrines or submit to a paternal chastisement. But the Doctor objected to the fate of John Huss; perhaps his mind, corrupted with German literature, was unable to appreciate the charms of a military career in the ranks of the Austrian army. Dr. Keif left Leipzig with all possible secresy; nor could he be induced to return, even by the taunts of the official Vienna Zeitung, which justly accused him of cowardice, since he preferred an ignominious flight to a contest with only 600,000 soldiers, twelve fortresses, half a million of police officers, and the “peinliche Halsgerichts Ordnung” of the late Empress Maria Theresa. Whether Dr. Keif lacks courage or not, and all other traits of his character will be sufficiently shown in the course of the Wanderings through London, which we propose to make in his company.

Dr. Keif and the author live in the house of Sir John ——, a full-blown specimen of the old English gentleman, and one worthy to be studied and chronicled as a prototype of his countrymen. This house of ours is the centre of our rambles, the point from which we start and to which we return with the experiences we gathered in our excursions. And since an English fireside and an English home are utter strangers to the most ideal dreams of the German mind, we propose commencing our Wanderings through London with a voyage of discovery through all the rooms and garrets of our own house.

At the first step a German makes in one of the London streets, he must understand that life in England is very different from life in Germany. Not only are the walls of the houses black and smoky, but the houses do not stand on a level with the pavement. A London street is in a manner like a German high-road, which is skirted on either side with a deep ditch. In the streets of London the houses on either side rise out of deep side areas. These dry ditches are generally of the depth of from six to ten feet, and that part of the house, which with us would form the lower story, is here from ten to twelve feet under-ground. This moat is uncovered, but it is railed in, and the communication between the house door and the street is effected by a bridge neatly formed of masonry.

Every English house has its fence, its iron stockade and its doorway bridge. To observe the additional fortifications which every Englishman invents for the greater security of his house is quite amusing. It is exactly as if Louis Napoleon was expected to effect a landing daily between luncheon and dinner, while every individual Englishman is prepared to defend his household gods to the last drop of porter.

You may see iron railings, massive and high, like unto the columns which crushed the Philistines in their fall; each bar has its spear-head, and each spear-head is conscientiously kept in good and sharp condition. The little bridge which leads to the house-door is frequently shut up; a little door with sharp spikes protruding from it is prepared to hook the hand of a bold invader. And it is said, that magazines of powder are placed under the bridge for the purpose of blowing up a too pertinacious assailant. This latter rumour I give for what it is worth. It is the assertion of a Frenchman, whom the cleanliness of London drove to despair, and who, in the malice of his heart, got satirical.

A mature consideration of the London houses shows, that the strength of the fortification is in exact proportion to the elegance and value of the house and its contents. The poor are satisfied with a wooden stockade; the rich are safe behind their iron chevaux de frise, and in front of palaces, club-houses, and other public buildings, the railings are so high and strong as to engender the belief that the thieves of England go about their business of housebreaking with scaling-ladders, pick-axes, guns, and other formidable implements of destruction.

Every Englishman is a bit of a Vauban. Not only does he barricade his house against two-legged animals of his own species, but his mania for fortification extends to precautions against wretched dogs and cats. To prevent these small cattle from making their way through the railings, the Englishman fills the interstices with patent wire-net work, and the very roofs are frequently divided by means, of similar contrivances. Vainly will cats, slaves of the tender passion, make prodigious efforts to squeeze themselves through those cruel, cruel walls, and vainly do they, in accents touching, but not harmonious, pour their grief into the silent ear of night. Vainly, I say, for an Englishman has little sympathy with “love in a garret”; and as for love on the roof, he scorns it utterly.

We now approach the street-door, and put the knocker in motion. Do not fancy that this is an easy process. It is by far easier to learn the language of Englishmen than to learn the language of the knocker; and many strangers protest that a knocker is the most difficult of all musical instruments.

It requires a good ear and a skilful hand to make yourself understood and to escape remarks and ridicule. Every class of society announces itself at the gate of the fortress by means of the rythm of the knocker. The postman gives two loud raps in quick succession; and for the visitor a gentle but peremptory tremolo is de rigueur. The master of the house gives a tremolo crescendo, and the servant who announces his master, turns the knocker into a battering-ram, and plies it with such goodwill that the house shakes to its foundations. Tradesmen, on the other hand, butchers, milkmen, bakers, and green-grocers, are not allowed to touch the knockers—they ring a bell which communicates with the kitchen.

All this is very easy in theory but very difficult in practice. Bold, and otherwise inexperienced, strangers believe that they assert their dignity, if they move the knocker with conscious energy. Vain delusion! They are mistaken for footmen. Modest people, on the contrary, are treated as mendicants. The middle course, in this, as in other respects, is most difficult.

Two different motives are assigned for this custom. Those who dislike England on principle, and according to whom the very fogs are an aristocratic abuse, assert that the various ways of plying the knocker are most intimately connected with the prejudices of caste. Others again say, that the arrangement is conducive to comfort, since the inmates of the house know at once what sort of a visitor is desiring admittance.

As for me, I believe that a great deal may be said on either side; and I acknowledge the existence of the two motives. But I ought to add, that in new and elegant mansions the mediæval knocker yields its place to the modern bell. The same fate is perhaps reserved for the whole of the remainder of English old-fogyism. There are spots of decay in these much vaunted islands; and now and then you hear the worm plainly as it gnaws its way. I wish you the best of appetites, honest weevil!

We cross the threshold of the house.

Sacred silence surrounds us—the silence of peace, of domestic comfort, doubly agreeable after a few hours’ walk with the giddy turmoil of street life. And with peace there is cleanliness, that passive virtue, the first the stranger learns to love in the English people, because it is the first which strikes his eye. That the English are capital agriculturists, practical merchants, gallant soldiers, and honest friends, is not written in their faces, any more than the outward aspect of the Germans betrays their straight-forwardness, fitful melancholy, and poetic susceptibility. But cleanliness, as an English national virtue, strikes in modest obstrusiveness the vision even of the most unobservant stranger.

The small space between the street-door and the stairs, hardly sufficient in length and breadth to deserve the pompous name of a “hall,” is usually furnished with a couple of mahogany chairs, or, in wealthier houses, with flower-pots, statuettes, and now and then a sixth or seventh-rate picture. The floor is covered with oil-cloth, and this again is covered with a breadth of carpet. A single glance tells us, that after passing the threshold, we have at once entered the temple of domestic life.

Here are no moist, ill-paved floors, where horses and carts dispute with the passenger the right of way; where you stumble about in some dark corner in search of still darker stairs; where, from the porter’s lodge, half a dozen curious eyes watch your unguided movements, while your nostrils are invaded with the smell of onions, as is the case in Paris, and also in Prague and Vienna. Nothing of the kind. The English houses are like chimneys turned inside out; on the outside all is soot and dirt, in the inside everything is clean and bright.

From the hall we make our way to the parlour—the refectory of the house. The parlour is the common sitting-room of the family, the centre-point of the domestic state. It is here that many eat their dinners, and some say their prayers; and in this room does the lady of the house arrange her household affairs and issue her commands. In winter the parlour fire burns from early morn till late at night, and it is into the parlour that the visitor is shewn, unless he happens to call on a reception-day, when the drawing-rooms are thrown open to the friends of the family.

Large folding-doors, which occupy nearly the whole breadth of the back wall, separate the front from the back parlour, and when opened, the two form one large room. The number and the circumstances of the family devote this back parlour either to the purposes of a library for the master, the son, or the daughters of the house, or convert it into a boudoir, office, or breakfast-room. Frequently, it serves no purpose in particular, and all in turn.

These two rooms occupy the whole depth of the house. All the other apartments are above, so that there are from two to four rooms in each story. The chief difference in the domestic apartments in England and Germany consists in this division: in Germany, the members of a family occupy a number of apartments on the same floor or “flat”; in England, they live in a cumulative succession of rooms. In Germany, the dwelling-houses are divided horizontally—here the division is vertical.

Hence it happens, that houses with four rooms communicating with one another are very rare in London, with the exception only of the houses in the very aristocratic quarters. Hence, also, each story has its peculiar destination in the family geographical dictionary. In the first floor are the reception-rooms; in the second the bed-rooms, with their large four-posters and marble-topped wash-stands; in the third story are the nurseries and servants’ rooms; and in the fourth, if a fourth there be, you find a couple of low garrets, for the occasional accommodation of some bachelor friend of the family.

The doors and windows of these garrets are not exactly air-tight, the wind comes rumbling down the chimney, the stairs are narrow and steep, and the garrets are occasionally invaded by inquisitive cats and a vagrant rat; but what of that? A bachelor in England is worse off than a family cat. According to English ideas, the worst room in the house is too good for a bachelor. They say—“Oh, he’ll do very well!” What does a bachelor care for a three-legged chair, a broken window, a ricketty table, and a couple or so of sportive currents? It is exactly as if a man took a special delight in rheumatism, tooth-ache, hard beds, smoking chimneys, and the society of rats, until he has entered the holy state of matrimony. The promise of some tender being to “love, honour, and obey,” would seem to change a bachelor’s nature, and make him susceptible of the amenities of domestic comfort. The custom is not flattering to the fairer half of humanity. It is exactly as if the comforts of one’s sleeping-room were to atone for the sorrows of matrimony, and as if a bachelor, from the mere fact of being unmarried, were so happy and contented a being, that no amount of earthly discomfort could ruffle the blissful tranquillity of his mind!

It was truly comical to see Dr. Keif, when the lady of the house first introduced him to his “own room.”

The politics and the police of Germany had given the poor fellow so much trouble, that he had never once thought of taking unto himself a wife. As a natural consequence of this lamentable state of things, his quarters were assigned him in the loftiest garret of the house. Dismal forebodings, which he tried to smile away, seized on his philosophical mind as he mounted stairs after stairs, each set steeper and narrower than the last. At length, on a mere excuse for a landing there is a narrow door, and behind that door a mere corner of a garret. The Doctor had much experience in the topography of the garrets of German college towns; but the English garret in Guildford Street, Russell Square, put all his experience to shame.

“I trust you’ll be comfortable here,” calls the lady after him, with a malicious smile; for to enter the bachelor’s room, would be a gross violation of the rules and regulations of British decency. And before he can make up his mind to reply, she has vanished down the steep stairs.

And the Doctor, with his hands meekly folded, stands in the centre of his “own room.” “Oh Bulwer, Dickens, and Thackeray”—such are his thoughts—and thou, “Oh Punch, who describest the garrets of the British bachelor! here, where I cease to understand the much-vaunted English comfort, here do I begin to understand your writings! If I did not happen to be in London, I should certainly like to be in Spandau. My own Germany, with thy romantic fortresses and dungeon-keeps, how cruelly hast thou been calumniated!”

There is a knock at the door. It is Sir John, who has come up for the express purpose of witnessing the Doctor’s admiration of his room. He knows that the room will be admired, for to his patriotic view, there is beauty in all and everything that is English. His patriotism revels in old-established abuses, and stands triumphant amidst every species of nuisance. The question, “How do you like your room?” is uttered exactly with that degree of conscious pride which animated the King of Prussia when, looking down from the keep of Stolzenfels Castle, he asked Queen Victoria, “How do you like the Rhine?” And equally eager, though perhaps not quite so sincere, was the Doctor’s reply: “Oh very much! I am quite enchanted with it! It is impossible to lose anything in this room, and the losing things and groping about to find them was the plague of my life at home in the large German rooms. A most excellent arrangement this! Everything is handy and within reach. Bookcase, washstand, and wardrobe—I need not even get up to get what I want—and as for this table and these chairs, I presume that the occasional overturning of an inkstand will but serve to heighten the quaint appearance of this venerable furniture!”

“Of course,” said Sir John, “certainly! this is liberty-hall, sir. But mind you take care of the lamp, and pray do not sit in the draught between the window and the door.”

He does not exactly explain how it is possible to sit anywhere except in the draught, for the limited space of the garret is entirely taken up with draughts. Perhaps it is a sore subject, for, with an uneasy shrug of the shoulders, the worthy Sir John adds:—

“But never mind. Comfortable, isn’t it? And what do you say to the view, eh? Beau-ti-ful! right away over all the roofs to Hampstead!”

He might as well have said to the Peak of Teneriffe; for the view is obstructed with countless chimney-pots looming in the distant future through perennial fog. Sir John is struck with this fact, as, measuring the whole length of the apartment in three strides, he approaches the window to enjoy the glorious view of Hampstead hills. He shuts the window, and is evidently disappointed.

“Ah! never mind! very comfortable, air pure and bracing; very much so; very different from the air in the lower rooms. And—I say, mind this is the ‘escape,’ ” says Sir John, opening a very small door at the side of our friend’s room. “If—heaven preserve us—there should be a fire in the house, and if you should not be able to get down stairs, you may get up here and make your escape over the roofs. That’s what you will find in every English house. Isn’t it practical? eh! What do you say to it?”

The Doctor says nothing at all; he calculates his chances of escape along that narrow ledge of wall, and thinks: “Really things are beginning to look awfully comfortable. If there should happen to be a fire while I am in the house, I hope and trust I shall have time to consider which is worst, to be made a male suttee of, or to tumble down from the roof like an apoplectic sparrow.”

We leave the Doctor between the horns of this dilemma, and descending a good many more stairs than we ascended, we find our way to the haunts of those who, in England, live under-ground—to the kitchen.

Here, too, everything is different from what we are accustomed to in Germany. In the place of the carpets which cover the floors of the upper rooms, we walk here on strong, solid oilcloths, which, swept and washed, looks like marble, and gives a more comfortable aspect to an English kitchen than any German housewife ever succeeded in imparting to the scene of her culinary exercises. Add to this, bright dish-covers of gigantic dimensions fixed to the wall, plated dishes, and sundry other utensils of queer shapes and silvery aspect, interspersed with copper sauce-pans and pots and china, the windows neatly curtained, with a couple of flower-pots on the sill, and a branch of evergreens growing on the wall round them—such is an English kitchen in its modest glory. A large fire is always kept burning; and its ruddy glow heightens the homeliness and comfort of the scene. There is no killing of animals in these peaceful retreats. All the animals which are destined for consumption, such as fowls, ducks, pigeons, and geese, are sold, killed, and plucked in the London shops. When they are brought to the kitchen, they are in such a condition, that nothing prevents their being put to the fire. And then, in front of that fire, turned by a machine, dangle large sections of sheep, calves, and oxen, of so respectable a size, that the very sight of them would suffice to awe a German housewife.

Several doors in the kitchen open into sundry other subterraneous compartments. There is a back-kitchen, whither the servants of the house retire for the most important part of their daily labours—the talking of scandal apropos of the whole neighbourhood. There is also a small room for the washing-up of plates and dishes, the cleaning of knives and forks, of clothes and shoes. Other compartments are devoted to stores of provisions, of coals, and wine and beer. Need I add, that all these are strictly separate?

All these various rooms and compartments, from the kitchen up to Dr. Keif’s garret, are in modern London houses, lighted up with gas—and pipes conducting fresh, filtered, and in many instances, hot water, ascend into all the stories—and there is in all and everything so much of really domestic and unostentatious comfort, that it would be very uncomfortable to give a detailed description of every item of a cause which contributes to the general and agreeable effect. Indeed, such a description is simply impossible. Just let any one try to explain to an Englishman the patriarchal physiognomy of a pot-bellied German stove; or let him try to awake in the Englishman’s wife a feeling, remotely akin to sympathy, for the charming atmosphere of a German “Kneipe”; or make an American understand what the German “Bund” is, and what it is good for. To attempt this were a labour of Sysiphus—toil without a result. Nothing short of actual experience will enable a man to understand and value these national mysteries.

CHAP. II.
Street Life

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE MASSES.—FASHIONABLE QUARTERS.—HOW MR. FALCON SAID GOOD BYE TO HIS CUSTOMERS.—THE CROSSING IN HOLBORN.—MOSES AND SON.—ADVERTISING VANS.—THE PUFFING MANIA, ITS PHASES AND CAUSES.

FROM our house, which is our starting point, we have several large and small streets leading to the south and opening into Holborn, which is one of the great arteries of this gigantic town. Holborn extends to the east to the old prison of Newgate, where it joins the chief streets of the city; in the west it merges into interminable Oxford-street, which leads in a straight line to Hyde Park, and farther on to Kensington Gardens and Bayswater.

“If to this large line of streets,” says Dr. Keif, “you add the Friedrichstrasse of Berlin, you get a line of houses which extend from this day, Monday, into next week, and perhaps a good bit farther. But any one who attempts to walk to the farther end of Oxford-street—I say ‘who attempts,’ for, since the English prefer a constitutional monarchy to an absolute prince, they are surely capable of any act of folly—any one, I say, who performs that insane feat, will find that the Berlin Friedrichstrasse commences at the very last house of Oxford-street.”

For once Dr. Keif is wrong. Where Oxford-street ends, there you enter into a charming English landscape—one green and hilly and altogether captivating. But at the end of the Berlin Friedrichstrasse you enter nothing but the sandy deserts of the Mark.

Holborn is a business street. It has a business character; there is no mistaking it. Shops and plate-glass windows side by side on each hand; costermongers and itinerant vendors all along the pavement; the houses covered with signboards and inscriptions; busy crowds on either side; omnibuses rushing to and fro in the centre of the road, and all around that indescribable bewildering noise of human voices, carriage-wheels, and horses’ hoofs, which pervades the leading streets of crowded cities.

Not all the London streets have this business character. They are divided into two classes: into streets where the roast-beef of life is earned, and into streets where the said roast-beef is eaten. No other town presents so strong a contrast between its various quarters. But a few hundred yards from the leading thoroughfares, where hunger or ambition hunt men on, extend for many miles the quiet quarters of comfortable citizens, of wealthy fundholders, and of landed proprietors, who come to town for “the season,” and who return to their parks and shooting-grounds as soon as her Majesty has been graciously pleased to prorogue Parliament, and with Parliament the season.

These fashionable quarters are as quiet as our own provincial towns. They have no shops; no omnibuses are allowed to pass through them, and few costermongers or sellers of fruit, onions, oysters, and fish find their way into these regions, for the cheapness of their wares has no attractions for the inhabitants of these streets. These streets, too, are macadamized expressly for the horses and carriages of the aristocracy; such roads are more comfortable for all parties concerned, that is to say, for horses, horsemen, and drivers, and the carriages are, moreover, too light to do much harm to the road. In these streets, too, there are neither counting-houses nor public-houses to disturb the neighbourhood by their daily traffic and nightly revelries. Comfort reigns supreme in the streets and in the interior of the houses. The roadway is lined with pavements of large white beautiful flag-stones, which skirt the area railings; it is covered with gravel, and carefully watered, exactly as the broad paths of our public gardens, to keep down the dust and deaden the rumbling of the carriages and the step of the horses. The horses, too, are of a superior kind, and as different from their poorer brethren, the brewer’s, coal-merchant’s, and omnibus horses, as the part of the town in which they eat is different from the part in which the latter work.

In the vicinity of the Parks, or in the outskirts of the town, or wheresoever else such quarters have space to extend, you must admire their unrivalled magnificence. From the velvety luscious green, which receives a deeper shade from the dense dark foliage of the English beech-tree, there arise buildings, like palaces, with stone terraces and verandahs, more splendid, more beautiful, and more frequent than in any town on the continent.

An Englishman is easily satisfied with the rough comforts of his place of business. The counting-houses of the greatest bankers; the establishments of the largest trading houses in the city have a gloomy, heavy, and poverty-stricken appearance. But far different is the case with respect to those places where an Englishman proposes to live for himself and for his family.

A wealthy merchant who passes his days in a narrow city street, in a dingy office, on a wooden stool, and at a plain desk, would think it very “ungenteel” if he or his family were to live in a street in which there are shops. And, although it may appear incredible, still it is true, that in the better parts of the town there are many streets shut up with iron gates, which gatekeepers open for the carriages and horses of the residents or their visitors. These gates exclude anything like noise and intrusion. Grocers, fishmongers, bakers, butchers, and all other kitchen-tradesmen occupy, in the fashionable quarters, the nearest lanes and side streets, and many of them live in close vicinity to the mews. For no house, not even the largest, has a carriage-gate; and that we, in Germany, shelter under our roofs our horses, grooms, and all the odours of the stable, appears to the English as strange and mysterious, generally speaking, as our mustachios, and our liberalism in matters of religion.

We have endeavoured to draw the line of demarcation between the residential parts of the town and the business quarters. This being done, we return to Holborn.

Dr. Keif does not escape the common lot of every stranger in London streets. His theories of walking on a crowded pavement are of the most confused description, and the consequence is that he is being pushed about in a woful manner; but, at each push, he expresses his immoderate joy at having, for once, got into a crowded street, where a man must labour hard if he would lounge and saunter about. All of a sudden he stops in the middle of the pavement, and, adjusting his shirt-collar (a recent purchase), he takes off his hat and bows to somebody or something in the road. A natural consequence of all this is, that the passengers dig their elbows into the Doctor’s ribs, as they hurry along.

“To whom are you bowing with so much heroic devotion?”

“Whom? Why to Mr. Falcon, on the other side of the street.”

“So you have found an acquaintance already? That is a rare case. Many a man walks about for weeks without seeing a face he knows; and you have scarcely left the house when—”

“But do you really think I know that Mr. Falcon on the other side of the way?” Saying which the mysterious doctor bows again; and I, taking my glass, find out that there are a dozen Mr. Falcons, hoisted on high poles, parading the opposite pavement. Twelve men, out at elbows, move in solemn procession along the line of road, each carrying a heavy pole with a large table affixed to it, and on the table there is a legend in large scarlet letters, “MR. FALCON REMOVED.” It appears that Mr. Falcon, having thought proper to remove from 146 Holborn, begs to inform the nobility, the gentry, and the public generally, that he carries on his business at 6 Argyle-street.

The Doctor, crossing his arms on his chest gravely, while the passengers are pushing him about, says:

“Since Mr. Falcon is kind enough to inform me of his removal, I believe I ought to take off my hat to his advertisement. But only think of those poor fellows groaning under Mr. Falcon’s gigantic cards. He is an original, Mr. Falcon is, and I should like to make his acquaintance.”

Again the Doctor is wrong in fancying, as he evidently does, that Mr. Falcon sends his card-bearers, with the news of his removal, through the whole of London. Why should he? Perhaps he sold cigars, or buttons, or yarns, in Holborn; and it is there he is known, while no one in other parts of the town cares a straw for Mr. Falcon’s celebrated and unrivalled cigars, buttons, or yarns. His object is to inform the inhabitants of his own quarter of his removal, and of his new address.

The twelve men with the poles and boards need not go far. From early dawn till late at night they parade the site of Mr. Falcon’s old shop. They walk deliberately and slowly, to enable the passengers to read the inscription at their ease. They walk in Indian file to attract attention, and because in any other manner they would block up the way. But they walk continually, silently, without ever stopping for rest. Thus do they carry their poles, for many days and even weeks, until every child in the neighbourhood knows exactly where Mr. Falcon is henceforward to be found, for the moving column of large scarlet-lettered boards is too striking; and no one can help looking at them and reading the inscription. And this is a characteristic piece of what we Germans call British industry.

There is no other town in the world where people advertise with so much persevering energy—on so grand a scale—at such enormous expense—with such impertinent puffery—and with such distinguished success.

We have just reached a point in Holborn where, a great many streets crossing, leave a small, irregular spot, in the middle. In the centre of this spot, surrounded by a railing, and raised in some masonry, is a gigantic lamp-post, and the whole forms what one might call an island of the streets. Every now and then the protection of this island is sought by groups of women and children who, amidst the noise and the wheels of so many vehicles that dash along in every direction, shrink from a bold rush across the whole breadth of the street. As Noah’s dove thought itself lucky in having found an olive branch to alight on amidst the waters of the deluge, so do tender women breathe more quietly, and look around with greater composure, after having reached this street-island, where they are safe from the ever-returning tide of street life.

Leaning against the lamp-post we are at leisure to look around and see the moving beings, things, and objects, which rush past on every side; and for the nonce we will devote a special attention to the various advertising tricks.

The time—Night. One of those clear, fogless, calm summer nights which are so “few and far between” in this large town. The life-blood in the street-veins runs all the fuller, faster, and merrier, for the beauty of the night. Holborn is inundated with gas-light; but the brightest glare bursts forth exactly opposite to us. Who, in the name of all that is prudent, can the people be who make such a shocking waste of gas? They are “Moses and Son,” the great tailors and outfitters, who have lighted up the side-fronts of their branch establishment. All round the outer walls of the house, which is filled with coats, vests, and trousers, to the roof, and which exhibits three separate side-fronts towards three separate streets, there are many thousands of gas-flames, forming branches, foliage, and arabesques, and sending forth so dazzling a blaze, that this fiery column of Moses is visible to Jews and Gentiles at the distance of half a mile, lighting up the haze which not even the clearest evening can wholly banish from the London sky.

Among the fiery flowers burns the inevitable royal crown, surmounting the equally unavoidable letters V.R. To the right of these letters we have Moses and Son blessing the Queen in flaming characters of hydro-carbon; to the left they bless the people.[A]

[A] “God save the Queen,” and “God bless the people,” are the legends of these Mosaic illuminations.

What do they make this illumination for? This is not a royal birthday, nor is it the anniversary of a great national victory. All things considered, this ought to be a day of mourning and fasting for Messrs. Moses and Son, for the Commons of England have this very afternoon decided that Alderman Salomons shall not take his seat in the House.

Motives of loyalty, politics, or religion, have nothing whatever to do with the grand illuminations executed by Messrs. Moses and Son. The air is calm, there is not even a breath of wind; it’s a hundred to one that Oxford Street and Holborn will be thronged with passengers; this is our time to attract the idlers. Up, boys, and at them! light the lamps! A heavy expense this, burning all that gas for ever so many hours; but it pays, somehow. Boldness carries the prize, and faint heart never won fair customers. And if it were not for that c——d police and the Insurance Companies, by Jingo! it were the best advertisement to burn the house and shop at least twice a year. That would puff us up, and make people stare, and go the round of all the newspapers. Capital advertisement that, eh!

Being strollers in the streets, we delight in this extempore illumination. It is our object to see and observe; and Messrs. Moses and Son convert night into day for our especial accommodation. A whole legion of lesser planets bask in the region of this great sun. Crowds of subordinate advertising monsters have been attracted to this part of the street, and move about in various shapes, to the right and to the left, walking, rolling on wheels, and riding on horseback.

Behold, rolling down from Oxford Street, three immense wooden pyramids—their outsides are painted all over with hieroglyphics and with monumental letters in the English language. These pyramids display faithful portraits of Isis and Osiris, of cats, storks, and of the apis; and amidst these old-curiosity-shop gods, any Englishman may read an inscription, printed in letters not much longer than a yard, from which it appears that there is now on view a panorama of Egypt—one more beautiful, interesting, and instructive than was ever exhibited in London. For this panorama—we are still following the inscription—shows the flux and reflux of the Nile, with its hippopotamuses and crocodiles, and a section of the Red Sea, as mentioned in Holy Writ, and part of the last overland mail, and also the railway from Cairo to Alexandria, exactly as laid out in Mr. Stephenson’s head. And all this for only one shilling! with a full, lucid, and interesting lecture into the bargain.

The pyramids advance within three yards from where we stand, and, for a short time, they take their ease in the very midst of all the lights, courting attention. But the policeman on duty respects not the monuments of the Pharaohs; he moves his hand, and the drivers of the pyramids, though hidden in their colossal structures, see and understand the sign: they move on.

But here is another monstrous shape—a mosque, with its cupola blue and white, surmounted by the crescent. The driver is a light-haired boy, with a white turban and a sooty face. There is no mistaking that fellow for an Arab; and, nevertheless, the turban and the soot make a profound impression.

“We are being invaded by the East!” says Dr. Keif. “They are going to give a panoramic explanation of the Oriental question. If I were Lord Palmerston, I’d put a stop to that sort of thing. It’s a high crime and misdemeanour against diplomacy. Pray call for the police!”

But Dr. Keif is wrong again. On the back of the mosque there is an advertisement, which is as much a stranger to the Oriental question as the German diplomates are. That advertisement tells us, that Dr. Doem is proprietor of a most marvellous Arabian medicine, warranted to cure the bite of mad dogs and venomous reptiles generally; even so, that a person so bitten, if he but takes Dr. Doem’s medicine, shall feel no more inconvenience than he would feel from a very savage leader in the Morning Herald. The mosque, the blue crescent, the gaudy colours, and the juvenile Arab from the banks of the Thames, have merely been got up to attract attention. There need be no very intimate connexion between the things puffed and the street symbolics which puff them. Heterogeneous ideas are as much an aid to puffing as homogeneous ideas. If ever you should happen to go to Grand Cairo, rely on it, every cupola of a mosque, peeping out from palm-groves and aloe-hedges, will remind you of Dr. Doem and his Arabian medicine, as advertised in Holborn in Europe. Allah is great, and the cunning of English speculators is as deep as the sea where it is deepest.

Hark! a peal of trumpets! Another advertising machine rushes out of the gloom of Museum Street. In this instance the Orient is not put in requisition. The turn-out is thoroughly English.

Two splendid cream-coloured horses, richly harnessed; a dark green chariot of fantastic make, in shape like a half-opened shell, and tastefully ornamented with gilding and pictures; on the box a coachman in red and gold, looking respectable and almost aristocratic, with his long whip on his knee; and behind him the trumpeters, seated in the chariot, and proclaiming its advent. In this manner have the people of London of late months been invited to Vauxhall—to that same Vauxhall, which, under the Regency, attracted all the wealth, beauty, and fashion in England—which, to this very day, still attracts hundreds of thousands; whose good and ill fame has crossed the ocean. Even Vauxhall—the old and famous—makes no exception to the common lot; it is compelled to have its posters, its newspaper advertisements, and its advertising vans.

In no other town would such tricks be necessary conditions of existence; but here, where everything is grand and bulky—in this town of miraculous extent, where generations live and die in the East-end without ever having beheld the wonders of the West-end—among this population, which is reckoned by millions instead of by hundreds of thousands—here, where all press and rush on to make money or to spend it—here, where every one must distinguish himself in some way or other, or be lost and perish in the crowd—where every hour has its novelty—here, in London, even the most solid undertakings must assume the crying colour of charlatanism.

The Panorama of the Nile, the Overland Route, the Colosseum, Madame Tussaud’s Exhibition of Wax-works, and other sights, are indeed wonder-works of human industry, skill, and invention; and, in every respect, are they superior to the usual productions of the same kind. But, for all that, they must send their advertising vans into the streets; necessity compels them to strike the gong and blow the trumpet; choice there is none. They must either advertise or perish.

The same may be said of great institutions of a different kind; of fire and life insurance companies; of railways and steamers; and of theatres—from Punch’s theatre in the Strand, upwards, to the Royal Italian Opera, which ransacks Europe for musical celebrities, and which, nevertheless, must condescend to magnify its own glory on gigantic many-coloured posters, though it has managed, up to the present day, to do without the vans, trumpets, and sham Nubians.

It is either advertising or being ruined. We have said it before. Many of our readers will think this a bold and unwarranted assertion. It is neither the one nor the other; for it is founded on the experience of many men of business. Of many examples we quote but one.

Mr. Bennett keeps a large shop of clocks and watches in Cheapside. His watches and clocks are among the best in London; they have an old-established reputation, and they deserve it. But their reputation is not owing to their excellency alone; it required many years of advertising, years of continual and expensive advertising, to inculcate this great fact on the obtuse, bewildered, and deluded Londoners. Thanks to Mr. Bennett’s perseverance they were at length convinced. And, when a few years ago, the reputation of the firm had spread throughout the length and breadth of the land, it struck Mr. Bennett that now was the time to put a stop to this expensive process of advertising. “In future,” said that gentleman, “I mean to take the full interest from my capital instead of paying part of it to the printers.” And he set at once about it. In the year in which Mr. Bennett took this bold resolution, the firm spent a few thousand pounds less than usual in advertisements. But the consequences made themselves felt; and as month followed month, they became still more disagreeably perceptible. Mr. Bennett understood that in London virtue is its own reward, provided it keeps a trumpeter; and as Mr. Bennett was not an obstinate theorist, he had again recourse to the printing-press. He advertises to this very day, and to a greater extent, if possible, than formerly. In proof whereof we quote his advertisement in the Catalogue of the Great Exhibition, on which occasion he paid £900 (say nine hundred pounds sterling), for the insertion of his advertisement on the back of the wrapper.

Mr. Bennett’s business is as prosperous as ever. Of course, his watches were quite as good during the period he did not advertise; but the public was about to forget him. Advertising is an indispensable item in the expenditure of a London trader.

While we were talking of Mr. Bennett’s shop in Cheapside, the little lamp-post Square in Holborn has become more quiet. Two coal-waggons, each with four elephantine, thick-necked, broad-footed horses have suddenly emerged from the darkness of one of the side-streets. The half-circle which these clumsy horses must make in order to obtain a locus standi in the street of Holborn, causes a general stoppage among the vehicles, which up to the present have been proceeding in regular order, at an all but uniform pace. For a few moments we are relieved from the clanking of chains, the rattling of wheels, and the dull rumbling of wooden pyramids and vans. Now is the time for the lesser sprites of the advertising mysteries.

A boy on our right puts printed papers into our hands. On the left, the same process is attempted by an elderly man of respectable appearance, who jerks his arm with what he believes to be a graceful indifference, while everybody else would mistake that same jerk for a convulsive gesture of despondency. Just before us we have a man with a pole and board, recommending some choice blacking, and on the opposite pavement there is a Hindoo dressed in white flannel, with a turban on his head, and with all the sorrow of a ruined nation in his handsome brown face and chiselled features. At his side is a little girl dressed in filthy rags. The Hindoo has a bundle of printed papers in his hand, Sabbatarian, temperance, and other tracts—inestimable treasures—which he offers to the public at the very low price of one penny each. That poor fellow got those tracts from some sacred society as a consideration for allowing them to convert him to Christianity. But his sad face is a sorry recommendation of the treasures of comfort he proposes to dispose of. Better for him to stand in primitive nudity among his native palm-forests, adoring the miracles of nature in the Sun, and in Brahma, than to shiver here on the cold, wet pavement, cursing the torments of want in the image of the sacred Saviour. On the banks of the Ganges that man prayed to God; here, among strangers, he learns to hate mankind. But then he was a pagan on the banks of the Ganges; on the banks of the Thames he has the name of a Christian. Whether or no the Christian is really more religious than the Pagan was, is a question which seems to give little trouble to the pious missionaries. The Bible Society has done its duty.

Our worthy friend, Dr. Keif was, it seems, also struck with the melancholy aspect of the Hindoo. He made a bold rush across the street, put some pence into the tiny brown hand of the little girl, and took in return a tract on “True Devotion,” which he did not read, but crushing it into a paper ball, angrily, threw it into the gutter. He had taken the tract out of consideration for the poor man’s feelings. “It’s begging under the pretence of selling,” said the worthy Doctor in a great rage, “but

since the delusion is a comfort to him, I would not for the world offer him money without taking one of his papers!”

It was very naughty in the Doctor to fling that tract away as he did. As a punishment, we were immediately assailed by a set of imps who mistook us for easy victims on the altars of speculation.

Men with cocoa-nuts and dates, and women with oranges surrounded us with their carts. One man recommended his dog-collars of all sizes, which he had formed in a chain round his neck; another person offered to mark our linen; a third produced his magic strops; others held out note-books, cutlery, prints, caricatures, exhibition-medals—all—all—all for one penny. It seemed as if the world were on sale at a penny a bit. And amidst all this turmoil, the men with advertising boards walked to and fro; and the boys distributed advertising bills by the hundred, with smiles of deep bliss, whenever they met a charitable soul who took them.

The coal-waggons are gone, and the street noise is as loud as ever.

Are we to remain here and pursue our studies of the natural history of advertising vans? It is not likely we shall see them all, for their numbers are incalculable. They generate according to abnormal laws. Each day and each event produces another form. The Advertisement is omnipresent. It is in the skies and on the ground; it swells as the flag in the breeze, and it sets its seal on the pavement; it is on the water, on the steam-boat wharf, and under the water in the Thames tunnel; it roosts on the highest chimneys; it sparkles in coloured letters on street lamps; it forms the prologue of all the newspapers, and the epilogue of all the books; it breaks in upon us with the sound of trumpets, and it awes us in the silent sorrow of the Hindoo. There is no escaping from the advertisement, for it travels with you in the omnibuses, in the railway carriages, and on the paddle-boxes of the steamers.

The arches of the great bridges over the Thames were at one time free from advertisements. The masonry was submerged by the periodical returns of the tide, and the bills would not stick. But at length the advertisement invaded even these, the last asylums of non-publicity. Since bills could not be pasted on the walls, the advertisement was painted on them. At this hour there is not an arch in a London bridge but has its advertisements painted on it. But for whom? For the thousands who every day pass under the bridge in steamers. For the Thames, too, is one of the London streets and by no means the least important one.

CHAP. III.
The Squares.—Lincoln’s Inn.

A MAN may be familiar with London streets, he may for years have gone his weary way amidst these endless rows of bare, narrow, irregular houses, which are black with fog and smoke, without ever suspecting that gardens sparkling in idyllic beauty are hidden behind those masses of sooty masonry.

This is one of the chief distinctions between London and Paris and other continental capitals. Paris has much outside glitter, much startling show. Its Boulevards, its Place de la Concorde, Place Vendôme, Rue de la Paix, Rue Rivoli, and sundry others of its streets and public places are unrivalled; London cannot vie with them in architectural prodigies. But the brilliant points of Paris, of which Frenchmen are in the habit of boasting, attract our attention only to divert it from the narrow crooked lanes, and the filth of the other parts of their town. Paris sports a clean shirt-front merely to hide the uncleanliness of its general nature. The French are adepts in the art of draping. The English, on the contrary, know nothing whatever of that noble art. The cut of their clothes is inelegant, but the cloth is the best of its kind; their dwelling-houses have the appearance of old chimneys, but the inside is replete with comfort and unpretending wealth; their language is rough, and without melody; but it is energetic, flexible, and expressive. Their metropolis, too, conceals its real beauties. It requires some investigation, some instinct and discernment to discover and enjoy them.

In the broadest part of Holborn, there are on either side certain suspicious-looking lanes, in which pawnbrokers and cobblers “hang out,” and where a roaring, though not a very fragrant, trade is driven in greens, meat, and fish. The lanes on the north side communicate with Gray’s Inn; on the south, they form an intricate labyrinth, which we enter on our way to Lincoln’s Inn Fields.

Travellers proceeding from London to Dover pass through a series of monstrous tunnels, which have been bored through those mountains of chalk, the bulwarks of the British islands. As they emerge from the darkness of the last tunnel, they feel happy and grateful for the fresh sea-breeze which plays around and the vast, boundless view which opens before them. In a like manner, do we breathe more freely as we emerge from the last of these narrow, and by no means sweetly-smelling lanes.

A broad square, filled with trees, flowers, and garden-ground, opens before us. This is one of the many “squares” of which you, O my beloved countrymen, entertain such crude and indistinct notions!

“Squares” are wide, open spots, surrounded by houses, exactly like our own “Plätze.” But, instead of the monuments of saints, whom the Anglican Church ignores; instead of the pestilence-columns, which Englishmen object to (though London, like every other respectable old town, had its plagues in olden times); and instead of our beautiful market-fountains, the poesy of which is a sealed book to the English mind, their “Plätze” have been converted into Gardens with broad commodious streets all round the railings. These gardens are not by any means so small as the Germans generally believe. Indeed, in the larger squares, they are of considerable extent. The curiosity of the passers-by is repelled by trees, shrubs, and carefully-trimmed hedges, and the shady walks and the grassplots in the centre are strictly private. Of these squares, Lincoln’s Inn Fields is the largest; it covers an area of twelve acres. The joint extent of all the London squares is one thousand two hundred acres. With the exception of Smithfield and Trafalgar-square, all the London squares have gardens, and the trees and shrubs which grow in them improve the air of all the neighbouring streets. Such gardens are found in all quarters of the town, and in many cases they are hidden among the narrowest alleys and gloomiest courts, where the wanderer least expects to find them. They are the most beautiful spots in London, for they present specimens of nature’s paradise, blooming in concealment, and all the more lovely are they for that very reason.

Let us return to Lincoln’s Inn Fields.

We stand on classic soil. Three sides of this large square are surrounded with buildings, whose open doors shew at once that they are not mere ordinary dwelling-houses. One of them attracts our special attention; it is so black and its columns are so many and so high. It is the Royal College of Surgeons, where the medical students pass their examination in surgery. This house, too, shelters the famous Anatomical Museum which John Hunter bequeathed to the College of Surgeons. All the other buildings are owned by the guild of the lawyers. In the heart of the city, the houses, from the cellars to the garrets, are let out as offices and store-rooms. The houses in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, too, are devoted to the special accommodation of lawyers. A walk up and down, and a look at the door-posts, which are black with the names of advocates, suffice to convince us of the lamentable condition of English law.

We have said that this is classic soil. Sir Thomas More, Shaftesbury the statesman, and Lord Mansfield, studied in the precincts of Lincoln’s Inn; and Oliver Cromwell passed two years of his eventful life in the same locality. The square has its sad reminiscences too. In the centre of the gardens, where flowers blow and birds sing, there stood at one time a scaffold; and on that scaffold died one of the noblest patriots of England, Lord Russell, an ancestor of Finality John, and son to William, Earl of Bedford.

The crown of England rested in those days on the head of the second Charles. At his side was his brother, the Duke of York, the evil genius of Charles and of England. Charles, and James his brother, listened to the counsels of France and of Rome, for they wanted money, and the Whigs would only consent to vote the people’s money in exchange for some crumbs of liberty for the people. Thus it came to pass that England’s honour was sold to France, and the “rebellious” Parliament was dissolved, and the press put down; the liberties of the city were curtailed; venal men were placed on the bench, and venal witnesses thronged the courts; the best men of England were put into jail and arraigned on charges of high treason. Among the best and bravest was William Russell.

They accused him of having conspired against the king’s life, and sent him to the Tower. Witnesses were bribed to appear against him; they were men of proverbial villany. Among them was Lord Howard, of whom the king himself had said he would not hang the worst cur in his kennel on the evidence of that man. But that man’s evidence sufficed to bring the best man in all England to the block. It is the old story—a tail-wagging cur is more considered at court than a thinking man. Lord Russell’s head fell in the centre of this very square. Vainly did his wife implore the king’s mercy. Lord Russell’s head fell in the immediate vicinity of his estates; and the Londoners of those days saw him pass through Holborn on his way to the scaffold. Many wept—many abused him; others jeered at him. The people of that time had even less respect for its heroes and martyrs than the present generation. In our days, even the vilest of the vile are awed into silence when the princes of this earth deliver their political adversaries to the hangman’s rope or the “mercy” of a platoon of rifles.

But even in these our own days there is a party in England, there are Englishmen, citizens, writers, and members of Parliament, and most of them truly honourable men, who, while they declare that the British Whigs of those times were patriots and martyrs, do not hesitate rashly to condemn the “rebellious” Parliaments and political parties of the continent. No Englishman, not the most conservative, would dare to deny to Lord Russell one single ray of that glorious crown of martyrdom which the English people and its historians have placed upon his bleeding head.

“It cannot be denied,” they say, “that Lord William Russell conspired against an illegal Government; but to conspire against such a Government was his duty; he was justified in so doing.”... But if the Russells of those days were justified in vindicating the people’s rights against the King, how then can you so smoothly and glibly apply the word “rebels” to the continental Russells of our own days? If armed opposition is treasonable, was it less treasonable in days gone by? Do the rights of mankind dwindle away as century follows century? Or has the great nation of England so small a mind that it cannot distinguish between the merits of a cause and its success?

The Russells of the last centuries shed their blood for this generation. England is free, happy, undisturbed, mighty, strong, tranquil and reasonable; she develops a brighter future from the benefits she at present enjoys. The English know it; and in this knowledge is the secret of their pride. The sanguinary conflicts of the continent, which have hitherto had no results, provoke in Englishmen a smile of mingled pity and derision. “Those people don’t know what they are driving at,” say some; “if they would be happy they ought to imitate England.” And others say, “They want freedom, but they are not practical enough; they do not turn their revolution to advantage as our ancestors did, and as we would do in their place.” But I say, it is easy to find fault with others, and a happy man has all the wisdom of Solomon. These English sages do not consider how much easier it was to their ancestors to bring the contest with the power of the crown to a successful issue. The English patriots were not opposed by large standing armies; the contest lay between them and a single family and its faction, and—this is a point which has never been sufficiently dwelt upon—they had no reason to fear a foreign intervention. For England, as the greatest living author[B] says, never fought as France did for the freedom of the world, but for its own freedom. Hence the continental powers paid little attention to the battles of the Puritans, and the contests between Charles and Cromwell. Clarendon indeed considered their non-intervention a great grievance. But this non-intervention of Spain or France was the greatest blessing for royalty in England. If those countries had interfered, the contest for the principles of constitutionalism might have been prolonged to this very day, or perhaps royalty would have been killed outright on the English battle-fields.

[B] Macaulay’s Essays, vol. ii.

The history of England—says Macaulay—is a history of progress. Who would gainsay it? At the commencement of the twelfth century, a small and semi-barbarous nation, subject to a handful of foreigners, without a trace of civilisation—large masses enslaved—the Saxons still distinct from the Normans—superstition and brutality everywhere, and the law of the strong hand the supreme law of the land—such was England seven hundred years ago. Then came the bloody civil wars—brain-scorching, land-spoiling, men-consuming, sectarian wars—contests abroad and contests at home—a series of vile, hypocritical, dissolute, and narrow-minded monarchs—and at intervals bright epochs of great times in history and politics, and day was changed into night and night into day, until England attained its present position among the nations of the earth. From one decade to another there may have been periodical retrogressions, but each century gave clear and irrefragable evidence of the progress of England.

If, therefore, in the next years, France should happen again to attain those giddy heights of freedom, which she gained three times already, and which three times have vanished beneath her feet, then let not France, as she is wont to do, wax proud in the scanty shade of her newly planted trees of liberty, and let her not look down contemptuously on the cold, thickblooded, clumsy tree of liberty in England. At the end of the century the two nations may compare their charters; it will then be seen which of them has really and truly had the greatest gains. The blood of France has manured the mental soil of all the world; England should be the last to forget what her liberty has gained by the ideal conquests of France. France, on the other hand, might make the most useful study in considering the consistent carrying out of great political maxims on the British soil.

When two nations express their opinions of one another, and reproach each other with their faults, they are in the habit of paying too little attention to the circumstances which promote or obstruct the advance of freedom. In this respect, the peculiarities of the countries and their geographical position cannot be too highly estimated. Who can tell what would be the condition of Germany, if our country were secure from foreign intervention; and if, as is the case with England, the sea protected it from the violence of its enemies or the insidious advances of its political friends.

CHAP. IV.
Up the Thames.—Vauxhall.

THE RIVER-SIDE.—VIEWS OF THE RIVER.—THE TIDES.—THE BRIDGES.—THE TEMPLE AND SOMERSET HOUSE.—ENTRANCE TO VAUXHALL.—BRITISH DECORATIVE GENIUS.—SOMEBODY RUNS AWAY WITH DR. KEIF.—MAGIC.—NELSON AND WELLINGTON.—THE CIRCUS.—THE BURNING OF MOSCOW.—AN EPISODE AT THE TEA TABLE.

IF you leave King William-street just at the foot of London-bridge and turn to the right, you will find your way into a set of narrow and steep streets, few only of which admit of carriage and horse traffic. The lower stories of the houses are let out as offices, and the upper as warehouse floors; the pavement is narrow and the road as bad as broken stones and long neglect can make it; dirty boys in sailors’ jackets play at leap-frog over the street posts; legions of wheel-barrows encumber the broader parts of these thoroughfares; packing-cases stand at the doors of houses, and cranes and levers peep out from the upper stories. Such are the streets which lead down to the banks of the Thames. It is altogether a dusty, filthy, “uncannie” quarter. A few steps through a black, cornery, nondescript structure of sooty brick and mortar, covered all over with immense shipping advertisements in all colours, and we stand on the bank of the river. An entirely new scene is opened before our eyes.

Close to our left the mighty grey arches of London-bridge rise up from the river. We look under them downwards where the last ocean ships are crowded together on their moorings, where the distant masts are lost in the haze, and where ocean-life finds its limits, because the bridges prevent those large ships from passing up the river. We look in an opposite direction along the broad expanse of water, with busy little steamers rushing frantically in every conceivable direction; we look up to the parapet of London-bridge, where, high as it is, we see the heads of the passengers, and the crowded roofs of the omnibuses; we look over to the other bank, where a thousand high chimneys vomit forth their smoke and we behold Southwark, that amiable appendix to the metropolis, which at this day has its six hundred thousand inhabitants; and lastly, we look straight down before our feet where half a dozen steamers, closely packed together, dance up and down on the waves; where steam rushes forth noisily from narrow pipes, where hundreds of men, women, and children, run about in inextricable confusion pushing their way to the shore, to one of the boats, or from one boat to another; where the paddles beat the water and the boys start the machinery by shrill screams, while the mooring barges creak as the ropes are drawn tight. We look and behold this is the Thames! This is the great, living, fabulous, watery high-road in the heart of the British metropolis.

They have abused thee sadly, thou grey Thames, for the filth of thy waters and the fogs which arise from thee. But most unjustly hast thou been abused. At Lechlade where the four rivulets from the Cotswolds join into a river, thy waters are as pure and pellucid as the Alpine streams which spring forth from the glacier. At Lechlade there are no fogs obscuring thy surface; there the air is pure; there art thou romantic and idyllic, innocent alike of the temptations of the world and the vice and filth of the greatest town. For many, many miles further down to Kew and Richmond thou art beautiful to behold, flowing through the emerald green of the meadows and the deep luscious green of the bush, a mirror for the lordly villas and charming cottages which stud thy banks. But most rapidly dost thou rush forward to thy metamorphosis! Most quickly dost thou expand into a broad, grey, elderly man of business. He who saw thee at Richmond will not know thee again at Westminster; and the travelling stranger who only beheld thee between the bridges of the metropolis has not the faintest idea of thy beauties at Richmond. The grey business atmosphere of London has cast its gloom upon thee, as well as on the stones, the houses, and the human beings that inhabit them.

But, whatever the Thames may lose in romance, it gains in the grandeur and importance of its appearance. Its breadth increases with every step. Navigable to the length of 180 English miles, with a tidal rise to the extent of seventy miles, the Thames takes the largest merchantmen to the immediate vicinity of London-bridge; and as the tide is going out it takes them back, without the help of oars, sails, or steam-tugs. Nature has made the Thames the grandest of all trading rivers; it gave it a larger share of the ocean tides than it ever bestowed on any other river in Europe.

At the Land’s End the tides from the Atlantic are divided into two distinct streams. One rushes up the Channel, and round the North Foreland into the mouth of the Thames; the other beats against the western coasts of England and Scotland, and, taking a southerly direction down the eastern coast, this tide too enters the basin of the Thames. Hence the tides in the Thames are formed of two different ocean-tides; they are equal by day and by night, and so powerful is the rush of the tide from the North Foreland to the metropolis, that it flows at the rate of five miles an hour.

But here is the boat smoking away right at our feet. There is a rush of persons from the shore, and a rush of persons to the shore. We pay two-pence, scramble down a variety of steps and stairs, and jump on board just as they are casting off. There is no whistling or ringing of a bell, no noise whatever. We are already steaming it up to the far west.

The bank on our left offers no interesting points on which the eye might dwell with pleasure. Manufactories, breweries and gas-works dispute every inch of ground with the ugliest store-houses imaginable. The sight strikes one as that of a large city in ruins. But on our right we see St. Paul’s rising from an ocean of roofs. The sun, still visible on the horizon, shines on the roof of the cathedral, and shows the gigantic cupola in the most charming light. St. Paul’s ought to be seen from the river by those who would fully understand its grandeur.

We pass through the arches of Blackfriars-bridge and proceed in a line with Fleet-street; before us the stream is spanned by a number of bridges, so that it seems as if their pillars crossed one another, and as if the nearest bridge bore the next following on its arched back. So strange and astonishing is this sight that we are tempted to mistake it for a Fata Morgana and expect to see it dissolve into thin air.

Seven enormous bridges have been built across the river at very short intervals, and unite the more animated parts of the Borough and Lambeth with London proper. Among these bridges is an iron suspension bridge with a bold double arch; another bridge is composed of iron and stone; and the rest are simply built of massive stones. It is true that only three of these seven bridges are freely open to the public, and that the four others exact a toll. But, for how many years past, have the Germans talked of a stone bridge across the Rhine at Cologne, and another stone bridge across the Danube at Vienna! And as yet neither Cologne nor Vienna have mustered the funds for such undertakings! And in London there are seven bridges within a river-length of a few miles. A little higher up, moreover, is Battersea-bridge, and lower down the river there is the Tunnel, and already have they commenced making a new bridge at Chelsea. The English have a right to pride themselves on the grandeur of the British spirit of enterprise. But the German who comes into this country and beholds its marvels, makes comparisons which sorely vex and trouble his spirit.

We pass the Temple, the Chinese Junk, Somerset-house, the new Houses of Parliament, and Westminster Abbey, but we cannot stop to describe them, for we purpose to reserve them for a special visit on another occasion. Besides our attention is engaged by the general aspect of the river and its banks. Darkness has set in. Steamers with red and green eyes of fire rush past us; little boats cross in all directions under the very bows of the steamers; fishing-boats with dark brown sails go with the tide in solemn silence; the lights on the bridges and in the streets are reflected in the water. This is the hour at which matter of fact London dons her poetical night-dress.

We pass Lambeth Palace and its ruin-like watch-tower. The boat stops at Vauxhall-bridge. We get off, and walk through some of the streets of Lambeth; we pass under a railway-bridge, and stand in front of Vauxhall.

“The season is over! every body is gone out of town,” etc., write the correspondents of provincial and continental newspapers—“every body”—that is to say, every body with the exception of two millions of men, who make rather a considerable noise in the northern, southern, and eastern towns of London. But of course they are “nobodies”; they are merely merchants, tradesmen, manufacturers, clerks, agents, public functionaries, judges, physicians, barristers, teachers, journalists, publishers, printers, musicians, actors, clergymen, labourers, beggars, thieves, foreigners, and other members of the “vile rabble.” Every body else left the metropolis immediately after the Parliament was prorogued by the Queen, and the Royal Italian Opera was prorogued by Signora Grisi. The West-end is now a city of the dead. The deserted streets and the shuttered windows proclaim that all who are not exactly “nobodies,” are shooting in Scotland or gaping on the Rhine; that they suffer from the blues in Italy, or that the trout suffer from them in Sweden. But Vauxhall is still open, partly because the weather is so uncommonly mild for the season; partly because there are a good many foreigners in London; but chiefly because Vauxhall has come to be vulgar—and very vulgar too—a haunt of milliners and democrats, “by birth and education.”

Vauxhall was born in the Regency, in one of the wicked nights of dissolute Prince George. A wealthy speculator was its father; a prince was its godfather, and all the fashion and beauty of England stood round its cradle. In those days Vauxhall was very exclusive and expensive. At present, it is open to all ranks and classes, and half a guinea will frank a fourth-rate milliner and sweetheart through the whole evening.

A Londoner wants a great deal for his money, or he wants little—take it which way you please. The programme of Vauxhall is an immense carte for the eye and the ear: music, singing, horsemanship, illuminations, dancing, rope-dancing, acting, comic songs, hermits, gipsies, and fireworks, on the most “stunning” scale. It is easier to read the Kölner Zeitung than the play-bill of Vauxhall.

With respect to the quantity of sights, it is most difficult to satisfy an English public. They have “a capacious swallow” for sights, and require them in large masses as they do the meat which graces their tables. As to quality, that is a minor consideration; and to give the English public its due, it is the most grateful of all publics.

The entrance to Vauxhall is dismally dark and prison-like. Dr. Keif objects to the place.

“It’s a trap,” says he; “the real road to ruin! I am sure the Chevalier Bunsen and that fellow Buol-Schauenstein lie in ambush in some of those dark holes; they will pounce upon me, and seize me, and take me back to Germany, where they have no brown stout, and where I must needs get famous, or die with ennui. Lasciate ogni speranza, voi che entrate!”

Just at that moment a German refugee goes by. He bids us good evening, and is lost in the darkness.

“Ah!” says the Doctor, “that boy has been sentenced to be shot in the Grand Duchy of Baden. I believe they shot him in effigy. He’s an imp of fame, and if he dares go in why should’nt I dare it. Let us go in!”

The dismal aspect of the entrance is the result of artistic speculation; it is a piece of theatrical claptrap. For all of a sudden we emerge from the darkness of the passage into a dazzling sea of light, which almost blinds one. All the arbours, avenues, grottos and galleries of the gardens are covered with lamps; the trees are lighted to the very tops; each leaf has its coloured lady-bird of a gas-light. Where the deuce did those people ever get those lamps! And how did they ever get them lighted! It must be confessed that the manager has done his duty. If you can show him a single leaf without its lamp, he will surely jump into the Thames or hang himself on the branch which was thus shamefully neglected.

Dr. Keif, who is disposed to find fault with everything, and who just now protested that the entrance to Vauxhall was a trap expressly constructed for the apprehension of political refugees, asserts that the illumination is enough to spoil the temper of any one. “Look at those English madcaps!” says he. “In other parts of the town I walk for hours before I find a human being smoking a cigar, and offering an opportunity to light my own weed; and here I stand as the donkey in the midst of three hundred thousand bundles of hay. Which of these lamps shall I select for the lighting of my cigar?”

“This way, sir! Look down there where the Queen is burning in gas,” says an Englishman, with a cigar in his mouth, who has overheard the Doctor’s lament. And he added—“Light your weed at the flames of Victoria, and implore Her Gracious Majesty that she may be pleased to abolish the duty on tobacco.”

From that moment is Dr. Keif lost to the rest of our party. An Englishman, who, spurning all old-established customs and traditions, dares to address a stranger, and to address him too on a subject which has nothing whatever in common with the state of the weather—such an Englishman is a rara avis, and nothing could induce Dr. Keif to forego his acquaintance. Already has he engaged him in conversation, utterly oblivious of the friends who came with him, and of all the world besides. We must try to get on without the Doctor.

The gardens are crowded; dense masses are congregated around a sort of open temple, which at Vauxhall stands in lieu of a music-room. The first part of the performance is just over; and a lady, whose voice is rather the worse for wear, and who defies the cool of the evening with bare shoulders and arms, is in the act of being encored. She is delighted, and so are the audience. Many years ago this spot witnessed the performances of Grisi, Rubini, Lablache, and other first-class musical celebrities.

The crowd promenade these gardens in all directions. In the background is a gloomy avenue of trees, where loving couples walk, and where the night-air is tinged with the hue of romance. Even the bubbling of a fountain may be heard in the distance. We go in search of the sound; but, alas, we witness nothing save the triumph of the insane activity of the illuminator. A tiny rivulet forces its way through the grass; it is not deep enough to drown a herring, yet it is wide enough and babbling enough to impart an idyllic character to the scene. But how has this interesting little water-course fared under the hands of the illuminator? The wretch has studded its banks with rows of long arrow-headed gas-lights. Not satisfied with lighting up the trees, and walls, and dining-saloons, he must needs meddle with this lilliputian piece of water also. That is English taste, which delights in quantities: no Frenchman would ever have done such a thing!

Following the rivulet, we reach the bank of a gas-lit pond, with a gigantic Neptune and eight white sea-horses. To the left of the god opens another gloomy avenue, which leads us straightway to Fate, to the hermit, and the temple of Pythia, who, in the guise of a gipsy, reclining on straw under a straw-roofed shed, with a stable lanthorn at her side, is in the habit of reading the most brilliant Future on the palm of your hand, for the ridiculously low price of sixpence only. This is specially English; no house without its fortifications—no open-air amusements without gipsies. The prophetess of Vauxhall is by no means a person of repulsive appearance. You admire in her a comely brown daughter of Israel, with black hair and dark eyes; it is very agreeable to listen to her expounding your fate. She is good-tempered and agreeable, and has a Californian prophecy for all comers. She predicts faithful wives, length of days, a grave in a free soil to every one, even to the German.

The dwelling of the sage hermit is much less primitive, nor are believers permitted to enter it. They must stand on the threshold, from whence they may admire a weird and awful scenery—mountains, precipices and valleys, and the genius loci, a large cat with fiery eyes, all charmingly worked in canvas and pasteboard, with a strict and satisfactory regard for the laws of perspective. The old man, with his beard so white and his staff so strong, comes up from the mysterious depth of a pasteboard ravine; he asks a few questions and disappears again, and in a few minutes the believer receives his or her Future, carefully copied out on cream-coloured paper, and in verses, too, with his or her name as an anagram. Of course these papers are all ready written and prepared by the dozen, and as one lady of our party had the name of Hedwig—by no means a common name in England—she had to wait a good long while before she was favoured with a sight of her fate. This, of course, strengthened her belief in the hermit and the fidelity of her husband.

We, the Pilgrims of Vauxhall, leave the hermit’s cell. Our eyes have become accustomed to the twilight, and as we proceed we behold, in the background, the tower and battlements of a large and fantastically-built tower. Can this be Westminster Abbey, or is it a mere optical delusion? Let us see.

Hark! a gun is fired in the shrubbery. The promenaders, who are familiar with the place, turn round, and all rush in one direction, sweeping us along with them. Before we can collect ourselves, we have been pushed forward to a panoramic stage, on which Nelson, in plaster, is in the act of expiring, while Wellington, in pasteboard, rides over the battle-field of Waterloo. These two figures are the worst of their kind; still the public cheer the two national heroes. No house without its fortifications—no open-air amusements without gipsies—and no play without the old Admiral and the old General.

Wellington has scarcely triumphed over Napoleon, and silenced the French batteries, when the cannonade recommences in the shrubbery: one—two guns! it is the signal for the arena. Unless you purchase a seat in the boxes or the galleries, you have no chance of seeing the exhibition in the circus, for the pit, which is gratis, is crowded to suffocation. Englishmen care more for live horses than they do for pasteboard chargers, fraught though they be with national reminiscences.

The productions of horsemanship at Vauxhall are exactly on a par with similar exhibitions on the other side of the Channel. Britons are more at home on horseback, or on board a ship, than on the strings of the fiddle, or on the ivory keys of the pianoforte. And thus, then, do the men and women dance on unsaddled horses, play with balls and knives, and jump through paper and over boards; half a dozen of old and young clowns distort their joints; a lady dances on a rope, à la marionette; and Miss A., who was idolised at Berlin, and whom seven officers of the Horse Guards presented with a bracelet, on which their seven heroic faces were displayed, condescends to produce her precious bracelet and her precious person in this third-rate circus; and an American Gusikow makes music on wood, straw, and leather; and the horses are neighing, and the whips smacking, and the sand is being thrown up, and the boarding trembles with the tramp of the horses, and there is no end of cheering; and Miss A. re-appears and curtsies, with the seven gentlemen of the Horse Guards on her arm; and another gun is fired, and the public, leaving the circus, rush madly into the gardens. To the fireworks! they are the most brilliant exhibition of the evening. The gardens are bathed in a bluish light, and the many thousand lamps look all pale and ominous. The gigantic and fantastic city, which before loomed through the twilight of the distant future, burns now in Bengal fire. It is Moscow! it is the Kremlin, and they are burning it! Sounds of music, voices of lamentation, issue from the flames, guns are firing, rockets shoot up and burst with an awful noise, the walls give way—they fall, and from the general destruction issues a young girl, with very thin clothing and very little of it, who makes her escape over a rope at a dizzy height. The exhibition is more awful than agreeable; but the public cheer this, as they do any other neck-or-nothing feat. If the girl were to carry a baby on her perilous way, the cheering would be still greater.

It is past midnight. The wind is cold, and fresh guests are crowding in to join the ball, which is kept up to the break of day. But we have not the least inclination to watch the ungraceful movements of English men who dance with English women, or of English women who dance with English men. We hail a cab and hasten home.

At the door we fall in with the Doctor, whom we had lost in the early part of the evening. He is greatly excited, for he has walked the whole way from Vauxhall to Guildford-street. In the parlour we find Sir John and his most faithful wife seated at the round table, with the tea-things before them, waiting tea for us. As we enter, Sir John puts down the Times, in which he has been gloating over a “damaging letter” against the Chancellor of the Exchequer; and the lady of the house welcomes us with a friendly nod and a look of anxious inquiry. That look means, “Have you caught a cold, you or any of you? Or is it a sore throat or a cough! Surely you cannot have been out all night without some slight illness which will justify me in opening my medicine chest?” And she looks at the things to see if they are all in good order, and then the tea is poured out with the utmost precision. A cup of tea is delicious after that long ride from Vauxhall, and there is much comfort and snugness in an English parlour.

The cup, which “cheers but not inebriates,” loosens Dr. Keif’s tongue. “The tea is very refreshing, Madam,” is a remark which the Doctor makes twice every day, in fine and foul weather; and, in making this remark, he always holds out his empty cup that it may be filled again.

“But, most loyal Sir John,” continues the Doctor, refreshed by the tea, “it’s a mighty difficult task to get through an English evening’s pleasure in a single night. To think of all the things I have seen this evening, and for half-a-crown too. Why one-half of them would suffice to entertain the inhabitants of a German capital for a period of six calendar months.”

“That is what I always say,” interposed Bella, the daughter of the house, with a look of triumph, “London is the cheapest town in the whole world.”

“So it is,” says Dr. Keif, “awfully cheap. I had some cold beef at Vauxhall, some cheese, and a cruet of wine, and I paid only nine shillings—on my honor nothing but nine shillings. The bread was not included. The waiter gave me a piece after I had asked him long enough. But I had scarcely put it on my plate, and I was lost in its contemplation, when it was carried off by a sparrow. Now that will give you an idea how very large it must have been.”

“But what could induce you to drink wine or ask for bread at Vauxhall!” said Bella. “And where have you been all the evening? What did you do with your friend?”

“O I had a delightful conversation with him, and let me tell you he is a clever fellow. Still he is not free from English prejudice, though a great deal of it has been rubbed off on his travels. Of Germany he saw only the south, having been compelled, as he told me, to return to England to look after some property which a whimsical old uncle had left him, under conditions which make residence in this country a matter of necessity. It’s a pity! There is a great deal of good in him, and I have no doubt he would be a great genius, if he could but pass a couple of winters at Berlin.”

“Indeed! What was his English prejudice?” asked Sir John with great disgust.

“It is not easy to answer that question. National prejudice is like a pig-tail—you can’t see it in front. Another cup of tea, if you please, it’s only my fourth. And it’s scandalous how they teach history in your schools. This new friend of mine is a well-bred man, but he had never heard of Blücher. We looked at the Duke of Wellington riding over the field of Waterloo; and I said: ‘Couldn’t you find a place for our Blücher?’ ‘Blutsher,’ said he, ‘who is Blutsher?’ He knew nothing whatever of Blücher and the Prussian army; and when I told him, that but for the Prussians Wellington would have been made minced-meat of at Waterloo, he actually laughed in my face. Now tell me, most respectable Sir John, how do they teach history in your schools? The French, I know, cook history, and make matters pleasant for ‘the young idea.’ ”

Sir John was silent. The article he had read in the Times had made him magnanimous; and our friend Keif remained uncontradicted.

“I told my companion,” continued the Doctor, after a pause, “that the dancing was a disgraceful exhibition; he said, so it was. He had seen the dancing abroad. If he had never been out of England, I am sure, he would have been delighted with the performance of his countrywomen; and, as most Englishmen do in such a case, he would have shrugged his shoulders and set me down as a fool for the unfavourable opinion I pronounced. But he had left part of his prejudice on the other side of the channel, and he himself pointed out to me how ridiculous those people looked, and how the couples clung to one another like woolsacks which cannot stand alone, and how they pushed one another, and marked the time by kicking one another’s toes.”

“Don’t believe,” said he, “that there is better dancing in the saloons of our aristocracy. We know nothing of the noble art, and for that very reason do we practise it with so much devotion. Such like unnatural leanings are common with all nations. They are most zealous in what they least understand. The Russians build a fleet, the Austrian affect finances, the Germans make revolutions, the French will have a Republic, and the English dance.”

“But surely, Doctor,” said Bella, “neither you nor your new friend can deny that better dancing is going on in London than in any other town. This very season we had Taglioni, Rosati, and Feraris, all on the same stage!”

“The old argument,” said the Doctor. “Because you have got money, and because you can afford to pay for a good ballet, you pretend that the most graceful dancers are hatched in England. You subsidised the German armies against Napoleon; and now you believe that your red-coats alone vanquished the French. Port and sherry are your English wines; and because you succeed, at an enormous expense, to rear hothouse peaches, grapes, and apples, you will have it that England produces better fruit than any other country. But it’s all nonsense. It’s money and money, and again money; and with that money you buy up the world, and—— After all, old England for ever! Then another cup of tea for me?”

“Did you see that gas-lit rivulet at Vauxhall?” asked I, for I like to hear the Doctor find fault with England. He does it in such a good-natured, amiable manner, and with a spice of roguishness which is all the more interesting, since in Germany Dr. Keif is generally disliked for his Anglomania. “What,” asked I, “do you say to the romantic style of decoration which prevails in England?”

“Of course I saw that rivulet, and had a splendid adventure on its banks.”

Dr. Keif is literally overwhelmed with adventures. He cannot go to the next street without a remarkable incident of some sort or other.

“I had lost my companion,” said Dr. Keif, leaning back in his chair; “I had lost him in the crowd. I saw a dark avenue in the distance, and I longed for rest. You know, Sir John, we Germans cannot for any length of time go on without peace and tranquillity, although the Times will have it that we are the most restless and disturbance-loving nation in Europe. Well, under the trees, near the rivulet, I espied a loving couple—they walk up and down, and stand still—of course they are happy to be alone and unobserved. But anxious to understand the character of the English, I resolved to overhear their conversation. I passed them several times, but they were silent. Right, thought I, affection makes them mute! Their souls stand entranced on the giddy pinnacle of passion! But they could not be silent all night, especially since it was so dark they could not speak with their eyes. I laid myself in ambush; they approached; my heart beat quick with thrilling anticipation; they were talking—but can you fancy what they were talking about?—Of Morrison’s pills, and the mode and manner of their effect in bilious complaints! Of course there was no resisting this; I jumped out of the thicket, leaped across the rivulet, and came home at once.”

We all laughed at the Doctor’s adventure, and Sir John, too, laughed. Dr. Keif had met with half a dozen adventures on his way home. For instance, he had fallen in with a sailor who told him long stories about Spain. He (not the sailor) had found a drunken woman in a gutter and dragged her out; and Bella declared that that woman must have been Irish. And two vestals had taken hold of his arms, and he had a deal of trouble before he could induce them to leave him alone. In short, there was no end of the Doctor’s adventures.

CHAP. V.
The Police.

THE LONDON POLICE.—JOURNEY FROM PARIS TO LONDON.—THE POLITICS OF THE FORCE.—ITS MODE OF ACTION ILLUSTRATED.—DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE POLICE IN ENGLAND AND ON THE CONTINENT.—DETECTIVES.—ROOKERIES.—THE POLICEMAN AS A CITIZEN.

IN a town such as London is at the present day, where thousands of honest men follow their daily avocations at the side and mixed up with thousands of dishonest men, the Government has but one alternative with respect to the police regulations. It must either resign the idea of organising a surveillance by means of the police, or that surveillance must be carried on according to a highly practical principle.

With the police and other political institutions, it is exactly the same as with our clothes. They would seem to grow with us; but the fact is, as we grow in height and breadth we take care that our coats have greater length and width.

In the same manner, is the police allowed to grow in proportion to the growth of a town; and none but thieves or fools in politics can object to the process, provided always that the police is for the protection and not for the torment of the peaceful citizen.

Scarcely a hundred years ago, no one could dare to walk from Kensington to the city after nightfall. At Hyde Park corner, not far from the place where the Crystal Palace stood, there was a bell which was rung at seven and at nine o’clock; those who had to go to the city assembled at the call and proceeded in a body, by which means they were comparatively safe from the attacks of highwaymen.

Small bodies of men were frequently stopped by the robbers; it happened now and then that the passengers were attacked and sorely molested by a roistering band of wild young fellows, who were fresh from the public-house.

But all this romance came to an end when George II. was stopped and plundered one fine night on his return from hunting. The very next morning a troop of armed horsemen was established to watch over the security of the public streets, and though these were not the rudiments of the London Police (there were already some watchmen and river-guards), yet we consider them as a fraction of the police-embryo which has since grown up to such respectable dimensions.

The Guild of the London police (on the continent they are but too frequently confounded with the older constables) was founded and trained by Sir Robert Peel; they are consequently a product of our own times; and that this product is not a luxury, and that it is more useful than many other creations of our own times is clearly shewn by the great London journals, which daily acknowledge the institution in their police reports. But this institution is very little understood in Germany, and even strangers, who pass a short time in England, are not likely to understand it.

Let us watch the steps of a German, for instance, on his journey across the channel. He leaves Cologne with an express train, and reaches Calais at midnight. Bewildered with sleep, he leaves the carriage; the first object which strikes his view is a large hand painted on the wall. He follows the outstretched index of that hand and finds his way, not to the refreshment rooms whither he wants to go, but to the “Bureau de Police,” where he never thought of going. He is cruelly disappointed; but he is an honest man, and not even a political refugee, and he has, therefore, no reason to avoid communication with the French police. They ask for his passport, and if the traveller can produce some document of the kind they are content. The passport may, indeed, be a forgery: its possessor may have stolen it. Napoleon the Great found his way back from Elba without a passport; and Louis Philippe, also without a passport, found his way out of France; but no matter! the French require the production of passports, doubtlessly for some hidden good, for the alcun’ bene of Dante.

On his arrival in Folkestone or Dover, many an honest German has, from mere force of habit, put his hand in his pocket and produced his passport ready for inspection. Of course the methodical foreigner was laughed at for his pains. The Emperor of France and his satellites may possibly have an interest in knowing all particulars about those who turn their backs upon them; but constitutional England is not in the habit of asking her guests whence they come, why they come, and whither they go. After a short interview with the Custom-house officers—and these, too, though functionaries, are dressed like all other honest men—the stranger is free of the country; and if his trade be an honest one, he is not interfered with; indeed, he is almost neglected by the public authorities. On his arrival in London, he takes apartments in an hotel, or in a boarding-house, or he takes furnished lodgings, or a house, or a street; no matter, the police do not interfere with him; and to all appearance they pay no attention whatever to his proceedings.

This apparently unguarded liberty is the secret of the real grandeur of the Preventive Service. But that this is possible, is partly owing to the good-will of a liberal government, and partly to the peculiarities of English life and manners. This is a point which we shall, on a future occasion, treat at greater length.

The circumstance that a stranger may walk to and fro between the Isle of Wight and the Orkneys without being questioned, protocolled, and stopped, has caused many a foreigner to doubt the safety of life in England generally. A certain Berlin professor, I am told, got quite angry on the subject. “A man,” said he, “goes about in England exactly as if he were disowned by society and removed from within the pale of it. The very dogs of Berlin are more respected! At least they have their numbers taken and are entered into the dog-book (Hundebuch), at the police-office, while in England none but thieves can feel comfortable, since thieves alone are in a manner noticed by the police.”

In treating of the functions of the London Police, we ought at once to say, that the police in England is essentially a force of safety, whose functions are limited to the prevention of crime and the apprehension of criminals. All its departments of river, street, and railway police are instituted for the same purpose. There has not hitherto been a political department in Scotland-yard. The police, as at present organised, deals only with the vulgar sins of larceny, robbery, murder, and forgery; it superintends the cleaning of the streets; it prevents the interruption of the street traffic, and it takes care of drunkards and of children that have strayed from their homes. But political opinions, however atrocious, if they have not ripened into criminal action, are altogether without the sphere of the English police.

The policemen, as the free citizens of a free country, are perfectly at liberty to have political opinions of their own; they need not modify or conceal their sentiments when they take the blue coat and the glazed hat. They are required to catch thieves as cats do mice. Some of them are ultra-royalists; others are ultra-radicals. Generally speaking, they are not by any means conservatives. The majority of them belong to the poorer and less educated classes; they take their political opinions from the radical weekly papers. They club together as sailors, cabmen, and labourers do, and take in their weekly paper, which they read and discuss all the week through. They quote their paper whenever they talk politics, and this they do frequently, for your London policeman is as zealous a dabbler in politics as any ale-house keeper in Suabia.

Adam Smith founds his financial theories on the division of labour. The division of labour is also the firm basis of the efficiency of the English police. Since they have not to perform all the functions which weigh on the shoulders of their helmeted and sabred brethren on the continent; since they need not devote their attention to political conversations and movements in the case of individuals or of communities; since they need not keep watch over and give an account of the movements and opinions of strangers and natives; and since they have nothing whatever to do with the secrets of families, the leaders of the daily papers, nor with the unsealing and sealing of post-office letters, they are at liberty to devote all their energy and ingenuity to the efficient discharge of those functions which are properly assigned to them.

It is not a fable, nor a piece of English braggadocio, when it is said, that the thieves are more thoroughly hunted down in this immense city of London, than they are in the smaller German capitals. A foreigner who studies the police-reports of the great London journals, will find there ample matter for admiration and reflection. We quote but one example, to show the manner in which the various parts of the police machine work together. The anecdote may possibly contain some useful hints for the guardians of constitutional towns.

A printer sends one of his men to the stationer to take in stock for the printing-office. It was late on a Saturday afternoon, and the manufacturer promised to have the paper in readiness early on Monday. The man to whom the message was entrusted and who brought back the answer, was, for some reason or other, dismissed in the course of that very evening.

On the Monday, another messenger was sent for the paper. He came back without it. The paper had been taken away a few hours before he arrived at the stationer’s. No paper, however, had come to the printing-office. The greatest embarrassment prevailed. A couple of hours pass, and yet the paper does not arrive. Suspicion is at length directed to the man who had been discharged. Inquiries are made at the stationer’s, and the description of the person who came for the paper corresponds with the appearance of the suspected person. Upon this, the printer proceeds to the police-station to report the case. What with waiting and sending about, the better part of the day was gone.

Mr. M—then makes his appearance in the inspector’s office, and proceeds to state his case. But scarcely has he given his name, when the inspector puts a stop to all further explanations. “You’ve been robbed, Mr. M—. We know all about it. The thief is in custody, and the goods must by this time have been delivered at your office. One ream of No. 2 and two reams of No. 5 are wanting; but we know where to find them. They shall be sent to you to-morrow. Good bye, sir.”

Mr. M—, who, like every Englishman of the same stamp, is in no wise to be surprised with any thing that may happen between heaven and earth, is nevertheless inclined to think this a strange case—a very strange one indeed. He pushes his hat back, strikes his umbrella on the floor, and turning on his heel, he makes the best of his way home, where he finds “all right,” while all the “devils” are frantic with joy that the paper has been recovered, and that Toby, who carried matters with such a high hand, is, after all, nothing but a thief, and sure to be transported.

The state of the case was simply this:—

The man, assisted by a friend, had called for the paper, put it into a cart, and gone off. The worthy pair sold a small quantity in a place where they had, on similar occasions, “done a stroke of business;” and, after this little matter had been settled to their entire satisfaction, they drove off to a public-house at the distance of about five miles from the scene of their crime. This public-house was situated in a very quiet street. The cart and horse were left at the door while the two associates, snugly ensconced in the parlour, commenced enjoying the fruits of their robbery.

They had not been there very long before the policeman on duty became struck with the cart and its freight of paper. He had been on that beat for many months past, and knew that no printer, bookbinder, or stationer, lived in the street. The horse and cart were strangers to him; so were the two men whom he saw in the parlour as he passed the window. The whole thing had an ugly appearance. He meets with one of the detectives, and communicates his suspicions to that sagacious individual. The two fellows, utterly unconscious of the watch set on their movements, produce more money than they could have earned in the course of a week. They are taken into custody and brought up before the magistrate. They cannot account for the possession of the paper, and make a confession in full. The policeman, however, must have been very sure of his case when he arrested them; for in doing so he incurred a heavy responsibility. If his suspicions had turned out to be unfounded, he would have been mulcted in a heavy fine, and possibly he might have lost his place.

Now let us change the venue, and suppose this affair had happened in Paris, Vienna, or Berlin. Not only have the police of those capitals duties of greater importance than the mere catching of a couple of wretched thieves, but it is also altogether absurd to believe that a policeman or “Sicherheitsmann” should pay any attention to the fact of a cart and horse being stationed at the door of a pot-house. Such a thing is utterly impossible. The policemen of Vienna and Berlin change their beats as soldiers do their posts. Possibly they know the street and the outsides of the houses; they may also have some slight knowledge of the most disreputable dens, and of those who habitually frequent them, and, in some instances, they are au courant of the politics of a few honest tradesmen or citizens, who are too harmless to make a secret of such matters.

The London policeman, on the other hand, knows every nook and corner, every house, man, woman, and child on his beat. He knows their occupations, habits, and circumstances. This knowledge he derives from his constantly being employed in the same quarter and the same street, and to—and surely a mind on duty bent may take great liberties with the conventional moralities—that platonic and friendly intercourse which he carries on with the female servants of the establishments which it is his vocation to protect. An English maid-servant is a pleasant girl to chat with, when half shrouded by the mystic fog of the evening and with her smart little cap coquettishly placed on her head, she issues from the sallyport of the kitchen, and advances stealthily to the row of palisades which protect the house. And the handsome policeman, too, with his blue coat and clean white gloves, is held in high regard and esteem by the cooks and housemaids of England. His position on his beat is analogous to that of the porter of a very large house; it is a point of honour with him, that nothing shall escape his observation.

This police-honour constitutes the essential difference between the English and the continental police. Even the most liberal of politicians—not a visionary—must admit, that it is impossible for a large town, and still more impossible for a large state, to exist without a well-organised protective force. It matters little whether the force which insures the citizens against theft and robbery, as other associations insure them against fire and hail-storms, is kept up and directed by the State, or whether it is maintained by private associations—as has been proposed. It is enough to refer to the fact, that philanthropists of the Cobden and Burritt stamp have found reasons as plenty as blackberries against standing armies of soldiers; but that they have never yet dared to deny the necessity of a standing army of policemen.

The police, whenever and wherever it answers its original purpose, is a most beneficent institution. Its unpopularity in all the states of the Continent is chargeable, not to the principles of the institution, but to their perversion. It is the perversion of the protective force into an instrument of oppression and aggression, which the German hates at home; but he has no aversion to the police as such. Even the maddest of the democratic refugees confess to great love and admiration for the police in England. A man may like his cigar without entertaining a preposterous passion for nicotine.

The policeman, no matter whether in a uniform or in plain clothes, is a soldier of peace—a sentinel on a neutral post, and as such he is as much entitled to respect as the soldier who takes the field against a foreign invader. This is the case in England. The policeman is always ready to give his assistance and friendly advice; the citizen is never brought into an embarrassing and disagreeable contact with the police; and the natural consequence of this state of things is, that the most friendly feelings exist between the policeman and the honest part of the population. Whenever the police have to interfere and want assistance, the inhabitants are ready to support them, for they know that the police never act without good reasons.

The detective police, who act in secret, do not stand on such an intimate footing with the public as the preventive part of the force; but whenever they are in want of immediate assistance for the arrest of an offender, the detective has but to proclaim his functions, and no man, not even the greatest man in the land, would refuse to lend him assistance. In Germany and in France no one will associate with an agent of the secret police, a mouchard, or by whatever other name those persons may be called. Every one has an instinctive aversion to coming in contact with this species of animal, for they are traitorous, venomous, and blood-thirsty. And that such is the case, is another proof of the vast superiority of the British institutions over those of the Continent.

That London has not in the fulness of time come to be a vast den of thieves and murderers, is mainly owing to the action of the detective force. Here, where the worst men of the European and American continents congregate, the functions of a detective are not only laborious but also dangerous. The semi-romantic ferocity of an Italian bandit is sheer good nature, if compared to the savage hardness and villany of a London burglar. The bandit plies his lawless trade in the merry green wood and mossy dell; he confesses to his priest, and receives absolution for any peccadilloes in the way of stabbing he may have happened to commit; on moonlit nights his head rests on the knees of the girl that loves him, in spite of his cruel trade. He is not altogether lost to the gentler feelings of humanity, and, in a great measure, he wants the confounding hardening consciousness of having, by his actions, disgraced himself and his species. But the London robber, like a venomous reptile, has his home in dark holes under ground, in hidden back rooms of dirty houses, and on the gloomy banks of the Thames. He breaks into the houses as a wolf into a sheepfold, and kills those who resist him, and, in many instances, even those who offer no resistance. There is no sun or forest-green for him, no priest gives him absolution, the female that herds with him is, in most cases, even more ferocious and abandoned than himself; and if he be father to a child, he casts it at an early age into the muddy whirlpool of the town, there to beg, to steal, and to perish.

The streets which skirt the banks of the Thames are most horrible. There the policeman does not saunter along on his beat with that easy and comfortable air which distinguishes him in the western parts of the town. Indeed, in many instances, they walk by twos and twos, with dirks under their coats, and rattles to call in the aid of their comrades.

Many policemen and detectives, who, hunting on the track of some crime, have ventured into these dens of infamy have disappeared, and no trace has been left of them. They fell as victims to the vengeance of some desperate criminal whom, perhaps, on a former occasion, they had brought to justice. And it would almost appear to be part of the haute politique of the London robbers, that some policeman must be killed from time to time as a warning to his comrades. The guild of assassins, too, have their theory of terrorism.

Another remarkable fact is, that the London policemen, though their duty brings them constantly in contact with the very scum of the earth, contract none of their habits of rudeness, which appear to be an essential portion of the stock-in-trade of the continental police. One should say, that the “force” in England is recruited from a most meritorious class of society, one in which patience, gentleness, and politeness are hereditary.

Look there! A fine strapping fellow crossing the street with a child in his arms! The girl is trembling as an aspen-leaf, for she was just on the point of getting under a wheel. That fine fellow has taken her up; and now you see he crosses again and fetches the little girl’s mother, who stands bewildered with the danger, and whom he conducts in safety to the opposite pavement. Who and what is that man? His dress is decent and citizen-like, and yet peculiar; it differs from the dress of ordinary men; coat and trowsers of blue cloth; a number and a letter embroidered on his collar; a striped band and buckle on his arm; a hat with oilskin top, and white gloves—rather a rarity in the dirty atmosphere of London. That man is a policeman, a well got up and improved edition of our own German Polizeidiener, those scarecrows with sticks, sabres, and other military accoutrements, standing at the street-corners of German capitals, and spoiling the temper of honest men as well as of thieves.

It is, however, a mistake to believe, as some persons on the continent actually do, that the London police are altogether unarmed and at the mercy of every drunkard. Not only have they, in many instances and quarters, a dirk hidden under their great-coats, but they have also, at all times, a short club-like staff in their pockets. This staff is produced on solemn occasions, for instance, on the occasion of public processions, when every policeman holds his staff in his hand. The staves have of

late years been manufactured of gutta percha, and made from this material they are lighter and more durable than wooden staves. In the name of all that is smashing, what a rich full sound does not such a gutta percha club produce when in quick succession it comes down on a human shoulder. That sound is frequently heard by those who, on Saturday or Monday night, perambulate the poorer or more dissolute quarters of the town, when all respect for the constable’s staff has been drowned in a deluge of gin. Matters, on such occasions, proceed frequently to the extremity of a duel. The policeman, like any civilian, fights for his skin; he gets a drubbing and returns it with interest. But since his weapon does not give him so manifest an advantage as a sword would, the public consider the fracas a fair fight. And after all, the combatants must appear before a magistrate; in the police-court they are on equal terms, and witnesses are heard on either side. There is no prejudice in favour of the policeman.

But stop! Look at the crowd in the street. Two policemen are busy with a poor ragged creature of a woman, whom they carry to a doorway. An accident perhaps? Nothing of the kind. The woman is drunk, and fell down in the road. The policemen are taking her to the station, where she may sleep till she is sober. But it was a strange spectacle to see those two men in smart blue coats and white gloves rescuing the ragged woman from the mire of the street.

Let us go on. At Temple Bar there is a Gordian knot of vehicles of every description. Three drays are jammed into one another. One of the horses has slipped and fallen. The traffic is stopped for a few minutes; and this is a matter of importance at Temple Bar. Just look down Fleet-street—the stoppage extends to Ludgate-hill. But half a dozen policemen appear as if by enchantment. One of them ranges the vehicles that proceed to the city in a line on the left side of the road. A second lends a hand in unravelling the knot of horses. A third takes his position in the next street, and stops the carriages and cabs which, if allowed to proceed, would but contribute their quota to the confusion. Two policemen are busy with the horse which lies kicking in the road. They unhook chains and unbuckle straps; get the horse on its legs, and assist the driver in putting him to rights again. They have got dirty all over; and they must, moreover, submit to hear from Mr. Evans, who stands on the pavement dignified, with a broad-brimmed Quaker hat, that they are awkward fellows, and know nothing whatever about the treatment of horses. In another minute, the whole street-traffic is in full force. The crowd vanishes as quickly and silently as it came. The two policemen betake themselves to the next shop, where the apprentice is called upon to brush their clothes.

The continental policeman is the torment of the stranger. The London policeman is the stranger’s friend. If you are in search of an acquaintance and only know the street where he lives, apply to the policeman on duty in that street, and he will show you the house, or at least assist you in your search. If you lose your way, turn to the first policeman you meet; he will take charge of you and direct you. If you would ride in an omnibus without being familiar with the goings and comings of those four-wheeled planets, speak to a policeman, and he will keep you by his side until the “bus” you want comes within hailing distance. If you should happen to have an amicable dispute with a cabman—and what stranger can escape that infliction?—you may confidently appeal to the arbitration of a policeman. If, in the course of your peregrinations, you come to a steam-boat wharf or a railway-station, or a theatre or some other public institution, and if you are at a loss how to proceed, pray pour your sorrows into the sympathetic ear of the policeman. He will direct yourself and baggage; in a theatre, he will assist you in the purchase of a ticket, or at least tell you where to apply and how to proceed. The London policeman is almost always kind and serviceable.

At night, indeed, as some say, he is rather more rough-spoken than in the day-time; and when you meet and address him in some solitary street, he is reserved and treats you with something akin to suspicion. Whether or not this remark applies to the force generally, we will not undertake to decide. But it is quite natural that they should not be altogether at their ease in

solitary or disreputable quarters, and that their temper gets soured thereby. A glass of brandy now and then may also contribute to produce the above effect. But the English climate is damp; the fog makes its home in the folds of the constable’s great-coat; the rain runs from the oilskin cape which stands the policeman in the stead of an umbrella; the wind is cold and bleak; and we leave the policeman on his beat with “the stranger’s thanks and the stranger’s gratitude.”

CHAP. VI.
Newgate and its Neighbourhood.

RIVERS UNDER GROUND.—DIVISION OF LABOUR.—EXECUTIONS.—THE PEOPLE’S FESTIVALS.—PREDILECTION FOR CRIMINAL CASES.—STATISTICS OF NEWGATE.—PATERNOSTER-ROW.—SMITHFIELD.—SELF-GOVERNMENT, ITS BRIGHT AND DARK SIDES.

LONDON has, besides the Thames, a great many smaller rivers, the majority of which have, for many years past, been appropriated by the commissioners of sewers and the antiquarians. In the olden days, men went out of the way of rivers. In our own time, the rivers are compelled to give way to mankind. They are vaulted and bridged over, and houses have been built on the vaults, or streets have been constructed over them; and the grocer in the corner shop yonder has not the least suspicion of his house standing on a river, and he never thinks of the lamentable condition of his goods, in case the vault were to give way under him.

One of these rivers was the Fleet river. After it the street is named even at the present day. The site of its bed is still marked by a broad valley street with considerable hills, all built over, on either side. The hills are so steep that heavy drays and omnibuses cannot come down without locking.

This operation, though insignificant, furnishes an opportune illustration of the extent to which the principle of the division of labour has been carried in London.

Just look at that lumbering omnibus, thundering along at a sharp trot. It has reached the brink when the horses are stopped for a second; and at that very moment a fellow makes a rush at the omnibus, bending his body almost under the wheels, and moving forward with the vehicle, which still proceeds, he unhooks the drag, and puts it to one of the hind-wheels. This done, he calls out “All right!” The horses, sagacious creatures, understand the meaning of that sentence as well as the driver; they fall again into a sharp trot down the hill. At the bottom there is another human creature making a neck-or-nothing rush at the wheels, taking the drag off and hooking it on again. “All right!” The horses stamp the pavement to the flying-about of sparks, the driver makes a noise which is half a whistle and half a hiss, and the omnibus rushes up the opposite bank of the quondam Fleet river.

“Time is money!” is an English proverb, and one whose validity is so strongly acknowledged, that in many instances money is freely spent in order to effect a saving of time. Those two men save the omnibuses exactly one minute in each tour down Holborn Hill, for one minute each of them would lose if they were to stop to put on the drag. But one minute’s loss to the many thousands who daily pass this way represents a considerable capital of time. If the two men are remunerated at the rate of only one halfpenny per omnibus, their incomes will be found to be larger than the salary of many a public functionary in Germany.

This, then, is another specimen of industry and economy peculiar to London streets. But, let us say, that it is possible only by means of the enormous traffic which crowds the streets of London.

We have, meanwhile, walked down the steep descent. We have crossed the hidden stream, walked up the hill on the other side, and now we stand on a broad plateau, where two large streets cross at right angles. This conformation produces a considerable amount of space between the pavements—a sort of irregular open square, and one which from time to time presents a melancholy spectacle.

One of the street corners is taken up by the old Newgate Prison; and the open place in front serves for the execution of felons who have been sentenced to death at the Sessions, and who, in the first instance, had been committed to Newgate. It is a shocking custom, though it springs from the humane desire to shorten the agony which the criminal must suffer on his road from the prison to the scaffold.

“Our popular festivals!” said a lady, who had been emancipated by a lengthened residence on the Continent. “You wish to know where the people’s merry-makings are held? Go to Newgate on a hanging day, or to Horsemonger Lane, or to any other open space in front of a prison; there you will find shouting, and joking, and junketting, from early dawn until the hangman has made his appearance and performed his office. The windows are let out, stands are erected, eating and drinking booths surround the scaffold; there is an enormous consumption of beer and brandy. They come on foot, on horseback, and in carriages, from a distance of many miles, to see a spectacle which is a disgrace to humanity; and foremost are the women—my countrywomen—not only the females of low degree, but also ladies, ‘by birth and education.’ It is a shame; but, nevertheless, it is true. And our newspapers are afterwards compelled to chronicle the last death-struggles of the wretched criminal!”

There is no exaggeration in this. A criminal process, robbery and murder, a case of poisoning—these suffice to keep the families of England in breathless suspense for weeks at a time. The daily and weekly papers cannot find space enough for all the details of the inquest, the proceedings of the police, the trial, and the execution; and woe to the paper that dared to curtail these interesting reports! it would at once lose its supporters. Rather let such a paper take no notice of an insurrection in Germany; but neglect a criminal trial, a scene on the scaffold—never!

Let us look into that room. The father of the family, his wife, the old grandmother, with her hands demurely folded, and the daughters and little children, are all crowded round the table. The father reads the newspaper; the family listens to him. The tea is getting cold, the fire is going out, the curtains are still undrawn and the blinds are up; the very passengers in the street—“O tell it not in Gath!”—can see what is going on in the parlour; but the listeners pay no attention to all this, for the paper contains a full report of the trial of Mrs. Manning, or some other popular she-assassin. Did she do the deed? Is she innocent? Did she make a confession? And what about her husband? And how was it done, and when, and where?

It is truly marvellous! These good, gentle people, who would not willingly hurt or pain any living creature, actually warm to the scenes of horror reported in that paper. It is altogether incomprehensible, how and to what extent this passion for the horrible has seized hold of the hearts of English men and women. They languish after strong emotions; they yearn for something which will make their flesh creep. A similar phenomenon may occasionally be observed on the other side of the Channel; but there it forms the exception, while here it is the rule. And on the Continent, too, we find this horror-mongering only in the provinces, where people, wearied with the monotony of their long winter evenings, hunger and thirst after anything like a public scandal or spectacle; but we do not find this sort of thing in large towns, where people have a variety of objects and incidents to attract their attention. But the English on the Continent make long journeys to be present at an execution. Their passion accompanies them even across the Channel. Surely we do not envy their feelings in this respect!

Newgate is a gloomy-looking, ancient building. It is the beau ideal of prison architecture, with hardly any windows, with here and there an empty niche, or some dilapidated carvings; all besides is gloomy, stony, and cold.

Newgate has gone down in the world. In its early years it was devoted to the reception of persons of high rank; it has since submitted to the principle of legal equality, and rich and poor, high and low, pass through its gates to freedom or the scaffold. About three thousand prisoners are annually confined within its walls. The prison can accommodate five hundred at a time, and this number is usually found there immediately before the commencement of the sessions. But the sessions of the Central Criminal Court once over, Newgate is almost empty, for some of its inmates have been discharged from custody, while the majority of them have received their sentence and taken their departure for sundry houses of detention and correction. The prisoners in Newgate are at liberty to communicate with one another; they are not compelled to work.

We pass through Newgate-street and turn to the right into Paternoster-row, a narrow street, from times immemorial the manufactory of learning, where the publishing trade is carried on in dingy houses, and where it runs its anarchical career without the benefit of a censor.

“From times immemorial!” That is a hasty expression. There was a time when Paternoster-row harboured the grocery trade of the city, while the upper stories were taken by Marchandes des Modes and visited by all the beauty and elegance of old London. But gaiety had to give way to religion, and the Marchandes des Modes, taking flight to more modern streets, were followed by the rosary-girls under Henry VIII. Luther’s translation of the Bible was publicly burnt in this neighbourhood, and soon after warrants were issued against those who had burnt it. So varied have been the applications of this narrow dusky lane, in which, to this day, the traveller may read an inscription on a stone tablet, announcing that Paternoster-row is the highest point of ancient London.

In our own days this street is to London what Leipzig is to Germany. The departments of the publishing trade are, however, kept more strictly separate. The publishers of Bibles, who send forth the Scriptures in volumes of all sizes, from the smallest to the largest, and who do business in all the civilised and barbarous languages on the face of the earth, exclude all vain and secular literature, such as tales, novels, plays, poems, and works of history. While the publishers of such like works in their turn, generally fight shy of tourists and travellers whose works belong to departments of another class of publishing firms. Juvenile books form a very important department of the publishing trade; and this department, like the infant schools, is entirely devoted to the instruction and amusement of the rising generation. So strenuous are the exertions of those publishers to entice the babes and infants of England into the treacherous corners of the A, B, C, and of the higher sciences, that their solicitude in this respect appears almost touching to those who fancy that all this trouble is taken and all this ingenuity expended, purely and simply for the interest of philanthropy, and of good sound education.

We ought not to stop too long in Paternoster-row. Our presence is required elsewhere. But still we must for the benefit of German mothers and publishers, state the fact, that of late years the publishers of Paternoster-row have hit upon the plan of printing the rudiments of all human science on strong white canvass. English children, in the dawn of their young existence, are as essentially practical as German children. They have an instinctive aversion to all printed matter. The A, B, C, is to them the first fruit from the tree of knowledge, the key to the mysteries and woes of life. Therefore do the children of England detest the primers; they soil them, tear them, roll the leaves, in short treat them with as much scorn and contumely, as though the annihilation of a single copy would lead to the extinction of the whole species.

The practical spirit of English speculation meets this prejudice on its own ground. The primers, or A, B, C, books as they are called in Germany, are printed on canvass, and each leaf is moreover hemmed, for all the world like a respectable domestic pocket-handkerchief. For children are sagacious, and but for the hemming the rudiments of science would, under their hands, be converted into lint. As it is, even the most obstreperous of little boys is powerless in the presence of such a canvass book. And, supposing, he be uncommonly obstinate, and that after great exertion he succeeds in running his finger through one of the leaves; even then he is foiled, for his mother darns it as she would an old stocking; and the monster book appears again as clean and immaculate as a diplomatic note. And the upshot of the affair is that the poor little boy must go without the usual allowance of Sunday pudding.

London is the greatest market for books in the world. Not only does it supply England, but also Asia, Africa, Australia, and those island colonies of the great ocean, in which English daring and English enterprise have established the Anglo-Saxon race, and with it the English language. About 15,000 persons are employed in the printing, binding, and in the sale of books. Their mechanical aids and machinery have been brought to an astounding height of perfection, and an edition of a thousand copies in octavo requires but ten or twelve hours for the binding. But when you consider those bony, broad-shouldered, firm-looking Englishmen, you understand at once that such men could not live on literature alone. Paternoster-row, the centre of the book-trade, carries on its existence in modest retirement amidst a conglomeration of large and small streets, but to the north there is the provoking, broad, impertinent extent of old Smithfield, the notorious cattle-market of London, the greatest cattle-market in the world, the dirtiest of all the dirty spots which disgrace the fair face of the capital of England.

This immense open place, or more properly speaking, this immense conglomeration of a great many small open places, with its broad open street market, is covered all over with wooden compartments and pens, such as are usual on the sheep-farms of the continent.

Each of these pens is large enough to accommodate a moderate sized statue; each of them must, on Mondays and Fridays, accommodate an ox and a certain number of cattle, pigs, or sheep. If by a miracle all these wretched animals were converted into marble or bronze, surely after thousands of years, the nations of the earth would journey to Smithfield to study the character of this our time in that vast field of monuments.

But since such a poetical transformation has not taken place, the appearance of that quarter of the town is curious but not agreeable. Surrounded by dirty streets, lanes, courts, and alleys, the haunts of poverty and crime, Smithfield is infested not only with fierce and savage cattle, but also with the still fiercer and more savage tribes of drivers and butchers. On market-days the passengers are in danger of being run over, trampled down, or tossed up by the drivers or “beasts”; at night, rapine and murder prowl in the lanes and alleys in the vicinity; and the police have more trouble with this part of the town than with the whole of Brompton, Kensington, and Bayswater. The crowding of cattle in the centre of the town is an inexhaustible source of accidents. Men are run down, women are tossed, children are trampled to death. But these men, women, and children, belong to the lower classes. Persons of rank or wealth do not generally come to Smithfield early in the morning, if, indeed, they ever come there at all. The child is buried on the following Sunday, when its parents are free from work; the man is taken to the apothecary’s shop close by, where the needful is done to his wound; the woman applies to some female quack for a plaister, and if she is in good luck she gets another plaister in the shape of a glass of gin from the owner of the cattle. The press takes notice of the accidents, people read the paragraph and are shocked; and the whole affair is forgotten even before the next market day.

For years Smithfield has been denounced by the press and in Parliament. The Tories came in and went out; so did the Whigs. But neither of the two great political parties could be induced to set their faces against the nuisance. The autonomy of the city, moreover, deprecated anything like government intervention, for Smithfield is a rich source of revenue; the market dues, the public-house rents, and the traffic generally, represent a heavy sum. In the last year only, the Lords and Commons of England have pronounced the doom of Smithfield. The cattle market is to be abolished. But when? That is the question—for its protectors are sure to come forward with claims of indemnity, and other means of temporisation; and the choice of a fitting locality, on the outskirts of the town, will most likely take some years. For we ought not to forget that in England everything moves slowly, with the exception of machinery and steam.

Smithfield and its history are instances of the many dark sides of self-government. For self-government has its dark sides, commendable though it be as the basis of free institutions. It is to the self-government of every community, of every parish, and of every association, that England is indebted for her justly envied industrial, political, and commercial, greatness. But self-government is the cause of many great and useful undertakings proceeding but slowly; and, in many instances, succumbing to the assaults of hostile and vested interests. The government, indeed, attempts to combat all nuisances by mooting and fostering a variety of agitations. In Germany, it wants but a line from a minister to eradicate small evils, or introduce signal improvements. In England the same matters must be dealt with in a tender and cautious manner; it takes a score or so of years of agitation, until parliament yielding to public opinion, passes its vote for the improvement, or against the nuisance. Great joy there would be in London, if Smithfield, as Sodom of old, were consumed with fire; but the whole of London would have been urged to resistance if the government had presumed, on its own responsibility, to interfere with Smithfield. Is this prejudice or political wisdom? On which side is the greater good—and on which the worse evil? The present happy condition of England has long since answered that question in favour of self-government. If ever there was a question on this point, it has long been settled in the hearts and minds of all continental nations. If they were to act according to their inclinations, I am positive they would “go and do so likewise.”

CHAP. VII.
Street Life.—The Post-office.

LONDON AND THE OCEAN.—HOW YOU MAY ATTACK THE REPUTATION OF EITHER.—THE METROPOLIS “EN NEGLIGEE.”—THE POST-OFFICE.—THE MODERN LETTER-WRITER.—MONEY ORDERS.—PENNY STAMPS, THEIR USE AND ABUSE.—JOHN BULL AND THE CHANCELLOR OF THE EXCHEQUER.—HOW MR. BULL IMPOSES UPON THAT RESPECTABLE FUNCTIONARY.—WHAT IS A NEWSPAPER?—THE GREAT HALL OF THE POST-OFFICE AT SIX P.M.

“DID you ever see the ocean?” said I, some time ago, to a Vienna friend, as by accident we met in Cheapside. Not far from the spot where from Newgate-street the passenger turns off to the Bank, there is a crossing of some of the most crowded streets. We stood on the pavement waiting for an opportunity, or a stoppage among the vehicles, to make a rush to the opposite side. “Well,” said I; “Did you ever see the ocean.”

“In a way!” replied my countryman, producing a cigar; and in a moment a match-seller was by his side offering his inflammable wares. “In a manner,” repeated my countryman, as he lit his cigar. “Of course I did not come by land from St. Stephen’s Place, in Old Vienna. I did cross a piece of salt water as far as I can remember; but that confounded sea-sickness got hold of my stomach, and made me blind to the marvels of the ocean. And—between you and me—I can’t say I was much taken with what I could see. I’ve read a deal about the sea, the wide and open sea, and all its glories. But it’s all humbug, that’s what it is; or, if you would rather, it’s poetic fancy. Water, after all, is but water. And, as for the sharks, you can’t see them. There wasn’t even such a thing as a storm. The lakes of Ischl are quite as green as the channel, and, perhaps, a shade greener. And last year, when I was on the Platten Lake, on my honour! I could not see to the opposite shore. Water, after all, is but water; and a few miles, more or less, make no difference that I can see. Besides, you only see a certain portion. That’s my opinion.”

O good and honest Viennese! I stopped my countryman, who was just taking a desperate leap into the road. No doubt he would have reached the opposite pavement in safety; but I stopped him, for I wanted a pretence for shaking hands with him. A Berlin man would never have deigned to declare that the ocean is a humbug, even though he had never gone beyond the bridges of the Spree or Havel river at Potsdam. Humbug has no existence for the real Berlin man, who has been reared in the superlative; and, besides, how can a Berliner, with all his contempt for authority, ever plead guilty to considering an important phenomenon, one which has been established ever since the days of the Great Elector, with less poesy than Henry Heine, and with less interest than Alexander von Humboldt. A Berliner would certainly have held forth on the “absolute idea,” or the “relative nothing,” or the “subjective view of space”; even though he never felt anything like the meaning of those hard words, and even if, within his secret heart, he had thought exactly as the Viennese did before he got sea-sick. There are things which a Berliner would rather die than say in public.

But my readers are justly entitled to ask what could induce me to connect Cheapside with the first impressions which a continental mind receives of the sea. The association of the two ideas is not by any means so absurd as some very sapient Germans may think. The first impressions which London makes on the stranger’s mind are similar to his first impressions of the sea. They are not overwhelming. “A town, after all, is but a town”; that’s what my Viennese friend would say. “There are as fine houses in Vienna and Berlin, and some are more imposing. Brewer’s drays, foot-passengers, cabs, omnibuses, and policemen—we have them all. A town, after all, is but a town. A few miles, more or less, make no difference. You can’t see it all at once!”

But it so happens that my countryman, thanks to the intervention of some friends, gets a place as engineer, at Folkestone. Between ourselves, he is a refugee. But what German, of our days, is not a refugee, or likely to be one? The Germans are a nation of traitors just now; therefore.... No offence.

Now my friend passes his leisure hours on the beach. He looks at the dark waters, and the white spray, and the waves which break at his feet. The waves come and go, and keep coming and going, alternately large and small, fast and slow. At one point they shoot smoothly over the yellow sand; at another they break with a thundering motion against the granite blocks of the jetty, flinging their spray over the stone parapet; and where my friend sits, the waves wash up shells and curious stones, and strange sea-weed, and withered leaves of sub-marine plants and shrubs; and the tides turn, coming in and going out, and the demon of the storm disports itself in the blackened air. The sea is dark and seething, and the fishing-boats, with their masts creaking and groaning, hasten up and down the waves to the gates of the harbour. The water in the very harbour is moved to and fro in violent convulsions; monster clouds, fringed with lightish gray, are driven landwards day and night; are confounded in the gloomy tints of the ocean, which groans and raves, and engulphs its victims, until its strength is exhausted. And the moon breaks through the clouds, preaching peace with her pallid demure face; and the waves are converted by the sentimental saint, and again rush playfully along the sand of the beach; and again they wash shells, and curious stones, and strange sea-weed, and withered leaves of sub-marine plants to the feet of my friend, who, overwhelmed with the spectacle, sits staring on vacancy.

“But you are quite wet, and really you look very sentimental, my dear countryman from the banks of the Danube! Water, after all, is but water! I hope you haven’t seen a shark? The lakes of Ischl are just as green as the sea, and perhaps a shade greener. A few miles more or less—what does it matter? A good deal of humbug about it, isn’t there?”

“You are malicious, Doctor. On my honour, very malicious! One ought to look at that pool for a year or so to know what it really is.”

Pilgrim from the land of passports, when you come to this giant town, in which traffic built its living dykes in every street then do not, in the name of all that is candid, be ashamed to appear, for three days at least, as an unfeeling callous creature. Make no secret of your thoughts. A few houses more or less cannot make an impression on a truly reasonable man!

But, friend stranger, stand for an hour or two leaning against the iron gate of Bow-church, Cheapside, or take up your position on the steps of the Royal Exchange. Do, as my countryman does in lonely Folkstone; let the waves of the great city rush past you, now murmuringly, now thunderingly, now fast, now slow, as crowds press on crowds, and vehicles on vehicles, as the streams of traffic break against every street corner and spread through the arterial system of the lanes and allies; as the knot of men, horses and vehicles get entangled almost at every point where the large streets join and cross, to move and heave and spin round, and get disentangled again, and again entangled. After such a review only can you realise the idea of the greatness of London.

It is said of a stranger, who came to London for the first time and took his quarters in one of the most crowded city streets, that he remained standing at the door the whole of the first day of his London existence, because he waited “until the crowd had gone.” A man who would do that ought to rise and go to bed with the owl. It is this which, after a prolonged stay in London so moves our admiration, that there is no stop, no rest, no pause in the street-life throughout the busy day.

In smaller towns, too, there are occasions or times when the streets are crowded in the extreme. The trottoirs of the Paris Boulevards are charming places, and on a beautiful evening they are as crowded, and even more so than the pavements of the London streets. But the crowding on the Paris trottoirs lasts a few hours only during the usual promenade time. London street-life is not bound to time; it is not confined within the narrow limits of a few hours. Indeed there is not a single hour in the four and twenty, in which any one of the principal London streets can be said to be deserted. For when the denizens of the far West retire to rest, at that very hour does the street-life dawn in the business-quarters of the East.

Early in the morning, before the chimneys of the houses and factories, of the railway-engines and steamers, have had time to fill the air with smoke, London presents a peculiar spectacle. It looks clean. The houses have a pleasing appearance; the morning sun gilds the muddy pool of the Thames; the arches and pillars of the bridges look lighter and less awkward than in the daytime, and the public in the street, too, are very different from the passengers that crowd them at a later hour.

Slowly, and with a hollow, rumbling sound do the sweeping-machines travel down the street in files of twos and threes to take off every particle of dust and offal. The market-gardener’s carts and waggons come next; they proceed at a brisk trot to arrive in time for the early purchasers. After them, the coal-waggons and brewer’s drays, which only at certain hours are permitted to unload in the principal streets of the city. At the same time, the light, two-wheeled carts of the butchers, fishmongers, and hotel-keepers, rattle along at a slapping pace; for their owners—sharp men of business—would be the first in the market to choose the best and purchase at a low price. Here and there a trap is opened in the pavement, and dirty men ascend from the regions below; they are workmen, to whose care is committed the city under-ground, which they build, repair, and keep in good order. Damaged gas and water-pipes, too, are being repaired, and the workmen make all possible haste to replace the paving-stones and leave the road in a passable condition. For the sun mounts in the sky and their time is up. They return to their lairs and go to sleep just as the rest of the town awakens to the labours of the day.

Besides these, there are a great many other classes whose avocations compel them to take to the street by break of day. At a very early hour they appear singly or in small knots, with long, white clay pipes in their mouths; as the day advances, they come in troops, marching to their work in docks and warehouses. Ill-tempered looking, sleepy-faced barmen take down the shutters of the gin-shops; cabs, loaded with portmanteaus and band-boxes, hasten to deposit their occupants at the various railway-stations; horsemen gallop along, eager for an early country-ride; from minute to minute there is an increase of life and activity. At length the shops, the windows and doors of houses are opened; omnibuses come in from the suburbs and land their living freight in the heart of the city; the pavements are crowded with busy people, and the road is literally crowded with vehicles of every description. It is day and the hour is 10 A.M.

Long before this, hundreds of high chimney-towers have belched forth their volumes of thick black smoke, and that smoke obscures the horizon with long streaks of black smut, and mixes and becomes more dense as the millions of chimneys on the house-tops contribute their quota, until a dusky atmosphere is formed, which intercepts the rays of the sun. Such is London by day. That is the enormous city with her deep grey robe of smoke and fog, which she spins afresh every morning, and silently unravels during the hours of the night, that she may, as Penelope of old, keep idlers and courtiers away from her gates.

We are still at the point where Newgate-street opens into Cheapside. It would almost seem as if the whirlpool of human beings that turn about in that locality, had made us giddy, for our thoughts took their wayward flight across the Thames, up to the clouds, and through the gully-holes into the recesses of the city under-ground. We ought now to proceed on terra firma, and with this laudable resolution, we turn to the left, and stop in the front of the post-office at St. Martin’s-le-Grand.

The existing arrangements of the English post-office, and the penny-postage, which, in 1840, was introduced by Rowland Hill, have proved so excellent in their results, that the majority of continental states have been induced to approximate their institutions to Mr. Hill’s principle. Men of business and post-office clerks are not yet satisfied; they desire a system of cheap international postage, and it is devoutly to be hoped that those pious wishes will, in the end, be gratified. But the majority of the continental governments hesitate before they commit themselves to an experiment, which, in the most favourable case, only promises a future increase of revenue, while in every case it is certain to entail losses on the present. In England, however, the experiment has been made, and the system works well and pays. And the arrangements of the post-office have been brought to a degree of perfection unknown even to the wildest dreams of the boldest political economist of the last century.

With the general penny postage for England, Scotland, Ireland, and the Channel Islands—with a regular, rapid, and frequent transmission of the mails from and to the provinces, there is, moreover, an admirable system adopted for the distribution of letters throughout the metropolis. London is divided into two postal districts: one of them embraces the area within three miles from the Chief Office at St. Martin’s-le-Grand; the second district includes those parts of the town which lie beyond the three miles’ circle.

The postage, of course, is the same for either district; but the difference lies in the number of deliveries. In the inner circle there are not less than ten deliveries a day.

The construction of the houses contributes much to the efficiency of the system. The postman’s functions are here much easier than those of his continental colleagues. He is not required to go up and down stairs, he gives his double knock; and as the majority of letters are inland letters, and as such prepaid, no time is lost with paying and giving change. The frequency of letter-boxes at the house doors tends still more to simplify the proceeding.